genre
whether this response i'm writing is a new (digitally new) scholarly genre depends on what any genre is. in other words, how do we draw genre boundaries that allow us to distinguish new from old? what is changing (or not) across a range of semiotic objects that have been identified as digital—purdy and walker consider webtexts, blogs, microblogs like twitter®, and email/web discussion boards while rhodes and alexander add digitally-mediated installations? and what makes any text scholarly?
earlier today (now i'd have to say two months ago) i downloaded several pdf articles from sign system studies, a journal from tartu associated with the tartu school of semiotics and especially yuri lotman. those texts were written for a print journal but i haven't even seen the print journal. (actually i'm just assuming that there is one because it is formatted that way.) anyway, were those articles digital? does digitization and digital distribution, or my receptive accessing and reading of it on a screen, make it a new scholarly genre, or does something else need to change in its content, representation, production?
what's new in new scholarly genres? that's a question that i would tackle via the model that i, janine solberg, patrick berry, hannah bellwoar, bill chewning, karen lunsford, liz rohan, kevin roozen, mary sheridan, jody shipka, derek van ittersum, and joyce walker (and note that writing out all these names would be challenging in the economy of print-on-paper) proposed in 're-situating and re-mediating the canons: a cultural-historical remapping of rhetorical activity, a collaborative webtext' in kairos: a journal of rhetoric, technology, and pedagogy, 11.3.
i would focus particularly on the literate activity column in the model, which maps out the following dimensions: production, representation, distribution, reception, activity, socialization, and ecology. i would ask how these dimensions relate to the chapters' representations of new scholarly genres.
these chapters all point to, enact and/or discuss ways production has changed, the uses of new technologies, and altered processes of writing, work and inquiry.
and they point to, enact and/or discuss ways that representation has changed: digitally animated textuality, internet hyperlinking, use of digital video, pervasive multimedia.
and they point to, enact and/or discuss ways that distribution has changed—think of viewing texts on phones and other mobile devices, of the ways links operate within texts, of how much of this digital book is located outside its pages and even outside its servers, of (as ralston highlights) how information is increasingly being linked to geographically located users.
by my read, these chapters say less about the way reception might be changing. but how much is anybody studying reception of any kind of texts seriously? we keep imagining reception (when we're not trying to regiment and regulate it). anyway, let's imagine, grounded in personal experience, that reception of these digital texts is altering because viewer-readers might be taking more complex paths than typical of print-text reading (though that too has largely been idealized) and might be engaging in more distracted reception (like how many times did i check my email when i was surfing these chapters? how many times did i find myself skimming quickly over a page and then, because i was writing a response, go back and slowly read what i had just skimmed?).
some of the chapters do deal with activity, mainly of course noting how digital technologies alter the activity of scholarship (purdy & walker) or change the boundaries of home and work (gresham & aftanas) or are beginning to remake some of our sense of place (ralston). harder to grasp is how computer technologies are re-making social practice. what people-acting-with-tools-in-environments do as part of their socially organized lives may be changing in multiple ways, but how these changes are (tacitly) re-shaping activity systems (social goals and patterns) is less certain, which leads to....
questions of socialization, of the way socialization is morphing us and our social worlds as more and more people learn to act-with computer technologies, as more and more people's identities become varyingly defined in relation to such technologies (to tweet or not to tweet—that's an identity issue as well as a communication issue), those questions are addressed here in some ways, like ralston's discussion of hyperlocalization practices or gresham and aftanas's attention to the interface of home, work, and gender. however, socialization as the ever-present, continuous ways mediated activity (re)makes people and their social systems—and how digital technologies and literacies figure into that equation and then get refracted in scholarship—is mainly an issue on the edge of these chapters.
i see little here on the ecology of new-digital scholarly genres. to the extent that digital genres are paper-less (better to say paper-reduced if others print out some texts as i do), they will have a different ecological profile from the ecological costs of the paper industry (trees, chemicals, water, energy, health). however, computer technologies also use chemicals, metals, energy, and water, and the lifespan of digital technologies is very short.
i still have books from my grandmother's high school years in my house
but i'm trashing computer games i last played with my kids five years ago because i no longer have any working computer system that will play them. honestly, digital scholarship feels akin to tibetan mandala sand painting, as meticulously crafted designs are often swept away almost as soon as they finished.
in short, digital scholarship's relationship to physical, biological and biologically relevant systems of the planet are certainly new, but exactly what they are is uncertain, except that they remain far from sustainable.
i suggest we use this kind of model to ask these questions, but i don't think that it makes the questions easier. is a traditional thesis-driven academic essay, composed on a computer and drawing material from digitally accessed texts, then submitted to a journal via email as an attached Word® document, a new scholarly genre?
if a reviewer does an internet search on a phrase from that submitted, blinded manuscript and one or more of the hits is a page that seems to identify the manuscript's author, does this shift in reception make it a new genre?
if that page turns out to be a fake, planted to give the manuscript an impressive provenance, does that make the original submission new?
and on the flip, non-digital side, what about all the alt-discourse experimental scholarship that has appeared in print-text genres or in situated performance without direct digital re-mediation?