Abstract
Despite a general interest in exploring the possibilities of multimedia and web-based
research, the humanities profession has been slow to accept digital scholarship as a
valid form of intellectual endeavor. Questions about labor, peer-review, and
co-authorship often arise in academic departments’ attempts to evaluate digital
research in the tenure and promotion process. In this essay, we argue that these
tensions stem from a general misunderstanding of the kinds of
“work” that goes into producing scholarship in multimedia form.
Multimedia work, we suggest, places scholars in an extended network that combines
minds, bodies, machines, and institutional practices, and lays bare the fiction that
scholars are disembodied intellectuals who labor only with the mind. We argue that
while traditional ideas of what “counts” as scholarship continue
to privilege content over form, intellectual labor over physical labor, and print
over digital media, new media’s functional (and in some cases even biological)
difference from old media contributes to a double erasure, for scholars working in
multimedia, of both their intellectual contributions and their material labor.
I construct, and I am constructed, in a mutually recursive
process that continually engages my fluid, permeable boundaries and my
endlessly ramifying networks. I am a spatially extended cyborg.
[Mitchell 2003, 39]
Knowledge arises from the flesh — that intertwining of my body
and the world, and my interactions with others.
[Tuana 2001, 236]
Digital scholarship is not new. By the time the World Wide Web appeared on the
screens of professors and students at academic institutions in the mid-1990s, a
profound transformation was well under way. Digital preservation, spearheaded by the
Text Encoding Initiative and other similar efforts to apply computing power to
literary analysis and preservation, had become a well established, if somewhat
marginalized, field of study. For literary critics interested in computing, text had
morphed into hypertext. Still others recognized that multimedia, as a practice, was a
promising new frontier; as a result, media studies quickly became new media studies.
In many ways, the institution adapted: new journals, such as the Electronic Book Review, emerged as open-access e-journals. Print
journals, such as Genders, followed suit and were reborn
in cyberspace. Brave, forward-looking deans, provosts, and grant-giving agencies like
the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation threw
money at multimedia and web-based projects that promised to revolutionize the way
that scholarly knowledge is presented and circulated.
This institutional interest in exploring the possibilities for digital scholarship,
after an initial flurry of activity followed by something of a hiatus, seems to be
gaining impetus again. We have recently seen the establishment of new granting
initiatives (such as the NEH’s Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants and the ACLS
Digital Innovation Fellowship Program) as well as a general “buzz”
about digital scholarship epitomized by recent articles in the
Chronicle of Higher Education and elsewhere, culminating in a standing
room only panels on digital humanities at the MLA conferences of 2009 and 2010, and
the awarding of the MLA’s 2009 first book prize to
Mechanisms
[
Kirschenbaum 2008], a seminal book on new media forensics. Innovative
work, such as that sponsored by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the
Humanities (MITH), MediaCommons, and the journal
Vectors, is gaining ground among a growing cohort of digital scholars.
Despite these promising developments over the last decade, however, academia itself
has been slow to respond to the changing face of scholarly practice when it comes to
issues of promotion and tenure, peer-review, funding, and faculty development, and
more broadly in recognizing the emerging importance of scholarly multimedia. In this
respect, academia seems to suffer from its own version of technological obsolescence,
seeing the emergence of scholarly multimedia as challenging the primacy of
traditional humanities scholarship.
This article considers the historically important role that new media have played in
configuring not just articulations of humanist subjectivity in general (a now
well-trodden field in literary and cultural studies), but also the humanist
scholarly subject. By placing the institutional tensions between
traditional scholarly practice and new media within larger theoretical and
disciplinary contexts, we can demonstrate how new media challenges the ways in which
the traditional humanities scholar has been imagined as having a secure and stable
position within institutionalized hierarchies of knowledge production. Furthermore,
we can consider how scholarly multimedia threatens the very coherence of humanities
scholarship by insisting on the re-embodiment of scholarly activity. In this respect,
we hope to bring critiques of techno-scientific epistemologies coming out of new
media and science studies to bear on humanities scholarship in order to follow
through on Donna Haraway’s call for interventions into all forms of knowledge
production: “Knowledge-making technologies, including crafting subject
positions and ways of inhabiting such positions, must be made relentlessly
visible and open to critical intervention”
[
Haraway 2004, 236]. Our analysis will reveal the ways in which the production of scholarly
multimedia has been hampered by two key obstacles: traditionalist definitions of
humanities scholarship that still overwhelmingly determine the evaluation of digital
works, and a narrow understanding of what the “materiality” of new
media can actually come to mean. We hope to address both of these issues by
foregrounding some of the material and intellectual potentialities revealed by
scholarly multimedia.
Scholarly Multimedia: Defining an Emerging Genre
Scholarly multimedia in the humanities has, historically, gone by many names: digital
humanities, humanities computing, and more recently new media scholarship. Each of
these names points to the technological aspects of this new mode of scholarship, and
thus acknowledges the vital importance of medium to scholarly activity. In literary
studies, media scholarship has for the most part diverged into two basic fields of
study. On the one hand, we have traditional text-based readings of innovative
literary forms, usually referred to as
new media studies. N. Katherine
Halyes, among others, has pioneered this important field.
[1] On the other hand, we have digital reimaginings of or interventions into
preexisting text manuscripts, such as the William Blake Archive and Emily Dickinson
Electronic Archives. These works are usually gathered under the title of
digital humanities or
humanities computing. This
division between analysis of new media and digital archiving has been accompanied by
an equally notable split in tenure and promotion evaluation, wherein scholarship
about new media, in the form of single-author monographs,
“counts,” while multimedia projects themselves, no matter how
transformative, are viewed (if the scholar is lucky) as akin to producing a somewhat
gimmicky scholarly edition — i.e. the “work” is primarily viewed
as reformatting rather than as “original” scholarship. The
important work of digital preservation of existing texts, itself a crucial field, is
more likely to be considered the province of library science than that of Literature
and the Humanities.
Spearheaded by the Electronic Literature Organization, scholars in the digital
humanities are now starting to explore some of the technical and rhetorical problems
of approaching and preserving “born digital” creative works —
interactive Flash poems, hypertext novels, and the like — which never existed in
print. But what about “born digital”
scholarship — scholarship that never had a print analog? Very few
theorists have attended to this category, being mostly concerned with digital
creative works as their object of analysis, rather than digitally rendered scholarly
works. Thus the work of new media researchers in the humanities tends to get lumped
into a single category rather than, as Cheryl Ball distinguishes, into the very
distinct categories of scholarship rendered
in new media and scholarship
about new media [
Ball 2004, 404]. Institutionally,
this distinction is crucial for upcoming scholars, since much of the contention
centers around
originality of content: if the multimedia format of the
work is absolutely essential to (and constitutive of) the argument it presents, where
should it count — as a work of scholarship as fundamentally complex as a written
monograph, or as a reworking of an existing argument (a
porting, if you
like — a term we borrow from software development practices)? Thus it is important to
distinguish, as we do here, between the term
scholarly multimedia and
other terms frequently used in considerations of the role of new media in academic
contexts. By scholarly multimedia we specifically mean critical scholarly works —
interpretive and argumentative, as opposed to creative or archival — that are
produced, and in some cases performed, in multimedia form. These works represent a
new rhetorical genre of scholarship that is at once both discursive and embodied, and
that differs from multimedia art or hypertext fiction (as artistic and literary
genres) and from multimedia as interactive storage spaces for archival materials or
critical resources.
The messy contention over how to define scholarly multimedia is symptomatic of the
very old argument, played out continually in the academy, over a perceived split
between form and content. Content is the essence of analysis, while form is merely
the “matter” out of which it is made. But materiality matters —
has always mattered — in the meaning-constitution of analysis. Digital machines, in
all their undeniable physicality, confront us as a transformational tool in the same
way that the printing press does. In this way, we see, from the earliest writings
about the role of computers in humanities scholarship, an awareness of materiality.
In the fields commonly known as “history of the book” or
“print culture,” critics have devoted considerable
attention to the materiality and visual spatiality of the scholarly artifact – the
illuminated manuscript, the Concrete poem, the hypertext novel, etc. In the analysis
of the many forms new media take, [
Drucker 2002], [
Hockey 2000], and [
McGann 2004] serve as excellent
examples, as does N. Katherine Hayles in her call for “media-specific analysis” and later “New
Materialism,” a mode of literary criticism that takes seriously the
material instantiation of the text as integral to critical interpretation ([
Hayles 2002, 29]; [
Hayles 2005, 142]). Critics
have also attended to the body of the reader as an important locus of materiality,
arguing, as Mark Hansen does, that readers engaged with new media experience the
text/artifact in an embodied, post-representationalist way; that is to say, new media
produces in the user/reader “affects” that cannot be separated
from material embodiment [
Hansen 2006, 223]. But the importance of
the material conditions of multimedia
production, i.e. the embodied and
materially-mediated work of the digital author has remained drastically
under-theorized.
Our goal here is to extend the discourse of new media criticism by addressing
specifically the materiality of scholarly production, both in print and multimedia
form. That is, we hope to attend not only to the bodies of the text and the
user/reader, but also to the bodies of the authors/engineers and to the material
aspects of scholarly activity itself. Crucially, we want to focus on the material and
embodied aspects of multimedia production, rather than simply the rhetorical
arrangements or rearrangements of information that are so often considered the
primary labor of multimedia authoring. In this mode, it is important to distinguish
between material labor and embodied labor.
For us, material labor is a broad term encompassing both physical
movement and the kinds of “material” actions necessary to provide
an infrastructure for digital media. On an immediate level, these actions can be
thought of as a nodal network of bodies and machines in which machines combine
with humans to perform tasks: the manipulation of software packages, the
shooting and compression of video, the recording and recasting of audio. In addition,
we have the even wider infrastructural support necessary for producing such media
objects: the institutional search for grants, the subvention of copyright clearances,
the securing of financial support for and mentoring of graduate students, and
technical assistance provided by, variously, presses, contract programmers,
videographers, and animators.
By embodied labor, more narrowly, we mean the physical actions (often
disciplined by machinic interactions) that go into interacting with machines — the
focusing of the eye on the screen, the repetitive hand movement, the response of the
ear to input, and the performative bodily movements when interacting with machines as
physical objects. This distinction will be crucial when we come later in the article
to a discussion of the most radical forms of scholarly multimedia currently being
conducted in the academy — performative scholarship.
Purification and the Problem of Material Rhetorics
A host of binary oppositions emerges when we reflect on the unusual space scholarly
multimedia occupies within the academy, particularly within the humanities: content
versus form, information versus materiality, multimedia versus print, collaboration
versus single-authorship, nodal or networked “writing” versus
linear academic prose, word versus image, and so on. These binaries are often cited
as arguments for the line we draw between print and new media as well as between
intellectual labor (often seen as pure information) and bodily labor (often rendered
transparent) in the process of producing scholarly works. But such binaries are by no
means sustainable, and lead to a proliferation of hybrids, in the Latourian sense, as
the labor practices of academics who work in multimedia have become more and more
visible as embodied material practices.
In Bruno Latour’s articulation of the modern constitution, he offers
purification as a term to describe the institutional practice of
vigorously separating the domain of the social from the domain of nature. But this
practice of purification is met with resistance as there continue to arise objects
(and by extension practices) that refuse to be easily contained within one or the
other of these purified domains. Modernity attempts to subsume such unrulqy “quasi-objects” or hybrids by characterizing them as “a mixture of two pure forms,” so that rather than tearing at
the fabric of modernity’s stable ontology, they reinforce the purified domains of the
material and the social that constitute modernity [
Latour 1993, 78]. The consequence of this dual process of purification and mediation (Latour also
calls this mixing of domains “translation”) is a
frustration with modern philosophy’s incapacity to account for the proliferation of
hybrids other than by resorting to a pernicious relativism at the expense of more
nuanced accounts of the relationship between materiality and cultural productions.
Within the academy we see these processes of purification and mediation at work,
producing and maintaining the distinction between intellectual labor and material
labor, both of which are essential to multimedia production.
The distinction between intellectual and material labor is pervasive throughout
scholarly criticism and evaluation of media forms. But usually these oppositions
amount to a debate over genre in terms of
rhetorical construction,
rather than its material conditions. In addition, any discussion of scholarly
activities in multimedia format are usually elided in favor of literary texts, which
can be safely analyzed using traditional tools of critical analysis. Thus early
criticism of hypertext, for example, focuses on its rhetorical difference as a
reading and writing practice. However, critics of this early celebration of hypertext
generally point out the ways that print conventions have
always been
associative, non-linear, and intertextual, citing footnoting and indexing as examples
of the always already hypertextual nature of print. Richard Grusin, for one,
demonstrates how ascribing revolutionary qualities to electronic writing is
tantamount to a technological fallacy whereby we ascribe agency to technology itself
rather than attending to the ways in which writing is always produced in particular
historical, social, and technological contexts. In this way, he asserts, rather
paradoxically, that electronic authorship is the same as print authorship only
different: “To then imagine that current technologies of (and like)
writing are destabilized by pointing out that they have histories is only to
suggest that since things used to be different, they could be again”
[
Grusin 1996, 52].
Some attempts have been made to reintroduce the material world into new media texts.
In a reexamination of literary “cybertexts,” for example, [
Aarseth 1997] attempts to reconcile the “new/old” contradiction pervasive in media criticism. Aarseth’s project, he
claims, is to create a space within literary theory that can account for new media
technologies. At the same time, however, Aarseth dismisses new media technologies as
“not important in themselves” in order to favor a
reader/user-centered approach to cybertext that disregards media-specific rhetorics
and aesthetics, both of which, implies Aarseth, are superficial: “The ideological forces surrounding new technology produce a
rhetoric of novelty, differentiation, and freedom that works to obscure the
more profound structural kinships between superficially heterogeneous
media”
[
Aarseth 1997, 14]. By focusing on the role of the reader in the construction of meaning,
regardless of the medium in which meaning is delivered, and by redefining writing
itself as a “material machine” (and therefore only
superficially different from new media) Aarseth dismisses arguments for cybertexts’
newness as being premised on extraneous distinctions [
Aarseth 1997, 18–24]. In this way, Aarseth levels the field between digital and
non-digital literary objects and redefines
cybertext, not in material or
technological terms, but as “a
perspective on all forms of textuality”
[
Aarseth 1997, 18]. This view fails, however, to account for actual material and technical
differences between media, as well as the material-social differences (i.e. in the
skills and knowledges required to produce such works) that necessitate a more nuanced
account of new media as facilitating new rhetorical modes.
More recent criticism has begun to grapple with the idea of media writing as a
practice that is embedded in
both rhetorical and material networks of
machine and institution. Mary Hocks and Michelle Kendrick consider the “modern constitution” in terms of the purifying impulses that “dichotomize our experiences with visual and verbal
communication systems”
[
Hocks & Kendrick 2003, 3]. The binary that emerges within the humanities between word and image points
to a larger constitutional dichotomy between old modes of scholarly practice and new
modes. This dichotomy, often described in critical discourse as a contest among
media
[2],
produces two contradictory purification narratives, the first being overstated claims
of new media’s radical newness and the second being claims of its radical sameness.
Early enthusiasts of hypertext, Michelle Kendrick points out, have claimed that
electronic writing, by embedding technologically associative structures in a
non-linear way, function more like the natural human brain than the artificial medium
of print. In this way, hypertext enthusiasts have claimed that new media “truly reveals the subject, for it enacts the patterns of
cognition in the human mind[…]”
[
Kendrick 2001, 233]. Such claims, Kendrick writes, rely on the notion that the subject of writing
in print culture has been rendered obsolete by the emergence of new media [
Kendrick 2001, 233].
This ongoing debate about new media’s functional (and in some cases even biological)
difference from old media contributes to a double erasure, for scholars working in
multimedia, of both their intellectual contributions and their material labor. If
multimedia is regarded as no different from other scholarly forms, the complex labor
practices and new knowledges required to produce scholarly works of multimedia, such
as interface design, coding, video production, hardware support, institutional
interactions and so on, may be devalued to the extent that they are seen more as
service (akin to maintaining a department’s computer lab or website) or not seen as
meaningful scholarly activity at all. This leads to the reduction of scholarly
multimedia to the status of “unacademic,” suggesting that it is
somehow less intellectually significant than “equivalent” works
produced in print because the differences between media are
“superficial.” Here we find ourselves in a bind similar to the
“old/new” argument. On the one hand, if we claim that
digital scholarship is old scholarship translated to a new format, we elide the ways
in which multimedia fundamentally changes scholarly argument; on the other hand, if
we regard multimedia as radically other to scholarly production (i.e.
“new”), the intellectual and rhetorical expertise of multimedia
authors/engineers may also be discredited insofar as they are working in a medium not
recognized within the institution as scholarly enough. Furthermore, as a consequence
of casting academic labor practices in these ways, the material practices of
all scholarship are erased, as traditional scholarship is purified as
a solely intellectual act. Narratives of purification that dictate which scholarly
practices count as intellectually significant and which don’t foreclose the
possibility of accounting for multimedia as a viable scholarly activity and limit our
understanding of how scholarly activity more generally is socially and
technologically constructed.
Old Media and New Media: The Problem of (Scholarly) Humanism
The emergence within the academy of scholarly multimedia as a new rhetorical genre is
certainly not the first time that technological change has prompted anxious
reconsiderations of humanism. Rather, it exists as one localized example of an
ongoing concern about the status of the human in relation to technology. In
Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Friedrich A. Kittler argues
that media threaten, indeed have always threatened, to render the liberal humanist
(and by extension, we would argue, the humanist scholar) obsolete [
Kittler 1999]. According to Kittler, prior to the invention of devices
such as the phonograph that could record sound waves, writing was imagined as the
only means to transmit the voice of the author. In this respect, the voice of the
author, as it was imagined by readers, functioned as a kind of “fictitious elevated phallus born from the alphabet”
[
Kittler 1999, 70]. With early recording devices, the modern engineer was able to capture the
waves of human vocalizations and could thus reproduce this “fictitious phallus” technologically, calling into question the purity of
the phallic voice. Kittler elaborates on this in his discussion of Rilke in which
Rilke describes phonographic emanations as “primal
sounds.” In other words, phonographic recordings, which seem to capture the
human voice “as it really is,” offered the illusion of
primacy (immediacy) and in this way appear to outperform the written word:
With the demise of writing’s storage monopoly comes to an end
a love that was not only one of literature’s many possible subjects but also
its very own media technology: since 1800 perfectly alphabetized female readers
have been able to endow letters with a beloved voice. But tracing primal sounds
has, as Rilke put it, nothing to do with “the presence of
mind and grace of love”.
[Kittler 1999, 70]
In this passage, we see a crucial split between mind and body take shape: “machines have taken over the function of the central nervous
system”
[
Kittler 1999, 51]. Machines are primal and embodied and therefore threaten the subject of
writing. Suddenly, with the emerging importance of the machine engineer, there is the
capacity for writing without a subject-author, and so the role of the subject-author
is no longer entirely stable. One important consequence of machines taking over the
function of the central nervous system is that, for the first time, memory
suqpersedes “spirit” as the imminent characteristic of
subjectivity, yet memory is no longer solely the domain of the mind or brain. It can
also be scratched on surfaces. Memory has now been externalized by media
technologies. The consequence of this externalization of memory, Kittler argues
rather dramatically, is that “Media render Man[…]superfluous[…]The fictional elevated
phallus shrivels up[…]the engineer has finally beaten the author”
[
Kittler 1999, 78]. As Kittler’s historical analysis reveals, this perceived contest between
media technologies (captured here through the figure of the engineer) and the liberal
humanist subject-as-author (presumed here to be male or at least to possess the
phallus) is ongoing. More interestingly, we see this contest structured around yet
another series of dichotomous relations: author versus engineer, soul versus memory,
writing versus recording, humanities (e.g. the poetry of Rilke) versus science and
technology (e.g. phonographic recordings), and ultimately, mind versus
body.
[3]
In “The Condition of Virtuality”
[
Hayles 1999a] and
How We Became Posthuman
[
Hayles 1999b], N. Katherine Hayles’ offers a similar narrative of the
emergence of the tension between mind and body, which she casts as a tension between
virtuality and materiality. As a result of post-World War II scientific discoveries
(namely, DNA and genetic code) we (meaning Westerners) have experienced a paradigm
shift in the ways we imaginCe the “self.” Whereas prior to these
discoveries we imagined the material body and the “self.” as a
unified, self-identical whole (this is what Hayles calls humanism), in the post-DNA
age the body is re-imagined as a container or husk for the self, which is itself
re-imagined as an informational pattern produced by and through genetic code. Hence,
writes Hayles, we see the emergence of a posthuman dialectic — information versus
materiality — where the former trumps the latter as the root cause of the (illusion
of the) liberal humanist subject. “A defining characteristic of
the present cultural moment,” Hayles writes, “is the belief that information can circulate unchanged among
different material substrates”
[
Hayles 1999b, 1]. The body, in such a posthuman arrangement, becomes the “original prosthesis”
[
Hayles 1999b, 1]. This ongoing tension between materiality and informatics contributes to our
understanding of how we in the academy think about multimedia in relation to other,
more “legitimized” modes of scholarly practice. For one, the
materiality of multimedia scholarship is constantly under erasure insofar as we
imagine that the heart of any scholarly work (the intellectual part) is purely
“informational,” as if, like Athena, it springs forth from the
scholar’s mind and takes up residency inside the book or article or machine. Hayles,
drawing on Richard Doyle, calls it an “impossible
inversion,” where the informational pattern or code is imagined as actually
producing the thing on which the pattern nonetheless depends [
Hayles 1999b, 293].
In the case of humanities scholarship and the methods by which we evaluate and
validate research practices, Hayles’ “impossible
inversion” surfaces as a practice of purification wherein the embodied or
material aspects of scholarly work are rendered secondary to (rather than
constitutive of) scholarly argument. We imagine that the intellectual content of
scholarship pre-exists its material enactment. Deborah Lines Andersen, in her
introduction to
Digital Scholarship in the Tenure, Promotion,
and Review Process, reiterates this view:
The critical issue in academe is what one does with what one
has. It is the act of creation that defines the digital scholar. Tools such as
computers and software programs are critical to this creation, but they are
only the means to this end.
[Andersen 2004, 3]
While
Digital Scholarship is a valuable and
ground-breaking discussion of the institutional problems faced by those working in
multimedia, Andersen’s attempt to define digital scholarship as independent from the
medium in which it is produced tends to undermine her argument for the value of
digital work. We should be mindful, then, of Hayles’ criticism of similar virtualist
accounts that disregard the material substrates upon which informational patterns
depend. Perhaps understandably, given its computational origins, Andersen sees
digital scholarship as better suited to natural or social sciences where research
tends to be presented graphically (for example, in the form of maps or charts) or
quantitatively. She does her best to argue for the application of these existing
strengths to a wider range of cultural materials.
Arts, languages, literature, philosophy, and religion have not
naturally embraced digital scholarship in the ways exhibited by scientists and
social scientists. There are a variety of very good reasons for this
resistance. Foremost among these reasons is the type of material humanists
study. Diaries, plays, music scores, novels, paintings, religious works, and
philosophical treatises, to name a few, do not lend themselves to
quantification.
[Andersen 2004, 9]
Along with arts, languages, literature, philosophy, and religion, we might add
film studies, visual culture, cultural studies, science studies, and new media, all
of which lend themselves quite well to scholarly analyses using multimedia precisely
because they are not constrained by the purely textual.
More to the point, this view fails to account for versions of scholarly multimedia,
particularly within the humanities, that do
more than facilitate textual
or rhetorical analyses of print literature or art objects through the use of a
computer. In part, Andersen’s restrictive view of digital scholarship within the
humanities stems from an historically narrow understanding of the diversity of
humanities research as fundamentally ancillary to the text, rather than
transformative. Certainly Andersen is not alone in her assumptions about the meaning
of digital scholarship within the humanities, nor is such an argument without value
for the crucial scholarship of digital annotation, translation and preservation.
Again, [
Hockey 2000], [
Drucker 2002], and [
McGann 2004] are among those who imagine media technologies as useful to
humanities scholars insofar as they facilitate the capturing, cataloging, and
indexing of “electronic texts,” and rightly so [
Hockey 2000, 1]. And while we recognize the crucial value in this
practical application of technology, we resist the argument that electronic archival
work offers a totalizing view of the possibilities offered by digital humanities.
Such a limiting perspective reveals precisely the sort of virtualism that, as Hayles
points out, relies on the unusual notion that information can exist independently of
its medium:
The illusion that information is separate from materiality
leads not only to a dangerous split between information and meaning but also to
a flattening of the space of theoretical inquiry. If we accept that the
materiality of the world is immaterial to our concerns, we are likely to miss
the very complexities that theory at its best tries to excavate and
understand.
[Hayles 1999a, 30]
This passage from Hayles bolsters her claim that literature
itself is undergoing a revolution as a result of digital technologies
and that, as literary critics, we must confront these changes by incorporating an
awareness of a text’s materiality into our analyses. We would extend this argument to
suggest that the very practices of literary and cultural analysis are undergoing a
parallel revolution and that we must also confront these changes and embrace the full
potential of multimedia as a rich, complex scholarly medium.
How Scholarly Media Restructure Intellectual Work
All of these discussions, from the early hypertextual emphasis on the newness of
multimedia, through critiques of this newness in favor of a continuation of existing
textual practices through to, finally, the important recognition of the material
embeddedness of media that must accompany any evaluation of what it means to be a
digital humanist, present a trajectory of media criticism that moves us closer and
closer to a recognition of the crucial materiality of digital rhetorics.
From this trajectory, we can begin to formulate a true manifesto for digital
scholarship. If we are to argue for the value of multimedia work in the academic
milieu, we must confront the physicality of rhetorical practices themselves. On the
most physical level: what can we make, given the material constraints of the machines
we work with? And on the rhetorical level: what can we argue (or not argue) given the
structures we're given to work with (software packages, database design) which are
themselves constrained by issues of memory storage, drive and processing speed? But
most importantly: why and how does the academy seek to constantly devalue the work we
do as multimedia scholars by casting it as instrumental practices of rhetorical and
material labor, rather than the intellectual practices of analysis and criticism –
and what can we do about this perception?
Addressing these important issues requires, first, that we break open our
understanding of what scholarly multimedia is and can become. Andersen’s primary
example of digital humanities scholarship consists of digitizing Jane Austen’s work
in its entirety in order to perform database queries of main characters. As Andersen
points out, this is hardly an appropriate or efficient scholarly use of computing
technology. But then again, computer assisted textual analysis, while valuable, is
not the only role computing plays within the humanities, and such a view ignores
recent (and not so recent) forays into argument-driven scholarly multimedia, notably
a number of academic presses who have experimented with publishing original works of
scholarship in laserdisc, CD-ROM, and DVD-Rom format.
[4] In terms of rhetorical strategies, the
significance of these works is their contribution to humanities knowledge where the
contribution itself exists as medium-dependent and cannot simply be reduced to acts
of digital archiving or remediations of a pre-existing scholarly book. On a more
basic level, the materiality of these works — both in terms of production and
delivery in tangible format — leads us to consider the immense technical labor
involved in producing scholarly multimedia.
It is important to note that one of the chief characteristics of the above titles is
that they are “published” in tangible form — CD-ROM, DVD-ROM or
laserdisc — and thus at least benefit from the fetishization so readily apparent in
the academy of the print document as a physical form. More recent works in multimedia
(mostly web-based works) confound even this basic understanding of what constitutes a
“text.” Roderick Coover’s
Voyage Into the
Unknown
[
Coover 2008], an “interactive documentary”
about John Wesley Powell’s journey down the Colorado River in 1869, consists of
tagged maps, first-and third-person narratives and analyses, and invites readers to
integrate all these modes into thesir own “journey.” Additionally,
we must account for the many non-“publishable” but infrastructural
multimedia projects proliferating in the community: the development of authoring
software such as if:Book’s SOPHIE and Juan B. Gutierrez’
Literatronic; the CommentPress project supported by MediaCommons; and the
open peer-review model pioneered by Noah Wardrip-Fruin for his book
Expressive Processing
[
Wardrip-Fruin 2009]. Evaluating these works as scholarly activity has proven
difficult in an academy so wedded to the physical artifact as indicative of
“real” scholarship.
Finally, digital scholarship can take on radical, literally physical forms. To take
as one case in point, consider Marcel O’Gorman’s
Dreadmill
[
O’Gorman 2005]. Described as “Critique,
Performance, Installation, Education,” this unruly hybrid of art
performance, argument and exposition is by far one of the most provocative examples
to date of a re-embodiment of humanities scholarship. While running on a treadmill
that generates a multimedia display, O’Gorman critiques our culture’s increasing
denial of the body and our increasingly sedentary lifestyles. He delivers a smart,
theoretically informed presentation about the relationships between technology,
death, violence, mobility, consumerism, corporeality, disability, and even
nationality and national borders. The entire performance lasts about one hour.
How might such a performance be classified as a work of scholarship? It isn’t
“publishable” in any traditional sense, though the ideas are
sophisticated enough in that respect. Most troubling, to the academy, is the fact
that it would be impossible to disentangle the content of Dreadmill from its delivery medium — its dynamic presentation. It is
certainly more than a conference presentation. And while O’Gorman is an artist among
other things, Dreadmill isn’t easily classified as an
art installation. For one, unlike other somewhat famous “body
artists” like Stelarc, Dreadmill is not
just about manipulating the body in visually provocative or sensual ways. While
running, O’Gorman delivers a thesis-driven academic argument. He cites Nietzsche,
Kittler, Virilio, Haraway, Ernest Becker, among other scholars. In all aspects,
Dreadmill represents a new frontier in reimagining
humanities scholarship. It also foregrounds the roles of both multimedia and physical
bodies in the practice of humanities scholarship where the stakes of that scholarship
are no less than (bodily) death and (intellectual) obsolescence.
Jay David Bolter has suggested that theoretically informed multimedia performances
such as O’Gorman’s
Dreadmill are often the products of
new media artists and thus are only tangentially related to the academy [
Bolter & Grusin 2000, 24]. He points this out in order to argue that a key
dichotomy that takes shape within the academy is that of theory versus practice
(which, of course, is another deployment of the mind/body dichotomy). While this
divide between theory and practice may have been clearly in place in the past,
performative scholarship such as O’Gorman’s threatens the integrity of precisely such
a divide. O’Gorman’s status as an academic as well as new media artist is well
established; he has been a tenured Associate Professor of English at the University
of Detroit Mercy; he is now in the Department of English at the University of
Waterloo, where he also directs the
Critical Media Lab. In other words, as both a multimedia performance artist
and scholar, O’Gorman embodies a new kind of academic professional — a cyborg scholar
— who answers Bolter’s call, that “media theory engage with the practice of digital
media”
[
Bolter & Grusin 2000, 25]. O’Gorman demonstrates the kind of hybrid scholarship possible in our current
digital age, in which the tools available to humanities scholars extend far beyond
the textual to include the material, the technical, and the rhetorical (not to be
confused with the textual). Gregory VanHoosier-Carey and Ellen Strain, practitioners
of scholarly multimedia themselves, frame these new potentialities offered by new
media in terms of interface design which they site as an often invisible locus of
rhetoric praxis. Interface design, they argue, creates “architected meaning, an arena within which the demonstration
of humanities methodologies can take on a dynamic form”
[
Strain & VanHoosier-Carey 2003, 259].
“Selling” New Media: the Problem of Genre and Tenure
Confusion within the institution over how to categorize and evaluate scholarly
multimedia often amounts to a tension between “the application of
digital scholarship”
to research, to quote Andersen, as opposed to doing digital scholarship
as research [
Andersen 2004, 11]. This tension seems symptomatic of
a larger problem within the institution to reckon with the emergence of new media,
particularly at the level of promotion and tenure where the traditional model of
humanities scholarship as intellectual labor dominates. According to this traditional
model, a scholarly publication in an online journal, even if the writing itself was
performed on a word processor, “counts” as digital scholarship
primarily because it can be easily be measured according to traditional print
standards: is the journal peer-reviewed? Does the journal have a reputation of being
intellectually rigorous? While such online publications, which have significant merit
in their own right, are in the practical sense digital, they don’t necessarily depart
significantly from print-based journals. Nonetheless, e-journal articles are often
devalued for the simple reason that they do not appear in print form.
[5] By relying on this
older and, frankly, obsolete model for defining and evaluating scholarship, we
continue to privilege content over form, intellectual labor over physical labor, and
print over digital media.
Scholars working in multimedia have been forced to reckon with this problem and must
continue to engage with fundamentally conservative analogies to argue for the
scholarly merit of the project. The first project in Penn Press’
Mariner10 series,
Red Planet
[
Markley et al. 2001], led by Robert Markley (at some professional risk) had
to be “pitched” to presses, granting agencies, and fellow
colleagues as a multimedia version of a scholarly book. The argument necessary to
secure publication and scholarly credibility even took the form of equating the
storage capacity of a DVD-ROM to the thickness of a book: “This storage capacity means that a DVD-ROM can hold several
hours of high-resolution video, the equivalent of a book ninety feet
thick…”
[
Burgess et al. 2003, 67–68]. While describing the project in terms of such an equivalence seemed a
necessary step at the time to gain entrance into the humanities scholarly canon in a
way that would “matter,” especially for collaborators who were
untenured or still in graduate school, such a decision would also force the project’s
authors to reconsider the implications of such a choice in terms of the politics of
remediation. Were the authors really challenging the conventions of humanities
scholarship by producing such a work of multimedia, or were they hampered by old
standards for what counts as legitimate scholarship? Were they, by claiming to
remediate the scholarly book, limiting the potential of what we were already
recognizing as a new and valuable rhetorical genre? The answer to this last question
is certainly yes, and points to
Red Planet as a
first-generation (and conservative, given what can be done with the form) work of
scholarly multimedia. Nonetheless, much was gained by working through the
institutional and rhetorical challenges that multimedia practitioners face in
articulating the significance of their scholarly activities.
As we have suggested, scholarly multimedia has often been situated outside of the
traditional model of scholarly activity insofar as its practitioners participate in a
host of activities rarely recognized as “intellectually
significant.” Coding, shooting and editing digital video, interface and
information design, data-basing, troubleshooting, debugging: these activities often
fall outside the purview of traditional notions of humanities scholarship. In a
supreme irony, it is only after the project has itself become the object of critical
inquiry, for instance in a scholarly print article reflecting on the visual rhetorics
of multimedia design, do these activities come into view. Two examples of such
post-production publications include, as we have previously mentioned, “The Dialogics of New Media: Video, Visualization, and Narrative in
Red Planet: Scientific and Cultural Encounters with
Mars
”
[
Burgess et al. 2003], as well as “Eloquent Interfaces:
Humanities-Based Analysis in the Age of Hypermedia”
[
Strain & VanHoosier-Carey 2003]. In both articles, which appear in
Eloquent Images: Writing Visually in New Media
[
Hocks & Kendrick 2003], authors reflect critically on their collaborative
multimedia projects; thus the articles bear two crucial markers. First, they offer a
kind of testimonial of the work accomplished in the multimedia project itself,
explaining some of the works’ features, and some of the authors’ technical choices;
Second, the articles argue for the importance of the combined intellectual and
material labor practices that went into the multimedia projects. These
characteristics of early articles about the practice of scholarly multimedia suggest
rather strongly that multimedia is a rich medium in which to work. However, these
articles also demonstrate that, at the time of their publication, it still seemed
necessary to argue aggressively for the merits of multimedia as a new scholarly
genre, suggesting that multimedia remained, and continues to remain, outside of
accepted definitions of what counts as legitimate scholarship. This perception of the
need to defend the significant and unique contributions of multimedia has been of
particular concern for scholars who have embraced multimedia production as their
primary research activity despite obvious professional challenges and risks. More
importantly, the emergence of scholarly multimedia points to a fundamental conflict
between traditional views of the humanities scholar and the new digital scholar who
threatens to reveal the former’s purchase on reality.
One way to trace the origins of the traditionalist view is to situate evaluations of
humanities research in terms of its perceived difference from natural or social
sciences research. Multimedia, because it relies overtly on digital technologies, has
been historically situated in an intermediary position between these two disciplines.
The definition of digital scholarship offered by the traditional model depends on
seeing scientific research as quantitative and graphical and humanities research as
textual and/or rhetorical. Even when humanities scholarship does make use of visual
or graphical content, for instance in art history, the graphical nature of the
scholarship is commonly viewed as the subject of the investigation (akin to
scientific data) rather than a rhetorical or research tool (akin to a graphical
representation of the data). Scholarly multimedia, on the other hand, relies heavily
on graphical interfaces, navigational schemas, and visual layout as well as text as
essential rhetorical tools for the construction of arguments and the production of
meaning. In this way, multimedia occupies a liminal space between or even beyond
science and humanities as a new mode of scholarship and is, as a consequence,
battered by traditional definitions of what constitutes research within
the humanities. Is research found in the production stage or embodied within the
final new media object? Is it the rhetorical analysis one produces as part of the
multimedia work, or the analysis one writes about the production process, or the
rhetorical analysis one writes about the new media object? Ironically, because new
media work has been so hampered by accepted models of humanities scholarship that
privilege content over form and intellectual labor over technical labor, the
temptation exists to see print-articles or books about multimedia as more valid than
the multimedia work itself. In fact, a host of well-known
“multimedia” scholars have themselves never actually practiced
multimedia. This is by no means to suggest that scholarship about
multimedia is not valid or important or that all critics of multimedia must,
themselves, become practitioners (in the same way that we would not expect literary
critics to also become poets or novelists). Rather, we should take care not to
confuse storage medium (book versus multimedia) with rhetorical genre (book versus
multimedia) lest we fall into the trap of technological determinism, or worse,
technophobia, when evaluating the merits of a scholarly work.
One way to draw ourselves out of this bind is to pay attention to the key overlap
between representationalism (what humanities scholars are assumed to do) and
performativity (what bodies and machines are assumed to do) in the context of the
technologies we work with in producing multimedia. In
Embodying
Technesis, and later in
Bodies in Code, Mark
Hansen calls for a deeper understanding of the role embodiment plays in producing
reality ([
Hansen 2000], [
Hansen 2006]). At the same time,
he argues, we must develop a more robust, materialist account of the ontological role
of technology. Technological change, he states, is so foundational to human
experience that it has taken on an “extracultural, extrasocial dimension”
[
Hansen 2000, 3]. This transformation invites us to reconsider technology in terms of its
resistance to “explicit cultural thematization” or “representational capture” so that we can come to understand
technology as an agent of “material complexification” that
does not rely solely on cognition or human intervention for its evolution ([
Hansen 2000, 56], [
Hansen 2006, 19]).
Hansen’s argument in both books, that we must move beyond a representationalist
understanding of humankind’s relationship to technology by focusing on embodiment,
suggests that we should also rethink our own identity as scholars and intellectuals,
in particular the ways in which our scholarly activities are bound up at a very deep
level with the technologies we use to practice our craft. We believe scholarly
multimedia offers a promising answer to Hansen’s call insofar as it can truly perform
at the nexus of what Hayles calls our posthuman “mindbodies”
[
Hayles 2005, 7]. Technology does not merely assist us as representationalist scholars. Rather,
it transforms us into embodied agents.
Performing Scholarship: A Radical (Technological) Act
In complicating the traditional academic model of disembodied intellectual activity,
scholarly multimedia tends toward what Andrew Pickering calls the “performative idiom,” a model that foregrounds the material
agencies (both human and nonhuman) that emerge as essential to the scholarly
production of knowledge [
Pickering 1995, 7]. Scholarly multimedia
stands as an unruly and undisciplined body of work that challenges humanities
scholars’ claims about what we “do” precisely because it changes
what we do at the material level, revealing that what has been overvalued all along
is the immaterial, intellectual act that has often been conceived of as existing
independently from social, institutional, and material contexts. In this respect,
scholarly multimedia makes visible what Marcel O’Gorman calls the
material
remainder, “the repressed technological element of humanities
scholarship”
[
O’Gorman 2006, 6]. This material remainder includes the material-technical labor practices of
multimedia scholars as well as the material contexts and constraints of the scholarly
production of knowledge in general.
By making these aspects of scholarly practice visible, multimedia reveals the
repressed other, the material monster if you will, of scholarly production and
invites scholars working in this genre to take seriously O’Gorman’s recommendation
that we engage with the materiality of our own knowledge-productions:
If the remainder is hidden or repressed, monstrous
“other” of the conventional academic discourse, then
those who seek to change that conventional discourse might engage in a science
of
anagnorisis
; that is, a science of invention and knowledge-production that depends
on a face-to-face encounter with the monster.
[O’Gorman 2006, 4]
In part, this engagement can be achieved by making visible the strategies that
scholars employ to construct arguments that are valued for their capacity to produce
closure and containment, and to construct a scholarly subject-of-writing as a
hyper-rational, often-disembodied subject, a subject described by Bruno Latour in
Pandora’s Hope as a “mind-in-a-vat”
[
Latour 1999, 12]. The denial of the material remainder of writing is too horrible to
contemplate for long: Latour’s formulation of a giant brain floating in a vat of
fluid attached by wires to a CPU, or worse, a typewriter, or, still worse, pen and
paper. A single pattern, a single brain, a single author alone in a small dark room,
immersed in the gray matter of others who came before. This is the image cultivated
by the notion of an “immaterial” disembodied humanities scholar
resistant to rediscovering the materiality of his or her own activities.
In “Interactive Technology and the Remediation of the Subject of
Writing,” Michelle Kendrick writes that early critical discourse about the
revolutionary nature of hypertext centered on its supposed ability to better reflect
the way we think — in nonlinear, networked associations. Such claims, she argues,
depend on a dubious double logic: that through its intensification of media
technologies, hypertext erases mediation. “This double
logic,” Kendrick continues, “promises metaphysical transcendence, while paradoxically
grounding such transcendence in technology’s materiality and
specificity”
[
Kendrick 2001, 233]. Kendrick’s crucial insight, that all subjects-of-writing are produced by and
through material-technological interventions, invites us to reconsider traditional
print-based scholarship in order to uncover this double-logic. Her critique reveals
the incoherence of the subject-of-writing that is covered over by media-specific
strategies such as dense, esoteric, often impersonal academic prose, complex citation
practices, as well as the conventions of single-authorship. Such strategies continue
to set the standards by which we define and judge ourselves as scholars, and this
evaluation is extended through the peer-review process as well as through the
promotion and tenure process. Multimedia threatens to undermine the establishment of
these standards, not because, as early hypertext enthusiasts claimed, it disperses
the writing subject over vast networks or because it liberates the reader from the
tyranny of the disembodied, single author. Rather, scholarly multimedia threatens to
re-embody the heretofore disembodied intellectual by embracing a more performative
mode or, to borrow from feminist philosopher of science Nancy Tuana, an
interactionist mode of scholarly practice that emphasizes the “emergent interplay” between “human
materiality and the materiality of the more than human”
[
Tuana 2001, 221–223]. The multimedia scholar, by taking seriously
the materiality of knowledge production, embodies an intellectual identity that is
dispersed over material, rhetorical, and technical networks — a crucial
transformation that must be acknowledged when assessing “what
counts” as scholarly activity in the academy.
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