Book overview. This edited collection explores theoretical and practical questions about multimodal, digital production through lenses of rhetoric/composition, digital writing studies, English studies, and the humanities.
Abstract. Given our field’s long-standing history of digital publication in journals, it is appropriate that the new digital scholarly book begins in part with composition studies. As we have constructed this project, we have tried to consider what new kinds of disciplinary knowledge a digital book can promote. That is, we have asked what do we, as composition scholars, want from a digital book?
APA Citation: Journet, Debra; Ball, Cheryl E.; & Trauman, Ryan. (2011). The new work of the book in composition studies: An introduction. In The new work of composing. Computers and Composition Digital Press/Utah State University Press. http://ccdigitalpress.org/nwc/chapters/journet-et-al/
The Book: Object, Technology, Genre
As we write this Introduction, we have (literally) in our hands the massive second edition of The Book History Reader. This collection of 40 chapters (560+ pages in extraordinarily small type) gives a good sense of the complexity, depth, and range of recent theoretical, historical, and empirical scholarship in book studies: what a book is, how it developed, and what kind of work it does. The collection charts the history of books as it evolved from “a preoccupation with the physical materiality of books” to concerns with “the social and cultural conditions governing the production, dissemination and reception of print and texts” (Finkelstein & McCleery, 2002, p. 7).
How does this complex history of what a book is and how it works—narrated in Finkelstein and McCleery and other work (e.g., Eisenstein, 1979; Febvre & Martin, 1997)—shape our sense of the digital book? In our thinking about these questions, we found ourselves returning to three related considerations: the book as a material object, the book as a technology, and the book as a genre. We believe each way of thinking about the book illuminates the goals of this project. But we also believe that the digital book is something different, and to understand it, scholars will also need new theoretical concepts and a new vocabulary.
A Book is an Object
As we worked to define this project, we found ourselves invoking metaphors of materiality associated with the book as an object. This digital collection is a book, we explained, because it has a book’s “weight” or “heft,” its “length” or “specific gravity.” We remain convinced of these analogues with printed objects, a relation we mime in our references to paper and print, to pages and chapters. But we are also aware that some of what is tangibly part of a book is rendered symbolically in a digital format.
Many of the chapters of this digital book comment upon their own material conditions: the ways they are arranged; the interplay they exploit among text, sound, and image; the kinds of actions, interpretive and responsive, they expect of their audience (e.g., Garrett et al., Gresham & Kirkwood, Trimble & Grotz, Fitzgerald, Rhodes & Alexander*). We see a similar kind of self-consciousness in early print book production. Early novelists, for example, in their invention of the novel, made explicit references to their acts of writing and to the texts they produced. Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy is infamous for what seems an almost postmodern evocation of its own materiality. Samuel Richardson’s epistolary Clarissa constantly evokes the acts the characters engage in as they compose, revise, read, and respond to the improbably long string of letters that forms the novel’s corpus; in several places Richardson (who was himself a printer and very much aware of the materiality of print books) plays with the visual appearance of the page in ways that try to break through semiotic restrictions of the very print conventions he was helping to define.
Early digital books, like this one, are similarly self-reflexive (Hayles, 2002). Because they are in the process of being invented, their authors are often hyper-aware of their status as objects whose conventions are yet to be defined. Thus, as we thought about this book, we considered how the book’s materiality could or could not be translated to digital formats.
A Book is a Technology
When we think of a book, we think most immediately of the material object. But the book is also a technology, a point prominently made in the infamous YouTube Medieval Help Desk parody. Books, that is, are not only the products of technological changes such as the development of the printing press or the codex; they are themselves a technology—a way of organizing and instantiating certain kinds of information, values, and ideologies. As technologies, they exist within complex frameworks of communicative practices including not only the object of the book itself, but also its authors, publishers, printers, shippers, sellers, and readers (Darnton, 2002).
There has been enormous discussion about the degree to which particular technologies change how people make sense of the world. Early arguments, for example, about reading and writing (e.g., Ong, 1982; Goody & Watt, 1968) posited that literate cultures were marked by certain cognitive abilities that oral cultures lacked. Similarly, arguments have been made that the printing press enabled enlightenment projects such as modern science (Eisenstein, 1979) or that the codex enhanced the kind of quick and silent reading that gave rise to imaginative literature (Roberts & Skeat, 1983; Saenger. 1997). Discussions of digital media often offer related arguments: that they foster different ways of reading, comprehending, or responding to ideas than print texts do.
These arguments are sometimes overly reductive or deterministic, but they do seem to us to have a core of truth: the semiotic modes (visual, aural, and alphabetic) as well as the media through which information and ideas are constructed and communicated shape the kinds of intellectual, aesthetic, or visceral work a “text” (Kress, 2003) can accomplish. That is, we believe that a digital book is a different (though related) technology from the print book. Thus, in many of this book’s chapters, our authors (e.g., Garrett et al., Purdy & Walker, Gresham & Kirkwood, Sayers et al.*) argue that they are accomplishing a different kind of intellectual project: work that fosters new types of reader/writer interactions or less linear arguments. These chapters thus raise the issue of the new affordances of technology of the digital book.
However, we also remain convinced that there are important connections between the digital book, as a technology, and the technology of the print book, as it has evolved. While a digital page is different from a material piece of paper, it can, we believe, perform comparable work. Thus, The New Work of Composing is organized in ways that are recognizable to anyone familiar with what books are and how they are used. In particular, this project employs many technological components of the academic scholarly book: e.g., the “Introduction” (establishing the book’s scope, relevance, and focus), the body chapters with their own recognizable authors and their self-contained status, and the use of scholarly references to other texts outside this one. That is, The New Work of Composing is continuous with the technologies of the print book in terms not only of its material analogues but also the scholarly values and academic ideologies those technologies invoke.
A Book is a Genre
The physicality of books and the technologies they employ both announce and enact assumptions that have become so ingrained in our practice that we are often no longer aware of them: e.g., that the author exists, that books are generally not produced with specific individual readers in mind, that readers can carry books around and lend them (within constraints) to others (Johns, 2002). But what seems natural to us who have lived in print culture is, of course, learned behavior.
We know how to use the technology of the book because we have learned how to respond to the genre conventions it employs. That is, books are recognizable as books because they share not only formal conventions but also substantive agreements about what books are, what they do, and what kinds of interactions they foster. Different kinds of books, of course, instantiate different sets of generic agreements. Novels, for example, are meant to be read continuously, from the first to the last page, and their meaning is understood as building cumulatively through the temporal experience of that reading. Encyclopedias or dictionaries, on the other hand, are meant to be read piecemeal; the meaning of a particular section does not depend on its sequential relation to other parts of the book. These agreements reach back into the book’s early history. As books evolved, they taught their readers how to understand and respond to them.
The New Work of Composing asks its readers to enact many of their learned responses to the genre of the edited academic collection. This book exists within a set of conventions about academic arguments in composition studies (their scope and relevance) as well as assumptions about what constitutes scholarly knowledge in our field (e.g., as a book, it is published by a scholarly press, it has a review board, it makes reference to other scholarly literature in the field). Readers of this book are thus asked to enact many of the genred responses that have been built up through a complex disciplinary history and lengthy negotiations about what counts as book-knowledge in composition studies. Charles Bazerman (1988) tells a similar story of how the development of the genre of the scientific article allowed certain kinds of scientific knowledge to be both constructed and communicated (see also Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995).