What's the Point of New Media?

The MLA Task Force on Evaluating Digital Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion (2006)
Digital Scholarship is becoming pervasive in the humanities and must be recognized as a legitimate scholarly endeavor to which appropriate standards, practices, and modes of evaluation are already being applied. The rapid expansion of digital technology has been fundamentally transforming the production and distribution of humanities scholarship, generating not only new forms of publication and dissemination…but also significant new modes of scholarship… (43)

… [F]rom 35% to over 50% of department chairs report that they have had no experience evaluating scholarly work produced in these new forms by candidates for tenure and promotion ; departments in Carnegie Doctorate-granting institutions consistently reported the highest percentages of inexperience….65.7% of departments in Carnegie Doctorate-granting institutions report that they have no experience, as compared with 38.4% of departments in Carnegie master’s and 47.4% of departments in Carnegie Baccalaureate institutions. Overall, 52.1 % of respondents report having no experience with evaluating monographs in digital form. (44-45)

More positively, higher percentages of departments across the institutional board regard work in digital formats as “important” rather than “not important” in evaluation for tenure and promotion…. Refereed articles published in electronic forms are regarded as “important for earning tenure and promotion in 38.9% of departments…28.1 1% of respondents indicate that monographs in electronic form count as “important” in their processes of evaluation… (46)

What’s the Point of New Media?! Evaluating Transitional Scholarship Dr. Cheryl E. Ball, Illinois State University

Expectations of print scholarship
What does it look like?
Who is the audience?
How is it written? (formal/informal, jargon, etc.)?
What formatting conventions are assumed?
What do you expect to get out of it?

Expectations of print scholarship
Can you think of an example of “traditional” scholarship that breaks from tradition but is still considered successful?
How does it break from tradition?

Continuum of digital scholarship
Braun (2006)
print online digital media
print-based print-like webtext new media
Warner (2007)

webtexts vs. print scholarship (Warner, 2007)
Webtexts follow print conventions regarding content
Webtexts diverge from print conventions regarding form
Webtexts have added value through web affordances

Webtext examples Zoeteway’s “Disrupting the Computer Lab(oratory)” (2004)

Webtext examples Wysocki’s “bookling monument” (2002)

Warner’s webtext heuristic (handout)
Content : Considers whether the content of the text meets traditional standards of scholarship.
Web-based allowances : Considers whether the text incorporates the allowances of the medium to enhance the rhetorical effect of the argument as well as to justify its construction within the online environment.
Emerging conventions: Considers whether the text follows emerging conventions of web-based writing in order to accommodate the new reading experience.

implications of study (Warner, 2007)
“ The ability to engage with the content of a text depends on the accessibility of the form.”
“ Readers often do not value what they do not understand.”
(p. 145)

New media examples Wysocki’s “bookling monument” (2002)

Trends toward new media scholarship
“ As trends in online scholarship move toward new media studies, scholars will need to develop revised assessment strategies; the current assessment tool does not account for texts that make meaning in non-textual ways” (Warner, p. 148).

Types of webtexts (Kalmbach, 2006)
Linear
Exploratory
Looping
Sequential
Matrix
Menu
Multi-windowed
Timelime

New media example
Words are the ultimate abstraction!: Toward using Scott McCloud to teach visual rhetoric.
by Robert Watkins

New media scholarship?
What does NOT seem scholarly about this text?

An example of new media scholarship
Words are the ultimate abstraction!

What do you think?
What lenses or traditions or genres did you use to evaluate “ultimate abstraction”?
What was unexpected?
How did you reconcile “gaps” in meaning-making? (Or were they irreconcilable?)

What do you think?
Scholarly persona
Documentation
Not replication (form/content)
Self-reflexive
Music- punk
Production weaknesses
Layering of multimedia
Timing of textual elements/pace
No/less control over pacing
Assertion vs. argument?/propaganda
Reader relationship to text
Immersion
Not dialectical/book review?

Assessing new media scholarship
Content
Web-based allowances
Emerging conventions
Warner’s heuristic:

Assessing content
introduction
documentation
lit review
methodology
formal tone

Assessing added value (web-based allowances)
discrete nodes
multilinear navigation
apropos links
form enacts content
apropos multimedia

Assessing emerging conventions
navigation instructions
sitemap
effective linking
design rationale
multimedia enhancements

Shifting conventions in new media scholarship?
space/time
memory
chapters/segments
design methodology
linearity/transcript of voiceover
voice, pitch, tone
authority/credibility
ethos of print/digital bridge

Questions?
Thank You.
Dr. Cheryl Ball
[email_address]

What's the Point of New Media?

by s2ceball on Oct 29, 2009

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What’s the Point of New Media? — Presentation Transcript