"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

Multimodal Composition

Xchanges: What place does multimodality have in the college composition classroom today? Has it expanded in the ways you would have liked or expected in 10+ years you’ve participated in this composition ecosystem as a professor of digital rhetoric?

JH: When I interviewed at the University of Texas, I had just finished my PhD (about 2009). I'm interviewing and talking about all this weird, wonderful media stuff that I want to do in a classroom to help students and graduate students learn how to do multimedia and digital composition. An interviewer asks, “Who's going to teach these things? Who's trained to do this stuff?" Of course, my answer was, "Me. That's what I do." Me and a few other people at the time. Of course, the professor group is not that small at this point anymore. I teach with video games and I know others who do. Some people do really amazing things like mobile production, augmented reality, virtual reality, social media, web design. At this point in time, there's a larger set of folks in composition studies and rhetoric more generally who do things in and around the technological production side.

Digital rhetoric is rhetoric at this point. We're so saturated by the technology that to separate them is somewhat problematic already. You're right in wanting to say that not a lot of people are doing these things in the composition classroom, but at the same time, if we don't, then we're going to be operating notably behind where the majority of writing occurs.

While we don't all bring technical expertise, we bring rhetorical expertise. If you think it's late in the game, just give it a shot. You'd be amazed at what you can do.

As scholars in rhetoric and writing or communication, the way in which we frame and understand how ideas take shape, those critical skills transfer across media and they always have. I think that you'll find that there's a lot more space for these weird technologically driven kinds of practices that reflect not only digital learning principles but challenge what it means to write. What it means to write today is inherently intertwined with the technologies we use. It's always been that way. It's just the technologies now have more agency than the ink pen.

What matters is not whether instructors can do all these things, but how they can help students understand how to apply the how-to-learn process in other realms.

I've been thinking about this a lot: "What [ten years ago] did I really expect to happen?" We had this sense that technologies were going to continue to grow, become more ubiquitous, and be more prevalent, but I don't think anybody fully understood what was going to happen with like mobile writing, mobile production, and the app-based world. If I knew back then what I know now, I would have definitely been a lot wealthier.

We definitely knew that these technologies were going to play an increasing role for students’ writing skills and capacities upon leaving school. Every job, even start-ups, needs a digital presence. They were going to need an ability to make a video, they're going to need to make audio content of some capacity because they're going to reach a different audience who's oriented in a different way. To that extent, I envisioned that more and more classrooms would take up with writing.

I really thought that by now more universities would have the digital writing component or digital literacy as a core curricular value, in the same way that they have writing, speaking, and math. I thought it would be more prevalent in terms of curricular development. There are universities that have done this and colleges that have done this. But, yes, I'm a little shocked that it hasn't become a curricular value. The sad part is, most universities recognize they need to develop these skills in their students. They have statements about it, they talked about like how, "We're at the leading edge in digital literacy skills. We're producing students who can hit the ground running in the industrial corporate world with digital technologies," and yet it's not a fundamental part of their identity.

The more writing becomes digitally oriented, the less time you have for more traditional writing things. I mean I work at a university that, honest to God, still defines writing as words on a page. I teach intensive writing courses, and I have to meet the university requirements on what counts as intensive writing. I'm trying to make the case that even if it was just words on a page, it still includes design, layout, production, and orientation. It's never just been words on a page.

The fact that we define the sense of writing by word counts and a peer review process means we got half of it right. The peer review process is critical, and letting them revise and redesign is great, but students who can make amazing videos, or design a really informative web text, or learn how to write a series of blog post for critical or public service kind of things, that's just as much development of writing skill as is writing the essay. In fact, I'd say it's more relevant than the essay.

The essay model is actually a very brilliant model for when it was invented and what it was doing. Truth be told, if you can learn to develop and sustain the kind of extended engagement across what the essay is still designed to do, that kind of thinking, reasoning, and expression still produces a lot of critical value. But it's harder and harder for students to see how readily something like the essay and essay-based practices help them now and then transfer to other areas. It's not just transfer skills that I'm after. It's really critical awareness of the moves or strategies or maneuvers that work rhetorically in different contexts.