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 InterviewerElizabeth 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. ContentsElectracy and Thinking Digitally |
Challenges of Digital PublishingXchanges: What’s been the most challenging issue(s) over time with THEJUMP+? Do they tend toward the technical, the archival, the human resources, or other area? JH: I'll start with the archival issue because I think it's easier and more important to how the field sees things. We are, by design, married to the archive drive. We really believe that things should be archived, they should remain forever into perpetuity, and that people should be able to access them forever. There's a lot of value in that, and it's important for a number of reasons. But if we do that, then that means the kind of work students produce have to be things that I can house and I can archive and I can control as a journal. On the one hand, if that's the goal, then that causes all kinds of problems because the vast majority of things students can produce are in black box corporate-owned software. If a student makes a really cool Wix project on wix.com, and I want to share this awesome interactive web text with other people, I can't publish it, because I can't host it. Wix owns it. So what we did was build masks on top of projects to add that kind of academic validity and a community around the projects. There's a number of projects that we have that we don't actually host on our site or on our various channels. They actually still belong on the corporate site of the student author. As long as that place is still operating, they're there. We just build a window over top of them. That's great, and I like that because then it lets students work with the technologies and tools they have available to them and they don't have to feel limited by not being able to do their own HTML5 coding or whatever the case may be. The downside is that means we can't guarantee that all the projects will be archived forever. For example, I'm at a conference in Seattle couple years back and it's four in the morning, and I get a phone call from somebody in Michigan who is looking for a project that he uses in his classes every year, and it's no longer on TheJUMP+. What happened was that the faculty member who had run the site for the student’s work he was looking for stopped working in academia and went into industry, and then her university website was shut down. She didn't copy the assets; they lived on the university's site. There was no way for us to get to the work. It was gone, like it was just "Poof," vanished. I understand that that's frustrating to people, and it does violate this archive drive. But at the same time, if we limit ourselves to only those things that we can house, we dramatically limit the students, the kinds of projects we can see and share from students that would make their rounds on social media, that would make their rounds in the world. For me, the reality is I was less concerned about being able to look back 10 years from now and say, "Here's what we did 10 years ago," and more concerned about making sure people had a sense of what students are doing right now in classes across the country in this year or this past year. Lastly and probably the biggest issue for me is building the system. TheJUMP has been built three times, or four if you count the prototype. I built a prototype in IWEB and then built the first operating version in Drupal. But I realized quickly that the only person who could make an issue in that system was me because it was built to my weird idiosyncratic practices. We rebuilt it after a couple years in the Drupal 6 platform. Later, I tried to rebuild it in an Indiana University system, and that was not going to work well because they were in the process of also updating their program. We were scheduled to try out Cheryl Ball’s new Vega platform, but it wasn’t quite ready for beta testing when we were, so I rebuilt it again from scratch in the WordPress platform. I think we’ll forever be undergoing this kind of transformation as the publishing tools improve and the platforms improve and the systems improve. We’ll always want to try and try new things or re-brand ourselves for new market or new purpose or new value. That is a definite labor-intensive kind of practice, particularly if there’s a labor of one or one and a half. There’s no metric for us helping people understand what that looks like. Those are my headaches, but they’re good headaches because that means we’re doing things well enough that people want to use what we have. They want us to maintain it, they want us to make it accessible, and they want it to be available and functional and aesthetic in ways that matters to them. I guess I’ll continue to battle those things as long as people want them. I never thought in a million years that I would learn nearly this much about the infrastructural back-end of digital publishing. So that’s probably the biggest hurdle. It’s not really a widespread issue for viewers, but again, those back-end choices, those coding choices, those platform choices, dramatically affect the aesthetics. [video:youtube:MnxO4EXarsk] |