II. Exigency

Although a common feature of publication in the sciences, collaboration is still considered fairly “unusual” for humanities scholarship (Haddow, Xia, and Willson; Hirsch and Spitzer 191, in Bammer and Boetcher Joeres; Lunsford and Ede 157; Real; Marx; McGrath). This is not to say that it is completely unheard of; the fields of writing studies and digital composing testify to the combined influences of productive collaborators such as Flower and Hayes, Lunsford and Ede, Selfe and Hawisher, and Rhodes and Alexander, to name just a few examples. Furthermore, several studies point to the increasing uptake of collaborative practices in humanities scholarship (Brown and Simpson; Green, Courtney, Senseney, and Bonn; Lowry, Curtis, and Lowry). More broadly, however, collaboration in humanities scholarship remains a less frequently pursued and even potentially risky endeavor—a state of affairs as true for Hirsch and Spitzer in 2015 as it was for Lunsford and Ede in 1983.

The idea of writerly invention upon which traditional academic conceptions of writing have been founded (for students and professors alike) is that of the “lonely writer in the garrett” (Lunsford and Ede 157) or the “solitary author” that Cooper describes in the following passage:

With this model of writing and invention as the goal, it is little surprise that the scholarly single-authored monograph remains the “gold standard” for tenure and promotion in humanities scholarship (Estabrook and Warner, Smith 130, Hirsch and Spitzer 191). The individual genius, generating ideas in isolation, remains the primary model by which knowledge creation is judged and valued. Insofar as this model dominates invention, there is a very real concern about the risks of investing time, energy, and professional credibility in projects that will not reap the ultimate returns for building a career and livelihood as a scholar. Collaborating with another scholar thus becomes framed not as a resource but as a risk: credit for new ideas decreases significantly when distributed, and an author’s status as a self-sufficient idea generator may be questioned during the high-stakes evaluations of tenure and promotion.

However, as studies in rhetoric, composition, and literacy have demonstrated time and time again, the acts of inventing, composing, and creating knowledge are inescapably social processes that occur not in isolation but amidst a vast ecology of “socially constituted systems” (Cooper, “The Ecology of Writing”, 367), socially influenced contexts (Shaughnessy, Street), systems of circulation (Drucker 185, Prior and Shipka, Royster and Kirsch), and complex networks involving an array of agential forces including human and nonhuman actants (Latour, Dobrin, Hawk). To view the generation of ideas as an isolated act, as Alexander and Williams note, “contrasts significantly with published research in our field that views knowledge as social, collaborative, relational, and shared” (41) and does not do justice—appreciatively or ethically—to the rich interplay between minds, hands, and ideas behind the single name to which the work is ultimately attributed.

These interpersonal acts of invention and composing take on additional layers of complexity when translated into multimodal digital environments in the creation of webtext scholarship. As Claire Lauer notes, “Because of the complexity of multimodal texts, it takes a village to compose them, and this fundamentally changes how it feels to be an author” (“A technological journey”). Thus, a scholarly webtext—as both a work of multimodal composing and as an act of scholarly knowledge creation—has the potential to challenge traditional assumptions about academic authorship by making visible the diverse roles and people involved in the creation of a text whose argument is performed in a particular way via its design.

Furthermore, the gaps noted in research on conditions of multimodal composing include lack of exploration into the role of collaboration in multimodal composing (Scanlon). If multimodal composing is often so intricately networked and materially distributed that it is difficult to investigate for one composer, adding further composers to the mix complicate the problem exponentially. A digital autoethnographic approach offer opportunities to document the moments where other people enter the invention process, as well as the nature of the influences they have on a webtext’s developing inscape.

In this chapter, I investigate the role people play as influences on the invention of webtexts. I first 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 influences 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.