I. Opening

The scene: A guestroom-turned-office, mid-afternoon. One woman onscreen sits curled up on the bed in front of her laptop, while the wind blows loudly through an open window offscreen.

Video Recording 1 18 November 2016 (18:00-19:02)
Screen Recording 1 18 November 2016 (17:45-18:47)

Video 7: Tools Introduction

In this clip, I finally reach a design solution for an audio file featured in "Religion, Remediated", which had gone through multiple iterations, none of which I was entirely satisfied with. I searched for "thoughtful music" on SoundCloud, listened to several examples, found a light piano soundtrack, added it to my Audacity file, found that it just happened to be precisely the perfect length, liked the combination, and used this new juxtaposition to reimagine my idea of how this particular audio file's design fit as a component of the total webtext project.

This clip demonstrates a moment of invention in which the tools I used led me to new ways of thinking about my project's pieces in designin a digital argument. This clip might seem like a relatively peaceful, serene moment of new ideas blossoming. However, that was most definitely NOT the case in getting to this point. I had gone through multiple iterations of this audio file, which was causing me a lot of trouble for such an apparently simple one-minute segment. I'd had technical difficulties with the audio-editing software (Audacity), with finding the right kind of source materials, and with the audio piece itself, which was conceptually fantastic but recorded at a low sound quality. These technical difficulties pushed me to keep revising and changing my ideas about how I wanted to present this file, until I finally found this specific complementary audio piece—a light piano soundtrack—and brought it together with the original vocal file, in a way that sounded nice and that I was capable of bringing together with the tools I had. It was not a bad result, but it was not what I had initially imagined for how the project would turn out.

During this session, the tools I was using to work with the pieces played a crucial role in shaping the webtext’s developing inscape. Without the technological stumbling blocks I hit along the way, I would never have arrived at this audio file's particular combination of pieces and implicit argument. Although it was my decision as composer to work with the tools I did (in this case, Audacity), this tool (and my knowledge of how to use it) offered both possibilities and limitations that shaped how I worked with and thought about this audio file's design. In other words, the tools I used played an important role in suggesting and presenting an implicit design element that shaped an important component of my project as a whole. These technological forces shape a webtext's implicit argument in subtle ways throughout a project's development, and it is these seemingly invisible influences on webtext invention that I seek to make visible in this section.

In this chapter, I take a closer, more critical look at tools’ effects on the webtext design process, and in particular at the kinds of influences these nonhuman collaborators have on webtext invention. Through autoethnographic data and reflection narratives, I examine the specific ways tools influence the webtext invention process. Viewing these tools as rhetorical agents, I investigate how their influence leads to shifts in a webtext’s inscape through layers of key drafts. I argue that tools’ role in scholarly invention is often obscured by the final published artifact’s apparent completeness. I hope to disassemble the “black box” effect that makes a webtext’s design seem inevitable and shine a light on the otherwise invisible agents who play a key role in this design's development. Such an investigation contributes to a deeper understanding of how webtexts function rhetorically as multimodal arguments in digital environments.