"Profiles in Digital Scholarship & Publishing: Cheryl Ball"

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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 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

An Evolution of Scholarly Multimedia

Teaching Decoloniality & Multimodality

The Rigor of Digital Scholarship

Issues in Open Access

Toward a True OA Publishing Platform: Vega

Teaching Decoloniality & Multimodality

Xchanges: Do you still find yourself having to spend as much time cultivating a knowledge base to critique multimodal work with students, who we think of now as digital natives, with your Kairos authors, and also with your Kairos reviewers? 

CB: The first thing I want to say is, I never have and never will refer to my students as digital natives because the colonialist metaphor is way too much for me to put that on students. Phill Alexander (http://phillalexander.com/home/) has a fantastic short essay that he wrote for the Bad Ideas About Writing (https://textbooks.lib.wvu.edu/badideas/badideasaboutwriting-book.pdf) collection that debunks the myths between the digital native and the digital immigrant, dealing in part with this concept that our students come to us with a lot of consumption practices but not a lot of production practices. That's been something that's been evident in the field since those terms first arose in the early 2000s. That hasn't changed. Students are still coming in with very little production experience in the rhetorical ways that we want and need them to have as part of a first-year writing classroom, or any writing classroom, or any classroom at all. When we ask them to do an assignment, we want them to have production experience, whether it's with linguistic text or multimodal texts. That's the first thing I'll say. And go read that essay by Phill Alexander!

The second thing is that I want to make sure that I give credit to Ann Wysocki (https://uwm.edu/english/our-people/wysocki-anne-frances/), who was my dissertation adviser. She was the one from whom I first heard the phrase, “generous reading.” Of course, that floats around in the field. In our field, I think her use of that is especially important in relation to new media texts and digital media composition. She was one of the first people to remind us in the early days of writing about new media that we need to approach these texts that are on the boundaries of our genre knowledge in a way that we can assume that the authors, particularly in peer-reviewed environments, are presenting the text in a way that it's meant to be presented. That's part of the scholarly ecosystem: understanding that a text that appears in a peer-reviewed platform is in its best possible format ideally.

But we still need to be teaching students this multimodal work. At the undergraduate level, a lot of that happens in professional and technical writing classes, but we don't want to limit that work only to the workplace and the professionalization types of coursework. We want to expand that out into the same ways that we teach writing. When we're teaching writing, we are teaching production in a way. We're teaching students to sit down and create something from essentially nothing. It's the same with digital media. It's just a bunch of different layers and channels of communication added on to that. Does that mean we need to teach them how to use Final Cut Pro? No. No, we don't.

There's many different ways and many ubiquitous technologies that we can use to have our students play around and create these finger exercises, as Cindy Selfe (http://webservices.itcs.umich.edu/mediawiki/DigitalRhetoricCollaborative/index.php/Selfe,_Cynthia) used to like to say, around digital media composition.

I think it’s important to note here that I'm not teaching in the classroom anymore now; I'm teaching faculty and scholars how to author scholarly multimedia work. I'm teaching editors and publishers how to produce this kind of work. I'm still invested in going to the Computers and Writing conference and hearing the conversations that people are having there. With my role with Kairos, it's very important that I'm still involved with the field. One of the things that I see in my current role is that authors’ ability to do anything with HTML and to produce clean code gets more difficult with the expansion of technological possibilities. Some authors at Kairos aren't able to author even the simplest HTML page, which is a problem for us because we require it. Some authors can use very fancy software to produce interactive web texts, but they're using them in WYSIWYG ways. What you see is what you get. It produces horrendous code that they don't know how to clean up, so we end up having to clean it up. We take that on as part of our job, part of our editorial process, but we can only do that with a limited number of texts. There's this real balance that needs to be attended to with being able to produce something that's rhetorically beautiful and useful in terms of a piece of scholarly multimedia and being able to know what's happening underneath. I think authors need to know what's happening underneath because they can't rely on publishing it in Kairos to get their code cleaned up. You send that stuff to another publisher and they're not going to do that work. I'm very proud that we have that workflow built into our system. It's one of our key strengths. Also, one of the key literacies that our field needs to pay attention to: learning how to just do the most basic coding there is. Even if you don't author it from scratch that way, you need to be able to go in and clean it up and edit it. Everybody needs a good editor. That's true of your writing. That's true of your multimedia design. That's true of your code.