III. Background

D. Metaphors and Webtexts

Not all webtexts rely on some kind of overarching metaphorical object to unite their design. However, it appears as an invention strategy frequently enough that it’s worth investigating in more depth, especially since it appears in highly influential and awarded webtexts such as Delagrange's "Wunderkammer, Cornell, and the Canon of Visual Arrangement", which received Kairos Journal's 2010 Best Webtext Award.

To examine the role of metaphor in webtext invention I looked at specific webtexts that use metaphor. This was one of my primary reasons for selecting the three published and four interview invention narratives as data to check my autoethnographic analyses. I selected webtexts from the online journals to which I submitted my projects (Kairos, Computers and Composition Online, and Computers and Composition Digital Press) published within the last ten years (2008-2018) that also rely on some kind of material metaphor to organize their interfaces' designs.

In my analysis, I investigate how the chosen metaphorical conceptual object’s material logics and rhetorical impact exert agency on the composer and other pieces, and thus the total inventive juxtaposition of a particular webtext draft. I highlight the “stickiness” of metaphor in moving to a webtext draft, in that it has a long life through the project from beginning to end (especially if entering as a visual metaphor). I also examine how metaphor's emergence serves as a key moment for many authors in the invention process, such that it becomes a total cohering structure for all the pieces in the project. Although all scholarly arguments rely on a conceptual organizing structure in some way, I want to explore metaphor’s possibility for helping to resist dominant print-based logic in digital spaces, and the extent to which it can help to generate new ideas but also serves to limit them. When it comes to composing scholarly webtexts, what does it mean to bring in a material metaphor as a conceptual resource for organizing, designing, and inventing multimedia scholarship in digital environments?