"Cultural Materialist Critique
and Digital Scholarship"
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Computers & Writing
Conference Presentation 2009 - Ryan Trauman
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1. Introduction
• Citation as Material and Social Practice
• editing work on The New Work of
Composing
– born-digital scholarship
• citability?
• Subtopic
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2. Texts and scholarship are
changing
•
•
•
•
•
Hypertext/Websites
dynamic sites
user-generated content
N. Katherine Hayles. How We Became Posthuman - Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and
Informatics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999.
– "flickering signifiers, characterized by their tendency toward unexpected metamorphoses,
attenuations, and dispersions" (Hayles 29-30).
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge, MA and
London: MIT Press, 2008.
– "the ontology of digital phenomena" (4)
– "In what...does the materiality of electronic texts consist?" (9).
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2. Texts and scholarship are
changing (2)
•
Christing L. Borgman. Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the
Internet. The MIT Press, 2007.
– "This is a critical juncture of scholarly information infrastructure. The technology has
advanced much more quickly than has our understanding of its present and potential
uses. ... Design decisions made today will determine whether the Internet of tomorrow
enables imaginative new forms of scholarship and learning" (3)
– "Building a technical framework for scholarship is much easier than understanding
what to build, for whom, for what purposes, and how their usage of the technologies
will evolve over time." (3)
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2. Texts and scholarship are
changing (3)
• Cheryl Ball - Show, Not Tell
• CELJ - "Best Practices for Online Journal
Editors"
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6. How do scholarly digital texts
cite other texts?
• citation/bibliography
– Susan H. Delagrange. "Wunderkammer,
Cornell, and the Visual Canon of
Arrangement." Kairos, 13.2, Spring 2009
• Urls and Email links embedded
– Sean Zdenek. "Accessible podcasting:
College students on the margins in the new
media classroom." Computers and
Composition Online. Fall 2009
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8. Functional notions of
traditional citation practices (aka
interface designs)
•
•
Interface elements
– citation
– quotation, paraphrase, summary, stills
– bibliography
– page #
scholarly work
– citation
• connects texts rhetorically
• maps to a static text
– quotation, paraphrase, summary, stills
• conjures immediate reproduction
• reduces the need to physically locate source material
– bibliography
• embeds a text within a discourse
– page #
• delineates scope and location of source material
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8. Functional notions of
traditional citation practices (aka
interface designs) (2)
• data storage/proximity
– citation
• one text stored outside another text
• points away from text toward others
– quotation, paraphrase, summary, stills
• stores one (partial) text within another
– bibliography
• embeds a discourse within a text
– page #
• delineates scope and location of source material
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13. In what specific ways do
scholarly digital texts complicate
citation practices?
•
•
•
•
PDF
– Sean Zdenek. "Accessible podcasting: College students on the margins in the
new media classroom." Computers and Composition Online. Fall 2009
Flash Text
– Susan H. Delagrange. "Wunderkammer, Cornell, and the Visual Canon of
Arrangement." Kairos, 13.2, Spring 2009
YouTube
– theamishaugur. "English Downfall." Kairos, 13.2, Spring 2009.
Flash Movie
– Bonnie Kyburz. "Bones." Kairos, 13.2, Spring 2009.
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16. What are our best current
options for citing digital texts?
• alphabetic citation
– of alphabetic texts
– of movies
– of flash texts
– of Web sites
– of still images
• Still images
– screen capture
– embedded images
• moving images
– video screen capture
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16. What are our best current
options for citing digital texts?
(2)
• audio
– audio capture
– download files
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17. What might we do as
producers and editors of digital
texts to better facilitate certain
types of citation?
• Portable citation assets.
– movies
• Digital Mirrors: Multimodal Reflection in the
Composition Classroom
– Project Files
• Flash texts
• Sophie books
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19. Concerns for continued
exploration
• copyright and circulation
– licensing options
– trackability statistics
• burden on producers/editors/hosts/presses
– increase in scope of what consititutes a "text"
– server space, traffic, maintenance, archives
• proprietary software (politics)
– politics
– economics
• software versioning
– avoiding obsolescence
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