No Respect? Multimedia Publishing & Pedagogy

Joyce Walker writes about how “we do not yet have a a very good understanding of what happens to our efforts to write in scholarly ways when we move into digital environments” in a recent issue of Kairos (10.2). Walker’s article (composition?) enacts new media scholarship, and is thus what Ball calls for in her article, “Show not tell,” in which Ball argues for the academic use of multimedia in the classroom and in publication. Such publications need to (must) garner institutional respect, especially considering how sometimes they don’t “count” as publications at all for tenure-track faculty.

Katie Retzinger, Ashley Hall, (and more) & I authored a pretty substantial wiki post on this article last semester for Texts and Technologies. Here’s the link: http://courses.kathiegossett.com/fa07/engl801/index.php?title=Ball%2C_Cheryl:_Show%2C_not_tell:_The_value_of_new_media_scholarship
I hope you’ll visit that wiki because it has a lot of info on it that the class created together!

Walker’s article is genuinely interactive and invites readers to travel to different online spaces. It is non-linear and non-sequential and functions as a database. In The Language of New Media, Manovich considers database as a genre. Manovich sets up a paradigm of database versus narrative. I see database as allowing multiple narratives, which might give the author less “control,” privileging the audience—of course, this is within the constraints of the author-created site. The question is, is this a more “democratic” system than traditional, written texts have allowed? Is narrative “under threat” by database?

Such a question would buy into Manovich’s metaphor of a battle between narrative and database. In this battle, narrative needs protection, as chronologies and traditional scholarship comes under attack. Certainly, online publications like Kairos remediate traditional textual venues. Bolter and Grusin’s term “remediation” refers to the overarching tendency of new media to imitate and incorporate forms they “seek to supersede” (1593). I see a relationship here to the tendency of quotation in postmodern art, which is at once an homage and a departure. (class wiki link to Bolter & Grusin: http://courses.kathiegossett.com/fa07/engl801/index.php?title=Bolter%2C_Jay_David_%26_Grusin%2C_Richard:_Remediation:_Understanding_new_media.)

See what Katherine Hayles says in a recent issue of PMLA in her article “Narrative and Database: Natural Symbionts” (PMLA 122.5 (October, 2007):

“The indeterminacy that databases find difficult to tolerate marks another way in which narrative differs from database. Narratives gesture toward the inexplicable, the unspeakable, the ineffable, whereas databases rely on enumeration, requiring explicit articulation of attributes and data values” (1605). So, there’s this vital paradox at work, that databases are simultaneously flexible and inflexibile. But I disagree with Hayles because I think databases can still “invite the unknown” in the same way narratives do, and as with narratives, it’s in the usage (that is, in the reader’s work). Hayles cites a few famous literary examples of unknowns, but I see these as constrained by authorship as any database could be—constrained by authorship and the physical pages of a book which is like the constraint of data in a database.

For how long will scholarship and pedagogy privilege the physical pages of a book?

END OF POST