VIII. Implications

Based on the findings that emerged out of my analytical approach, I want to highlight the following implications as takeaways for building professional infrastructures to support webtext composing, invention, and design as a mode of scholarly composing and communication. These implications address material technological resources as well as habits of mind in practicing invention.

● “Rethink” foregrounds a need for flexibility in composing multimodal scholarship as an ongoing negotiation with tools. The tools used can raise new insights about the pieces that the composer might not have considered. An ongoing process of discernment, weighing, and balancing is needed to see whether the original idea in its initial form is worth pursuing at all costs or whether the new inscape design possibilities might be worth introducing as a shift into the project.

● “Engage” highlights the importance of professional development in learning new technologies and skills, even if their immediate use is not clear. Once learned, this knowledge and these skills can serve to generate new ideas for projects based on an expanded idea of what projects might be possible.

● “Adapt” points to the importance of being familiar with a wide range of tools and options as a way of increasing one’s rhetorical “vocabulary” in designing multimodal scholarship. “Adapt” additionally encourages an ethos of a DIY or open-source aesthetic (Stolley) and systematically sharing that adapted approaches so that others can benefit from that knowledge and the effort gained in achieving it.

● “Afford” speaks to the need for a strong digital composing center and available software on campuses. Sometimes workarounds, patches, or bandaids for a project are simply no longer effective or practical, and an expanded set of affordances (especially via high-quality tools, and individuals or tutorials to help teach them) may be precisely what is needed to fully communicate an implicit design-as-argument in its most sophisticated form.

● “Limit” speaks to the need to teach and value failure as a key part of invention, to accept limitations and setbacks as part of the process of developing a webtext’s inscape. “Limit” highlights a key need to judiciously negotiate when it comes time to let go of an idea but also to build a culture around webtext composing that accepts and values failure as part of the knowledge creation process.

I want to briefly consider why the “afford” invention influence might not have appeared as frequently as a category in my webtext invention process. One thought might have been that these were not my first webtext projects; I knew what worked for me, what I had access to, and what I was comfortable using.⁵ I also felt a sense of pressure with time, in that I was attempting to complete each project if possible before the end of my graduate career and so I could write about it for my dissertation; I did not have several years to work on the projects at leisure as time permitted.⁶ I was also starting with tools that gave me a fair amount of flexibility and control, even if the process of learning to enact new effects and strategies “on the fly” was relatively intensive. There are benefits, to be sure, for a composer to work with what they know, not the least of which is a more efficient drafting process. Hower, this choice may also have represented a narrow-mindedness on my own part, that I was driven primarily by what I knew rather than exploring what might be the best option for the project’s unique argument. The discussion highights familiar tools’ power to shape imagined possibilities in webtext design. It also speaks to the need to learn more about other webtext composers’ processes in more transparent detail, to learn what tools they are working with and how these tools help them to enact particular designs. I call for more openness about webtext composing processes and methods, not just in Kairos but as a feature of webtext research more broadly. I suggest that this increased openness and transparency will improve options and rhetorical choices for implicitly performed design, and that this will in turn increase the rhetorical sophistication of webtext inscapes.

I also want to note that I structure the discussion with an emphasis on the inventive agency of tools, and the resulting ideas these interventions introduced into the design of the webtext. I had initially approached the analysis from the perspective of investigating a “breakdown” in invention, out of the perspective of a composer encountering a moment of failure. However, further analysis suggested a need to reframe the approach to a slightly more removed perspective. Approaching these moments as “breakdowns” gives a relatively negative connotation applied in retrospect to an idea that did not work, when at the time an idea seemed reasonable or viable based on available knowledge. “Breakdown” thus becomes a retroactive judgment rather than an inherent characteristic of the initial idea. It is only when the idea intersects with tools and pieces in a composer’s experience that it becomes a moment of seeming “breakdown.” I want to highlight the inventive agency exerted in these intersections rather than put the main focus on an experience of failure from the perspective of a human composer. I thus encourage webtext composers to engage “breakdowns” and “failure” not as shortcomings but rather to embrace them as moments of invention and productive idea generation at the intersections of human and nonhuman agency.

In this and the previous chapter, I investigated how social and technological forces influence on webtext invention processes by examining the ways “people” and “tools” act on a webtext’s developing design. I now move into my final chapter, which explores the influence of “metaphors” as devices for organizing information and structuring multimodal arguments in digital environments. In contrast to people and tools as entities that exist apart from a webtext as document, I suggest that metaphors operate differently, in that their influence can be traced not only contextually but also through their direct, emerging representation in the drafts themselves.