Dissertating Digitally

Collaborative project with Dr. Carrie Lamanna, @ CSU

Phase one of the study, completed this summer, analyzed the training graduate students are receiving not in pedagogy but in conducting digital, multimodal scholarship outside the classroom. We investigated the new digital composing work being done by graduate students with a specific focus on the research opportunities and challenges they face when composing new media theses and dissertations. We hypothesized that the digital nature of new media forms make visible the ways in which the traditional print-based form, the standard for humanities theses and dissertations, constrain the research and arguments graduate student scholars can make. The survey and interviews were designed to answer the following questions:

1. What textual forms are current graduate students permitted to use for their theses and dissertations, what programs and offices regulate these textual forms, and how do format restrictions constrain the types of research graduate students can undertake?
2. What theoretical and practical training is necessary for graduate students to be able to make rhetorically sound decisions about using new media forms in their theses and dissertations, and is that training being offered?
3. How can the print-based model that encloses humanities research be altered in order for graduate student scholars to fully participate in the critical new media work being done in the field of rhetoric and composition?

Phase two of the project is a longitudinal study of six doctoral students who are beginning the process of composing a digital dissertation—that is, a dissertation that is multimodal (using a combination of text, audio, video, still images, etc.) and designed and published in a digital format. Phase one of the study confirmed our hypothesis that digital scholarship was not adequately supported at the graduate level because faculty were more focused on print-based knowledge production such as theory, critique, and written forms of argumentation. By closely following these doctoral students and the actions of their dissertation committees throughout the process, we hope to gain greater insight into the underlying resistance to digital scholarship.

Publication plan:

We are currently working on the first journal article with the data from Phase 1. We plan several more articles as well as a book at the conclusion of Phase 2, the longitudinal study.

Mouse-over to view some of the results.

Digital Dissertation Depository (D³)

Collaborative project with Dr. Liza Potts & Dr. Kevin Moberly, @ ODU

Despite a growing acceptance of new media as a form of academic expression, the dissertation, even within new media disciplines, remains primarily print-based. This is not because doctoral students or committees are unwilling to consider projects conceived as works of new media. Rather, it stems from the fact that no mechanism exists to adequately archive and publish such projects. The D³ seeks to remedy this by ultimately establishing an open-source, database-driven system into which new media projects can be deposited, maintained, accessed and cross-referenced. D³ will encourage innovation in the humanities by facilitating complete scholarly exploration of new media as a discursive strategy, and encouraging an examination of the norms through which traditional modes of scholarship, like dissertations, are constructed. This project will generate the hardware and software architecture for D³.

Publication Plan:

We plan on publishing our findings as an open-source document. Future plans for this project include creating the depository and making it available to doctoral students.

Going Medieval on New Media (Working Title)

Single-author project

This study is an examination of the historical relationship between rhetorical theory and compositional practices in both medieval and 21st century multimodal texts. Rather than further widening the schism between textual and visual rhetorics and compositional practices, I argue that these modes cannot be theorized independently. Following claims by several new media theorists that multimodal texts are “closer in spirit to the medieval illuminated codex than [they are] to either ancient speech or the modern printed book” (Bolter, 1993), I turn to these illuminated manuscripts, and their underlying rhetorics, to begin the work of interrogating and substantiating these similarities.

Ultimately, I argue that twenty-first century multimodal texts, like medieval illuminated manuscripts, are a synthesis of the visual and the textual and thus require a unified rhetorical theory, which will in turn require an expansion of compositional theory and practice to include such texts. In order to further substantiate the claims of similarity between the two periods, I identify several key conceptual convergences between modern and medieval compositional practices by tracing the intersections of knowledge creation, emerging technologies and organizational practices in each period. I then turn to the medieval praxis of memory with its development of complex, multimodal internal imagines agentes, which used color, design, text and image in learning and composing, as a theory of multimodal composing.

Arguing that the importance of the trained memory in medieval culture coupled with the technology of the manuscript tradition eventually led to the external application of the multimodal methods developed in the ars memoriae, I trace these methods through their manifestations in the programmes of illustration, organization and marginalia in several medieval manuscripts. As this examination shows, the canon of memory, rather than simply being the practice of memorization or mnemonics, as it is conceived in current-traditional rhetoric, was an essential canon for multimodal composing and learning in the medieval period. Returning to the conceptual convergences identified earlier in my study, I argue, therefore, that the canon of memory needs to be reexamined and reclaimed for use in twenty-first century composition practices.

Publication Plan:

Preparing prospectus for submission to the New Media Theory series at Parlor Press.