Converging assumptions: How new media can bridge a scholarly/creative split in English studies
citation
Ball, Cheryl E., & Moeller, Ryan M. (forthcoming/March 2008). Converging the ASS[umptions] between U and ME; or, How new media can bridge a scholarly/creative split in English studies. Computers and Composition Online [Special issue: Media convergence]. Retrieved February 17, 2008, from http://www.bgsu.edu/cconline/convergence/
abstract
Authors of new media texts regularly draw on both scholarly and creative genres to construct their arguments. In so doing, they bridge disciplinary boundaries that have split English departments in the past. These boundaries are discussed in our text using the following binaries: high :: low, literature :: composition, and popular :: academic discourse. In this article, we examine, then complicate, the binary form :: content through a popular and academic YouTube video (Wesch, 2007). We then situate new media texts within the historical split between rhetoric and literature using Berlin’s social epistemic rhetoric as a bridge. Our argument concludes by showing that new media texts can provide a convergence between binaries in English studies, particularly the one found in tenure guidelines suggesting that research is either scholarly or creative. New media is both/and.
materials
- convergence-final.pdf of the print-like webtext
open-access scholarship
In the news:
Harvard University’s arts and sciences faculty will vote today on a proposal in which the university would publish all the finished papers of its scholars in a free online repository unless they opted out of the arrangement, The New York Times reported. In an op-ed in today’s Harvard Crimson, Robert Darnton, director of the university library, said that the new arrangement would be “collective but not coercive” and that “[i]n place of a closed, privileged, and costly system, it will help open up the world of learning to everyone who wants to learn.”
from Inside Higher Education today, http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/02/12/qt
introductions | Comment (0)new media scholarship lecture at OSU
citation
Ball, Cheryl E. (2008, February 1). What’s the Point of New Media? Evaluating Transitional, Digital Scholarship. Digital Media Lecture Series, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH.
overview
Some folks have asked for my PowerPoint slides from the talk on evaluating digital/new media scholarship, which I gave a preliminary version of two weeks ago at UIUC and again in more robust form last week at The Ohio State University. (Thanks to Cindy and Gail for tag-teaming me into making sense :)) I am putting the OSU version of the PP slides online. I do not have a formal talk for these slides because discussion was a large part of the point. Instead, I have gone back and made notes under each slide as to what the point of it was and what the audience reaction was. I hope that helps to partially contextualize the event for anyone who may care to see this version of the talk.
abstract
From 3:30-5:00 pm on Friday, 1 February 2008 (Denney 311), Professor Ball will speak on “What’s the Point of New Media? Evaluating Transitional, Digital Scholarship.” In this presentation, she will address the recent MLA Task Force report, Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion (2006), which acknowledges an increasing need for thoughtful new strategies of evaluating digital scholarship in departments of English.
Professor Ball will look at a contemporary heuristic (Warner, 2007) for reading and evaluating “webtexts” (texts that convey most of their meaning through text and hyperlinks) and compare them to “new media texts” that use multimodal elements to enact and convey meaning.
This talk will be especially relevant for colleagues who might be involved in reading and evaluating new media texts during tenure and promotion cases. The presentation will be exploratory–just like the new media texts that it investigates–and discussion from the audience will be encouraged.
attendance
UIUC = ~16
OSU = ~35
innovations
This was my first time ever using PowerPoint! (I tried to add into someone else’s template once, but totally messed it up and they had to fix it for me. So this is my first solo usage.)
materials
- OSU-talk-slides
- Warner’s heuristic for evaluating webtexts *
(flyer for talk; Cindy made this :))
*note
The heuristic comes from Allison Brovey Warner’s (2007) dissertation entitled, Assessing the Scholarly Value of Online Texts. (U of Maryland). A webtext about her research study and methodology can be found in Kairos.