Bahl, "Refracting Webtexts"

III. Background

A. Definitions | B. Digital Tools and Composition | C. Digital Tools and Invention

In order to provide context for my analysis, findings, and dicussion, I first briefly define what I mean by the words “tools” and “technology” for the purposes of this project. I then review how composition studies has accounted for technologies’ influence on written acts of communication and knowledge creation. Finally, I qualify my discussion of tools’ rhetorical “agency” as active shapers of (rather than passive instruments for) the digital invention process.

A. Definitions

As C. Lauer documents in “What’s in a Name?”, there is a great deal of slippage in terms used to discuss webtext scholarship, which can extend to the material means used to create these documents. For the purposes of this project, I define “tool” as an object used to fulfill a communicative purpose—namely, creating, editing, shaping, curating, combining, and otherwise developing the total set of pieces into an integrated structure that comprise a webtext’s developing inscape. Specifically, I’m interested in digital software interfaces used to act directly on the pieces, and how these interfaces’ affordances and constraints intervene in webtext invention to shape a scholarly argument’s design.²

A tool in this case functions as a kind of technology, a word encompassing multiple aspects of systematic knowledge creation and application. “Technology” derives in part from the Greek word techne, meaning “art” or “craft”, which in the Aristotlean sense meant “the knowledge of principles and strategies to guide a complex activity” (J. Lauer 6). Techne has long been at the heart of the study and practice of rhetoric, particularly in framing rhetoric as a set of communication strategies that can be taught rather than as inherent persuasive skills (J. Lauer 46). I follow Delagrange (2011) in focusing on technologies oriented toward mediating communication in digital environments (4). Specifically, I investigate how “technologies-as-tools” (Delagrange 4) affect the process of combining a webtext’s pieces into an integrated inscape. In my analysis, I will use “tools” to refer to software interfaces that interact directly with webtext components, while recognizing that many other material communicative technologies contribute to shaping a project’s implicit argument.

² Although this discussion focuses on digital technologies, I do not want to discount the material complexity and distributed nature of other modes and experiences of composing, or to imply that digitally composed scholarship is superior to (and should replace) more traditional modes of knowledge creation. Rather, like Delagrange, I wish to avoid a “heroic, progressive narrative” and instead “suggest that alternative arrangements and appeals that are more possible in/available to new media should become a viable and credible part of how scholars learn and teach and think” (7). Shipka cautions against the dangers of associating multimodal, technologically-based composing practices solely with digital technologies, arguing that “when our scholarship fails to consider, and when our practices do not ask students to consider, the complex and highly distributed processes associated with the production of texts (and lives and people), we run the risk of overlooking the fundamentally multimodal aspects of all communicative practice” (13). ↩

Chapter 5: Tools

III. Background