On the first day of the Fall 2008 Multimodal Composition class at Illinois State University, the teacher (Cheryl Ball) introduced the concept of multiliteracies to 12 undergraduate students: Kenton Cody, Amy Determan, Ariana Haze, Jessica Huang, Steve LaGioia, Tom Raehl, Amos Rein, Katie Rockwell, Vince Scannell, Nick Walker, Matthew Wendling, and Julie Zei. The students were tasked with a unique learning opportunity: to record events at the 2008 Thomas R. Watson Conference on Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Louisville, and create a documentary-like multimedia project based on their attendance. The students interviewed conference presenters, filmed and audio-recorded 200 hours of sessions, and, from that data collection, submitted this digital media-based book chapter for consideration in The New Work of Composing. We’re happy it made the cut. (With, of course, the teacher-as-editor abstaining from the editorial vote.)
In honor of The New London Group’s effect on this collection of student–teacher–scholars, we herein refer to ourselves as The Normal Group, named after the Town of Normal in which Illinois State (Normal) University resides. We relish the irony of calling ourselves “Normal” within a collection that, on the one hand, would approve of the tradition of normal schools, but on the other hand—in terms of scholarly traditions—seems far from it. Thank you to all of the Watson conference participants who allowed us to video- or audio-tape their sessions or interviews. And, most of all, thank you for listening.
On interfaces and scholarly work…
The interface of this webtext is purposefully chosen so that you will ignore it. Why? Because what should stand out in this chapter —what needs to stand out—are the undergraduate student projects housed within the WordPress theme. Yet its choice is purposeful. The theme is called “Doc,” as in document, as in word-processing document, as in Microsoft Word's ".doc." On the blog post describing the theme, the designer (“Delicia”) explained:
Doc is a one-column theme, with a fixed width and lots of white space. It is intended to spoil your content and to satisfy your users’ reading pleasure. …
The story behind
Like you all, I spend a lot of time reading word processed documents. The image of a Pages, Word or Writer document is so familiar, that I can’t conceive my life without it. It’s like coffee. I thought that maybe that’s the case for you also, so I designed a theme impersonating such a document. // The default font is Times New Roman for consistency…. (http://wp-content-themes.com/doc-a-free-minimal-wordpress-27-theme/257)
It is not at all ironic that Delicia mimics word processing programs with this interface, nor that she called her design blog Theme Museum, as if themes are artful replications of our real-world experiences meant to be archived for further observation and study. The notion of a museum-as-WordPress-theme that spoils content for the “users’ reading pleasure” is a double entendre: the content of museums and of word-processing documents are both good spoiled (as in being indulged, or “treated with excessive kindness,” as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it) and bad spoiled (as in ruined, pillaged, taken out of context and placed into seemingly transparent settings).
We, the Normal Group, are no experts on museum spaces, but through a semester of multimodal composition research and practice have come to agree with scholars such as Dennis Baron (2000), Jay David Bolter (1999), The New London Group (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000), Gunther Kress (2000, 2006, 2009), Geoffrey Sirc (2001), and Anne Frances Wysocki (2004), who argue that a page from a word-processing document is no more transparent than a concrete museum wall. The page/wall is visible and thus part of the content. However, most authors (and teachers) refuse to acknowledge the concrete wall of print-on-screen that gets performed every single day in academia, in so-called academic writing. Our knowledge-making artifacts (“scholarship”) are dissemminated without us seeing the page within the screen, even as those pages get printed less and less.
Our point in choosing this Doc theme, then, is to acknowledge the still-accepted transparency of word-processing documents in the majority of scholarly communications while also pointing out that—despite our own radical re-envisioning of what scholarship is—alternate forms of scholarship such as scholarly multimedia or new media scholarship are still viewed within the frames of traditional, page-based work. We think that sucks. Not because page-based scholarship sucks; in fact, we read lots of it to get ready for the 2008 Thomas R. Watson Conference that we attended as 12 undergraduates + teacher. Page-based scholarship is necessary to communicate certain kinds of scholarly information. But we also read a lot of screen-based (or other-named: born-digital, new media, digital media, multimedia, semiotically mediated) scholarship that provided us with a richer set of academic writing practices than text-on-page presents. In the context of this particular “book,” The New Work of Composing, we hope you understand our point.