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About the Interviewee

Justin Hodgson is an assistant professor of rhetoric, writing, and digital media studies in the Department of English at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. His book, Post-Digital Rhetoric and The New Aesthetic  is available as of March 2019. Justin is the founder and general editor of TheJUMP+, The Journal of Undergraduate Multimedia Projects. This juried, electronic journal publishes exceptional undergraduate multimedia projects from students around the world. It also serves as a pedagogical resource for teachers interested in and working in multimedia and digital composition and scholarship.

About the Interviewer

Elizabeth Barnett is an MA candidate in Rhetoric and Writing in the University of New Mexico's Department of English Language and Literature. Her interests lie in the pedagogy of multimodal digital composition and technical writing. 

Contents

Showcasing Undergraduate Work

Electracy and Thinking Digitally

Post Digital Rhetoric

Technology and Rhetorical Consciousness

Multimodal Composition

Challenges of Digital Publishing

Xchanges, as an exclusively digital publisher, is naturally subject to and keenly interested in the practical issues surrounding the future and preservation of digital scholarly work. In the exploration of issues surrounding digital scholarship, we’ve produced a series of three interviews with prominent academic scholars and editors whose work spans the intersections of rhetoric, pedagogy, publishing, and technology. We hope that Xchanges readers enjoy the viewpoints looking both back at what’s happened in the field of digital publishing and pedagogy in the last decade or two and forward to what lies ahead.

In the first of this series, University of New Mexico English MA student, Elizabeth Barnett, conducted a video interview with Professor Justin Hodgson of Indiana University, who heads up the editorial board of The Journal of Undergraduate Multimedia Projects, or, TheJump+. This issue of Xchanges focuses on undergraduate research, and the two began their discussion of issues with digital scholarship in the 21 century, particularly as it involves undergraduates in the academy.

Showcasing Undergraduate Work

Xchanges: TheJUMP+ showcases some astounding undergraduate multimodal composition work, highly creative and technically advanced. You have a submission formula that includes the student’s and instructor’s reflections, peer responses, and assignment prompts.

Why focus on undergraduate composition? Was the decision to include the supplemental materials solely based on THEJUMP+'s goal to also be an instructor resource? Or is there more to including these in a critical sense? Or to more fully situate the compositions regarding authors’ rhetorical choices?

JH: I graduated from Clemson in May of 2009, and I started at Texas that fall. One of the first classes I was teaching was a “Writing for Digital Environments” class, which is something they had on the books. I was only teaching one class, and it was like, "Okay, just getting used to life as faculty at a major school." I had this assignment, a weird little video remix assignment. A student made this project called “Communism.”  Much like you, I was amazed and thought, "My goodness. What? Who? I didn’t teach you any of these things and this is genuinely amazing."

I shared it with my graduate cohort from Clemson and some folks I've known outside of there, and I asked, "Well, where would these projects go?" If a student writes a really brilliant paper or poem or argument or some kind, we have journals for that. But not for these kinds of projects. I said, "You know what? We should just start a journal," and they said, "Yes, sounds great." That was Friday, and so by Monday, I had mocked up a prototype of what it's supposed to look like. That's how we started. We always talked about needing the repository for the stuff our students did because as a teacher I can only show my own projects, and I had to get permission, and there was no unified space for that. This inherently filled two roles, and because of that, I knew early on that I wanted to do a couple of things with student work as I was mocking up this project.

• One was that it had to facilitate a pedagogical value because, let's be honest, there's not a widespread interest in undergraduate journals. I think they do amazing work, and I think people in our field read them. But for young Writing Studies scholars, it's hard to get a really notable readership for their undergraduate scholarship as they're exploring topics. I know young scholars are writing, and a number of their articles have been cited by scholars in the field as well, but it's not the same dynamic as College Composition and Communication or Rhetoric Society Quarterly. I knew it had to have a pedagogical value, and they need to be built partly around that because that's who the audience is going to be. So it wasn't for undergraduates as much as it was for undergraduates in classes working with faculty.

• The second part was, and this is the rhetorical part, that they affected me forever, that these projects that are amazing or engaging or dynamic or whatever we want to call them, by design, and make me want to make things. I'm trained to offer a critical response, to start poking holes at it and saying what it stands for or what it does or why it doesn't look as [good], but when it comes to the digital, my gut reaction is, "I should do that with this video," or "What would I make?" or "How can I do this with something else?" I knew that in going in, we wanted to create responses from our editorial board to each piece such that each part of the project would form its own medial ecology. The result was that for each project there's like 10 or 8 little nuggets of things that go with it, sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on what the students give to us.

The reason for undergraduate work is very simple. One, they do amazing things, and there's no place for that to go, and two, while I do teach graduate classes, I have far more experience and exposure to undergraduates doing weird, wonderful media stuff, so that's why the undergraduate focus.

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About the Interviewee

Douglas Eyman is Associate Professor of English and the Director of graduate
programs in Writing and Rhetoric at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.
His latest books are Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice and Play/Write:
Digital Rhetoric, Writing, Games. Dr. Eyman is also the senior editor and
publisher of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, one of the longest running, continuously published digital scholarly journals in the world.

About the Interviewer

Elizabeth Barnett is an MA candidate in Rhetoric and Writing in the University of New Mexico's Department of English Language and Literature. Her interests lie in the pedagogy of multimodal digital composition and technical writing. 

Contents

Digital Rhetoric: Expanding Definitions

The Human in the Machine

Digital Rhetoric In the Classroom

Sustainability in the Digital Realm

Authorship & Audience in A Digital Age

Future Work: A Theory of Digital Rhetoric

 As an exclusively digital publisher, Xchanges is naturally subject to and keenly interested in the practical issues surrounding the future and preservation of digital scholarly work. In the exploration of issues surrounding digital scholarship, we’ve produced a series of three interviews with prominent academic scholars and editors whose work spans the intersections of rhetoric, pedagogy, publishing, and technology. We hope that Xchanges readers enjoy the viewpoints looking both back at what’s happened in the field of digital publishing and pedagogy in the last decade or two and forward to what lies ahead.

Here, in the current installment of this series, University of New Mexico English MA student Elizabeth Barnett shares a video interview she conducted with Professor Doug Eyman of George Mason University. In addition to teaching courses in digital rhetoric, technical and scientific communication, editing, web authoring, advanced composition, and professional writing, Dr. Eyman is the senior editor of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. This issue of Xchanges focuses on graduate-student research in writing and rhetoric. Elizabeth and Doug began their discussion of issues with digital scholarship in the 21st century with a focus on the nature and definition of digital rhetoric.

Digital Rhetoric: Expanding Definitions

Xchanges: In your 2015 book Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice, you wrote, “the term ‘digital rhetoric’ itself has been applied to rhetorics of technology, network rhetorics, social media use, the use of rhetorical appeals in online discussion forums, website design, multimodal composition, and the study of new media (itself a contested term).”

Is “new media” still new? Has Digital Rhetoric moved beyond an emerging techne into an established realm of study as well as a means of production of persuasive communication and culture?

DE: I'd say the first question about new media is one that comes up quite a lot, especially for people newer in the field. "Is new media really new anymore?" is a refrain I hear often. “New Media” is a standardized phrase at this point, which indicates a kind of hybridization of media. We're looking at how image media, motion media, interactive media, and textual media all come together, and that hybrid version, that synthesis, is “new media.” We can almost call multimodal composition a form of new media as well, except that multimodal, currently, in the way it's theorized, actually bends quite a bit beyond the digital, whereas new media tends to stay rooted within the digital, in terms of the way people handle it. Multimodal composition is becoming a more expansive term in a lot of ways.

Xchanges: You talk about digital literacy being a prerequisite for understanding digital rhetoric. Let's go back. Is digital rhetoric concerned with new media, or is it concerned with all things multimodal?

DE: I think it's both and more than multimodality. There's a follow-up piece to the book that ended up in the journal Enculturation (http://enculturation.net/looking-back-and-looking-forward) that came out of the Indiana Digital Rhetorics Symposium, where I talk about what's not in the book. Digital rhetoric is concerned with how rhetoric operates in any digital realm. That includes new media and multimodal work but also includes the interaction between humans and algorithms, the ways code creates and operates as infrastructures for the activities that we engage in or that are engaged in by systems as well as people.

The idea of networks and the connectivity of networks is an important key for digital rhetoric, but we also don't want to lose sight of the embodied nature of people using technologies. At one point, people were saying, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." It was a [New Yorker] cartoon. People were saying, "The body's no longer there. It no longer has this representation, so that you can move beyond your corporeal references, and then that frees you up in some ways.” It turns out, that's not actually true. Coming back to the body and how the body operates is really an important component of where digital rhetoric is going. I would make the argument that rhetoric itself is a uniquely and innately human approach to communication. I don't really hold with the idea that we have animal rhetorics or computer system software agents that are creating rhetorical action on their own. I think, at the root, there's embedded humanness in it. I think with semiotics, you can get a lot of the same kinds of information and the same kinds of approaches as you would with rhetoric but applied to non-human actors. That's fine, but I want to reserve, in some ways, rhetoric as a human activity. This will probably be argued against by the folks who are interested in the new materialist/object-oriented approaches. I think there's quite a bit of value to that kind of work, but I see it as a way of re-centering, rethinking, flattening as a useful methodological tool, but the activities of rhetoric itself are always rooted and embedded in the human.

[video:youtube:0KFd6BWmNgk]

Those are the conversations that are happening around digital rhetoric or thinking through these issues of what constitutes rhetoric: Can a non-human actor or agency, can they operate rhetorically? Can they make rhetorical moves on their own? That's a really interesting space right now. Justin Hodgson actually has a book out. It just came out recently on post-digital rhetoric (https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814213940.html). We're moving from human to post-human, from digital to post-digital. I'm not sure what comes next. Maybe just post-rhetoric rhetoric.

There are lots of spaces where digital rhetoric can learn from other rhetorical frameworks and practices, especially from cultural rhetorics and Native American rhetorics and rhetoric that come from other places. We tend to be pretty deeply rooted in Western versions of rhetoric. Digital rhetoric also allows us to start expanding and seeing how some of these other rhetorical practices, other rhetorical frameworks, operate when you apply them in digital spaces. That's also a really interesting space in terms of what digital rhetoric is currently doing research-wise.

One of the things I think is really fascinating right now is a real push toward de-colonizing digital methods, opening up space that we have to different kinds of theories, different kinds of methods, and different kinds of communities, and then using some of these digital humanities methods to do social justice work. I’m thinking of work by Roopika Risam (http://roopikarisam.com/), Liz Losh (http://lizlosh.com/), and Dorothy Kim (http://brandeis.academia.edu/DorothyKim), among others, who as scholars are leading us in this direction.

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About the Interviewee

Cheryl Ball is the director of the Digital Publishing Collaborative at Wayne State University Libraries. Since 2006, Ball has been editor of the online, peer-reviewed, open-access journal Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy which is the longest continuously publishing digital journal focusing exclusively on digital media scholarship. She is also the project director for Vega, an open-access, multimedia academic publishing platform due to be released in 2019. Ball also serves as the executive director of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.

About the Interviewer

Elizabeth Barnett is an MA candidate in Rhetoric and Writing in the University of New Mexico's Department of English Language and Literature. Her interests lie in the pedagogy of multimodal digital composition and technical writing.

Contents

An Evolution of Scholarly Multimedia

Teaching Decoloniality & Multimodality

The Rigor of Digital Scholarship

Issues in Open Access

Toward a True OA Publishing Platform: Vega

As an exclusively digital publisher, we are naturally subject to and keenly interested in the practical issues surrounding the future and preservation of digital scholarly work. In the exploration of issues surrounding digital scholarship, we’ve produced a series of three interviews with prominent academic scholars and editors whose work spans the intersections of rhetoric, pedagogy, publishing, and technology. We hope that Xchanges readers enjoy the viewpoints looking both back at what’s happened in the field of digital publishing and pedagogy over recent decades and forward to what lies ahead. 

Here, in the final installment of this series, University of New Mexico English Master’s student, Elizabeth Barnett, conducted a video interview with Dr. Cheryl Ball, of Wayne State University. In addition to shepherding authors and reviewers through the digital publishing process as the editor of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy (http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/), Ball also works tirelessly on content management software development and evangelizing best practices in editorial systems and processes in the field of digital publishing. Their discussion of issues in digital scholarship in the 21st century began with an exploration of scholarly multimedia work.

An Evolution of Scholarly Multimedia

Xchanges: In your 2009 tenure application materials (http://ceball.com/research/tenure-letter/), you stated that your research and teaching is guided by the statement: “Digital media asks us to constantly re-evaluate what a text is, how it works, to whom it speaks, and why.”

Does this statement still guide you? Has it changed in 10 years? If so, how? Is new media still new? 

CB: It's funny to me looking back on that statement that I used the phrase “digital media” and not “new media,” but I think that that was because I was trying to signal at the time, 2009, that shift away from the verbiage of new media into something slightly broader. I certainly would still believe that something we used to call “new media” or “emerging media” does still ask us to reevaluate what a text is and how it works. Even more specifically, maybe I would replace the term “digital media” with the term “webtext” or “scholarly multimedia.” Then, I think scholarly multimedia does ask us to constantly reevaluate what a scholarly text is and how it works; typically, not necessarily to whom it speaks, because scholarly multimedia or web texts almost always have some sort of academic audience. The phrase “digital media” is purposefully broad, and too broad maybe to allow that statement to exist 10 years later because I think that digital media as a whole has become so ingrained in what we do. 2009 was a year after YouTube launched. We're in a radically different digital environment now than we were 10 years ago. I think that it is still true within scholarly publishing realms that digital media asked us to reevaluate what texts are but not necessarily digital media in itself, writ large.

For me at the time, it was trying to get at that issue of constantly reevaluating what a text is, and that was the newness of it. Again, I think that still applies in some ways to scholarly publishing, and less so to other forms of digital media texts just because that work has become so transparent to us in a way that we have established genres in digital environments now that we didn't have 10 or even 5 years ago.

In terms of an established realm of study, I think new media has been supplanted by all sorts of other things. Multimodal composition being one of them, just one of probably a dozen different terms. I do think that we're heavily into production, certainly in rhetoric and composition. When we talk about production, we're almost always talking about multimodal composition in some way or multimedia authoring. 

Xchanges: Your life’s work has been centered in what you call editorial pedagogy and what might be called more generally digital literacies pedagogy: educating authors, tenure reviewers, composition instructors and students, journal juries, and new journal editors about digital production, its rigor, and its focus on rhetorical choices. 

What place does multimodality have in the college composition classroom today? Has it expanded in the ways you would have liked or expected in the 20+ years you’ve participated in this composition ecosystem? And does the rigor of digital scholarly publishing still need explaining/justification? 

CB: It's great to see how much it has expanded over the last near 20 years. When we were working on this stuff in the early 2000s, it did seem so new and so radical. As I go around now and talk to people at different universities and hear what they're doing, schools where I wouldn't necessarily have expected them to have a multimodal curriculum have adopted one, and everyone is still interested in hearing definitions and descriptions and seeing examples of this kind of work. Of course, the mantra is that every text is multimodal, because there is no such thing as a monomodal text. How can we then help the production of this kind of work in composition writing classes and in other types of classes too to make it more interesting and innovative? I really like some of the work that's happening with folks like Laura Gonzales (http://www.gonzlaur.com/about/) and other scholars who are bringing an intersectionality, if you will, to multimodal composition. The work those scholars are doing allows it to flourish and thrive in some ways that get us out of reproducing some of the base genres and allow even more genres of multimodal composition. It's good that we've gotten a depth to the field, and it's been really surprising that it's happened over a short amount of time.