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. Part of the charm of The New Work of Composing is its willingness to take chances, embrace experiments, and expand the repertoire of what counts as scholarly production. From its reconfigurable table of contents to the videos, hypertext, Prezi arguments, and other experimental forms that comprise its chapters, this "book" offers us not just arguments but instantiations that challenge, expand, and subvert traditional assumptions about composition and rhetoric, teachers and students, writing and process, and production and publication, among other topics.
APA Citation: Hayles, N. Katherine. (2012). Foreword. In Debra Journet, Cheryl E. Ball, & Ryan Trauman (Eds.), The new work of composing. Computers and Composition Digital Press/Utah State University Press. http://ccdigitalpress/nwc/front/foreword.html
How many times have we read explanations of digital media in print? While there is a place for such work (primarily in building bridges between print-immersed scholars and new media), there are many fewer explorations of scholarship, research, and teaching with digital media in its native habitat. The New Work of Composing, from its reconfigurable table of contents to the videos, hypertext, Prezi arguments, and other experimental forms that comprise its chapters, offers us not just arguments but instantiations that challenge, expand, and subvert traditional assumptions about composition and rhetoric, teachers and students, writing and process, and production and publication, among other topics. Irreverent, inventive, and eloquent by turns, the works gathered here push the boundaries of what participatory learning and multimodal composition can be. Students who "talk back" through clever videotaping of teachers giving conference presentations; creative work that gathers text, audio and video together to probe long-hidden family secrets; installation art that combines with poetry, argument and videos to (refuse to) explain gay and lesbian experiences are just some of the delights awaiting the reader/viewer/user of this work.
While the chapters are wide-ranging in their interests and approaches, they hold in common the belief that the work of composing must be entirely rethought in the digital domain. And the work of re-imagining does not stop there. In larger scope, some chapters also point to a re-configuration of academic credit and promotion standards to take account of the fact that production in digital media is interwoven with conceptualization, design, navigation, and argument. Whereas the scholar working in print considers her labor substantially done when she turns the manuscript over to the publisher, for the scholar working in digital media, composing includes not just words but images, videos, sound, graphic design, and a host of other functionalities. The work of production is both highly nontrivial and also immensely time-consuming; academia is still struggling to find the appropriate measures and standards by which to judge such work. Even widely accepted notions of "excellence" and "rigor" are called into question by the shift to digital media. What weight should be given to experimental scholarship that, by traditional standards, show different measures of excellence but nevertheless open new territories for exploration? How should rigor be evaluated when those experiments attract audiences of thousands or even millions, in contrast to articles in print journals that have audiences that number in the dozens or low hundreds? What value should be given to play, invention, and creativity? Although one could argue that these questions also apply to print scholarship, the advent of the digital domain has given them increased force and urgency.
Part of the charm of The New Work of Composing is its willingness to take chances, embrace experiments, and expand the repertoire of what counts as scholarly production. In doing so, it raises questions that, although they may be addressed explicitly in some of the texts gathered here, are implicit throughout. Wildly heterogeneous, unapologetically exuberant, and unabashedly experimental, The New Work of Composing presents us with provocations we cannot ignore. In retrospect, future generations may well recognize it as one of the inflection points where scholarship, freed from the strictures of print, decisively enters the digital era.