"Profiles in Digital Scholarship & Publishing: Justin Hodgson"

Download PDF

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

Technology and Rhetorical Consciousness

Xchanges: In the past, you’ve talked about social media and online/digital culture studies and the dawning recognition that even hard technical activities like coding, programming, and algorithm creation are rhetorical.

Do you think we as multimodal and digital composition instructors should be calling students’ attention to the rhetorical nature of hard technical communication and ethical considerations technical authors have? If so, are there specific ways you do this in your teaching?

JH: Of course, ironically, I'm a screen-up kind of guy. I don't really care so much what's going on the bottom. So much of what we're doing now is drag-and-drop technologies. You no longer need to know HTML5 to build a dynamic website. That doesn't mean you can't benefit from it, but that's no longer a one-to-one correlation. That's a very significant kind of thing. But coding can have dramatic impact in a way that is both rhetorical and beyond rhetorical. Despite the fact that I'm a screen-up guy, it's really critical to understand what happens below the screen because you can very well be manipulated, shaped, positioned, or pushed in ways without even having any awareness of what's going on.

What happens when we don't really ever question the interface and the choices it's given us? It's agenda setting if nothing else, right? It's also a process of automating intensive labor practices. I use this example in my class all the time to talk about the importance of what algorithms do and how they're changing the landscape: 

One of the simplest things I can point to is photo filters. I assume you have a smartphone and you have some sort of photo app on it, right? One of the standard filters is a sepia effect. To actually make a sepia photograph is ridiculously labor intensive. You need the ink from a cuttlefish, you need a dark room, you need the right kind of materials, and the right kind of light exposures. It's insane in terms of how much time, and now I can do it in the blink of an eye. What's happening is that these algorithms—and this is just the production end, not even including the back-end coding and programming—on the production end, they are automating the master techniques. They're taking the advanced aesthetics of the master class and just giving it to you in the click of a button. That radically transforms how we think about mediating practices, production, and interface interaction. You don't have to have these skills in the same way anymore. As soon as an artist or a practitioner develops a really cool way of representing something, it seems like just minutes before some company has made an algorithm for it, to mirror it, to map it.

The more you really start to understand how the algorithms are being applied in the programming, the coding structure, and how the program and code itself shapes or controls or enacts, the more you can become critically aware or attuned to what the technology is doing and how it's setting upon you. These things are small in practice and in theory, but the ramifications are, in some cases, global, depending on which technological structure you're dealing with.

I think anytime you use a technology and you want to allow students to work with it, you have to balance between how much knowledge I need to give them to be able to produce what I want them to produce, and to what extent should I make them aware of the operating conditions that are the underbelly for this technology. I try to do it as a little bit of both. It's always going to be class specific. When I teach my class in rhetoric and games, we talk about the procedural mechanics of a video game, as well as the fact that in most video games, you cannot have access to the code or the assets that make the game go because those are either patented or copyrighted or both. For teaching writing, when students compose primarily in Microsoft Word, I have students write with Google Docs once or with Scrivener on a trial account and see how radically different their writing is, and it's just simply switching interfaces. They [the programs] all do the same basic thing, but they do it differently with different assumptions.