Chapter 4: Computers and Writing’s Relationship with the Digital Humanities

Some History

While historically tensions have existed between DH and computers and writing, in the video below Jason Palmeri and Cheryl Ball point out ways in which their disciplinary histories overlap considerably. They echo Michael Knieval’s (2009) contention that DH and computers and writing share a “history characterized by misunderstanding and marginalization” (p. 93).

Knievel (2009) noted that DH and computers and writing each have a “history characterized by misunderstanding and marginalization” (p. 93). And that misunderstanding includes beliefs about when they came into existence. Dates for DH’s origin range from the mid-twentieth century to the early twenty-first century. DH, for instance, is often described as an outgrowth or second iteration of the field known as humanities computing (see Hockey, 2004; Kirschenbaum, 2010; Parry, 2012). Humanities computing dates back as far as 1949 with the creation of a concordance program, designed by IBM, to help a Jesuit priest, Roberto Busa, create an 11 million word index of the works of St. Thomas Aquinas (Hockey, 2004). However, DH did not emerge as a specific and accepted term until the start of the twenty-first century.

The origin of the term digital humanities is credited to the editors of Blackwell Press’s 2004 collection A Companion to the Digital Humanities: Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth. In literary DH scholar Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s (2010) re-telling of this origin story, Unsworth took primary credit for the creation of the term, explaining that in conversation with the publisher’s acquisitions editor, Andrew McNeillie, he suggested “digital humanities” as a compromise between “humanities computing” and “digitized humanities” (p. 56). The name later received further credibility—and the promise of financial support—when Brett Bobley and Bruce Cole created the NEH’s Digital Humanities Initiative (Kirschenbaum, 2010, p. 57). Regardless of who gets credit for the term digital humanities—or when the field officially began—it appears that its collective founders agreed that they wanted to reduce emphasis on digitization (the technological activity) in order to focus on the humanities (the disciplinary content area).

DH in the Academy

DH has been both heralded as saving the academy, particularly the humanities, because of its privileging of open and collaborative work, and critiqued as a prime example of everything that is wrong with the neoliberal university because of its privileging of new digital technologies and scholarly work that is entrepreneurial and potentially economically profitable. Alan Liu (2009) made a case for the collaborative and innovative change(s) that could come from the kind of interdisciplinarity that DH encourages. In his 2009 piece “Digital Humanities and Academic Change,” he characterized the changes to “the academic humanities and, more broadly still, of the academy as a whole” brought about by digital technologies as more evolutionary than revolutionary, a kind of metamorphosis (he opened by using Kafka’s short story as his orienting metaphor)—a vision he described as “global humanities” (p. 17). The evolution, as he described it, is filled with the promise of collaboration and “true” interdisciplinarity resulting in innovative projects and grant money. He argued that interdisciplinarity, as the academy has historically described it, “has until now rarely, if ever, been truly interdisciplinary. It has not had to face up to the disparity of knowledge paradigms between the major divisions of academic knowledge” (p. 26). Those of us in the academy, he pointed out, have never had to prove our research or knowledge “across divisions”; however, we are now incentivized² to do so in the wake of the rapid growth of digital technologies. In this way, he argued that the humanities move beyond seeing digital technology’s influence as merely evolutionary to “making a fundamental difference in the humanities because it indeed serves as the vector that imports alien paradigms of knowledge” (p. 27).

In Jennifer Glaser and Laura R. Micciche's chapter in Jim Ridolfo and William Hart-Davidson’s (2015) collection Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities, “Digitizing English,” Glaser and Micciche (2015) similarly championed DH. They called for “applying principles of innovation, collaboration, and creativity learned through DH theory and practice” in order to provide “a realistic and viable future for a field mourning a primarily textual past” and to “recuperate” attention to rhetoric within English departments (p. 200). Here they present DH as giving English studies (and, by extension, the humanities) a positive future direction that they imply it would otherwise lack. They offered two other reasons for embracing DH. First, they positioned DH as theoretically advantageous because it foregrounds issues of materiality that, they claimed, English studies has too long ignored (to its peril in contrast with other academic departments that already have considered materialist approaches) (pp. 200–201). Second, they claimed that DH can move English departments beyond conservative (i.e., outdated) curricular and publishing models that privilege “insularity” and “limit[] the viability of the English department and the humanities in the wider world” (p. 201). In particular, they presented DH as opposing curricular models that define expertise around “a narrow period and methodological approach” as well as publishing models that continue to privilege print “dissertation-based monographs with academic presses” as the gold standard for publication for tenure and promotion (p. 201). In short, they proffered the value of the collaborative approaches—to curriculum and to publication—that they believed DH to encourage and employ. In their chapter, Glaser and Micciche, while careful not to present DH as an “antidote” to all that ills English studies or the humanities, offer DH as a foil: a new, up-to-date, outward-looking, relevant, collaborative, proactive field that moves beyond old, outmoded, inward-focused, irrelevant, isolated, reactive disciplines (p. 200).

Other academics were critical of DH. In “Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities,” Daniel Allington, Sarah Brouillette, and David Golumbia (2016) made the case that traditionally the humanities has resisted the kind of corporate restructuring of the university that values research that supports industry directly. DH, however, encourages scholarship that “appears to overcome” the kind of “painstaking individual scholarship and producing forms of knowledge with less immediate economic application” that generally characterize the humanities. Likewise, Richard Grusin (2014)³ drew a direct link between DH and the corporatization of higher education in his 2013 Modern Language Association (MLA) presentation, “The Dark Side of the Digital Humanities”:

I would assert that it is no coincidence that the digital humanities has emerged as "the next big thing" at the same moment that the neoliberalization and corporatization of higher education has intensified in the first decades of the 21st century.³

In short, DH promotes work that can lead to tangible products that are marketable in industry, leading to an alliance with corporate interests. This entrepreneurial spirit unsettles many academics but energizes others.

Negative reactions to DH also stem from concerns apart from technology and economics. For instance, for John Tinnell (2015) DH led English studies’ primary objects of study to become increasingly hard to define. He claimed that “in the wake of” DH, which he associated with postmodernism, “[t]ext and interface are perhaps two of the slipperiest terms in English studies today” (p. 138, emphasis in original).

DH and Computers and Writing

Computers and writing teacher-scholars’ responses to DH have fallen loosely into three camps:

1. Computers and writing professionals have been doing for over 20 years what DH is doing now, so how dare DH not acknowledge or include computers and writing in its history and work.
2. Computers and writing teacher-scholars should not concern themselves with the question of who started DH-related work but focus on how they can get involved with DH. That is, computers and writing practitioners should explicitly align themselves with DH, call their research DH work, and get on with their pursuits, including trying to take advantage of grant money connected to DH.
3. Computers and writing practitioners should pay no attention to DH because it is a fad (or worse—an actual detriment to the kind of work valued in the humanities). They should carry on doing their own equally (or perhaps more) valid and valuable work.

These positions can overlap. For instance, a computers and writing teacher-scholar can be upset that DH has claimed as cutting edge the technological and pedagogical work that the (sub)field of computers and writing has been doing for decades but might also identify as a DH scholar in applying for a Digital Humanities Advancement Grant through the NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities.

There are also arguments that do not fall into these categories. Alex Reid’s (2016) blog post, “de-baits in the digital humanities,” from his John Lovas Memorial Best Weblog Award winning Digital Digs blog, is one example. Reid rejected the arguments outlined above, ultimately asserting that arguments over whether to affiliate with DH are not productive. Instead, he sought to “de-bait” them, that is, “remov[e] the fuel from the argument rather than arguing.” He made this rhetorical move in order to protect digital work from being territorialized by computers and writing or DH. Thus, rather than focus on examples of scholarship that illustrate each of these three categories, in this chapter we provide examples of computers and writing scholars’ responses that might fall into several categories simultaneously. Responses have been multifaceted, complex, and varied, and have also shifted in focus and concern over the years.

The term digital humanities was first referenced in Computers and Composition in 2009, in Michael Knievel and Mary P. Sheridan-Rabideau’s “Articulating ‘Responsivity’ in Context: Re-making the M.A. in Composition and Rhetoric for the Electronic Age.” Since then not much formal scholarship has been published on the relationship between DH and computers and writing, though it has long been a popular topic of discussion on Listservs™, online discussion boards, and conference panels/roundtables (e.g., see Brooke et al., 2016). As we noted in the previous chapter, this same year it was also referenced for the first time in Computers and Writing Conference programs in two presentations by Jentery Sayers, “Three Case Studies on the Emergence of Collaboration and Expertise in the Digital Humanities” and “Sustained Systems, Sustainable Research: A Look at Undergraduate, Project-Based Approaches to the Digital Humanities,” as well as in a presentation by Nichole Poinski, “New Directions for the Non-Directive: The Digital Humanities and Writing Centers.” It has subsequently appeared in every program from 2011–2015. Apart from Lynn C. Lewis’s (2009) review of Sayers’ “Three Case Studies” presentation, the first mention of DH in Kairos was in editor Cheryl E. Ball’s Spring 2010 “Logging On” column. In it she mentioned “digital humanities” sessions at the Modern Language Association Conference as “a hot topic.” In the following issue, Ball (2010b) announced that Kairos had been awarded an NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant worth $50,000 to build plug-ins to help with the workflow of born digital scholarship submitted to the journal.

Tensions

Scholars (both inside and outside computers and writing) have questioned whether DH should be aligned with English departments. In the 2010 ADE Bulletin, literary scholar Matthew Kirschenbaum addressed queries about why DH work found a home with literary studies. He asked, “What is digital humanities, and what is it doing in English departments?” In response to the latter question, he pointed to “the long association between computers and composition” (p. 60), an answer that would seem to suggest a close alignment between computers and writing and DH. Indeed, he opened his article with an extended quote from Cynthia L. Selfe’s (1988) “Computers in English Departments: The Rhetoric of Technopower.” His characterization of DH as having “a culture that values collaboration, openness, nonhierarchical relations, and agility,” making it a possible “instrument for real resistance or reform" is one that, to many readers, might seem remarkably similar to the ethos of computers and writing. But the association between computers and writing and DH has not been seamless. Members of the computers and writing community have described the relationship between DH and computers and writing as alternatively contentious and praiseworthy.

One source of this tension is a perceived attempt by literary studies to jump on the technology bandwagon. For instance, Cheryl E. Ball, in her 2015 presentation for the Emory University Writing Program speaker series, “The Asymptotic Relationship between Digital Humanities and Computers and Writing,” characterized the response of many computers and writing scholars to DH as “skeptical,” “annoyed,” and “frustrated.” Ball ultimately characterized the relationship between DH and computers and writing as that of an “asymptote,” a term from analytic geometry for a line that approaches but never actually meets a curve. She claimed that many computers and writing scholars see DH as “a mask behind which literary studies pulls itself out of its supposed crisis,” a position she reiterated in her interview for this eBook. This position was reinforced by Jennifer Glaser and Laura R. Micciche (2015) in their chapter “Digitizing English,” in which they asserted, “DH represents a realistic and viable future for a field mourning a primarily textual past” (p. 200).

In the video below, Steven Krause and Kristin Arola define DH and share their perspectives on the, at times, contentious relationship between computers and writing and DH that we discuss throughout this chapter.

While one of the tensions expressed by computers and composition scholars is that they have already been doing (the equivalent of) DH work for a long time and literary studies is new to discover it, another tension can be traced to the (sub)field’s feminist roots. In “Meaningful Engagements: Feminist Historiography and the Digital Humanities,” Jessica Enoch and Jean Bessette (2013) characterized a “pairing” of DH and feminist rhetorical historiography as “unlikely” (p. 635). They affirmed that feminist historians have not embraced DH, at least not in their published scholarship, because of the broad and sometimes confusing range of methodologies that fall under the umbrella of DH, as well as because DH approaches may “run counter to feminist methodological imperatives” and ideals (pp. 636, 634). They noted, for instance, the misogynist histories and practices associated with computer programming, which can cause problems for feminist scholars. They explained that the ability to code is sometimes held as “the litmus test for a ‘real’ digital scholar” (p. 652). Enoch and Bessette ultimately argued for feminist historiographers to be open to considering DH approaches, but they urged caution.

Affiliations

Despite these reasons for reticence among computers and writing practitioners to fully embrace DH, members of the (sub)field have advocated connecting with DH for a number of reasons. One reason is a seeming desire to build bridges with other disciplines. This desire has manifested itself in three ways. One is to affiliate with literary studies. Computers and writing scholars have referenced DH as a way to connect with and appeal to colleagues in literature. For instance, as part of their argument for including a wider range of stakeholders in discussions about development of a graduate program in writing studies at the University of Wyoming, Michael Knievel and Mary P. Sheridan-Rabideau (2009) referenced the NEH’s Digital Humanities Initiative to help justify a new media hire in a predominately literature focused English Department. They presented DH as “readily recognizable in English department circles” and positioned new media—and, by extension, DH, as the transdisciplinary study of new media—as a means to build “departmental connections and coherent understandings about the future of English” (p. 34). From this perspective, DH is a bridge to technology-minded English studies colleagues.

A second affiliation was outlined by Jim Ridolfo and William Hart-Davidson (2015) in the introduction to their edited volume Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities. They described their collection as a “first step toward building interdisciplinary discussions between rhetoric studies and DH” (their use of “rhetoric studies” includes composition, computers and writing, and “areas of TPW,” or technical and professional writing) (p. 9). A third example was the case that Knievel (2009) made, which we address earlier in this chapter, for computers and writing to align with DH to provide computers and writing an opportunity to occupy a more central space in the humanities.

In addition to a desire to connect with colleagues in literary studies, rhetorical studies, and the humanities, the (sub)field’s connections to DH have also been motivated by money, particularly the availability of grant funding associated with DH projects through organizations like the NEH. Knievel (2009) explained, “the digital humanities has emerged as a vital, well-funded endeavor, moving from its initial status as a fringe concern of dubious value to a more prominent position where it is roundly recognized and legitimized in most humanities circles (see, for instance, the National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Initiative)” (p. 102). In this way, Knievel constructed the attractiveness and status of DH as based firmly in its financial viability—to it being a “well-funded endeavor.”

So, too, if less explicitly, did Gail E. Hawisher, in an interview with Estee Beck published in 2013. Hawisher shared,

The digital humanities seem to me a very hot topic now. It’s kind of interesting because although there was an early movement in the digital humanities, at least in the 1990s, it was less a part of our field. Now, there are grants available, and our colleagues in literary studies and our colleagues in computers and writing can do the kind of research where they can attract funding for their digital work. (p. 356)

Hawisher noted that DH was “less a part of our field” in the 1990s and suggested that DH being “hot” arose from the opportunity for computers and writing scholars to secure (perhaps more or better) funding for their research. They finally had the opportunity to “attract funding for their digital work.” Kirschenbaum (2012) made this point explicit in characterizing digital humanities as a “tactical” term (p. 415). Ridolfo and Hart-Davidson (2015) followed Kirschenbaum’s lead and explicitly argued for rhetoric scholars “to consider selectively redefining digital projects under the umbrella of DH in order to leverage funding,” speak to ”extrafield audiences,” and “leverage DH for additional hires” (p. 4) They emphasized the need for computers and writing scholars to apply for DH grants and, in turn, become reviewers for them (p. 5). As DH scholars Melissa Terras, Julianne Nyhan, and Edward Vanhoutte (2013) explained, “one important effect of the rise of the term ‘digital humanities’ is in the practicality of enabling scholars to self-identify as digital humanities scholars” (p. 2). From this perspective, computers and writing scholars benefit from identifying as DH scholars, particularly to secure funding opportunities marketed for DH work. Computers and writing scholars are seemingly heeding this advice. A frequent way we found scholars to use the term digital humanities in Computers and Composition articles after 2010 was in their bios—that is, in characterizing themselves as DH scholars.

In the video below, Jason Palmeri’s tongue-in-cheek “ham sandwich” anecdote illustrates Hawisher’s (2013) assertion that by embracing DH and labeling their work as such, computers and writing teacher-scholars finally had the opportunity to “attract funding for their digital work.”

This economic benefit of DH affiliation extended beyond grant monies to employment. In her study of terms used to advertise computers and writing related positions on the MLA Job Information List, Claire Lauer (2014) affirmed, “Making sure faculty and graduate students are familiar with sources of grant funding (and phrases like digital humanities) is becoming an increasing priority in the higher education landscape, even for those fields (like English) that are not traditionally expected to secure large amounts of funding” (p. 73, emphasis in original). While, like Anderson and McPherson (2011), she argued that the term digital is unnecessary because all communication is digital, she ultimately reinforced that computers and writing scholars are more marketable if they know what grant sources are available via DH (p. 73). Taken together, these scholars’ motivations for connecting with DH are economic: using the language of DH has allowed computers and writing scholars to secure funding for their work in ways they were not able to previously.

Scholarship Separation

Despite these possibilities for connections, however, in most of the scholarship in computers and writing, as well as DH, during the period under review, computers and writing and DH remained separate. For example, the major edited collections on DH in English studies mostly leave out computers and writing. Scholars from computers and writing (and writing studies more broadly) are wholly absent from Terras, Nyhan, and Vanhoutte’s (2013) Defining Digital Humanities: A Reader. This collection, which sought to define DH, drew from international scholars across the humanities, including history, English, humanities computing, and library and information science, but it included no chapters from scholars in computers and writing. The same is true of David M. Berry’s (2012) Understanding Digital Humanities, which reviewed the “computational turn” in the arts and humanities and likewise included scholars from across disciplines, including literature, media, communications, cultural studies, and computer science but no one from computers and writing. Brett D. Hirsch’s (2012) collection Digital Humanities Pedagogy, which argued for attention to and development of a DH pedagogy, did cite a few computers and writing scholars (e.g., Rice, Ridolfo & DeVoss, Wysocki & Johnson-Eilola), signaling that computers and writing had perhaps been able to bring its pedagogical expertise to DH conversations. Yet while Hirsch’s (2012) collection included contributions from computers and writing scholars Melanie Kill and Virginia Kuhn, they were the only contributors to cite other scholarship from computers and writing. That is, it was the computers and writing scholars who cited other computers and writing scholars, suggesting that while members of the (sub)field were invited to the DH table, computers and writing scholarship had yet to be taken up in a substantial way by other DH scholars. Computers and writing scholars are also absent from Matthew K. Gold’s 2012 Debates in the Digital Humanities as well as his 2016 update of the collection with Lauren F. Klein. Jentery Sayers' (2017) Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities continues this tradition. Though Sayers was a substantial presence in computers and writing during the period under review, this collection also wholly excludes computers and writing folks.

Cross-field absence also characterized DH work in computers and writing. In Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities (2015), Ridolfo and Hart-Davidson pointed out that the story of the 1982 project Writing Aid and Author’s Helper (WANDAH), which we discuss in Chapter 1, had not been “translated into the recent field history of DH; rather, it remains under the disciplinary umbrella of computers and writing, absent from DH conversations” (p. 4), despite the fact that it, much like contemporary projects funded by the NEH Office of Digital Humanities, was funded by a grant from the Department of Education for Improvement of Postsecondary Education. And, of course, Ridolfo and Hart-Davidson’s (2015) collection itself, with a couple notable exceptions from DH scholars outside computers and writing (e.g., Elizabeth Losh), is an entire volume on DH that comprises chapters from solely computers and writing scholars. Scholarly publications in both (sub)fields (at least as of the time of this writing in 2019) have yet to integrate computers and writing and DH voices in a substantial way.

Part of this lack of integration stems from the long-standing historical divisions between writing studies and literary studies. The division between MLA (Modern Language Association) and CCCC (Conference on College Composition and Communication) has long been representative of this rift, often characterized (as we have throughout this chapter) by different valuation each constituency places on the acts of production/making versus consumption/interpretation. CCCC is traditionally aligned with the former, and MLA is traditionally aligned with the latter. MLA has at times been criticized by the field of writing studies for leaving out its scholarship (e.g., not having a category for writing studies at its annual convention). Computers and writing scholars, too, have found fault with MLA for being an organization that tends to uphold the privileging of print texts as the default medium and for not paying serious enough attention to digital media scholarship.⁴

Given the tension of this history, the MLA Commons born-digital collection “Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models, Experiments” (Davis et al., 2016) is notable. So too is its inclusion of a number of teacher-scholars from computers and writing. This 2016 curated project contained 50 keywords contributed by “experienced practitioner[s] of digital pedagogy.” Each keyword was supported by “ten supporting artifacts” that were in some way pedagogical (syllabi, prompts, assignments). While this collection did not explicitly reference the (sub)field of computers and writing, it did contain contributions from a number of its teacher-scholars: Daniel Anderson, Kristin L. Arola, Douglas Eyman, Jason Loan, Jennifer Sheppard, Annette Vee, Joyce R. Walker, and Melanie Yergeau, to name a few. And the collection’s focus on pedagogy, which is common in computers and writing, is less characteristic of scholarship in DH (a topic we take up again shortly).

While “Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models, Experiments” was born-digital, Eyman and Ball (who were on the advisory board for that project) pointed to a relative dearth of this kind of publication in DH. In their chapter, “Digital Humanities Scholarship and Electronic Publication,” in Ridolfo and Hart-Davidson’s (2015) collection, Eyman and Ball argued that born digital scholarship was largely absent from mainstream DH publications—with the absence of born digital texts amongst DH work funded by the NEH as especially troubling. Working from their perspective as editors of Kairos, a major digital journal in computers and writing and beyond, Eyman and Ball argued that as English studies turned more to “scholarly multimedia or Web texts” (p. 66), digital rhetoric was well positioned to offer DH “methods and methodologies” for not only producing but also (peer) reviewing these new(er) forms of scholarship. They went on to state that most DH journals were comprised of “only print-like articles talking about new media, not with and through new media” (p. 69, emphasis in original)—a critique Ball raised regarding computers and writing scholarship in 2004 in her “Show, Not Tell” article in Computers and Composition. Elizabeth Losh (2015) made a similar claim in her chapter in Ridolfo and Hart-Davidson’s (2015) collection: “the digital humanities remains more comfortably oriented around textual artifacts from print culture” and remains “resistan[t] to working with born-digital materials that are generated in real time” (p. 288). Eyman and Ball pointed to Journal of Digital Humanities and Digital Humanities Quarterly as examples of DH publications that continued to privilege print-based scholarship. They argued that Kairos was the antithesis of this model because “design is treated as an equivalent form of argument to written content” (p. 69). In other words, Kairos published born digital webtexts that could not exist in any other format. They argued (other) DH publications had not yet taken this step but should. As we note earlier, Kairos was awarded an NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up grant worth $50,000 in 2010 to promote born digital work.

Role of Pedagogy

This difference in foci between DH and computers and writing extends not only to the kinds or forms of scholarship published. It also extends to the role of pedagogy in DH work. For computers and writing, research and pedagogy have always gone hand in hand. The (sub)field was founded on pedagogical concerns.

The story of the relationship between DH and computers and writing continues in the video below with Cheryl Ball. She describes the relationship between DH and computers as asymptotic with computers and writing having long been doing the kind of digital pedagogy work that DH seems to have discovered only recently.

Computers and writing's approach to technologies has arguably always been both pedagogical and methodological. DH, however, was founded on research method concerns. Its initial focus was how to use digital technologies for scholarly purposes; attention to pedagogy came later, at least as some scholars tell DH’s history (e.g., Brooke, 2014, p. 179). For instance, in his introduction to Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles and Politics, Hirsch (2012) cited his analysis of keywords in Blackwell’s A Companion to the Digital Humanities to justify his claim that DH had focused more on research than pedagogy. He noted that out of a corpus of 297,300 words from A Companion to the Digital Humanities, research appeared 504 times while pedagogy appeared only 8 (pp. 3–5). Thus, he characterized DH’s interest in pedagogy as newfound and needed, arguing

we should be […] concerned about the pervasiveness with which pedagogy is excluded from discussions of digital humanities. [... W]e owe it to ourselves (and indeed to our students) to pay more than lip service to pedagogy in our field. (pp. 5, 6)⁵

The “ourselves” here is seemingly mainstream DH audiences, particularly in literary studies.

In our previous chapter we make note of similar trends with language use in computers and writing. Our results of distant reading of keywords from Computers and Writing Conference programs from 2005–2015 indicate the centrality of pedagogy in the (sub)field, with pedagogy appearing in every program during this period. Raw counts, however, tell a more complex story. Research is the ninth most mentioned term at 950 references, with teaching coming in as the tenth most mentioned term at 945 references. Likewise, research was mentioned 1,105 times with pedagog* mentioned 1047 times. Both of these terms appeared significantly more than other research-related terms like theor* (at 652 references) and methodolo* (at 114 references). These results suggest that computers and writing’s attention to teaching has been concurrent with rather than in substitution of research, whereas Hirsch’s results speak more to an exclusion of attention to teaching in favor of research.

If we accept that computers and writing has long been interested in and focused on pedagogy, even viewed by some as a fundamentally teaching-focused (sub)field (e.g., Ball, 2015; Harris, 2012; Lauer, 1984; Phelps, 1986), then DH’s new attention to pedagogy presents both possibilities for and challenges to computers and writing’s relationship with DH. DH’s’ “discovery” of pedagogy as a scholarly area of importance possibly indicates an area where computers and writing scholars can participate in DH discussions and/or intervene in DH work. Ball (2015), for example, identified pedagogy as a potential area where computers and writing and DH could establish what she, following Douglas Walls (2015), called a mutual “rhetoric of alliance.” Walls drew on this concept⁶ in order to argue that there is a “mutual need” that exists between DH and rhetoric and that both fields need to adapt and change “by understanding the connectedness that we share” (p. 214). A “rhetoric of alliance,” as Walls used it, positions “DH and rhetoric as distinct entities that need to align with each other to create language that makes one potential ‘path’ of exchange, one based on mutual respect rather than privileging” (p. 214). Despite having characterized the relationship between computers and writing as “asymptotic” (2015) and “not yet one of mutual exchange," Ball posited that the most likely place of convergence is pedagogy. Ultimately, in her 2015 presentation she argued that DH had a lot to offer computers and writing in terms of “research, and tool building, and tools” and that computers and writing had a lot to offer DH in terms of “pedagogical methods and research and practice.” Though these connections have yet to be fully realized, there is the potential for meaningful connections.

Maker Culture and Computer Programming

Citing initiatives like “THAT Camps”⁷ and “maker labs” coming out of DH, Cheryl E. Ball (2015) went on to describe another possible site of connection between computers and writing and DH: maker culture. She professed that we in writing studies have always made things: “We call it composition.” As we discuss in Chapter 3, the “maker movement”⁸ was not referenced in Computers and Writing Conference programs before James Gee’s 2013 Keynote, “Writing in the Age of the Maker Movement,” but the years that followed (through 2015) continued to have at least one presentation devoted to this topic each year. Some DH scholars—most notably, Stephen Ramsay—emphasized the importance of making things. Participating in the long-standing “hack vs. yack” debate in DH, where “hack” refers to building and producing (e.g., coding) and “yack” refers to more theoretical academic talk (e.g., scholarship about coding)⁹, Ramsay (2011) offered the example that reading a map is "all very good” and at the heart of humanistic inquiry; however, making a map is

an entirely different experience. Dh-ers insist—again and again—that this process of creation yields insights that are difficult to acquire otherwise. [...] Building is, for us, a new kind of hermeneutic—one that is quite a bit more radical than taking the traditional methods of humanistic inquiry and applying them to digital objects. (p. 244)

The maker movement, in general, and Ramsay’s call for DH to be more process centered, specifically, resonate with the value writing studies has long seen in production as a hermeneutic process.

Computers and writing also had its own version of the “hack vs. yack” debate, particularly in the 2000s and 2010s. Teacher-scholars wrestled with whether attention to coding/computer programming and knowing how to code is important to the (sub)field. Regardless of the answer, however, attention to code and coding increased. As we note in the previous chapter, in Computers and Writing Conference programs references to code in relation to computer programming started in 2002 and appeared every year thereafter, except for 2004; code’s relative frequency was highest in 2014. This increasing attention to code culminated in the years at the end of the period under review in this eBook (and after). In particular, James B. Brown Jr.’s (2015a) Ethical Programs: Hospitality and the Rhetoric of Software argued both that software is rhetorical and that rhetoric is computational,¹⁰ and Annette Vee’s (2017) Coding Literacy: How Computer Programming Is Changing Writing presented coding as (potentially) a type of literacy.

But connections between coding and writing have a longer history in the (sub)field. Years earlier, a 1999 special issue of Computers and Composition on programming (Fortune & Kalmbach) included articles that analyzed code and the role of code in teaching writing. For instance, Nicholas Mauriello, Gian S. Pagnucci, and Tammy Winner (1999) professed that HTML complicated—and even displaced—more traditional writing instruction, “blur[ring] the lines” of the (sub)field. They argued HTML “turns the traditional composition course into a hybrid language/writing/computer course” (p. 410), situating coding as squarely within the purview of the (sub)field. James Ray Watkins, Jr. (1999) recounted ways in which the collaborative authoring of a hypertext (a HYPERCARD hypertext called the E.A.R.) could inform the teaching of first-year writing, especially in achieving a pedagogy rooted in bell hooks’ notion of cultural hybridity.

Scholars recognized that this embrace of coding in writing courses was not without challenges. In response to the “necromancy” of the software behind the interface of programs used in composition courses, Joel Hafner (1999) examined the “politics” of code (a riff off of Selfe and Selfe’s (1994) “The Politics of the Interface”), particularly the principles of Structured Programming in comparison with hypertext (p. 325). Laurie Cubbison (1999) illustrated these politics in her analysis of Listserv™ software, considering the decisions Listserv™ administrators make that can be invisible. And Morgan Gresham (1999) noted the problems of coding and teaching coding in an “outdated” computer classroom (p. 395ff).

Other scholars examined uses of particular programming languages, calling for members of the (sub)field to critically examine those languages and to teach students to do the same. For instance, Alan Rea and Doug White (1999) urged writing teachers not only to allow students to use HTML to create web pages in writing courses, but also, with their pedagogy for hypertext writing, to teach them to do so. Mark Haas and Clinton Gardner (1999) made a similar claim, advocating the use of a program called Pueblo to create MOO (MUD, object-oriented) domain interfaces. Similarly, Cecilia Hartley, Ellen Schendel, and Michael Neal (1999) recounted their experience using the programming language Perl to create an online learning environment called Writing Spaces. Despite this uptake of language of coding and programming more broadly, attention to the specifics of literal computer programming remained, particularly as a rhetorical activity. Like Rea and White (1999), for instance, Karl Stolley (2012) advocated the value of teaching students to code as part of writing courses. In “The Lo-Fi Manifesto” in Kairos, Stolley (2008) argued for a certain kind of coding, urging computers and writing teacher-scholars to eschew proprietary software in favor of “lo-fi” plain text coding.

Later discussions moved away from discussing specific programming languages to theorizing about the relationship between coding and writing more generally. For example, Robert Cummings (2006) argued for treating writing and coding as closely related composing activities, positing a coding triangle akin to the rhetorical triangle. Coder, program, machine, respectively, replaced the writer, text, reader configuration in Aristotle’s traditional formulation (pp. 435–436).

Digital Rhetoric

In addition to pedagogy and makerspaces, a third potential area of alliance between computers and writing and DH is digital rhetoric. Eyman (2015) explored this connection in Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice. Eyman devoted this entire book to defining digital rhetoric, but his “simpl[e]” definition was “the application of rhetorical theory (as analytic method or heuristic for production) to digital texts and performances” (p. 13; see also p. 44). Given this definition, Eyman argued explicitly that “digital rhetoric is well positioned to participate in and contribute to the digital humanities,” especially when DH turns attention to “born-digital” texts (which he affirmed was missing from DH at the time of his writing) (p. 59). Eyman positioned digital rhetoric as particularly valuable in recuperating rhetoric as at the core of humanistic work:

Digital rhetoric provides an opportunity to reclaim not just the neglected canons of memory and delivery, but to follow the work of contemporary rhetoricians who have been attempting to recover the full power of rhetoric and stake out a stronger claim within the continuing construction of digital humanities. (pp. 59–60)

Calling software “one of the available means of persuasion” (p. 23) (i.e., rhetorical), James J. Brown (2015b) likewise took up the assertion that rhetoricians play an important role in “letting go” of the disciplinary “turf wars” between DH and English studies. He advised that rhetoric studies would be wise to take lessons from software studies, in particular critical code studies, as a field that has straddled the gap between process and product. Thus, for him, one potential shared site of interest for both DH and computers and writing is electronic literature. “The study of electronic literature,” Brown contended, “is a particularly useful place to start given that it requires categories that move beyond separable notions of interpretation and production” (p. 22). Drawing on N. Katherine Hayles’s concept of “intermediation,” the idea that “recursive feedback loops […] show us how humans and machines learn from one another” (p. 22), and using Stuart Moulthrop’s Reagan Library (a piece of electronic literature published in 1999), Brown laid out the reciprocal and interactive relationship between humans and machines, as well as between creators and consumers, thereby illustrating the inseparability of interpretation from production. Reagan Library is both a sequence of short stories and also a piece of software. Because of this combination, Brown affirmed that computational aspects of the text can be interpreted: “Reagan Library provides us with an argument about life in a computational world, circa 1999” (p. 25). Aligning himself with Hayles, Moulthrop, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Brown subscribed to the argument that “computer programs are more than tools, [...] they are compositions and sometimes even arguments” (p. 29, emphasis in original). For Brown, by “calling on the reader to play,” texts like Reagan Library illustrate “that the work of interpretation is not separate from the work of production” (p. 30) and, as a result, computers and writing and DH can coexist harmoniously.

Outcomes of (Over?)Focusing on Process in Computers and Writing

Despite James J. Brown’s (2015b) claim, computers and writing and DH have oriented themselves differently. In contrast to the strong focus DH has placed on archival work and digital preservation, computers and writing’s primary concern has been pedagogy and composing processes. These foci in computers and writing have perhaps resulted in a lack of attention to the preservation of the (sub)field’s own scholarship—in particular, how to maintain the scholarly products of the (sub)field that are often born digital, digitized, and live online.

The fate of http://computersandwriting.org illustrates the outcomes of this lack of attention to preservation. From 2013–2016 http://computersandwriting.org was the (sub)field’s online hub and archival site. The web site suddenly disappeared in mid-2016 when its host server, Interversity.org, crashed. As a result, countless hours of labor, largely undertaken by Michael Day, and valuable artifacts, including those associated with the Computers and Writing Memorabilia Project, which comprised digitized and digital copies of conference programs, decades-old chat sessions, and photographs from thirty-five years of Computers and Writing Conferences, disappeared from the web. Only through the heroic volunteer efforts of E. Ashley Hall was some of this content recovered. But some content was irrevocably lost.

This threat—and reality—of disappearance of digital products is not unique to Computers and Writing Conference memorabilia. In their Computers and Composition article “The Kairos Preservation Project,” Tim Lockridge, Enrique Paz, and Cynthia Johnson (2017) directly addressed this question of preserving scholarship published in Kairos, the (sub)field’s preeminent journal publishing born digital webtexts. They called for a “preservation pedagogy” that “integrate[s] digital humanities work in preservation with the unique concerns of our field,” in particular, the need to preserve old(er) scholarly webtexts so they remain accessible and functional (p. 74). They ultimately offered a preservation pedagogy as “bridging the preservation efforts of digital humanities work with the long history of digital scholarship and innovation within rhetoric and composition” (p. 83). Here, Lockridge, Paz, and Johnson positioned DH work as focused on preservation, a focus that they see as crucial for computers and writing to adopt given the speed of obsolescence of digital platforms and proprietary software. Lockridge, Paz, and Johnson presented this call as echoing earlier calls in the (sub)field for practitioners to learn to code (calls we review earlier in this chapter). They noted that “[r]hetoric and composition has not treated these questions [regarding preservation] at much length. Instead, we turn to conversations among digital humanities and electronic literature scholarship” (pp. 72, 74). Like Ridolfo and Hart-Davidson (2015), they argued that computers and writing “has much to gain by taking up digital humanities scholarship” (p. 74). They presented DH as particularly valuable because “[d]igital humanities scholars have a substantial history negotiating questions about preservations of digital text, with some arguing that ‘curation’ should be a primary role for all Humanities scholars” (p. 74).

In part, what Lockridge, Paz, and Johnson (2017) argued is that computers and writing should likewise treat curation as a primary concern—an urging that speaks again to the (sub)field’s negotiation of the tension between process and product, or, put another way, the tension between whether (or to what extent) preservation “present[s] meanings already made” or provides “new opportunities for making meaning” (p. 75). On one hand, from Lockridge, Paz, and Johnson’s perspective, computers and writing is—or should be—more product focused than its parent field of writing studies. Yet the process/product dichotomy here gets troubled quickly, as treating preservation as offering “new opportunities for making meaning” fits squarely with a process orientation. Lockridge, Paz, and Johnson indicated that their work preserving webtexts from the first issue of Kairos soon caused them to ask “are we curators or collaborators?” (p. 79). Here curation seems to be aligned with a product orientation and collaboration seems to be aligned with a process orientation. Yet if curation can be viewed as collaboration, then it fits more squarely with the (sub)field’s foundational valuing of process. What Lockridge, Paz, and Johnson’s discussion of the Kairos preservation project reveals is that negotiating questions of process and product is fraught, particularly as boundaries between product and process can be quickly blurred with digital work.

Conclusion

The review of scholarship in this chapter highlights the relationship between computers and writing and the digital humanities in order to comment on the historical divide between consumption and production—with the humanities traditionally focused on consumption (i.e., analysis/interpretation) and the digital traditionally focused on production (i.e., deliverables). As much as scholars might rightly complicate this division (e.g., analysis can be productive) and we in computers and writing might see this divide as artificial, it has manifested in a tension between process and product that has long concerned those who define themselves as humanists (and computers and writing scholars). Computers and writing has traditionally been interested in process, given its affiliation with writing studies. One consequence is a lack of attention to preservation of its products.

Ultimately, the chapter points to parallels, points of overlap, and differences—all of which have at one time or another created some tensions and some innovative scholarship—between the two (sub)fields. More recent (2013–2015) scholarship suggests that the earlier territorial disputes of the heady years, when DH was in the spotlight (2009–2011), have given way to more tempered discussions about the importance of interdisciplinarity, collaboration, and genuine interest in productive interactions between the (sub)fields.