Living Digital Media

For writing studies scholars, webtexts are scholarly digital media arguments rendered through video, webpages, and soundscapes (Helms, 2017; Hidalgo, 2017; Rhodes & Alexander, 2015; Tham & Grace, 2022). During the drafting stage, authors write content, code web pages, design accessible interfaces, and arrange media. In other words, authors write the alphabetic and multimodal content and serve as the article’s printer and temporary publisher when they host it on a server. So, which practices and feelings limit and drive digital media scholarship? For this project, I’ve been pursuing this line of questioning because research concerning the lived, felt experiences of scholars who produce digital media scholarship remains under-explored in comparison to print-based scholarship. It warrants going behind the scenes with scholars and their production cycles, making visible the practices—and thus, experiences—imbued with feelings of disappointment, gratitude, and the like. Behind-the-scenes research uncovers felt experiences that support and forbid digital media scholarship. What happens, for example, when a scholar gets seven reviewer letters and one writes this about their production:

The ‘sloppy, inexpert design’ really drove me crazy. . . . I was constantly ending up in places I did not know how to get out of and the only solution I could find was to close the [web browser] window and start over.

Sloppy. Inexpert. Crazy. These words signal feelings that pulse through the practices in production cycles of webtexts.

Similar affective work arises in production cycles that shape print-based articles, conveyed through decades of process research and recent scholarship in the pages of College English, namely the journal’s “Scholarly Editing” special issue. Reflecting on a time when personal illness affected her editorial role with College English, Melissa Ianetta (2019) revealed “one of the many unseen relationships in editing: that between the body of the editor and the body of a journal” (p. 267). For Kelly Blewett et al. (2019), diverse voices need to be cultivated for our scholarly journals, for “inclusion activism” means evoking “fair and equitable representation, participation, and the desire to learn about what we don’t yet know” (p. 281). And for Lori Ostergaard and Jim Nugent (2019), public access to journal archives might “bring about more situated and accountable practices for editing our journals and maintaining a record of the often unseen and affective work of our journal editors” (p. 310). The special issue takes a reader closer to the scholarly editorial practices in English Studies, also revealing feelings that imbue practices such as recruiting authors, sending review letters, and archiving materials for future editors and researchers. However, practices and associated feelings discussed in the issue concern print journals (e.g., Composition Studies, WPA: Writing Program Administration), raising a question about the “unseen and affective work” of authors and editors involved in webtext production workflows.

This chapter builds on a topic that “Scholarly Editing” contributors started: why we need behind-the-scenes stories of scholarly production. Instead of focusing on my own practices as an author or editor, I intervene in this rich conversation by focusing on stories of writing studies scholars who have authored webtexts since 2015. As I note in the introduction, my qualitative study examined feedback letters, drafts of texts, and co-author correspondence—materials that Ostergaard and Nugent might define as “hidden facets of journal editing that can contribute greatly to our understanding of the historical evolution of disciplines” (p. 298). I am answering Jody Shipka’s (2016) call that our field ought to “be attending closely to processes of making” a range of texts because doing so “helps illuminate the highly distributed, embodied, translingual, and multimodal aspects of all communicative practice, something that is often overlooked or rendered invisible when analyzing final/finished texts, products, or performances” (p. 253). Such facets and aspects are part of the rhetorical-affective practices in circulation throughout a production cycle.

In the analyses that follow this section, I’ve chosen to interview excerpts and production artifacts regarding three areas of practice in a digital media production cycle: collaboration, revision, and delivery. These areas were the most deeply felt by participants, and they rippled across other areas of practice. Collaboration with peers and editors often cultivates good feelings that swirl with technical coding and revisions before the final publication. Based on reviewer letters and editorial calls for revision, revision practices entail reviewing the entire project, from design decisions to textual argumentation. Revision, in other words, flows back into drafting practices, often awash in bad feelings. Delivery is a kind of affective synthesis of those conflicting feelings but generally cultivates good feelings between creators and publics. Again, these feelings and practices shift and blend together as they circulate in and beyond a production cycle.

Before I move to the next section, I have a few words about the scholar-creators whose stories are featured in this chapter. All come from the broad field of writing studies, including digital rhetoric, technical communication, and composition. At the time of our interview, Brooke (pseudonym used) was a PhD candidate. The majority of scholars were tenure-track professors at various stages of their careers, and a few were tenured. My decision to reach out to authors who published digital media scholarship since 2015 happened to parlay into a good mix of creators and perspectives.

Even though all of their works are public and they consented to my using their real names, participants could opt for a pseudonym. Creating some distance, this approach is similar to Jean Mason’s (2001) study of “hyperwriters” of digital texts. Writing in 2001, Mason’s observations and implications are ripe with emotion in her studies of authors and productions. Consider her results: “Unquestionably,” she notes, “most of my informants—major and minor—suffered “techno-angst” of varying degrees at some time or other as they struggled with a technology that made word processing seem like child’s play by comparison” (Mason, 2001, “Implications”). For me, offering similar writers an option to be anonymous is an ethical middle ground because it honors the participants’ willingness to speak with me about their work and feelings in circulation without recourse—even though their work has already been published.

Collaboration: Embodied Intensities

Collaboration is a practice that several authors framed as imbued with good feelings. According to participants, collaboration involves talking out ideas and strategies with co-authors, seeking out peers and mentors, and assigning practices to co-authors. Collaboration is a kind of concurrent practice that touches many practices of a digital media production cycle, especially supporting invention and revision based on reviewer feedback. Consider what Kristin Bivens said in her questionnaire response when discussing a webtext co-authored with three scholars. Together the scholars “wrote the intro, lit. review, and conclusion and edited the entire piece. However, I [Kristin] wrote the aural section, [one co-author] wrote the tactile section, and [another co-author] wrote the visual section. [A third co-author] edited and did the web design.” Bivens’ commentary underscores the idea that many webtexts are highly collaborative. According to several authors who were living digital media, collaboration-as-practice was a constant source of pleasure, a counteragent to the pains of working with code and revising the entire webtext in response to lengthy reviewer feedback. Collaboration is a means of dividing rhetorical and affective labor.

What is most surprising about collaboration is that it is often hidden within the final publication of a webtext in a footnote or brief acknowledgment. Many webtexts I examined do not feature acknowledgements, which, as Laura Micciche (2017) argues, often reveal partners involved in composing practices and felt experiences (p. 4). Yet my research shows that many authors couldn’t complete a webtext without some form of collaboration, even if a webtext was listed as created by a single author. Henry (pseudonym used) relied on research assistants to convert his Word documents into web pages, whereas two senior scholars asked participant Tim Lockridge to transform their commentary into a webtext. Laurie E. Gries hired two data visualization and coding experts in the field to help her design a webtext and compose interactive maps. Similarly, Alexandra Hidalgo employed her partner and several students when she was filming for her (2017) digital book, Cámara Retórica: A Feminist Filmmaking Methodology for Rhetoric and Composition. As she told me in an interview, “I love collaborating. It’s very hard to make films without help. . . . I hire people who I know are kind and helpful, and I try to be kind and helpful in return.” Hidalgo also spoke of mentoring undergraduates: “I love collaborating with undergraduate students. It requires a level of mentorship on one’s part. But they also bring such energy and such amazingness. And then you can also put that on your merit review as part of your teaching.”

For Hidalgo, this undergraduate focus is vertical mentorship, a collaborative act that several authors spoke of. While drafting a webtext, for example, Palmeri and McCorkle attended KairosCamp, a two-week bootcamp for scholars interested in learning webtext production practices, taught by editors of Kairos. KairosCamp is like the Digital Media and Composition Institute (DMAC) insofar as both scholarly institutes assume that authors will learn and grow in a community of digital media producers (refer to KairosCamp’s “Author Workshop Archive” and DMAC’s “SCHEDULE” for overviews). Reviewer feedback for Palmeri and McCorkle’s webtext came in while they were attending KairosCamp. The timing was fortuitous, they said, as the two were surrounded by Kairos editors and peers with similar interests. Their proximity to editors, Palmeri and McCorkle told me, made their significant revision practices less painful. McCorkle described his KairosCamp experience this way:

That was huge in terms of motivators and terms of affect and stuff like that. We were in an isolated place for two weeks. We had an idea of an agenda related to the webtext when we got there and it was still related to this project, but when we got there we got feedback about this article, and so we kind of diverged course and decided to just tackle these revisions head-on. We had a lot of steam; we had a lot of energy; we were excited [emphasis added]; we had access to Kairos editors to bounce questions off of.

In response to reviewer feedback and editorial support at KairosCamp, Palmeri and McCorkle produced a video-based literature review and integrated it into the second draft of their webtext. Figure 2 depicts a page from their webtext.

Figure 2
Palmeri and McCorkle's Webtext

Their commentary and outcomes suggest that lively bodies in proximity, in shared time and space dedicated to digital media production, can be noticeably positive. Kara Poe Alexander and Danielle Williams (2015) call such a practice “proximal composing” under the process of distributed invention, or DI. Inventing with collaborators in proximity means “being aware of fellow composers in a material space and their potential influence on projects composed in that space. . . . Also, being willing to engage with and support others is another valuable element” (p. 35). Projects that come alive in a lively, supportive format allow good feelings to circulate between co-authors and peers.

The relationship between proximal collaboration and positive affect was even more apparent from my interview with one senior scholar, Jonathan Alexander, who traveled across the country to compose a digital book with a frequent co-author. As Alexander explained with some laughter, “Many of these (digital composing) things you can do from a distance, but it is helpful to have some face-to-face contact. It’s just more fun when you can actually share a bottle of wine.” He emphasizes proximity, of being with others to get digital work done:

What I don’t want to let go of is the sense that actually physically being with other people is another way of knowing and . . . while I’m in love with many digital forms of communication and technologies, I’m also in love with actually being in the same room with people and exchanging ideas and sharing and thinking about bodily cues.

A fair response to Alexander’s, Palmeri’s, and McCorkle’s reflections is that proximal collaboration on webtexts isn’t common in our field. We generally aren’t writing and designing webtexts—not to mention print articles—together unless we’re at institutes, camps, or conferences. Well before the COVID-19 pandemic, which relegated many of us to our homes, co-authors of digital media scholarship were working across institutions, time zones, and myriad borders. Even in contexts of remote collaboration, though, good feelings persist. Working across two time zones, Eric and Grace (pseudonyms used) define their remote collaborations with co-authors and peers as “horizontal mentorship.”

When drafting their webtext, Eric and Grace were uncertain about what Computers and Composition Online editors were looking for in terms of design. They recalled that the editors were open to design possibilities, pointing to the general guidelines for Computers and Composition Online (“Submission Guidelines”). Grace felt like she needed more direction from the editors: “I felt like I was doing something wrong or that we were going to get to the end of this and there was going to be some major disaster or something, so that was kind of scary, I guess.” Fortunately, Grace’s fear was quelled when she and Eric found support through peers who had published webtexts. In our interview, Eric had more to say about one peer to whom he is indebted. He called a peer who recently published a webtext, asking about design choices and coding strategies: “I had really basic and what I perceived to be dumb questions and she was like, ‘No, that’s not a dumb question. Here’s what I did.’ If I didn’t have that (mentorship) from the start, we wouldn’t have been able to finish the project.”

Put differently, Eric’s newfound knowledge helped Eric and Grace divide the labor behind their webtext, writing in Google Docs and sharing prototypes over GitHub; Grace could focus more on content writing, while Eric could take charge of coding and designing the webtext in HTML5. Eric’s commentary on horizontal mentorship calls attention to peer-to-peer supports that made the publication of several webtexts possible. Gries was indebted to her collaborators, who indeed taught her the basics of data visualization and helped her feel more confident about the claims of her argument:

That’s just very useful information for me to help understand the phenomenon in really nuanced ways. I could claim this, I could claim that based on my overall understanding, but when I have the numbers to back it up, all of a sudden I’m like, “Yeah, I feel more certain about what I’m claiming.”

Among other participants who spoke of mentorship, graduate student Ryan (pseudonym used) collaborated with faculty as well as five peers on a webtext. “Each of us created our own depiction of our multimodal composing processes, and also offered feedback on each other’s work during the composing stage,” he wrote. He added that “most of what I learned throughout the project had more to do with collaboration and working with other people than with digital technologies.”

It’s quite surprising how various forms of collaboration—whether in the same room or at a distance over the web—helped many participants experience positive feelings around a project, and that collaboration was a motivator to work through negative feelings that might be associated with drafting and revising digital media. Collaboration was a solution to resolving difficult composing practices, from anxieties about using HTML5 to uncertainties of how to visualize data. For scholars who decide to co-author a text, maybe collaboration keeps negative feelings at bay early on in the composing process. This isn’t to say that collaboration will always yield positive feelings, for collaboration means the involvement of more ideas and possibly more conflicting goals. My research might reflect an exigency for another study on failed collaboration in digital media scholarship.

Revising with Feedback: Woeful Responses

Feelings about revision are much different when compared to those of collaboration. According to participants in my study of webtext authors and their productions, revising in response to reviewer feedback was a common practice in which negative feelings arose in the rhetorical-affective production cycle, compelling the author(s) to circle back to drafting practices, such as writing and coding. Let’s consider how Henry discusses his experience with reviewers of his digital book:

I wish the positive stuff (about producing a webtext) jumped out but it’s always of course the negative things, the things you didn’t like. (Reviewers) did say nice things too, I swear. But the things that jump out were a sense of disorganization. And a sense that it was too long. And both things, the two things together were really interesting to me. The original version that I turned in had this table of contents that looked kind of like a word cloud where there were these little sub clouds. It was really, really, to me, well-structured, but there was a lot of structure to it. Maybe overly structured.

Henry’s recollection is indicative of the design and coding work done by webtext authors and the reviews that follow. For digital media scholarship, reviewers often have much more to say about a draft of a digital media production than an author might see in a feedback letter from a more traditional journal or publishing venue (e.g., Computers and Composition versus Computers and Composition Online). A number of participants spoke about lengthy review letters that cover the various elements of a webtext. Consider what Brooke said when she described reviewer feedback on her webtext in contrast to feedback she received on a submission to a community writing journal:

For my community writing piece it was shared and the editor letter said, “This is the overall concern based on reviewer feedback, and here’s my annotated version of your piece—fix it.’” Whereas webtext reviewers discuss design concerns, content concerns, and how they play together. That’s so different to me, because when you’re rewriting the content you have to think about how it’s gonna look on the page . . . especially with a webtext journal that doesn’t necessarily want everything to be linear.

Brooke’s insight underscores that lengthy feedback on webtexts can lead to time-consuming and potentially overwhelming revision work, even if the feedback is intended to be formative for junior scholars. The time needed to engage with the feedback and revise a webtext can be considerably more than that for a print article. Of all participants in this study, Brooke perhaps felt the most, in her words, “embroiled” and pained by the lengthy revision process—as indicated by her willingness to speak frankly about her experiences with revising a webtext. In the webtext, the author is writing about potentially harmful social media in writing classrooms. Her initial draft of the webtext was constructed with the drag-and-drop platform Wix. Later, the webtext was coded with Creative Commons web templates. In response to reviewer feedback, Brooke’s webtext was revised and recirculated to reviewers three times, during which she rewrote, recoded, and redesigned her webtext.

Brooke’s pain of revision was amplified by an embodied moment during a social gathering with peers in her graduate program. One advanced graduate student, also an editor for an online journal, told Brooke that he knew the status of her revised webtext before she learned of it:

Somebody asked me, “Hey, have you heard about your (webtext)?” And I said, “No, I haven’t.” And then this guy, (the editor), had to be “Mister Guy” (and) was like, “Oh, I know what’s going on with it,” and told me things that I probably shouldn’t have known, and then later I got the feedback and so I already knew it was going to not be accepted again, and I also had this weird, like, orientation of well, “This person didn’t like it and thought we shouldn’t publish it.” It made me take the feedback a lot harder.

“Mister Guy” wasn’t doing Brooke any favors, but he was giving her a reason to physically stop revising her webtext. He didn’t help her move forward, creating blockages and anxiety much like those created by men and publics who have rallied against women coders and technofeminists (Easter, 2020; Gelms & Edwards, 2019). Put differently, this scene of negative feelings echoes the questions that Cynthia L. Selfe posed in the 90s as she and Gail E. Hawisher were trying to publish: “Once we were in the profession, we looked around to say, ‘How the hell do we get published? How do we find people who can support us? How do we edit collections? How do we get voices of women out there?’” (as quoted in DeVoss, 2019, p. 70).

It’s not a stretch to suggest that these questions still linger in the field. In Brooke’s case, we might build upon Selfe’s questions by asking, “how do we—and can we even—ensure that editors will not leak review information before an author receives it?” Although this question applies to any and all editors and prospective authors with whom they interact, it is a question that becomes crucial in contexts that might affect women and BIPOC creators who have, historically, encountered editorial blockages.

Brooke isn’t alone in harboring negative feelings over the course of revising and recirculating her project to reviewers. In Lockridge’s case, his vision for a digital monograph took a totally different turn when reviewers told him that “it looks like a slideshow.” At first, it was defeating. In Henry’s case, reviewers “hated” what they called his “expressive table of contents.” Furthermore, collaborators Palmeri and McCorkle spoke of their surprise to see 14 pages of single-spaced feedback from the review board, five members of which wrote critiques. This webtext went through two “tiers” of review, during which all board members of the journal could provide feedback. Here is an example from the opening pages of their feedback letter:

Earlier reviewers at the Tier 1 level did indicate that they found your webtext fairly text-heavy. At the Tier 2 (Editorial Board) level, readers seemed to focus more on the content than the design, but did have some suggestions for tweaks to the design to make the webtext more user-friendly throughout.

For example, one reviewer suggested “you might consider enabling users to adjust the size of the graphs to adapt to their display. (Mobile display looks great in both iOS and Android.)”

Also, regarding your photos, you will need to provide ALT text, captions, and APA-style citations on your references list for these images. . . . A reviewer also suggested, “It would also be nice if one could access a higher resolution image by clicking on the thumbnails.”

The above passages are intriguing because they show that reviewers want something less “text-heavy” and more reflective of an interactive web page with multimedia elements. However, many participants have significant training in managing text-heaviness within print contexts; the multimedia elements, such as interactive graphs and high-resolution images cropped in Photoshop, are products of their independent learning and tinkering. And that learning has its own set of frustrations, according to several participants. Consider what Palmeri told me at DMAC when he discussed his experience learning the programming language Javascript, a programming language that runs underneath interactive graphs and many websites:

I remember three eight-hour days of just banging my head against the wall [emphasis added], trying to get like a dot on top of a line. It wasn’t even my graph; I was just trying to make any graph to get the syntax, and I was like, “This is never going to happen.”

Palmeri and McCorkle spent weeks writing content and tinkering with the technical requirements of the webtext, and reviewers sent back requests that would require more time. Palmeri’s technical challenges and the reviewer feedback for his co-authored article indicate that negative feelings—such as those begat by banging one’s head against the wall—are in circulation with drafting and revision practices. Because of the substantial review process, digital media scholarship circulates between creators and reviewers multiple times before its public circulation. Within that lively (and lengthy) circulation, practices might be imbued with negative feelings that accumulate with each revision. In other words, when reviewers hate something, that feeling flows into the new revision tasks ahead of authors. The cycle starts over and bad feelings accumulate.

However, such negative feelings can be generative for webtext authors. A webtext isn’t dead. Grace, for example, said she was grateful for the feedback from two peers who were reviewed her webtext:

I really agreed with all the things that they said about it, and that’s not always the case. Sometimes you get feedback back from editors and you’re like, “Oh god, I don’t want to change that or do that thing that you’re suggesting.” It was kind of fun to go through and, like, take a machete to it. We changed a lot and they may very well ask us to make more changes too, but to see the growth has been really cool.

Furthermore, my research also indicated that feedback, though a negative experience for authors such as Brooke, became an exigency for seeking out collaborators. Without feeling awash in disappointment or frustration, in other words, scholars might not seek out collaborators in order to revise their productions. Reconsider Brooke’s case. For all the pain and negative feelings that were imbued within her project—which saw three rounds of reviewer feedback and revisions—she experienced considerable positive feelings when working with a mentor, an editor who was assigned to Brooke later in the process. They were introduced over email. Connecting over Skype and social media, the editor helped Brooke reenvision her design and recompose her paragraphs for the conventions of academic writing in digital environments. How does she sum up their relationship? “It wouldn’t be published if it weren’t for his help.” The editor’s mentorship and helpful commentary on Brooke’s content were collaborative acts on which Brooke could rely for encouragement, a source of good feeling that helped her move the webtext project through to publication.

These sentiments were echoed by Hidalgo. She spoke of the support from her peers when her proposal for a print book was rejected by a publisher. They encouraged her to reframe the book into a video book, as depicted in Figure 3. Rejection, she told me, was a catalyst for her revisions:

Rejections can be the biggest gift you’ll ever get, because a good rejection with good feedback on it can make for an incredible project somewhere else. So, I’m very, very thankful to whoever it was who rejected my book.

Figure 3
Hidalgo's Video Book

In sum, it’s unproductive to claim that bad feelings that circulate in living digital media are to be avoided at all costs. When creators feel bad about revision, they turn to existing support networks, whether they’re made visible collaborators/receive publication credit. And when revisions are complete, new feelings emerge and circulate.

Delivery: There is Delight

Beyond collaboration and revision, authors described delivery practices in relation to good feelings. By delivery practices, I mean releasing the final publication in said journal issue and sharing the publication on social media as well with peers and administrators. When I asked participants to tell me the most pleasurable part of their project, they most often said something along the lines of:

“It was nice to see it published.”
“Publishing the piece! Having it finished! Having people see it and read it and appreciate it!”
“Collecting data. Imagining together. Seeing it published.”
“It was really helpful for me on the job market. It helped me apply for digital literacy jobs.”
“I think the most pleasure was just seeing the final whole web text. I love [one collaborator’s] front webpage thing that he did, and I love the spatiotemporal circulation map that [another collaborator] and I worked out together. The whole intellectual process of figuring all this out was very pleasurable.”

Although it’s no surprise that many authors feel good when a text is finished and published (don’t we all?), what is surprising are the ways in which delivery practices, just like collaborative acts, complicate feelings about drafting and revising practices. I want to return to Hidalgo’s story of responding to feedback and specifically the moment she said, “Rejections can be the biggest gift you’ll ever get, because a good rejection with good feedback on it can make for an incredible project somewhere else. So, I’m very, very thankful to whoever it was who rejected my book.” Perhaps Hidalgo’s sentiment didn’t exist before her video book’s publication and the accolades that followed. The same idea applies to Brooke and participant Aaron Beveridge, whose works helped them on the job market. A tenure-track professor at the time, Beveridge told me in a Skype interview that his webtext was “huge” on the job market: “Everyone said this article got me hired or offers.” In affective terms, Beveridge also said the publication helped him gain “confidence in approaching other editors and just sending stuff out because I had one in the bag. Having that first publication or two in the field makes you feel like, 'Alright, I might actually prove myself to be part of the club.'” After delivering his text, job hiring committees wanted to meet him, forging new relationships.

The authors I feature in the above passages underscore that delivery is a bit like affective remixing, through which good feelings reframe painful composing and otherwise negative experiences with writing and revising. Working through those drafting and revising pains, authors gained lines on CVs, accolades, jobs, and merits in tenure and promotion portfolios. In a digital media production cycle, pain’s value, that is, isn’t exactly clear until publication—until it really feels like it’s alive on the web. Alexander, for example, composed a multimodal memoir on a troubled childhood. The pain of re-living his formative years parlayed into pleasure when he presented excerpts to a public audience at university. Reflecting on meeting a department chair in the humanities after, he said, “I was so touched when he said this is deeply moving and theoretically sharp [emphasis added].” Alexander had more to say about the entanglement of pain and pleasure in his composing process.

I love trying new things with writing, and I think that we learn to write by trying to write in ways we’ve never written before, by trying out new genres of writing, trying out new audiences or publics to write to. I love that about writing. So for me, while it was hard and sometimes painful, emotionally evocative, and rich [to compose a multimodal memoir], it was also very pleasurable to see that come together, and to understand that I could write both in a theoretically sophisticated way but also in a personally powerful way.

Among all participants, there was only one instance in which delivery took a negative albeit somewhat comical turn. Teaching a visual rhetoric course to graduate students, Henry decided to assign his own digital book, which intervenes in the scholarly landscape of rhetoric and comics studies. According to Henry, his assignment was a means of demonstrating what a digital book can do that print can’t. He opened the discussion with a question, a prompt that led to self-induced terror:

I started off by saying, “What kind of argument does [the book’s author] make?” I sat back and I said, “Oh, that tastes bad. I hate myself for saying that. Hey, guys. Um. I just realized I’m wildly unprepared to teach my own book. So, let’s just talk. What did you think? Don’t spare my feelings.” I had this, like, existential crisis of faith. It was great. It was terrifying to my core and I was like, “Oh. Nope. Can’t do that.”

Speaking also about promoting a digital book, Hidalgo argues that creators need to share their digital media scholarship with public audiences and educate those less familiar with its approaches. Some target audiences? Tenure and promotion committees who evaluate scholarship and service: “And I know it’s annoying, but one has to educate others so they can evaluate [a digital project] accordingly. So that’s something that … it’s an added annoyance to the work, but it’s also great because then you’re opening doors for others to do that work.” Put differently, talking about your final publication, as participants of my study have done, might show aspiring authors and evaluators that digital composing isn’t as scary as it might seem on the surface.

However, perhaps there is an intellectual cost to educating audiences. Take Henry’s response when asked about composing a video walkthrough on the homepage of his digital book:

Oh, I’ve got such mixed feelings about it. I love it, and I think it’s so necessary to teach people how to read what you’re doing. The things I don’t like about it are the sense in which I’m prescribing things to people and telling them the way that they have to do something. And so luckily, I had that discovery that the more I prescribe, the less people follow my rules, and that’s fantastic. I’m less scared about giving people those rules now, because I know that they’re going to not follow them. They’re going to misbehave.

Beyond educating audiences, Hidalgo suggests that authors need to take pride in their digital work and the excitement that surrounds its release. In her words,

My god, [Cámara Retórica] is a peer-reviewed publication at one of the oldest and most prestigious digital presses. It is 100% a book. [The university] recognizes it 100% as a book, and they are thrilled by this. The department loves it, the college loves it, they wrote an article about it. The college wrote a big story about it and then it became a [university] “pride point,” which is when [the university] features the most exciting things that our professors have done.

In a way, Hidalgo is inviting future composers to learn about common feelings—confusion, disinterest—that peers and publics have when they encounter, review, or simply read digital media scholarship. If a book unfolds in a nonlinear, digital environment, then its final delivery and subsequent promotion might raise its profile and prestige in the academy, thereby creating an economy of good feelings around it. My study participants suggest that authors of digital media scholarship simply have to do more work to create such an economy—to prove the value of their work, to keep the lights on in their offices when they go up for tenure and promotion.

Recommending Practices for Writing Studies, Turning to Independent Game Developers

Setting the stage for the rest of the book, this chapter has covered three areas of rhetorical practice that have been deeply felt by creators of webtexts: collaboration, revision, and delivery. So how might scholarly creators, including authors and editors, support and share their experiences with such practices and associated feelings in a digital media production cycle? In closing this chapter, I propose three low-stakes approaches that apply to editors and authors, with the understanding that these approaches are contingent on factors such as time, departmental resources, and comfort (i.e., with sharing work in public). Signaling the chapters that follow this one, I close by suggesting we also turn to independent game developers, who often put themselves in vulnerable positions yet advance their creative visions and engage with vibratory affects in collaborative and lively public settings. Although my focus in this chapter has been on webtexts, I see applicability to print-based texts and their authors, for their rhetorical-affective work is significant to understanding scholarly production writ large. Again, without pulling together scholars and conveying our practices and feelings in some way, we who get published are guarding valuable information for aspiring scholars and those who archive our field’s production histories.

As a field, how do we support living digital media? How do we ensure creators don’t lose momentum on their webtexts in progress?

First, to support collaboration and formative feedback, writing studies journal editors and published authors ought to create more low-stakes workshops and professional development gatherings that reflect the approaches of the Dartmouth Summer Writing Research Seminar, DMAC, and KairosCamp. Held when many schools begin summer break, for example, DMAC at The Ohio State University hosts teachers and practitioners in English studies and beyond who want to sharpen their digital media composing practices. Situated in the Department of English, DMAC participants create audio and visual texts and consult with experienced teacher-scholars and graduate students. Participants in 2018 paid $1,900 to attend on a first-come, first-served basis. I was there, fortunate enough to have received a grant from my graduate school to attend. Similarly, KairosCamp is a professional development workshop created by Cheryl Ball, a senior editor at Kairos. Supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and West Virginia University’s Digital Publishing Institute, recent KairosCamps spanned two weeks in a university space. Writing studies, history, media studies, and social science scholars conceptualized and workshopped webtexts and digital humanities projects. Participants applied to attend KairosCamp, for which participation and lodging was provided free of charge (“About”). DMAC and KairosCamp have indeed been useful for scholars not previously trained in composing digital media scholarship.

However, the problem with summer institutes like Dartmouth, DMAC, and KairosCamp is that they serve students and professors with means of funding support or extended travel. In other words, the embodied intensities of collaboration are limited to field members who can afford it. DMAC’s website has archived past schedules and resources amassed over the years (“Schedule”), whereas KairosCamp has an archive of its 2017 author workshop (“Author Workshop Archive”). These archives might be useful for aspiring authors, but I think organizers of future institutes and workshops can address funding and travel barriers even further. When participants are rejected or unable to attend for financial, geographic, or health reasons, hosts might later amass a list of potential participants and help facilitate a peer network in an online setting. Help people find other people for technical, rhetorical, and emotional support. Help facilitate horizontal mentorship, for print- or digital-centric publications, which provides an opportunity to air out worries and doubts about work. Similarly, hosts might consider creating online equivalents to such institutes. (For the record, DMAC has been online only in recent years.) Together with a document-sharing platform like Google Docs, video-conference platforms have made synchronous and asynchronous collaboration quite accessible for authors. A video archive of a scholarly production workshop might be enormously useful for an aspiring author.

My point: We need to explore more ways to get people together or in contact with writing studies’ peers, editors, and leaders of scholarly production.

Secondly, the stories of this chapter hold implications for the circulatory review practices of digital media scholarship, and I call on editors to consider ways to streamline the review process. Creators such as Brooke, Palmeri, and McCorkle conveyed lengthy review letters that were more than 10 pages, perhaps because, at the time, Kairos allowed the senior editors and the entire review board to comment on submissions—rather than assigning, say, two board members/external experts to a text. A similar process occurs with manuscripts submitted to the University of Michigan’s Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative, which has a substantial review board of notable scholars. In contrast, Eric and Grace received feedback from two reviewers for their Computers and Composition Online piece, working from a few pages submitted by the two.

There is a tension here between these two review processes that we ought to address. It’s an understatement that Kairos’ review process enacts lively circulation because a submission courses through numerous editors and reviewers before it returns to the author(s). The process ensures that authors get feedback from a range of perspectives, like a usability testing session or focus group. It’s also inclusive and open-ended for the review board, allowing reviewers to respond as interested. Echoing Kathleen Stewart’s (2007) meditations of affect, however, I see this review process as one that sparks a strong electrical charge of mixed feelings (uncertainty, joy) that linger in circulation for weeks and months. And when more reviewers are involved, there are potentially more opportunities for that review process to leak out in social realms (e.g., Brooke’s discussion with “Mr. Guy”). Perhaps the charge is too strong, too much, for prospective authors. They are sharing their work and their name is all over it. The process isn’t anonymous, and neither are reviewers. As Kairos writes, “When submitting to the journal, there is no need to attempt to remove information about the author(s) or institutions referenced in the work. Reviewers will know authors’ names, and likewise, authors will know who reviewed their work” (“Submissions”). Well-respected names in the field are living digital media with authors. Following this metaphor a bit further, perhaps publications with large review boards need to dial down the voltage a bit by asking select reviewers to comment on a project.

I’m not suggesting that journals that welcome webtexts turn to the typical review process of scholarship. Inviting three or four reviewers to comment would likely be more than enough assessment for authors to consider as they revise. If Kairos and other journals opt to maintain review processes like the aforementioned, then perhaps a synthesis letter alone is enough for authors to consider. Furthermore, substantial review processes might feel as lively but less overwhelming if editors invite one-to-one meetings with authors on recently reviewed submissions. Brooke’s case demonstrates the value of Kairos “Tier 3” process, in which a mentor is assigned to an author after their submission has been reviewed by the board. Kairos and fellow journals have also offered virtual open houses and Q&A meetings for prospective authors, especially those in the early stages of a project. What about meeting with authors who go through their first Tier 1 and Tier 2? These mid-tier conversations might help authors decode the feedback and feel less overwhelmed by the many words before them. This approach would run counter to the arms-length, revise-and-resubmit expectations of scholarship in general, but given the labor-intensive nature of digital media scholarship, this approach might help streamline the next revision without compromising it. I turn to what Brooke said about her mentor’s advice:

Paragraphs don’t need to be long; they need to be concise. Don’t lose sight of the data and what the students were saying. And that stuff seems really obvious but when you’ve been embroiled in this piece for four years, it’s really easy to lose sight of it; it’s really easy to get caught up in just addressing what the reviewers say.

In short, that advice did wonders for Brooke's project.

Lastly, to reveal myriad approaches to collaboration and feedback, I call on more writing studies scholars to deliver process statements, behind-the-scenes stories, and even archivable ephemera that accompany or follow their scholarly publications (Ostergaard & Nugent, 2019). As demonstrated by Crystal VanKooten (2016) and David Sheridan (2015), behind-the-scenes stories foreground unseen and affective work—such as tools and bodies that render rhetorical practices and contribute to felt experiences. What did we struggle with in our production? What was challenging? Who and what supported our work? Figure 4 depicts an interview I did with game studies scholar Wendi Sierra on a livestream in order to understand her process behind the game A Strong Fire. As Berry, Hawisher, and Selfe (2012) found in interviews with composers that stories provide “glimpses of the challenges with which participants struggled [emphasis added] when they sought access to technology or assistance in learning to use technology but also tacit and often unconscious acts of world making” (p. 39). Stories are akin to acknowledgements of writing partners, or “animals, feelings, technologies, matter, time, and materials interacting in both harmonious and antagonistic ways with writing” (Micciche, 2017, p. 6). To put Shipka (2016) and Micciche (2017) in conversation, behind-the-scenes stories of making would help scholars and students identify human and nonhuman partners that contribute, for better or worse, to digital and print-based writing productions. By and large, stories in the form of process statements might serve well as rhetorical-affective repositories for future authors and for teachers who mentor such authors.

Figure 4
Interviewing a Scholar

I understand that composing a complementary statement on a production comes down to more time and labor for a text already completed. But those of us who have the know-how and privilege to see a production through would support the field by showing their work, even to a small extent. I am not referring to a full webtext like those in Kairos’ “Inventio” section but rather a few hundred words that discuss a production and its challenges. A short statement is a low-stakes approach to meeting the original goals of “Inventio,” which is intended to be “a forum for discussing production choices that have gone on behind the scenes, in essence allowing authors to guide the interpretation of their work by highlighting the hows and whys of its creation” (Sorapure and Stolley, 2007). Here are two examples of what I mean by a low-stakes approach. In his webtext “Instagram, Geocaching, and the When of Rhetorical Literacies,” Brian McNely (2015) offers a note about its design:

As a scrolling, responsive site, this webtext directly supports the central claims of the academic argument, to wit: rhetorical literacies unfold in trajectories and continua of everyday practice. . . . In addition, the photographic interludes between sections are liminal spaces in the webtext, representing the liminal spaces of a geocacher’s world.

A scrolling, responsive webtext. Photos. We know a little more about what McNely is doing. In “Looking in the Dustbin: Data Janitorial Work, Statistical Reasoning, and Information Rhetorics,” Aaron Beveridge (2015) writes that he created an infographic with the website Easelly and drafted his webtext with Markdown, Pandoc, and GitHub. As he explains, “GitHub also provides the free hosting as well—including images. For collaborative web-publishing, GitHub is a fantastic resource.” This kind of process writing that accompanies the final delivery of a webtext might help aspiring authors make better decisions when selecting tools and creating designs, especially if they feel lost on how to get started. It might also help review boards and tenure and promotion committees better understand and appreciate the lively circulation of rhetorical-affective practices that make a webtext possible. And these shouldn’t be exclusive to digital publications; future authors and reviewers of College English, Rhetoric Review, and College Composition and Communication would learn something valuable through the study of brief statements that accompany or follow articles.

I anticipate that some will take issue with my suggested approaches regarding workshops and statements. My research participant Eric, for example, spoke of the pleasure of losing track of time when composing his webtext. There might be good feelings entangled with building a webtext organically, in losing oneself in the assemblages of content writing, design, and code, or stepping into the mist of emotions of confusion, frustration, and wonder in order to forge a new digital draft. In Technologies of Wonder, Susan H. Delagrange (2011) argues against simple design prescriptions and reductive suggestions for digital media. Wonder, in her words, is significant for material, embodied production: “In digital media, the piling up of print, image, sound, pattern, movement, and association can be as unsettling as the juxtaposition of flowered wallpaper and the Brooklyn Bridge—and as potentially productive” (p. 175). She goes on: “Rhetorical techné is mobile and strategic. It does not conform itself to already-made discursive space and subjectivity; it shapes its discursive and embodied form and content in response to the kairos of the moment” (p. 175).

Considering her view of digital media production, I recognize that calling more attention to HTML5, Creative Commons templates, and process narratives might close off certain rhetorical avenues of wonder for scholars. Lane, for example, learned a great deal about his digital media composing practices by scrapping a project and drafting a new one. His initial failure was more than potentially productive—that emotional moment of getting rejected by reviewers was a gateway to what would be an exciting collaborative digital monograph that he co-authored with two senior scholars. Allow me to reframe Lockridge’s experience through the words of Collin Brooke and Allison Carr (2015): “Failure [and thus success] is one of the most valuable abilities a writer can possess. The ability to [compose digital media scholarship] well comes neither naturally nor easily; the thinkers we praise and admire are not the lucky few born with innate talent” (p. 63).

Still, if the field wants more scholars to author digital media texts and articles, we need a healthy mix of free workshops, scholarly reflections, and organic compositions. We need more lifelines for authors who find themselves unable to escape developmental purgatory. Between organic invention and informal conversations, an author might find a way out.

In closing, for the subsequent chapters of this book, I’m seeking to augment my aforementioned calls by turning to the rhetorical-affective practices of game developers. This book entwines stories of digital media creators—in both academia and the game development industry—to shed light on how creators are living digital media. These creators attend to a complicated mess of feelings inherent to digital media, such as the disappointment that imbues web design and the overwhelming joy that saturates beta testing. Thus, Living Digital Media looks to and beyond the disciplinary field in order to address the ways in which creators are experimenting with digital media and attending to feelings in circulation before and after circulation. Because of this interdisciplinary approach, my primary audience, the field of rhetoric and writing studies, stands to gain new insights into digital media production.