Along with the great morning sessions on the possibilities for teaching in digital contexts , HASTAC featured a stunning session of born digital scholarly projects. Although each presenter’s study was decidedly different in content, each demonstrated how new publishing venues–in this case the University of Southern California’s Vectors edited by Steve Anderson and Tara McPherson–opens up new ways of understanding, presenting, and, most important of all, doing research.
Craig Dietrich from the University of Maine opened the session by alerting the audience to the truly transformative research we were about to hear and see. The speakers—Tara McPherson of the University of Southern California, Wendy Chun of Brown University, Sharon Daniel from the University of California at Santa Cruz, and Craig himself—had all worked with Vector’s designers to craft an appropriate article for online publication that actually worked to enable the research itself. Each took advantage of the benefits of multimodal scholarship which, the presenters argue, has the potential for new visual, affective, and sensory experiences. But let me explain.
Tara argued—eloquently I might add—that it is time for those of us in the humanities to take advantage of digital possibilities in our research. An online journal like Vectors, for example, can encourage
1. Relational thinking: deep engagement with database forms allows humanities scholars to formlate new research questions
2. Emergent Genres of multimodal scholarship—from the animated archive to the experimental argument to the interactive documentary to the spatialized essay
3. Process as much as product: we need to value collaboration across projects, and even think about humanities research in terms of databases—often archives
Overall she wants us to think about broadening out what matters in the humanities as research and scholarship.
Wendy Chun then presented a study in which she plays with with the idea of race and uses her Vectors project so that the visualization of her research becomes becomes primarily a theoretical tool. Check out her article “Programmed Visions.” Wendy makes the interesting point that the less we know, the more we pay attention, the more we see, and finally the more we come to know. Her process of digital composing—like the process of writing itself—opened up these doors to her.
Craig too talked about groundbreaking possibilities in scholarship and urged us all to think about the resources at hand. This kind of thinking helps him, and he would argue other writers, be creative. He tells us that electricity and oil are, of course, energy resources, but he would have us think too of people—of writers and scholars as resources that must too be folded into the mix.
Sharon Daniel of the University of California, Santa Cruz, then demonstrated how online publishing can work to provoke new forms of scholarship. Specifically she showed us two case studies, both of which are fascinating examples of just what such research might look like. “Public Secrets” and “Blood Sugar” traverse a number of social, economic, and disciplinary boundaries in which the disenfranchised can be heard and which give meaning to the concept of a public multivocal dialogue. Her research into prison life comes alive in her Vector’s piece, “Public Secrets,” as images and voices allow you to link from one person to another and hear their stories. Everyone needs to take a look and experiment with these remarkable sites.
This session took on added meeting for me as a group of us from several universities (University of Illinois, Ohio State University, Illinois Institute of Techology, and Miami University), along with Utah State University Press, work to create Computers and Composition Digital Press (CCDP). Currently we’re working frantically to finish the CCDP website and ready our first volume, Technological Ecologies and Sustainability and, in doing so, I can’t help but hope for a similar impact on research and its presentation in our own field of writing studies. When you check out the CCDP link, be sure to view the videos there as well. They are truly an amusing take on “Digital” and “Print” today!
