Download PDF 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 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. ContentsAn Evolution of Scholarly Multimedia Teaching Decoloniality & Multimodality |
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 MultimediaXchanges: 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. |