Abstract

In this chapter I investigate the role people play as influences on the invention of webtexts. I review discussions on collaboration and invention in rhetoric and composition studies and then highlight how scholars have begun to investigate collaborative invention in the act of multimodal composing. I suggest that investigating people’s impact on a webtext’s developing design (as a part of its overall performed argument) helps to highlight the social nature of a scholarly argument’s development in a particularly visible way and also furthers understanding of an important influence on how this inscape came into being in the first place.

Based on my data collected from digital autoethnographic recordings, I suggest that “people” exert six major types of influences on webtext invention: Motivate, Halt, Give, Inform, Suggest, and Re-Envision. Additionally, they exert these influences on webtext design in five main capacities: as editors, collaborators, consultants, colleagues, and students, with differing degrees of influence on the invention process based on the differing nuances of their roles. From these six people-related influences, I highlight several implications as takeaways for building professional and pedagogical infrastructures to support webtext composing, invention, and design as a mode of scholarly composing and communication. These implications address material resources as well as habits of mind in practicing invention.

As with any publication project, the credits on a webtext’s design often don’t fully account for the many hands that went into the work and the nuances of their contributions to the invention process, both as resources and obstacles. I hope this investigation will help foreground the collaborative nature of scholarly knowledge creation by highlighting the ways that the webtext’s design—an important part of its performance of argument—took shape and substance through the intervention of other people.