Multi-Modal (Peer) Writing annd Review

These are loose ideas to initiate conversation with Julia Lesage and friends from ADA .It will be a live, online conversation on, January 17: Multimodal Editing and the Future (join us)! We”ll start with  On Publishing My YouTube “Book” Online (September 24, 2009) because here I list and demonstrate many of the issues, questions, delights and concerns about this kind of scholarly work and practice. I’ll ask to watch a brief section of this video:

I have three large points about new affordances, traditional rubrics, and their intersections and frustrations that I will make in my brief presentations before we have a conversation .

1) Why would you write online? What are its affordances?

• Because you are working on Internet culture, databases, or other objects or cultures or practices that (in part) reside online
• Thereby your access and your readers’ is streamlined
• You write in the vernacular, community, structure you analyze:
  • self-reflexive
• You need not describe, you can build (or analyze), from shared interaction with the object you study

A) It allows for multi-modal authorship

• Creative possibilities including: montage, sound, image, design
• Expressive possibilities in same vernacular you study
• Collaborative authoring possibilities:
  • with your “subjects,” “readers,” or “students”

B)  Different writing practices: See FLYT on Writing Practices

• Iterative
• Interactive
• Quick; Short
• Vernacular
• Public

C) Different audiences and places for scholarly practice

• Outside academia
• Public
• Your Subject

D) Different reading practices

• Distracted
• Quick, short
• Interactive

E) Different structures of vetting

• Free
• Open Source
• New models for peer review (or not)

E) Different paradigms, practices of Publishing

• “The Absurdities of Moving from Paper to Digital in Academic Publishing (June 11, 2010),” LFYT

2) Traditional Rubrics for Academic Writing (apologies to Rhetoricians and Scholars of Writing, this is my quick list and I’m ready for your additions and nuances!)

1. hypothesis and thesis
2. research: footnotes, bibliography
3. analysis: clearly expressed, smart, original
4. proof: facts, data, quotations
5. detail: relevant, elegant, supportive
6. coherent structure: 5 pg. paper, 10 pg. paper, dissertation
7. style: clear, pretty, personal, impersonal
8. rhetorical paradigm
9. Awareness of audience

3) Questions for conversation:

• How do you graft 1) New Affordances to 2) Traditional Rubrics?
  • Thesis is easy! Research is the same.
  • So are footnotes and bibliography, although they could take many forms and sit in many places (i.e. they could be spoken, or written on an image as text)
• What needs to shift or change entirely?
  • Structures: papers are cumbersome and incorrect
  • Style: different audiences and reading practices

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