III. Background

C. Collaboration and Multimodal Composing

The literature on invention and digital composing is relatively sparse, as Scanlon observed as recently as 2015: “Though multimodality is increasingly incorporated into our pedagogies and scholarship, explorations of collaborative multimodal composition are lacking” (105). She cites Fraiberg in interpreting the reason behind this gap: “only recently has scholarship focused on the work of multimodal composition, the ‘production, distribution, mediation, and reception of multimodal texts (beyond interpretive and hermeneutic analyses)” (Fraiberg 102-103). Having established the value of digital composing for teaching and research, scholars are now turning to investigating the actual work of enacting digital composing and what that looks like in lived, material, and often collaborative contexts, work that Scanlon takes up through investigations of collaborative comics teams in scholarly contexts. She notes the potential of this work for challenging traditional conceptions of the author as isolated inventor, citing Cross: “[W]hen we investigated a verbal-visual variety of collaboration, not only does the concept of authorship change from that of the romantic writer working alone in the garret, but also our very concept of writer and artist change as these roles overlap and to a degree merge” (Cross 149-150, emphasis in original).

However, Scanlon is specifically interested in non-digital (or beyond digital) multimodal collaboration, namely comics. I understand and applaud the need to push beyond digital texts in investigating multimodal composing; as Shipka notes, “multimodality” far exceeds the narrow category of digital artifacts. At the same time, if there is indeed a gap in the literature on multimodal collaboration, digital composing is an important place to fill it based on what we teach, what our students need to learn, and what we practice professionally in creating multimodal scholarship

A recent (2017) webtext project by DeVoss et al. offers an initial look at the role of collaboration and the influence of other people on composing processes. The webtext brings together videos documenting the digital composing processes of a number of graduate student composers in a digital media seminar. Like the present study, this webtext investigates the material conditions of digital composing through autoethnographic documentation and presentation of these digitally recorded materials. However, their notes on collaboration are relatively brief:

• writing-related collaborations happens in different ways and for different purposes;
• composing with others can happen within a room or within a shared document, in a writing workshop session or in an informal conversation (“Analysis”)

Moreover, the examples offered for collaboration are video clips under five minutes in length that investigate the process of developing slam poetry and primarily alphabetic writing in digital spaces. Nonetheless, this project raises interesting points for consideration of digital composing in lived contexts in both content and approach, and I hope to build on the initial points they’ve raised and their initial methodologies in order to investigate the invention of webtext scholarship over an extended period of time.

One of the most extensive studies to date in the field of digital composing on invention and collaboration is Alexander and Williams’s 2015 article “DMAC After Dark: Toward a Theory of Distributed Invention.” Similar to Lunsford and Ede’s discussion of new ideas resulting from collaborative conversation, their definition for “distributed invention” is “a process of thinking that involves two or more people engaging in brainstorming, problem-solving, and idea-generating activities together where original ideas become mutually appropriated and evolve into something different altogether” (33), which they see as applicable to both print and multimodal composing contexts.

Like the present study, Alexander and Williams attend to multiple dimensions of material composing conditions that include but are not limited to human agents; they consider, for example, the spaces, technologies, and infrastructures they engaged during the setting of their case study, the 2013 DMAC Institute. Furthermore, they use an autoethnographic approach via personal narrative reflections to illustrate their experiences of distributed invention and the ideas generated from these exchanges. They invite investigations into online influences of distributed invention, which aspects of the data collected may potentially address and extend. However, their current model of distributed invention emphasizes the importance of physical co-presence, which frequently but not always plays a role in the webtext composing data gathered. Finally, they focus especially on mutually invested composing acts, while I want to investigate different kinds of influences on invention that reflect differing levels of investment in the project as a whole throughout its composing timeline.

Having reviewed some of the developing thoughts in the field around collaboration, composing, and the social nature of invention, I now want to investigate in particular the role people play as influences on a webtext’s developing inscape. The main research question guiding this chapter is: “How do people influence the webtext design invention process?”