"Profiles in Digital Scholarship & Publishing: Justin Hodgson"

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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.