C&W 2008 Presentation: New Media Scholarly Heuristics
citation
Ball, Cheryl E. (2008, May 23). New media scholarship: Taxonomies, heuristics, and strategies to connect (?) authors, editors, departments, and tenure committees. Computers and Writing, Athens, GA.
abstract
Panel Title: New Media Scholarship Stakeholders: Departmental, Editorial, and Authorial Issues
Although increasing numbers of faculty are creating scholarship for online venues, the Report of the MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion indicates that most departments claimed to have no idea how to evaluate digital scholarship. The task force does not distinguish, however, between “print-like” scholarship that appears online and new media scholarship that utilizes modes besides typed words to make its argument. It should be straightforward enough to read print-like scholarship online and, in turn, help tenure and promotion committees read and value it. But how do we read and help tenure and promotion committees read and value — and how do journals help authors revise — new media scholarship that has no print analogue? These are the questions that this panel will explore.
Speaker 2 [Cheryl] will draw on Allison Warner’s (2007) heuristic for assessing the scholarly value of traditional webtexts that fall between print-like and multimedia-rich, digital scholarship. Warner intentionally leaves room for other scholars to explore the ways that such a heuristic might be applicable (or flexible) for texts that incorporate multimedia elements, such as new media scholarship. The purpose of this presentation is to posit additional heuristics — and the complications of adding more heuristics–for emerging new media scholarly conventions that can be of use to tenure and promotion stakeholders.
co-presenters
- Catherine Braun, The Ohio State University-Marion
- Virginia Kuhn, Institute for Multimedia Literacy at the University of Southern California
attendance
30ish people?
accompanying materials
C&W 2008 PowerPoint presentation with presenters notes
presentations, research | Comment (0)RNF 2008: Tips on Digital Scholarship
abstract
This is a talk I gave with Kris Blair (her portion is excised from the attachment, but I’m sending it to her) at the Research Network Forum 2008, during CCCC in New Orleans. We spoke to about, oh, 100+ people about publishing digital scholarship. I’ll write more on this later and include the handouts I distributed. Just trying to throw the talk portion online quickly now.
accompanying materials
presentations, research | Comment (0)CCCC 2008: “Peer Review in Digital Scholarship”
citation
Ball, Cheryl E. (2008, April 3). Scholarly peer-review in new media. Conference on College Composition and Communication, New Orleans, LA.
abstract
The MLA Report on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion (2006) renews the legitimacy gap between refereed print articles and refereed electronic articles, indicating that, “print articles count […] in 97.9% of departments, as compared with 46.8% for articles in electronic form.” The report notes, however, that electronic forms often don’t take into consideration new media forms of scholarship, such as the “innovative webtexts” published by several online journals in composition and rhetoric, and which James English (2005) wrote in the Journal of Scholarship Publishing as being an inconsequential form of scholarship. As the MLA Report suggests, the value of peer-reviewed digital publications might be greater if tenure committees knew how to read them, a problem that is heightened by the unfamiliarity of new media scholarship. To help, I examine a webtext to show how authors, editors, and review boards value a new media publication so as to provide an example for understanding scholarly innovation, which T&P committees can follow.
co-presenters
- Joyce Walker and James Purdy, “Valuing Digital Scholarship, Parts I and II”
- Cindy Selfe and Gail Hawisher, “New Scholarship for a New World, Parts I and II”
attendance: 100+
accompanying materials
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.
Jacobson Lecture, 2007
Following in a prestigious line of C&W scholars, including Michael Day, Dickie Selfe, Steve Krause, and Tracy Bridgeford, I presented the Jacobson Lecture this morning as part of Creighton University’s Jacobson Symposium on Teaching with Technology. The participants of the conference included teachers and other interested folks from a ton of fields including English, sociology, music and media technologies (that’s ONE strand, btw, of a local charter HS — how cool!), law librarianship, and theology. WAY cool crowd. Bob Whipple and Gina Merys were chair and co-chair of the symposium, and it was a marvelous time. My talk was called Composing from the Underground: Combining Academic and Aesthetic Modes in New Media, during which I drew on Joe Marshall Hardin’s descriptions (from the chapter in his book on English studies and aestheticism, among other places) of English departments’ binaries between high and low art cultures, as represented by literature and composition studies. IOW, aesthetic versus academic literacies — and how new media production in our classes can bridge that gap. Here’s the paper. I’d love feedback on how (and where) to turn it into an article.
Jacobson talk
presentations, research | Comment (0)