Feeling Digital Composing

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A dissertation submitted to the

Graduate School

of the University of Cincinnati

in partial fulfillment

of the

requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in the Department of English and Comparative Literature

of the College of Arts and Sciences

by Rich Shivener

B.A., Northern Kentucky University

M.A., Northern Kentucky University

March 2019

Committee Chair: Laura R. Micciche, Ph.D.

Abstract

This research investigated the relationship between digital media composing practices and feelings, specifically turning to authors of digital media texts and books in the field of rhetoric and composition. My primary purpose was to understand the extent to which digital composing is an embodied, felt experience, thereby articulating how authors feel about drafting, coding, designing and revising scholarly projects for digital environments. Theories of digital rhetoric and emotion supported a framework for analyzing a range of authors’ behind-the-scenes articles (VanKooten; Sheridan) and “practitioner stories” (Ridolfo) about digital composing.

In order to capture the affective complexities and workflows of authors composing digital texts, qualitative methods were necessary for this research. More than 20 authors participated in semi-structured interviews or online questionnaires. Methods that stemmed from digital rhetoric practitioner research and emotion studies positioned me to interview authors, take stock of their composing practices (e.g., sharing screen recordings; drafts of documents), and co-review data generated from interviews and observations (e.g., participants reviewed transcripts and responded). Presenting six case studies supported by ancillary interviews and survey data, my research suggests that responding to reviewer feedback and coding a digital media text are the most painful parts of the rhetorical-affective workflow. Research also suggests that collaborating with vertical and horizontal mentors (e.g., editors and peers) and delivering a text in public are the most pleasurable. Consequently, my research implicates the support systems (or lack thereof) and editorial workflows that make digital media production possible.

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Dedication

This dissertation is dedicated to my wife, Jess, and our son, Finn.

Acknowledgements

This research would be impossible without the supporters I acknowledge here. It’s an understatement to say that I’m very thankful for the support of my dissertation advisor, Dr. Laura

Micciche, whose constant mentorship and editorial prowess sharpened my research and writing.

Thanks for all that you do, Laura. Special thanks also to Drs. Chris Carter and Russel Durst for their teaching excellence, scholarly productivity, and committee member work that shaped my scholarly journey. Thanks to the Department of English and Comparative Literature administrators Alan Bothe, Jenny Lin and Jennifer Lange for putting up with my anxious requests. Thanks to UC friends such as Kelly Blewett, Ian Golding, Daniel Floyd, Katelyn

Lusher, Kathleen Spada, and Rhiannon Scharnhorst for helping me feel out dissertation ideas and the best coffee shops for work. Thanks also to cross-institutional pals such as John Silvestro,

Bridget Gelms, Dustin Edwards, Lucy Johnson, Zarah Moeggenberg, and Cynthia Johnson for many laughs and insights over conference proposals and drinks. Thanks to the Taft Research

Center and the Graduate Student Governance Association for awarding me several research grants. Thanks to Professor Pat Belanoff for funding the UC Pat Belanoff Graduate Summer

Research Award, which I received twice. Thanks to Cheryl Ball for mentoring me as an assistant editor at Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. Thanks to the Rhinegeist family for cheering me on and frequently dealing with my stress. Thanks to Paul and Laurel, and my mother and father, Dee and Rick, for providing oceans of support. Thanks to everyone who participated in my study. And last but not least, I give an infinite, super-massive thanks to my wife, Jess, for supporting my doctoral career, for being my best friend, for lighting my journey through the darkest realms of academia, and for taking care of our book-loving little guy.

Feeling Digital Composing

Table of Contents

Abstract ii

List of Tables and Figures vii

Acknowledgements v

Introduction Feeling the Stakes of Digital Composing 1

Chapter One Terms and Felt Conditions: Defining Digital Media Scholarship and Felt Experiences 15

Chapter Two Digital Composing Studies: An Emotional History 38

Chapter Three Studying Digital Media Practices and Feelings 65

Chapter Four Authors on Digital Media Practices and Feelings 91

Conclusion Feeling the Future of Digital Composing 131

Works Cited 147

Appendices 162

List of Tables and Figures

Table 1 Susan McLeod’s “working definitions” on affective states 28

Table 2 A synthesis of affect theories across disciplines 36

Table 3 A second synthesis of affect theories across disciplines 57

Table 4 Example of coding interview excerpts 85

Figure 1 Brooke’s webtext drafts 95

Figure 2 Grace and Eric's webtext drafts 97

Figure 3 Henry’s introduction page of his digital book 100

Figure 4 Helen’s video book 103

Figure 5 Lane’s webtext drafts 105

Figure 6 Screenshot of Emily’s webtext 108

Figure 7 A screenshot of a map composed by Emily and colleagues 109

Figure 8 Depiction of rhetorical-affective workflow 113

Figure 9 Screenshot of Rich’s webpage 119

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Introduction

Feeling the Stakes of Digital Composing

Yikes. Just got a real harsh DECLINE from a journal. Gonna try to figure out a way to

salvage what I made. It’s extra disheartening with new media work because it take so

much additional time to do in the first place. Ugh.

––@helmstreet

On a Thursday morning, I sit at my home office desk, wondering how to compose an audio reflection on a praxis chapter to be featured in an open-access digital book on soundwriting pedagogies. I’m struggling to find the right vocal register, the right music that complements my tone, the right mood that emerges when I juxtapose my voice with ambient sounds and melodies. I worry about sounding amateurish, and for that reason I’m feeling vulnerable throughout this digital composing process. Lucky for me, the editors of the collection assure me that the webtext will be designed by one of them, meaning I don’t have to fret about hand-coding the chapter. At the same time, my phone is notifying me of new messages from the communication platform in Slack, specifically in the #production chat channel of Kairos: A

Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. I’ve been assigned to copyedit a webtext on alternative reality gaming and S.T.E.M. pedagogy, a webtext for which I’ll be required to work with an HTML text editor, review transcripts of the author’s video sections, and test the webtext with a live URL that only the editorial team and authors can see.

Elsewhere in the world, Martin1 is working through reviewer feedback of a webtext in the form of a geo-spatial map, in which users can listen to and view his experiences in the American

South. He is working through seven reviewer letters that amount to approximately 2,500 words.

1 Pseudonym used.

For the purposes of showing the gravity and depth of the reviews, I quote “Reviewer 7” at length:

I find I agree with [other reviewers]. The “sloppy, inexpert design” really drove me

crazy. I had to keep your email open with the link as on my macbook air, I was constantly

ending up in places I did not know how to get out of and the only solution I could find

was to close the window and start over. I must have done that twenty times while trying

to read it. The inability to tell what nodes I had viewed also frustrated me. The more

engaged I was with individual bits (and there were some very engaging bits), the more

lost I was when I tried to figure out where to go next. Perhaps I am simply track ball

incompetent, but to me the grafting of Google Earth on to Omeka did not work very well.

It felt a lot like reading Michael Joyce’s “Afternoon” or the storyspace version of writing

spaces for the first time or a project from the smartest guy in the class who smirks during

discussions and you are never quite sure what they are doing. Then his project blows you

away I can’t tell if this is true or if it is a persona the author is trying to enact, and I

actually liked that ambiguity. I wondered at times if it was a deliberate parody of a

student project. If it was a parody then [another reviewer’s] irritation with the point of

view would fit, but I am unclear what the parody accomplishes in this context. I won’t

mind the interface so much if there was some alternate way to read the content for people

like me who can’t handle the google earthiness of it. I agreed with this comment from

[another reviewer]. I wondered, in other words, how a revision might be more

inventive—more experimental––in terms of what such a MEmorial would look like,

taking Ulmer as point of departure rather than termination. Making it even more

experiment more inventive might work. The author might consider separating the

author’s statement from the installation, taking as a model David Rieder’s “Typographia”

(http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/14.2/topoi/rieder/index.html) a piece that combines a

very experimental installation with a thoughtful introduction without the two getting in

each other’s way. I found some of the videos to be wildly creative, and there were

moments where I found the theory and the enactment really working together, but

ironically, now I can’t find those pieces to quote from them.

I am left with questions rather than recommendations: Is the interface a deliberate

parody and if so what does that parody add to the argument? Is there any way to make

the Omeka/Google earth mashup less madding or is the interface deliberately maddening

and if so how does that experience enhance the argument? Does the piece really benefit

from the juxtaposition of scholarly fragments and parody fragments? Would the author be

better served by pulling the scholarly nodes out of the tollbooth into an artist’s statement?

In all, these questions seem to reflect the same frustrations [other reviewers] had. In the

end I am unsure if this is merely an interesting if flawed creative installation or if there is

a larger intended critique of teaching multimodal composition. (Martin)

Despite the fact that “the reviewers were unimpressed with this [original] version,”

Martin said, “I was happy to incorporate their suggestions, which ultimately made it a better work.” He went on to say that:

I designed the project within the container of a website for ease of access, but embedded

within it a map of the area I was exploring in the project. I then overlaid the map with

videos of each tollbooth at the tollbooth’s location on the map. The arrangement was

chosen according to a spatial logic based on geographical locations. The text modules

describing the project were arranged along the side to make them less obtrusive when

navigating the geographically-arranged videos. (Martin)

In this introductory chapter, I articulate the rhetorical context and exigencies for my qualitative study of authors who compose digital media texts and articles. The scenes above reflect digital media work composed by rhetoric and composition scholars, from graduate students to tenured faculty. They have responded to, and even instigated, calls for innovative articles and books that unfold in digital environments. By digital environments, I mean scholarly composing in environments such as Wordpress, Google Maps, Twitter, Instagram, and hand- coded webpages, where knowledge production and works-in-progress are exchangeable and public. During my doctoral studies, I studied such scholarship and found myself wondering about how digital texts were conceptualized and eventually completed by scholars in rhetoric and composition. I was also wondering about the emotional language that scholars like Helms,

Martin and many others draw on to describe their recent practices. Disheartening, unimpressed, happy: Such emotional words have revealed the extents to which affects, feelings, and emotions imbue authors’ digital media composing practices. For authors like Martin and Helms, digital media projects––projects flush with information-rich displays of voices, images, film and interactive webpages––differ from print. These digital media spaces, practices, and their affective dimensions in relation to authors are often unacknowledged in our field’s scholarly investigations of digital texts, for and by scholars.

For this dissertation, my research aimed to capture practices and felt experiences of the digital scholarship production cycle by studying more than 20 authors, their drafts and recent publications. I pursued the following research question: for authors, what is the relationship between digital media practices and feelings? Put differently, what are the affective

consequences of digital media composing? As I show in subsequent chapters, I sought answers to the overarching question by conducting a qualitative study in which I interviewed authors of digital media articles and books.

Background for the Project

My qualitative study emerged from my past experiences as a journalist and, more recently, as a doctoral student and associate editor for the journal Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric,

Technology, and Pedagogy. As a full-time reporter and freelance journalist, I wrote about a number of authors and comics creators for such publications as Writer’s Digest, Publishers

Weekly, and Paste magazine, a print and online outlet that focuses on music and pop culture. I was fascinated by authors who spoke frankly about their textual and multimedia productions, opining about challenges and feelings that shaped their projects. I still recall what George R.R.

Martin, author of fantasy novel A Game of Thrones, part of a larger series and a related blockbuster television series, told me when we spoke for a magazine interview in 2012. Martin was responding to fans who have been disappointed by his years-long gaps between books of

Song of Ice and Fire series.

Meeting my deadline is extremely hard, so hard that I haven’t done it for years.

Fortunately, I have very forgiving editors and publishers who are willing to cut me some

slack. … A tremendous amount of effort goes into finding the right words (Shivener,

“George R. R. Martin: At the Top of His Game”; emphasis mine).

When I look back at this passage, I think about the notion that Martin’s writing experiences are entangled with feelings––between editors, the words on the page, and fans who critique his pages after they hit the market. Feelings imbue, ebb and flow through writing

practices and processes. As I claim in this project, similar affective work happens when authors and scholars compose digital texts.

In a second way, this project also emerges from my doctoral studies in 2015, when I received a grant to conduct research on social media activities of graduate students in rhetoric and composition. When I was synthesizing my interviews for a seminar paper, and later a manuscript submission, I found that graduate students privatized their digital texts (e.g., Twitter posts) because they feared public scrutiny and the unknown. Morgan, for example, thought carefully about what she wrote on the social media platform Twitter and where that writing might travel after it was published in a public feed. Similarly, graduate student Ryan composed from a public profile on Twitter for such purposes as networking with peers, linking to good reads from the field’s peer-reviewed journals, and researching subjects most relevant to an article in progress. Posts related to teaching and his personal life were saved for his private Facebook account, which is limited to friends and family. From day one in his undergraduate courses, he told students that they could not locate him on Facebook. In similar ways, Morgan and Ryan were driven to compose publicly on Twitter because they enjoyed networking with fellow scholars and circulating field texts. The graduate students’ social media activities inspired my research on emotional labor that limits and drives authors who compose digital media scholarship.

In a third strand of my professional-scholarly identity, this project was also inspired by my work as an associate editor for Kairos. As of finishing this dissertation in 2019, I’m going on my third year with Kairos’ large editorial team comprising more than 25 editors who help authors and peers work through the developmental and production workflows of our biannual issues (i.e., January and August; just in time for a new semester). For publication credit, authors

spend months, even years, conceptualizing and revising digital media projects for Kairos; when a project is accepted for publication, Kairos editors spend weeks reviewing a project’s technical requirements, accessibility, style, and citations and references. Like many editors in the journal world, it’s not uncommon for Kairos editors to send a query letter requesting more revisions and edits from an author. In the end, the final publication is often error-free and compatible with popular web browsers. To quote Kairos lead editors Cheryl Ball and Douglas Eyman, “Webtext authors (and, by virtue of the digital nature of text production, all authors) need to fully respond to all three of layers of digital composing— rhetoric, design, and code—in order to craft effective, persuasive arguments.” In turn, editors spend time making sure such layers are ready for public distribution.

More than my work in journalism and graduate school, my Kairos work was the driving force behind the project. Despite the scholarly research by Cheryl Ball, Catherine Braun, and

Douglas Eyman, the field still knows very little about processes, practices and workflows behind digital media projects published by scholars in rhetoric and composition and related fields. Very few authors in spaces such as Kairos and Computers and Composition Online, in fact, offer artist statements or thorough descriptions of their processes and practices. As I report in a later chapter, the process and behind-the-scenes articles featured in Kairos’ “Inventio” section is fewest in number across all sections of the journal. At the same time, peers have critiqued each other, and authors have even critiqued themselves, for composing print articles and books about digital media and multimodality––rather than using digital media to discuss the aforementioned (see

Ball, “Show Not Tell”; Li, “A Review of Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice by Douglas

Eyman”). Such a gap in scholarly production is one I address, and even grapple with myself, in this project.

And Speaking of Kairos…

Feeling Digital Composing is a timely response to the proliferation of digital and scholarly online journals and open-access publications over the last three years (i.e., since 2015).

While Kairos, Enculturation and Computers and Composition Online have been staples in the digital journal ecosystem since the 90s, journals such as Intraspection and The Journal of

Multimodal Rhetorics have launched since 2015, and the Digital Rhetoric Collaborative and enculturation’s monograph sister Intermezzo have published long-form pieces and books in digital form. At the same time, scholars and software developers have been collaborating on open-access programs and systems, such as Scalar and Vega, designed to make digital scholarship more efficient yet flexible for authors.

In addition to digital journals and open-access publications, social movements have gained plenty of traction in digital environments. Academic publishing aside, my dissertation project is rather timely because it arrives on the heels of social media-inspired protests such as

#BlackLivesMatter and University of Cincinnati’s student-led #Irate8 movement. The #Irate8 movement was a response to a white campus officer who shot an unarmed black man not far from campus; that incident was the exigence for #Irate8’s score of digital media projects, including a Twitter page and an information-rich website with videos on campus racism and a list of demands, such as restricting certain campus police officers and enforcing a fully funded comprehensive racial awareness curriculum (“Our Demands”). The #irate8 movement underscores that social media is a rhetorical and affective activity, capable of moving bodies and entities to action. We are in an age when composers of social media posts and public digital texts––from presidential candidates to local activists––are unapologetic about going public and displaying dissent and anger. But the problem is, as I’ll continue to argue in this project, we

know little about the practices behind such social media and digital texts. We can see and experience feelings that such texts evoke, but we can’t see practices and entangled feelings that limit and drive such texts. And as scholars and teachers, we need to see that behind-the-scenes work if we hope to teach others how to compose digital media projects and, to borrow from Sara

Ahmed, feel their way through such projects.

Lastly, this project is timely because of the next wave of emotion studies gaining traction in writing studies and the interdisciplinary movement under the umbrella of affect theory.

Wooten et. al’s call for proposals for the edited collection The Things We Carry: Strategies for

Recognizing and Negotiating Emotional Labor in Writing Program Administration hit academic listservs in summer 2017. It appeared on the heels of a summer 2016 Composition Forum special issue on emotion, in which Micciche encouraged writing studies to “stay with emotion,” and

Micciche’s 2017 book Acknowledging Writing Partners. Whereas Christine Martorana and Julie

Prebel argue for emotional literacy and a “pedagogy of discomfort,” respectively, Micciche’s

Writing Partners looks to acknowledgements as repositories of partners, including good feelings.

Partners are defined as “animals, feelings, technologies, matter, time, and materials interacting in both harmonious and antagonistic ways with writing” (6). Micciche’s work opens the door to the study of affective partners that limit and drive, open and close, shift and reframe scholars’ digital media productions. What’s striking to me is that among all these new minted studies of emotion and writing, there is hardly a mention––let alone an emotion theory––that concerns digitality or digital culture in connection to writing: computers and writing, digital rhetoric, and the like. That is, Micciche and Jenny Rice in addition to forerunners like McLeod and Brand were concerned with the affective states and works of minds, bodies, teaching, and print writing processes. One can argue that digital technologies were not as ubiquitous as they are now among our writing

projects and writing classrooms, but nevertheless, a whole host of scholarship on computer- mediated writing and digital rhetoric was surfacing at the same time as the aforementioned studies. Why weren’t these emotionally attuned scholars drawing from digital culture?

Conversely, why weren’t digitally attuned scholars making affective turns? Many studies on rhetoric, writing and digital media have left open discussions of emotion in relation to minds, bodies, and objects.

The three points of timely happenings have electrified the timeliness and exigences for my qualitative study. The next section presents an outline of Feeling Digital Composing, in which I move from defining digital media and emotion studies, to presenting findings based on more than 20 interviews and responses from authors of digital media.

A Look Ahead: The Main Chapters of Feeling Digital Composing

In this introductory chapter, I have previewed scenes of digital media production, as well as my professional background and timely response to the field’s interests in digital media and emotion. This section previews the chapters ahead in Feeling Digital Composing.

Laying the groundwork for a comprehensive study of authors’ composing practices and emotions associated with digital media scholarship, chapter one, “Terms and Felt Conditions,” offers a historical sketch of digital media scholarship and emotion studies that were useful for my study. I draw from Cheryl Ball, Doug Eyman, Kristi Blair as well as McLeod, Micciche, and

Rice to synthesize a collection of key terms I use in a review of digital rhetoric studies that have, thus far, merely suggested affectivity in relation to digital composing.

Chapter two, “Digital Composing Studies: An Emotional History,” articulates my intervention in recent studies of digital rhetoric and writing and interdisciplinary investigations of affect and emotion in digital environments. It later turns to examples of digital media

scholarship that represent digital rhetoric and emotion, calling the “Inventio” series of Kairos a fruitful object of study because authors document composing practices and feelings behind webtexts. In “Singer, Writer: A Choric Explanation of Sound and Writing,” for example, Chrystal

VanKooten notes that she had some worry about tenure in relation to her webtext, and she laughed and cried as she remixed and layered video clips over soundbites. In “Click to Add

Ideas,” a webtext on the constraints of PowerPoint, David M. Sheridan admits, “Our storehouses of words are always threatening to dissolve into nonsense; pie charts will turn into butterflies and fly away. It can be frustrating at times, but also fun in its own way.” Citing these webtexts and several more, I claim there are emotions we ought to take stock of when we study writers. My purpose of reviewing previous research and texts is to theorize how each body of scholarship reveals something about the other––perhaps a gap, a fissure, an area to explore––and helps me articulate a unique intervention in rhetoric and composition research. I aim to create and make use of an affective network I depict in chapter one, drawing from scholars such as Susan

McLeod, Kristie Fleckenstein, Jim Ridolfo, Laurie Gries, Zizi Papacharrissi, and Melissa Gregg to articulate why we should continue studying language and composition work that accounts for bodily sensations, motivations, energies, feelings and emotions entangled with composers, tools, and additional entities. While I spend time reviewing research that recognizes affective work in pedagogical and print-bound texts, I focus on studies of writers and participants who compose in digital media, and moments in the disciplinary literature where affective work exists but remains under-theorized. By and large, chapter two’s overall purpose is to show that emotions are absent- present but run high in digital writing research––that they are embedded in composing practices and critical for making sense of and reflecting on compositions. Furthermore, this chapter sets

me up to expand on my theoretical framework regarding digital media and feelings, a framework

I called on when surveying texts and interviewing authors.

Chapter three, “Studying Digital Media Practices and Feelings,” describes the methodology that drove my study of authors who compose digital media scholarship. In order to capture the affective complexities and workflows of authors composing digital texts, qualitative methods were necessary for my research. Methodologies and methods that stem from journalism, digital rhetoric practitioner research, emotion studies and grounded theory positioned me to interview authors, take stock of their composing practices (e.g., sharing screen recordings; drafts of documents), and co-review data generated from interviews and observations (e.g., participants review transcripts and respond). Put differently, mixed methods were an ideal approach because they allowed me to triangulate data and give way to multimodal representations (e.g., audio and video evidence) of the practices under analysis.

In addition to articulating the affordances these methods offer, I also point out limitations that surfaced during my research process. As I explain in the latter part of chapter three, I realize any interview with a composer has the potential to invite some artificial and unreliable responses in terms of composing practices and emotion––especially if the composers’ information is not anonymized or the composers are looking retrospectively at a published text. One way to combat that potentiality was by consulting the aforementioned triangulation and working toward confidentiality, especially if scholars who agreed to participate were grad students and perhaps more subject to scrutiny. I compared interview data to other sources related to a composer’s process, and I respected their privacy to the best of my ability.

Chapter four, “Authors on Digital Media Practices and Feelings,” opens with the findings from seven case studies of authors who composed digital media texts since 2015. The profiles

were contingent on authors willing to participate and pass through a three-stage protocol. I met with the authors, asked them to talk through their recent work, and reported their practices and feelings about their production cycle. After presenting the case studies, I then offer insights based on my analysis of the case study data as well as data generated from ancillary interviews and surveys completed by additional participants. By and large, my findings chapter––in which I discuss revision and collaboration as the most affectively charged––presents information-rich interpretations that speak back to my research questions. The chapter contributes to theories of emotion and digital rhetoric, and reveals problems and needs related to digital composing practices––including engagements with tools, resources, and interpersonal conflicts that cultivate unwanted affects and emotions.

Chapter five, “Feeling the Future of Digital Composing,” serves as my discussion and concluding chapter, in which I state the significance of my newfound results and present three tenets of what I call the rhetorical-affective workflow, a theory animated by my qualitative study.

The theory is supported by two low-stakes practical applications for addressing problems and barriers related to digital composing scholarship, including funding and travel. I call on our field to consider more “Inventio” articles and design remote workshops for disadvantaged scholars who can’t afford workshops like the Digital Media and Composition Institute and KairosCamp.

I also discuss the consequences of not attending to digital composing practices that cultivate affective relations with tools and texts. At the time of conceptualizing this project, I speculated that not attending to composing practices that cultivate affective encounters could flatten and mute some powerful work that unfolds in non-print and digital environments. I revisit that thinking here. I will also consider questions and methods that future researchers, including myself, might engage in relation to authors of digital media texts in writing studies contexts.

What questions remain, what methods should be undertaken in order to answer those questions, and what demographics and composers ought to be studied? This closing section is important because it positions me to think about my study’s life beyond the dissertation.

Overall, what I hope emerges from my study are valuable insights into the background work of digital media texts: a writer’s practices entangled with, and amplified by, felt experiences, bodies, tools, and networks. In a larger context, my research implicates the values that disciplines and writers place on digital media work. It makes sense of educational, ethical and emotional tensions that accompany digital humanities projects. When a “tweet” or digital monograph sees thousands of readers and circulates widely in public, we should consider how, and to what end, junior scholars and aspiring writers are composing and delivering knowledge in digital environments.

Chapter One

Terms and Felt Conditions: Defining Digital Media Scholarship and Felt Experiences

When was the last time you were flipping through a journal article like it’s a page turner?

Like, there’s a cliffhanger on that page? That’s not going to happen, but with digital

scholarship you can do some of that stuff in really subtle, fun ways to make your

argument really stick and to make new arguments that you couldn’t make in print.

—Henry

Laying a foundation for my research in this project, I begin this chapter by working through key texts that illustrate the history of digital media scholarship in rhetoric and composition. I look to the advent of such field journals as Kairos and Computers and

Composition Online, and the latter’s affiliated press. I then move to field discussions about the value and challenges of digital media scholarship. Rhetoric and composition scholars have worked to legitimize digital media scholarship’s intellectual power, namely in cases of tenure and promotion that traditionally examine and give merit to print-based texts. I thus call on Cheryl

Ball, Catherine Braun, Kristine Blair and many others who have worked to advocate for the possibilities and innovations of born-digital scholarship, sometimes referred to as new media and digital media texts (see Ball and Braun for respective definitions). For this project, I use “digital media scholarship” and “digital texts” as opposed to “new media.” Writing in 2004, Ball was referring to new media texts as those that experiment with form and media in emerging digital environments. Braun, writing 10 years later, was referring to the same kind of texts, and “digital media” reflects similar tools, modes and media.

After synthesizing key arguments on the advent and stakes of digital media scholarship, I also discuss theories of affect and emotion and what their critical terms offer for my study of

digital media scholarship. In Moving Politics, for example, Deborah Gould offers that “efforts to make sense of events and phenomena are never without feeling. Indeed, emotion incites, shapes, and is generated by practices of meaning-making” (13). The interdisciplinary character of affect theory directs our attention to intensities, embodied sensations and emotional stances (e.g., anger, worry and happiness) that imbue practices related to digital media scholarship. Once I have introduced the theoretical framework driving my study, I then re-articulate how key terms about digital media scholarship and feelings are useful for looking to our digital rhetorical past and composing future.

Histories and Terms on Digital Media Scholarship

Digital media scholarship is nothing new in the field of rhetoric and composition, and neither is the body of print scholarship about peer-reviewed articles and chapters designed exclusively for digital publications. This section begins with an examination of key journals and publishing houses that sponsor digital media scholarship, which aims to challenge traditional ways of publishing and representing theories, praxis and empirical studies. My aim is to show the field’s historical engagement with electronic, online and digital texts and the key terms related to them that have surfaced over time.

While rhetoric and composition has a long history of studying and theorizing computers and writing,2 1996 was a watershed year for the field’s scholarly work in born-digital publications. Simply put, rhetoric and composition scholars were taking seriously the idea of employing digital media to illuminate rhetorical theory and composition praxis. When Kairos: A

Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy debuted in 1996, founding editor Mike Doherty

2 A landmark essay on computers and writing is Ellen W. Nold’s 1975 text “Fear and Trembling: The Humanist Approaches the Computer,” in which she addresses the “lack of creativity on the part of those who know well the benefits of computer-assisted instruction but refuse to put their

noted in Issue 1:1 that “there are demands born of the creative instincts of the many, many people involved in ‘collaborating’ on ‘publishing’ this journal. Authors––though some have rejected that label––of hypertexts have startlingly (and refreshingly) disparate ideas about what should matter to teachers of writing” (“Hitting Reload”; emphasis mine). Twenty years later,

Kairos maintains that creative and collaborative spirit in an effort to amplify the importance of digital rhetoric and pedagogy in the field. Throughout this dissertation I will draw on webtexts from Kairos and make use of claims by subsequent editors such as Cheryl Ball, Doug Eyman, and Madeline Sorapure. With emotion as a terministic screen, I pay greater attention to the journal’s “Inventio” section, in which scholars analyze and reflect on the processes and practices behind a webtext. Founded by Sorapure and Karl Stolley, “Inventio” takes us close to the embodied sensations, tools, and media that make a digital text possible. We need more of this behind-the-scenes work in our field if we are to advocate for the value of digital media scholarship (“Introducting Inventio”). Furthermore, I will draw examples from my experience as an assistant editor with Kairos, a position I took on in 2016 and continued through my doctoral studies. This experience gave me incredible insights into the editorial workflows and affective encounters that imbue digital media scholarship.

Hitting the back button to my discussion above, I will note that 1996 was a watershed year for our field’s digital turn, given that, in addition to Kairos, Computers and Composition

Online also debuted. Computers and Composition Online was envisioned as a complement to the print-based field journal Computers and Composition: An International Journal. As Computers and Composition editors Cindy Selfe and Gail Hawisher wrote in an editor’s note for the print version of the fall 1996 issue, the online component of the journal would be “a vigorous forum

best efforts into writing instructional programs” (269). This essay is significant because it creates a historical exigence for studying the affective dimensions of digital composing.

for the submission and publication of electronic texts on the topic of computers and composition that go beyond traditional print formats to include audio, sound, video, and hypertext” (1).

Computers and Composition Online is a peer-reviewed and open-access publication, potentially circulating among public audiences. Another field visionary and advocate of feminist rhetorical and digital scholarship, Kristine Blair edits Computers and Composition and Computers and

Composition Online. The Spring 2017 issue features a webtext by Jeffrey Bacha that assesses first-year students’ digitally mediated, multimodal composing practices (“Technological

Familiarity & Multimodality: A Localized and Contextualized Model of Assessment”). Save for a number of hyperlinks and graphics, the webtext is alphabetic heavy, reflecting what appears in

Composition and Composition print issues. For some journal editors and scholars, such as Cheryl

Ball and Douglas Eyman, Bacha’s design and delivery runs counter to many experimental approaches of digital media texts.

While Kairos and Computers and Composition Online have been in cyberspace and notable in rhetoric and composition for more than 20 years, a number of recent online journals have emerged and published research featuring experimental designs and hypertextual arguments. Journals such as Enculturation, Across the Disciplines, Composition Forum, and

Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society publish scholarly works that juxtapose words, images, video and animation, releasing two or more issues a year. Journals not listed here have ceased publication indefinitely or disappeared from cyberspace almost completely for reasons unknown.3 Unpacking such reasons would be another dissertation project, but it’s reasonable to speculate that electronic journals come and go as founders and editorial teams change schools, budgets shift, servers shut down, and time commitments pile on. As Diane Davis says in the final

3 At the time of writing this dissertation, this page featured a number of dead links to journals now defunct: http://compfaqs.org/Free-accessOnlineJournals/HomePage.

editor’s note of Currents in Electronic Literacy, “Currents, one of the first electronic journals, was a real innovation in its day,” speaking to its 1999 launch (“Best of Currents”). “But given the proliferation of electronic journals over the years, Currents has struggled to find a way to stay current.” Davis’ comment might be a signal that the advent of digital publications has decreased the Currents’ visibility and engagement (e.g., page views and submissions). Many digital journals are free and open-access, hardly making any money to keep the lights on and servers running. Much work is contingent on the volunteer labor of scholars––including junior faculty and graduate students––who believe in the viability and power of digital media texts. By and large, financial limitations and scholars’ evolving commitments and electronic resources factor into the sustainability of a digital journal.

In addition to journals that have come and gone in the last 20 years, the field of rhetoric and composition also has two notable digital presses that continue to gain traction. Partnered with Utah State University Press, Computers and Composition Press debuted in 2007 and has published more than 10 books on topics such as queer theory, digital assessments and feminisms

(Rhodes & Alexander; McKee & DeVoss; Delagrange). Most books experiment with hyperlinks, high-resolution images, non-linear argumentation and animation tools, often requiring audiences to download large files and use Adobe Flash software. Alexandra Hidalgo’s Cámara Retórica: A

Feminist Filmmaking Methodology for Rhetoric and Composition, a 2017 publication, comprises six video essays that offer pedagogical and theoretical implications for filmmaking in rhetoric and composition contexts. As the press advertises, “Cámara Retórica weaves a visual and aural tapestry that performs the kind of feminist, moving-image scholarship it argues can be transformative for Rhetoric and Composition.” It is indeed unlike any ebook by the press, for the videos put scholars and their work front and center with sound and moving images. What’s more,

it is one of many texts that went through a rigorous review and publishing process (“Full

Prospectus Guidelines”). The review process behind such electronic books is one of many efforts to put electronic publications like Cámara Retórica on equal footing with print scholarship, a footing that continues to trouble scholars (see Braun’s Cultivating and Hidalgo’s fifth chapter).

Composition and Composition Press isn’t alone in its endeavors to publish innovative texts in digital environments. University of Michigan Press’s Sweetland Digital Rhetoric

Collaborative book series launched in 2015, joining the eponymous forum that publishes blog posts and various thought pieces by rhetoric and composition scholars; it is also connected to the university’s Gayle Morris Sweetland Center for Writing. Digital Rhetoric Collaborative has published three books to its name (see Ridolfo; DeVoss, Purdy et. al; Helms). As of 2018, the most experimental among them is Jason Helms’ Rhizcomics, a digital monograph that draws on comics to illuminate and till the grounds of poststructuralism, presymbolic and nonsymbolic rhetorics and visual theories. Ripe with nodes and parallax scrolling features that surface and dissolve visual-textual passages, Rhizcomics challenges ways of reading and making meaning from a text. As Helms notes in the introduction, “Comics must be approached as rhizomes with middles everywhere and no center to be found. This project attempts just that—to work in between scholarly and popular modes, between readers and writers, between disciplines, between media, between comics.” In this project, I find Helms’ claim useful for discussion because it reflects what Frankie Condon calls “the in-between,” a liminal state in which meaning and relations are uncertain and emotion is thick (152). Helms admits his book is not “without affect,” for it invites readers to follow their instincts and curiosities though multimodal markers and links, and all the while Helms shifts from first and second person voices to orient––and disorient––his audiences toward possible (and missed) connections. Indeed, Helms’ work and

that of the Digital Rhetoric Collaborative writ large contributes to the larger context of digital media scholarship that surrounds my study.

By and large, rhetoric and composition scholars owe a great deal to editors such as

Doherty, Hawisher, and Selfe for their visionary work in publishing and shaping digital production practices in writing studies. We also owe a great deal to authors such as Helms,

Hidalgo and Ridolfo who contribute scholarly texts that experiment with format, design, arrangement and more. Many texts in the arena of digital media scholarship are productively different on many levels, making each publication across Kairos and Computers and

Composition Online and the aforementioned presses unique––and perhaps unconventional. In some cases, the authors put their bodies, literacies, and scholarly merits on the line when they compose webtexts. As of 2019, the field is still debating the value of digital media scholarship–– that is, digital media scholarship and digital delivery strategies have yet to be on equal footing with print-centric and linear ways of composing and distributing knowledge.

Consider what Anne Frances Wysocki says in her now-seminal text “awaywithwords: On the possibilities of unavailable designs.” Wysocki challenges computers and writing scholars to experiment with design and materials in the scholarly domain. “As we analyze and produce communications, we need to be asking not only what is expected by a particular audience in a particular context but also what they might not expect, what they might not be prepared to see”

(9). A number of field articles and books on digital media and multimodality have embodied

Wysocki’s call to action (Helms; Prior et. al), but doing so has created tensions between departmental peers, field colleagues and experimental scholars (again, see Braun).

In rhetoric and composition’s scholarship on digital media, a common theme is the acknowledgement of print’s dominance over digitally mediated forms of scholarship. Scholars

who advocate for and experiment with digital media in their scholarship often articulate the impingements and expectations of publishing in more traditional forms. According to Braun, reasons for publishing in more traditional forms might be for the sake of graduation, (new) jobs, and tenure and promotion requirements (8). Or perhaps just for the sake of putting forth a new idea. Ball’s “Show, Not Tell: The Value of New Media Scholarship” indicates that she deploys the scholarly, print-centric conventions she critiques. However, she offers, “Mea culpa: New media scholarship is so new to humanities fields that I wanted the evidence of this linear article to point toward the exploration of new media texts as directly and conventionally as possible”

(404). This article is significant to me because Ball presents an important distinction between scholarship about new media and new media scholarship, which is related to ways I distinguish print and digital media scholarship. According to Ball, new media scholarship is defined by experimentation:

… new media scholarship should only be applied to texts that experiment with and break

away from linear modes of print traditions. New media scholarship—online scholarship

that uses modes such as audio, video, images, and/or animation in addition to written text

to make meaning—is fairly new in composition studies (and other fields), which might

cause readers to misinterpret these texts as too artistic to satisfy scholarly conventions

(404)

By “readers,” Ball was no doubt gesturing toward external reviewers, such as peers who sit on tenure and promotion committees and review job applications. The tension around scholarly modes has not been resolved, and likely won’t be for a long time. I felt that tension often as I composed this dissertation, one that follows the conventions and expectations set out by the university and rhetoric and composition’s long-held epistemological tendencies. I felt I

was reinforcing normative ways of producing and disseminating knowledge rather than experimenting with form and content. Thus, I tried to find a middle ground by exploring using audio and video in my research and preparing my chapters for eventual publication in digital journals. In a way, by using graphics and looking to upload my work to webpages, I am paying some homage to earlier electronic articles about hypertext and digital media. In fact, I am modeling after Jean Mason’s 2001 article “Hyperwriting: A New Process Model,”4 a condensed version of her electronic dissertation. At the time, Mason drew on case studies to articulate the challenges of hypertext writing and non-linear storytelling in cyberspace. As I explain later, her observation of “techno-angst” across writers and genres was useful to my research question.

Though not speaking of angst, Catherine Braun more recently has documented the tensions and conflicts that arise with digital media publishing endeavors. In Cultivating

Ecologies for Digital Media Work: The Case of English Studies, Braun depicts the challenges that teacher-scholars in English studies face as they articulate to departments and peers the value of teaching and composing digital media. Her research indicates that definitions of digital media and scholarship vary across departments, and so do ecologies in which technology and digital media are viable. Definition variations and faculty publishing expectations create tensions, she writes.

As a result, individuals who are invested in digital media teaching and scholarship must

negotiate complex waters, often having to make a choice between doing the innovative

work that is their passion (and for which they were ostensibly hired) and doing more

traditional work that has more potential to advance their careers at a particular institution

(Braun 6; emphasis mine).

4 I’m grateful that this article is still available online (at http://www.writinginstructor.org/files/mason/introduction.html) despite the Writing Instructor’s

Braun’s work reflects the observations of Grabill, Cushman and DeVoss on the infrastructures of digital media at universities (see “Infrastructures and Composing”).

Infrastructural entities such as information technology policies and server space thwarted a teacher’s passion for electronic, non-linear composition. Grabill, Cushman and DeVoss’ research suggests that we ought to pay attention to humans as well as nonhumans that create gateways and barriers to digital media production. Similar suggestions have been made by Bryon Hawk, Paul

Prior, Thomas Rickert and a whole host of scholars whose work engages with new materialism and actor network theory.

While it is difficult to condense 20 years of research, I argue that the following terms are key in rhetoric and composition’s long history of digital media scholarship and were critical for my research:

• Digital media and digital composing: Audio, video, sound and hypertext designed on a

computer screen and shared in a digital or online environment (e.g., PDF, Wordpress

blog, online journal);

• Technical requirements: Server space, Internet bandwidth, computers, compatible web

browsers, as well as support systems such as an information technology office or

department administration;

• Online journals and publications: Humanities, rhetoric and composition journals such

as Kairos, Computers and Composition Online, Computers and Composition Digital

Press, and Digital Rhetoric Collaborative;

• Digital media scholarship: Scholarly research and arguments in the form of audio, video

and hypertext and hosted by online journals; often non-linear and rhizomatic;

dormancy of late. Mason’s electronic dissertation is linked here but the links are broken.

• Scholarship about digital media: Research and arguments presented in print journals

(and sometimes in digital journals); see Ball and Braun;

• Fear, trembling, startling, refreshing, passion, techno-angst: Examples of emotional

language used by scholars who practice or study digital media; see Braun, Doherty,

Mason, Nold.

When surveying the field and starting my data collection, the aforementioned key terms were critical because they directed my attention to recent journals, publishing houses and scholars in the field, and they helped me work out quibbles one might face if interchanging, say, online scholarship versus digital media scholarship. Such terms presented here are used consistently throughout Feeling Digital Composing and are partnered with key terms under the umbrella of affect theory.

Histories and Terms of Affect, Emotion, and Feeling

Throughout this study, I will reinforce the argument that affective encounters, felt experiences and emotioned discourse are necessary for composing digital media scholarship as well as managing its reception. In other words, I theorize that digital media production is a rich affective endeavor, vibrant with pain and pleasure. Affective work, I argue, is absent but present in discussions of digital media scholarship and across studies of composing processes and rhetorical theories. Yet affective work is critical for meaning-making. By “work,” I mean instances in which affects, feelings and emotions circulate and intensify between composers, objects and other partners involved in a digital media production.

Theorists such as Laura Micciche, Jenny Rice and Joddy Murray have argued that social and rhetorical composing––before, during, and after its circulation––is ripe with affective encounters, felt experiences and emotioned discourse. Thus, this section engages with tenets of

emotion and affect theories under the large interdisciplinary banner “affect theory,” paying most attention to theories of affective mobility and circulation. Affect, feeling, and emotion are used interchangeably across disciplines––from political philosophy and psychology, to sociology and rhetoric and composition. In the early stages of my study, my research question took a theoretical cue from Aristotle’s theory of emotions, for which he drew on observations of the body to name emotions and the “states of mind” of people who display emotions such as anger, fear and calmness. Aristotle theorized what people do––physically and mentally––when they experience an emotion. As he argues in On Rhetoric, “emotions are those things through which, by undergoing change, people come to differ in their judgments and which are accompanied by pain and pleasure, for example, anger, pity, fear, and other such things and their opposites” (Kennedy

113). More specifically, his view of fear is physical and mental.

Let fear [phobos] be [defined as] a sort of pain and agitation derived from the

imagination of a future destructive or painful evil; for all evils are not feared; for

example, [a person does not fear] that he will become unjust or slow-witted but [only]

what has the potential for great pains or destruction, and these [only] if they do not

appear far off but near, so that they are about to happen; for what is far off is not feared:

all know that they will die, but because that is not near at hand they take no thought of it.

(Kennedy 128)

For Aristotle, then, fear is cultivated by a person’s state of mind that anticipates physical pain, perhaps attributed to the proximity of evil (e.g., destruction). You have more confidence if you have physical strength in the face of evil. You are calm if you have not been assaulted, robbed, or dealt some injustice. On Rhetoric translator George Kennedy claims that Greeks were a contentious population. “The infliction of harm on a rival was not a source of guilt to an

average Greek” (83). Perhaps this cultural outlook explains why Aristotle’s theory of emotions focuses more on pain than pleasure––of wrongdoing and being wronged in some way. While

Aristole’s theory was a useful framework for my study, I didn’t limit myself to it. Pain and pleasure are useful terms for categorizing negative and positive felt experiences in everyday life.

However, more recent definitions of affect, emotion, and feeling in rhetoric and composition can amplify Aristotle’s view on pain and pleasure by calling greater attention to sensations and expressions that move through, alongside, and between bodies and objects during encounters.

Rhetoric and composition has made significant contributions to affect theory, particularly as scholars have theorized affect’s role in cognition and embodiment. The field is no stranger to theorizing affects, feelings and emotions, especially in connection to writers and writing. Besides

Aristotle’s theories of pathos and emotion, our field has grappled with questions of cognition and emotion––thinking versus feeling––for decades. In the 1980s and 90s, Alice Brand and Susan

McLeod were forerunners in theorizing the relationship between writing, thinking, and a writer’s emotions. Without repeating Murray’s extended commentary on their work (Murray 83-97), I agree that Brand and McLeod are indeed important to writing and emotion studies. Brand and

McLeod extended the cognitive turn in composition studies, both claiming that the affective domain of the mind imbued writing processes and warranted more study. An advocate of cognitive psychology’s role in composition studies, Brand claims that cognitive theory scholars such as Linda Flower and John Hayes, Donald Murray and Peter Elbow largely ignored the affective as they explored the mental and intellectual acts of composing. For Brand, affect needs more attention as part of “the richness of our mental life during composing––our intuitions, insights, imagination, memory––and our feelings.” She muses that “emotions influence not only what we write and how we write, but how we view the process and how it shapes our thinking.

So why aren’t we studying the field of emotions psychology?” (7). Brand builds on the work of

“hot cognition” theorist Robert Ableson to argue that the emotions of a writer are not a signal of weakness nor a clouding of a writer’s thoughts. “Emotional states accompany writing and have the power to sustain writers through laborious revision. Which to my mind means that there is something important to be learned here” (9).

McLeod’s research followed a similar line of thinking, as seen in her call for working definitions of emotion that we might apply to writing studies research. Table 1 outlines

McLeod’s definitions that come out of psychology scholarship. For McLeod as well as Brand, studying “affective phenomena” of the mind can help writing researchers understand the cognitive processes that underpin a composition––namely those composed by students. In their respective views, affect and cognition are not one and the same; they are symbiotic partners.

Table 1

A Synthesis of Susan McLeod’s “Working Definitions” on Affective States (McLeod 97-98).

Affect “a generic term to describe such phenomena as emotions, attitudes, beliefs, moods, and conation” (Simon 335, qtd. in McLeod 97). Emotion “those ‘hot,’ more intense affective states, either positive or negative, where the organism is aroused for a fairly short period of time. Using this definition, grief, joy, fear, and anger are all emotions”. “less intense and more subtle affective states (such as depression, happiness, Moods or sadness)” “bodily sensations associated with an emotion or a mood. Feelings, in other Feelings words, can be thought of as part of an emotional experience, but not synonymous with that experience”. Attitude “similar to emotions, but less intense and more stable over time”. “usually characterized by tension (both physical and mental), worry, and Anxiety feelings of uneasiness”. Beliefs and “defined as judgments of the credibility of a conceptualization”. Belief Systems “can be physiological (thirst motivates me to find water) or psychological Motivation (anxiety about a deadline motivates me to finish my work)”.

McLeod’s working definitions underscore her claims that affective states have degrees of intensity and stability––whether in the mind or body. What’s interesting about the above table is that it defines affect as an umbrella term for the other definitions. However, affect is more recently theorized as amorphous, bodily, and even nonconscious (see Shouse, Brennan later in this chapter). Nevertheless, there is interconnectivity between McLeod’s definitions of affect, emotion and feelings, for each define a reaction in the mind or body.

In a direct response to McLeod’s working definitions, Kristie Fleckenstein theorizes affect and cognition as dance partners, creating a continuum between emotions, which are the most intense of affective states, and evaluations, which are the most intense of cognition.

Fleckenstein cites Louise Rosenblatt’s continuum of aesthetic and efferent reading, positing that

“no reading event is ever purely aesthetic (for the pleasure of the experience) or efferent (for the purpose of obtaining information), but an interweaving of both” (448). Fleckenstein, like her colleagues, connects the mind and the body’s roles in relation to affective states.

By and large, Brand, McLeod and Fleckenstein enrich research on the cognitive processes of writers. They add gravity to claims that affective work (in the mind) was worth studying––that rational thinking, goal-setting, and self-efficacy are partnered with emotional states. Interestingly, Brand, McLeod and Fleckenstein left emotion studies in the wake of other theoretical and research projects (see, for example, McLeod’s rich work on Writing Across

Curriculum programs), though Fleckenstein’s work in Embodied Literacies theorizes the body as a vehicle for empathic comprehension and rhetorical action (101). Nevertheless, their relatively short history of research on the affective and cognitive dimensions that shape writing signals that psychology was a productive disciplinary partner with writing studies. As Murray argues in Non-

Discursive Rhetoric, the work of Brand and McLeod complicates the long-held debates of the mind and body, emotion and intellect. If we pay more attention to their work, and take seriously emotion’s role in every writing situation, emotion studies might “become a more permanent and important aspect of the field’s scholarly endeavor, rather than remain as a somewhat ostracized movement that regains popularity from time to time” (84). Murray’s synthesis of Brand, McLeod and others drives his claim that non-discursive (image-based) production must embrace the affective domain––two reasons being that each image carries an “affective charge,” and

“emotions are running all the time through ‘background feelings,’ a neural and chemical connection to the body landscape running between the states of aware emotions” (104). Murray is a relatively new voice in our field’s research on affect, cognition and bodily sensations in writing situations. Nevertheless, his work as well as that of Brand, McLeod, and Fleckenstein were important for my study because they suggest that the mind figures well into embodied and rhetorical action. The way someone talks about their digital media production might signal mental as well as bodily pain and pleasure.

More recent theories of writing as an affective activity have paid even greater attention to emotion’s bodily orientations, social movements and circulations. Given its uptake and numerous citations, Micciche and Dale Jacob’s edited collection A Way to Move is a landmark of the more recent affective turn, featuring numerous perspectives on emotions and their consequences for pedagogy and research. Susan Kirtley, for example, re-articulates Greek philosopher Diotima’s theory of eros, or love and movement. “In Diotima’s idea of ascension,” Kirtley offers, “eros begins in our feelings for other bodies and in the feelings and emotions present in our own bodies” (62). For the teacher of composition, eros in teaching and writing, is about

embodied, intellectual passion that bridges gaps as a daimon [ancient spirit] might.

Teacher-Student. Longing-Possession. Writer-Audience. For many of us the pleasure of

writing is the journey it takes us on, and the mystery when it is sent off into the world to

reach others. (65)

Affective movement and circulation are ideas extended in Micciche’s recent articles and her now-widely cited monograph Doing Emotion: Rhetoric, Writing, Teaching. Micciche amplifies prior arguments that rational, logos-centric argumentation and emotioned discourse are not strong and weak, respectively, but are rather productive partners in writing. Untangling such a dichotomy, her writing classroom exercise on “deep embodiment” invites students to speak through the voices, the bodies, of authors in order to understand the writer’s rhetorical styles and emotional dispositions. As Micciche argues, “knowledge cannot be separated from the bodily world of feeling and sensation” (52). Deep embodiment, that is, situates emotion in writing bodies and reinforces the notion that emotion is circulated through writing. Bodily movements–– a key site of affect that opens us up to relations and affective states––and oral readings are central to emotional education, she argues. (In a later chapter, I explain that deep embodiment might be a useful method for analyzing digital media productions.)

Furthermore, Micciche regards emotion as something performed and not belonging to any body. Drawing from Sara Ahmed and others, Micciche argues that emotions are social, sticky and swirling––especially in composition studies scholarship. In thinking about such emotions as disappointment and fear, Micciche looks to composition studies scholarship that bemoans teaching and labor issues in the discipline; in a way, fear and disappointment become sticky and contagious in the field, creating communal feelings of discontent among teacher- scholars. Micciche’s investigation bonds well with Sara Ahmed’s position that emotions circulate

through bodies and social objects, including websites and public messages. Sticky and circulating emotions generate “affective economies” that accumulate and circulate meaning.

The aforementioned theorists have been gripped by relations from which emotions emerge. If emotions are relational, then they are also economical and ecological, tied to people, texts and objects. Jenny Edbauer Rice’s meditations on writing amid human and nonhuman publics further underscores emotion’s relational power. For example, what can graffiti writing do in public? “Before you can possibly get writing enough to respond, it gets you,” Edbauer Rice argues. It is “a cull to writing, which marks a relay between rhetorical context and the affective body,” one open to relations with another body, another object (“Metaphysical Graffiti” 142). For

Rice, Lloyd Bitzer’s oft-cited theory of the rhetorical situation could not account for the public consumption and circulation of texts. Examining a text within “rhetorical and affective ecologies” de-centers the rhetor and original text, and calls attention to “ways in which rhetorical productions are inseparable from lived encounters of public life” (“Unframing” 21). Her primary case study of a de-centered, ecological rhetoric concerns the “Keep Austin Weird” slogan that was distributed and circulated in response to the city’s commercial and “big-box” projects. The slogan’s message and affective energy––that of weirdness––flowed through stickers, T-shirts and advertisements. This flow means that “we find ourselves engaging a public rhetoric whose power is not circumscribed or delimited. We encounter rhetoric” (“Unframing” 23). I take Rice’s argument to mean that rhetorical encounters cultivate affects, feelings, and emotions, perhaps forming collective feelings or what Raymond Williams calls “structures of feeling” in communities. In public, rhetoric is alive and dynamic, not contingent on the work of any particular body but rather pulsing through moving, feeling bodies. Bound up with rhetoric, affect is atmospheric, moving from spaces to embodied sensations and back again. Rickert describes

affect and emotion as “background feeling,” using that idea to theorize ambient rhetorics such as

Brian Eno’s Windows startup music and Led Zeppelin’s drum tracks in Headley Garage (8). As he writes in Ambient Rhetoric, “affect is in some sense prior to language or symbolicity and that it has a strongly embodied, situated, and emotional trajectory” (147). Put differently, affect, while unseen, depends on movement and precedes emotional expression.

Affective ecologies. Embodied sensations. Emotional expression. Notice that, in the above passages, I interchange words rooted in affect, feeling, and emotion. Stemming from a range of disciplines outside of rhetoric and composition, theorists of affect, feelings, and emotions were important for my study because they call even greater attention to an author’s body in relation to objects and fellow bodies that hold, even temporarily, affective values that shape digital media production. Recent theorists also take greater care in defining affect, feeling, and emotion, even as they interchange such words. Their theories are nevertheless important for studying who and what moves people to rhetorical action.

In terms of bodies and mobility, affect is widely regarded as registers and sensations that transmit and circulate, often unconsciously, through bodies, objects and the like. Melissa Gregg and Greg Seigworth see affect as a force of encounter, but it “need not be especially forceful

(although sometimes, as in the psychoanalytic study of trauma, it is)” (3). An encounter might not stop us in our tracks, per se. Still, we can feel something, even if we can’t describe it, put it in words just yet. As Kathleen Stewart offers in Ordinary Affects, affect is much like a charge in a circuit that courses through publics.

Affect is connected to things. Literally moving things—things that are in motion and that

are defined by their capacity to affect and to be affected—they have to be mapped

through different, coexisting forms of composition, habituation, and event. They can be

“seen,” obtusely, in circuits and failed relays, in jumpy moves and the layered textures of

a scene. (4)

Stewart’s theory of affect’s mobility––moments in which bodies and things are affected–– accord with Teresa Brennan’s ideas in The Transmission of Affect. Brennan also argues that affect moves through bodies and things and that entities are porous. As Brennan writes, affects “come via an interaction with other people and an environment. But they have a physiological impact.

By the transmission of affect, I mean simply that the emotions or affects of one person, and the enhancing or depressing energies these affects entail, can enter into another” (3). Brennan’s remarks conflate affect and emotion rather than distinguish the two. Some scholars argue that affect is social and ineffable yet made effable by feeling and emotion. Affect is amorphous and manifests through one’s object relations and embodied sensations. We sense something’s up, and we respond with feeling and emotion. We move. As Brennan puts it, “feelings are sensations that have found a match in words” (140). Working from Brennan’s ideas, Eric Shouse takes feeling to mean a “sensation that has been checked against previous experiences and labelled. It is personal and biographical because every person has a distinct set of previous sensations from which to draw when interpreting and labelling their feelings” (“Feeling, Emotion, Affect”). Converging the theories of Brennan, Brian Massumi and many others, Shouse goes on to regard emotion as the projection of affect and feeling onto publics and bodies, suggesting that feeling is the in- between element of affect and emotion’s social capacities.

For several affect theorists, emotions are considered social, too, and are perhaps the most realized because they encompass the body and language, whether through direct words (e.g., fear, anxiety) or metaphors. For example, in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Ahmed views fear as transitory. “Fear does not reside positively in a particular object or sign. It is this lack of

residence that allows fear to slide across signs and between bodies” (64). Emotion––from fear, to happiness, to dissent––is mobile and circulates through bodies, texts and genres, all of which exist in spaces. Ahmed’s “Happy Objects” drives this point further when she discusses positive affect as something an object in circulation accumulates. “The promise of happiness is what sends happiness forth; it is what allows happiness to be out and about. Happy objects are passed around, accumulating positive affective value as social goods” (35). Ahmed’s ideas are quite useful to me as I argue that digital composing teems with encounters––whether stemming from objects or bodies––that accumulate affective value.

The terms and theorists I discuss throughout this section offer something valuable for my study, creating a theoretical framework that guides the chapters that follow. Table 2 is a synthesis of their contributions. However amorphous they may be, theories of affect help me recognize that people and things are moved and assembled toward a particular text, an idea. To echo

Brennan’s theory, bodies and things cultivate depressing and uplifting energies, and those energies are contagious, atmospheric. Discussions of feeling help me recognize embodied sensations that authors discuss when they talk and write about their composing experiences. “I feel good. I feel constrained, tired, in pain, etc.” suggests that something affective––bodily, mentally––is happening or has happened in a digital media production process. Discussions of emotion, then, put feeling in more direct and recognizable terms such as fear and happiness.5

Table 2

A Synthesis of Affect Theories across Disciplines

5 I admit here that I am following a scholarly move by Deborah Lupton, who unpacks bodies of literature on emotion. Emotions have been defined as universal and uniform to all humans, embodied and porous, culturally located, and social. I align with Lupton in theorizing emotions as part of embodied sensations and social expressions. I also acknowledge that theories of emotion are at once exciting and incredibly difficult to agree on. Her work challenged me to narrow my scope, which I discuss in my methodology chapter.

Category Affect Feeling Emotion Terms • Sensation • Embodied • Public • Value sensations • Socio- • Intensity • Bodily and cultural • Energy mentally • Sticky • Non- processed • Swirling concious • Affect put • Signals into affects and language feelings Key Brennan, Brand, McLeod, Aristotle, Ahmed, thinkers Massumi, Rice, Murray, Shousse Micciche, Rickert Stewart Rhetorical “Because the “Feelings, in other “We should see that Commenta body-of-sensation words, can be music and emotion ry is always thought of as part of are connected stubbornly an emotional through their present in scenes experience, but not emergence within an of writing, there synonymous with ambient situation, can be no that experience” conceived affectless (McLeod 97) ecologically and compositions” materially as well as (Rice 133) socially” (Rickert 148)

While it is true that these terms are at times conflated and used interchangeably (even in this project), scholars who engage with such terms encouraged me to ask what and who moves people (mainly, to compose), how they feel about digital composing, tools and peers, and how they translate their experiences with emotional language and content.

The Emotional Work of Digital Media Scholarship

Drawing from arguments by Ball, Braun, Brennan, Wysocki, Rice and many others, I leave this chapter with key terms put to work when I designed my qualitative study. Definitions of digital media scholarship and affect guided my research and directed my attention throughout the entire process of investigating the emotional work of digital media scholarship. Working with digital media scholarship defined as experimental, non-linear texts, I paid less attention to

articles and books that are published in electronic formats but reflect print journal structures. For example, Composition Forum articles are electronic but largely text-based, while Kairos webtexts are rhizomatic and multimedia-laden. I was more interested in studying the latter, for such webtexts, as well as the authors who compose them, have received relatively little attention in the larger context of writing and emotion research.

Furthermore, working from definitions under the banner of affect theory, I wanted to know the extent to which digital media scholarship is an embodied, felt experience. My next chapters will show that emotional expressions are ripe in scholarship on digital media, digital texts themselves, and in my original interviews that parlayed into case studies. In retrospective studies like mine, interviews prompt participants to recall felt experiences and use emotional expressions to describe digital composing projects, an assemblage of bodies, tools, networks and publics with which scholars form relationships. Their felt experiences and emotional expressions offer clues about relations that drive people toward and away from seeing a digital media project through. By asking about pain and pleasure when I was conducting interviews in 2017 and 2018, for example, I prompted authors to speak about their relations. Later in this project, I explain ways in which I narrowed my scope for studying the “feelings” of digital media authors.

Chapter Two

Digital Composing Studies: An Emotional History

On my computer a full-screen video is juxtaposing scenes from a choir concert, a rhetoric and composition scholar speaking to a webcam, and footage from a panel talk on multimodality.

The narrator says:

Chora is place, space, dance, a

dancing floor,

invention, becoming, gathering, analogy,

chance, collaboration.

Chora is felt in the body, it’s emotion, association, embodiment. (VanKooten)

Moving images––faces, hands––are layered with warped sounds, the pitches and tones of singers and speakers shifting and overlapping as the video progresses. It ends with textual credits, the closing passage of “Brahms Requiem,” and a woman’s voice quoting rhetoric and composition theorist Thomas Rickert:

There is movement to invention, a going beyond boundaries and returning, that precludes

its being fixed in place, even though it simultaneously emerges in and through place. It

turns back around on itself, ensuring that what remains at the heart of invention is

invention itself. (Rickert 270)

The video is the focal point of Chrystal VanKooten’s 2016 webtext “Singer, Writer: A

Choric Exploration of Sound and Writing,” a process narrative and reflection on composing the aforementioned video and embodying “the chora,” or a space in which “we compose and feel out meanings from diverse materials, patterns, emotions, bodies, and memories.” As VanKooten explains:

Music, in particular, brought out such extra-discursive, bodily rhetorical action during

this project. I listened to and worked around clips from Brahms, swaying to and fro,

humming. I laughed, and got a little choked up, feeling emotion well up through my nose

and eyes. The notes and associated memories were meaningful, moving. (VanKooten)

Before describing my qualitative study of authors’ composing practices and emotions associated with digital media scholarship, this chapter reviews previous and recent studies of digital production, including process narratives like VanKooten’s “Inventio” webtext. More specifically, I review scholars who use rhetorical theory as a lens to study digital media production. My purpose of reviewing previous studies and texts is to create a space for an intervention in the vast landscape of literature that aims to theorize how and to what ends composers make, produce and assemble texts––and more specifically, digital texts and their affective work. For decades, scholars of rhetoric and composition and related fields have authored a number of case studies and empirical investigations on the processes and practices of writers and composers, but, as I argue here, few scholars have integrated rhetorical and affective theories to study digital media production.

As a means to intervening in the scholarship in question, I first review studies of composing processes and rhetorical theory related to digital media. Next, to enrich previous studies, I briefly return to my theoretical framework based on theories of emotion, for many of these theories did not emerge from digital media studies. Lastly, I close with interdisciplinary studies of emotion in digital environments and re-articulate my intervention that emerged from previous studies. My ordering of this chapter paves the way for my claim that digital writing researchers have long engaged with emotions but have underutilized affect theory in studies of authors and their practices. Put differently, studies concerning digital media production have

been significant to the advancement of rhetoric and composition, helping scholars understand— often in situ and retrospectively—how writers compose a text, what tools and things they handle while in production, and why texts succeed or fail upon distribution and reception. Production studies have also put forth, explicitly and implicitly, affective work and emotioned discourse I argue we need to make use of in future studies of composers and digital texts. We need to more explicitly integrate rhetorical theory with affect theory. Embodied sensations, feelings, and sticky, circulating emotions that form between bodies (Micciche 13) are significant to digital media production, for they can––and often do––create gateways and barriers to a final text.

Theorizing Digital Processes

In this section, I focus on researchers who have investigated writers composing with electronic and digital tools and producing digital texts. This body of scholarship addresses digital media production in relation to rhetorical theories. Researchers have recovered and renewed ancient rhetorical theory in the pursuit of understanding how composers produce digital texts.

With those recovery and renewal efforts came discussions of affective states and relations. I argue that studies of digital media production are enriched when partnered with writing and emotion studies. Previous studies of writing and emotion can illuminate suggestions of affective states and emotion in studies of digital media production. Similarly, studies of digital media production can electrify writing and emotion studies.

Early Digital Process Studies

While studies of affective and cognitive states of writers were gaining traction in the late

80s (see Brand; McLeod), so too were studies of computer-mediated composition and digital writing. The late 80s and 90s saw a number of process studies of writers, namely students,

engaged in computer word processing.6 Previous studies that focus on hypertext editing and digital media indeed speak to the work of today’s scholars who compose webtexts for Kairos and

Computers and Composition Online. The 1990s was a critical decade for process research and composition theory in relation to hypertext productions, namely websites. One text illustrative of studies of hypertext and digital media is Barbara Kolosseus et. al’s “From Writer to Designer:

Modeling Composing Processes in a Hypertext Environment” from 1995. It was a time when personal computers and World Wide Web access were becoming commonplace in households, not to mention universities. Kolosseus et. al narrate and reflect on a website project aimed at promoting a university’s rhetoric and professional communication graduate program, arguing that hypertext is a grammar in its own right and that web writers and designers work “within this constant tension between planning and drafting, with serious consequences for insufficient planning.” By consequences, they mean page malfunctions due to bad HTML code and overwritten changes by saves (85). They go on to note frustrations and “ill effects” of collaborative work that emerged without a protocol between the writer and designer team. As they note in their conclusions, “Ownership is never simple to determine in collaborative writing, and it becomes even more blurred and troublesome in hypertext design” (91; emphasis mine). To wit: web work can be equal parts exciting and annoying for a team, especially when a team does not collaborate effectively on an electronic document intended for the web. One wrong edit in the code, and the network of pages is compromised, according to Kolosseus et. al. The code, the computer, the webpages, and the interface itself are at times troublesome.

Also writing in 1995, Emily Golson focuses less on the technical entanglements of hypertext and instead analyzes students’ web composing processes, namely how they

6 See Slattery and Kowalski’s 1998 article “On Screen: The Composing Processes of First-Year and Upper-Level College Students,” which includes a comprehensive review of typing and

conceptualize audience (or lack thereof) for hypertext fiction and researched arguments. To

Golson, students “design in the dark, moving toward a felt sense of hypertext addressed/invoked audiences, occasionally succumbing to pre-hypertext audience expectations” (297). Here she invokes prior discussions of felt sense, or “images, words, ideas, and vague fuzzy feelings that are anchored in the writer’s body” (Perl 101) in relation to imagined and possible audiences.

Golson’s study suggests that feelings about hypertext start in the body and move to the page–– and perhaps back again.

Bookending Kolosseus et. al and Golson are a number of studies concerning students and professionals composing hypertext and websites (Lohr, Ross and Morrison; Wambeam and

Kramer; Wegner and Payne; Hubbard and Walberg; Janagelo), computer documentation

(Rockley; Zimmerman; Breuleux, Bracewell, and Renaud), and writing and remediation (Bolter;

Bolter and Grusin).7 Such empirical and retrospective studies explain how and why digital media projects and hypertexts come into being, and how they might implicate print composing practices. However, Johnson Johnson-Eiola’s now-lauded 1996 book Nostalgic Angels is critical for understanding rhetoric and composition’s engagement with the Internet and digital tools, making an explicit critique of process studies. For Johnson-Eiola, past writing models, such as

Flower and Hayes’ cognitive process theory, cannot adequately account for how authors compose and navigate hypertext texts (68). “Nostalgia is a valuable feeling,” Johnson-Eiola argues, but

“we must also remember that we are changed, that new potentials do exist, and that our use of hypertext in writing classes and elsewhere can be used to help students think about their writing and reading as social and political activities” (176). While emotioned discourse is present in scholarship by Kolosseus, Golson and Johnson-Eiola, these discourses are not theorized in terms

keyboard studies.

of affect. Theories of emotion are largely absent in 90s research on computer-mediated communication and digital tools. Emotion is there and not there as part of the researchers’ theoretical constructs. This trend of eliding emotion theory continues into the early 2000s, even as emotion studies by Micciche, Micciche and Jacobs, Edbauer Rice, Lindquist and others are taking flight. At this point in our field’s history, digital process and critical emotion studies are not in conversation.

But there are some inklings of cross-talk. Theories of writing processes and technologies of the 90s are well represented and enacted in Jean Mason’s article from a 2001 online edition of

Writing Instructor. Drawing from prior process models and media theorists such as Flower and

Hayes, Johnson-Eiola, George Landow and Richard Lanham, Mason investigates “hyperwriters” among faculty and students across disciplines in order to claim that hypertext writing calls for a new process model. Notice how the following passage builds on the prototypes of process research and theories.

Because of the number of diverse elements the hyperwriter appears to have to consider

both simultaneously and sequentially, it seems logical that different levels of

consciousness may be involved. Moreover, the hyperwriter must consider both the macro

level (e.g., navigational system, style templates) and the micro-level (e.g., page layouts,

content) simultaneously as they impact on each other in an electronic environment that is

always in a kind of inter-dependent controlled motion rather than frozen on a printed

page. To accomplish this multi-faceted procedure, the hyperwriter likely processes these

elements internally at different levels of consciousness both simultaneously and

sequentially, while at the same time representing these elements and their evolution

7 See Bolter’s 1991 book Writing Spaces, and Bolter and Grusin’s 1999 book Remediation.

externally on either paper or—more likely—by using web authoring software. (Mason,

“Hyperwriting: A New Process Model”)

I situate Mason’s article here for three reasons: (1) it links historical cognitive process research, hypertext studies of the 90s, and more recent studies of digital and new media composing processes; (2) it is also an empirically based study of teachers and writing scholars and practitioners composing digital media scholarship, informing the scope of my research; (3)

Mason’s observations and implications are ripe with emotion in her studies of authors and productions. Consider her results: “Unquestionably,” she notes, “most of my informants--major and minor--suffered “techno-angst” of varying degrees at some time or other as they struggled with a technology that made word processing seem like child’s play by comparison” (Mason,

“Implications”). Mason’s participant Mac discusses that hypertext writers “naturally tend to be curious and more encompassing, and this sort of structure allows you to digress, to enjoy side pathways that might not be able to be incorporated in a more traditional—at least Western traditional—work” [emphasis mine]. These passages suggest that composers and readers develop affective states––techno-angst, curiosity, enjoyment––in relation with technologies (e.g., computers) and through compositions (e.g., hypermedia). Digital writing and reading processes are imbued with emotions.

While Mason’s research and its affective suggestions didn’t send shockwaves through writing studies scholarship nor shape writing process research, it is a predecessor to more recent studies of the composing processes of writers interfacing with digital environments––websites, blogs, social media, and digital video. In fact, “the composing processes of…” remains an open inquiry for writing studies researchers despite the field’s turns to social, cultural, political,

ecological, and nonhuman entities that affect writers and writing itself. 8 Researchers are still very much interested in who and what make digital texts and how they go about production through one process or another. We might turn to Pam Takayoshi’s investigations of graduate students who compose “short-form, internetworked writing,” paying attention to Facebook status updates and “micro revisions.” Calling for a renewal of process studies and in situ research,

Takayoshi suggests that composition studies’ social turn lost sight of the value of studying writers in action. Her think-aloud protocol—a nod to Emig and Flower and Hayes, in addition to many more composition researchers—gives way to claims that short-form writing processes in digital spaces are “complex meaning-making acts using written language symbol systems” (9).

Indeed, as more socially networked and digital forms of writing continue to emerge and take shape, composition process and rhetorical strategy studies can bring us closer to the thinking and texts writers produce. As Takayoshi argues,

Turning our attention to closer, fine-grained examinations of composing processes does

not mean turning our back on understandings of writing as a social practice; instead,

writing researchers might turn our attention to composing processes carrying with us the

richly developed understanding of writing as a social practice. (11)

Recent Studies of Digital Production

Recalling early emotion theories in writing studies (Brand; McLeod), Joddy Murray claims non-discursive rhetoric––that which stems from image-based and multimodal production–

–ought to be “sensuous and emotional.” Elsewhere, Angela Laflen and Brittany Fiorenza value positive and negative connotations in students’ computer-mediated communication (CMC), calling for “the challenge of differentiating emotions using only linguistic indicators (307). Sean

8 See Sid Dobrin’s Postcomposition for, in his words, a violent criticism of subjects and subjectivity in writing research and pedagogy.

Morey's 2015 book Rhetorical Delivery and Digital Technologies: Networks, Affects, Electracy insists that “delivery can employ other kinds of psychic and bodily sensations: feeling and affect” (96). Writing in May 2017, Trisha Campbell theorizes that software “platforms like

Audacity and Adobe Audition might invite us into affectively charged, new rhetorical and empathetic relationships with voices that are both our own and not our own” (“Digital

Empathy”). And just recently, Computers and Writing conference’s 2017 theme was “Techne:

Creating Space of Wonder,” a theme that ushered in panels such as “Everyday Wonder:

Narratives of Technical Expertise” (Van Ittersum et. al) and “Wondrous Possibilities: Feeling and/as Classroom Technology” (Blouke et. al). These studies focus on ways that affective relations form between words, tools and bodies involved in digital media production and pedagogy.

Bracketing the aforementioned scholarly endeavors for a bit, I argue in this subsection that a number of recent digital writing and production studies discussed emotion but have still largely elided theoretical orientations that make emotion visible and dynamic. I draw out those texts on digital writing, working from studies that use emotional language but leave deeper discussions of emotion on the cutting room floor. Studies discussed below concern the remediation and circulation of digital writing, including social media, web writing, and digital media, and they occasion further investigations of emotions taking form in and between writers and tools.

Writing in 2011, Leon and Pigg chronicle the composing practices of two rhetoric and composition graduate students, Philip and Alyssa, who engaged in “digital multitasking” (9) as they wrote academic papers, blog posts and updates on social media outlets like Facebook and

MySpace, for both personal and professionalizing purposes. The line between personal and

“professionalizing writing” practices, Leon and Pigg contend, is often blurry for graduate students, particularly as they move across activities and screens, in public or not. “What we did not expect to learn,” Leon and Pigg report, “was that the graduate students we studied felt some degree of discomfort with the extent to which their actual professional writing practices differ from their expectations about what doing writing work should look and feel like” (10; emphasis mine). According to the authors, an emotional paradox emerges when personal and professional practices blur: students find pleasure in participating on Facebook or personal email, for example, but also guilt for not working on a paper. Recognizing such emotionality and creating a space for future inquiries, Leon and Pigg close with a question that remains under-explored:

“Finally, how do we deal with (and help graduate students deal with) the emotional responses that arise as a result of the blurring of our professional and personal lives on computer screens and in the diverse digital sites they inhabit?” (12; emphasis mine). Their question creates a space for further investigations into the feelings that graduate students enact as they form a professional identity that is circulated and shaped by a public platform like Twitter.

In fact, Leon and Pigg’s above question has seen uptake in rhetoric and composition scholarship. Michael Faris and Kristen Moore’s 2016 pilot study of emerging scholars (e.g., junior faculty and graduate students) speaks directly to the emotional consequences of social media use. As Faris and Moore’s study demonstrates, scholars treat social media networks (e.g.,

Facebook and Twitter) as an expected professional practice, and they filter emotional displays in such public networks. The emotional rules that emerged from participant responses in Faris and

Moore’s research are as follows:

• Wait to post especially if you’re emotional.

• Don’t vent (e.g., don’t complain, especially in anger or annoyance about

something that happened at work).

• Stay positive. (58)

It is important to note that the above rules are not endorsed by Faris and Moore, who call for more attention to “social media as it helps co-constitute institutions and individuals, rather than seeing them as separate from one another” (59).While Leon and Pigg, and Faris and Moore pull to the surface the “emotional responses” of emerging scholars who compose across social media, I want to stay with emotion. I want to go deeper, looking at its embeddedness among writers, bodies, and tools.

The aforementioned researchers’ references to emotion reflect what has generally happened in studies of digital media production. A number of researchers and theorists have drawn from and renewed ancient rhetorical principles and canons––chiefly, ideas by Aristotle,

Cicero, Isocrates, among other white, Western thinkers and philosophers––by studying composers and digital media production. As Collin Gifford Brooke argues, ancient rhetorical canons––namely, invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery––must be reframed and redefined as texts are produced more exclusively in digital environments. Building on Brooke,

Douglas Eyman, a longtime editor of Kairos and author, notes that the canons, as well as theories of audience and kairos, are still significant to the field but have adapted with the advent of digital networks, remix culture, and more (see Eyman’s Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice).

Indeed, a number of researchers have focused on one or more canons of rhetoric to study production practices that give rise to digital texts. Some, such as Paul Prior and his collaborators, have even looked to expand the canons by integrating rhetorical theory with cultural historical activity theory (see Prior et. al), feminist theory (Delagrange), and queer theory (Alexander and

Rhodes). My intention here is not to discuss each canon and its relation to digitality (see Eyman for a comprehensive review), but rather to focus on researchers who have revisited one canon or another and occasioned affectively focused questions for future research.

Take the canon of arrangement, for example. For digital media scholars, the canon of arrangement is not easily distilled to issues of organization and order on a page. As Susan

Delagrange remarks in her digital book Technologies of Wonder and in Kairos webtexts, arrangement ought to be revised as “a material, embodied techné which, through hypermediated linking of visual and verbal evidence, enables a process of wonder and discovery that promotes thoughtful inquiry and insight” (107; emphasis mine). Delagrange focuses on the sixteenth- century visual art practice Wunderkammer, in which assemblages of objects and visuals amount to a non-linear composition. The art practice implicates digital media practices that appear clean and orderly so as not to confuse readers, as she argues. Delagrange articulates Wunderkammer’s value in a passage worth quoting at length:

If we were designing for that reader, then we would want to create a digital

Wunderkammer, a hyper-mediated thinking space that would allow us and our reader to

explore, to move things about, to seek out curious and unexpected connections, and to

defer closure and certainty while we consider the possibilities for rhetorical action that

different arrangements of our evidence might suggest. (108; emphasis mine)

At the time of writing this dissertation, Delagrange’s meditations on design and arrangement amount to one of the most comprehensive studies on the canon in relation to digital media, and it’s also the most oriented toward emotion. In fact, the ancient rhetorical concept of techné holds promise for studies of emotion in connection to digitality. Jonathan Alexander and

Jacqueline Rhodes’ 2015 digital book Techne: Queer Meditations on Writing the Self addresses

what Delagrange calls “the reluctance of the academy to accept scholarship that uses images, sound, and other media in conjunction with or in place of linear, unemotional, alphabetic argument” (49). Through rhizomatic design and moving images, Alexander and Rhodes’ Techne shows ways in which installation and embodied rhetorics––techne––can foreground author identities (e.g., queerness) and disrupt disciplinary expectations of scholarship and argumentation. Alexander and Rhodes’ perspectives and shared voices are juxtaposed with found objects, grayscale video via YouTube, sound modulations, and hyperlinks. Their style and design choices are inflected by

queer composing … a complex mix of affect and negotiation. On the one hand, queer

composing is a demand born out of anger, resentment, pain …. At the same time, our

“full, nasty, complicated lives” often require acts of de-composition, of un-composing

and re-composing dominant narratives of sexuality, gender, and identity. (“Composing

while Queer”)

Alexander and Rhodes’ verbal-visual remarks add weight to previous discussions that composing emerges from affective states or emotions––whether one is speaking of minds, bodies, or linguistic markers. Writing is an affective activity. No (digital) writing is without sensations and emotional expressions.

My claims above are amplified by a turn to recent memory studies of late. A number of studies have taken up the canon of memory in relation to digital texts, discussing and remediating memorials, archives, felt experiences, and various history projects. The canon of memory encompasses the focus of a 2011 issue of Kairos, in which Erin Anderson recomposes an interview with her grandmother and layers it with an audio-visual, non-linear archive. As

Anderson instructs, “To participate, you will be forced to interact with my grandma’s memories

without the comforts of chronology, the ease of passive reception, or even the conventional luxury of a user-friendly scrollbar.” Her remark suggests that interacting with and recomposing someone’s memories is guided by felt experience and affective encounters––through and with bodies. In the same Kairos issue, Santos’ webtext “How the Internet Saved My Daughter and

How Social Media Saved My Family” offers many moving recollections of his daughter’s battle with eye cancer––moving in the sense that they make visible the pain and despair (e.g., seeing his daughter suffer) that his family worked through as his daughter recovered from numerous surgeries.

Anderson’s and Santo’s comments and the special issue of Kairos call attention to other digital archives teeming with emotional work. Hosted by The Ohio State University, the Digital

Archives of Literacy Narratives (DALN) is, to some extent, one massive memory project on how reading and writing literacies are acquired and developed. The DALN hosts textual narratives as well as multimedia on literacy acquisition and loss. As DALN assistants and researchers Comer and Harker have noted, “the archive functions simultaneously as both an open public record and an exploratory research project—creating a space that brings together seemingly disparate views on literacy, its purpose, its place in our schools, as well as the attitudes and values that complicate literacy definitions and development” (“The Pedagogy of the Digital Archive of

Literacy Narratives: A Survey”; emphasis mine). Literacy narratives are driven by memories imbued with emotions.9

Outside of literacy studies, Ekaterina Haskins takes a different turn by examining the rhetorical work of The September 11 Digital Archive, whose organizers relied on and encouraged

9 If you search the archive, for example, you can find a video of me talking with Cynthia Selfe and recalling my mother’s disappointment when she learned I was changing my major from nursing to English. The conversation arose from Selfe’s question about a literacy challenge (“A Literacy Turn”).

publics to form collective memories of the tragedy. The archive now includes visual art, poetry, testimonies and more. “Although scores of stories simply recall their authors’ first emotional reactions—disbelief, terror, and sympathy for victims and their families are the most common sentiments—some also go on to reflect on the meaning of the tragedy and its aftermath” (412; emphasis mine). Whether examining the DALN or 9/11 archive, it is important to note that the founders created projects in which oft-unfiltered memories can live and cultivate collective public feelings, whether on writing or loss of life. Emotion, as Tom Bowers argues, can be a change agent––a source of rhetorical action––in public memory projects. Bowers looks to ways in which the grassroots organization Appalachian Voices drew on the fear of local publics to compose an online commemoration of a catastrophic flood in 1972, hoping to address infrastructural policies (or lack thereof). “Fear may be a reasoned, ethical, and appropriate response for a public questioning the viability of certain institutional structures and practice.” I will add that fear-laden memories may parlay into a powerful change agent as they circulate in public, as is the case of the 9/11 commemoration.

While studies of arrangement and public memory have bearing on relational affective work, so do those focused on the rhetorical canon of delivery. Delivery, too, is suggestive of emotion. Jim Ridolfo’s theory of “rhetorical velocity” re-situates delivery as part of a larger circulation endeavor in rhetorical production (see McCorkle, Porter, Gries, others). According to

Ridolfo and DeVoss, delivery is not simply a matter of distributing a text, but of composing it in such a way that it is redistributed by third parties (“Composing for Recomposition”). Rhetorical velocity, then, is a strategic way of anticipating the movement––and possible rapid appropriation––of a text after its initial delivery. Appropriation is a concept that Ridolfo suggests but does not fully advance as an affective move, or a concept imbued with one affect or another.

In Ridolfo, David Sheridan, and Anthony Michel’s text The Available Means of Persuasion:

Mapping a Theory and Pedagogy of Multimodal Public Rhetoric, the authors delineate the cultural positions of alphabetic and visual texts, one distinction being that visual rhetoric is emotional, whereas the alphabetic is intellectual (42). Showing the emotional work of combining and circulating alphabetic and visual rhetoric, Ridolfo recalls an activist group concerned with sweatshop conditions (86). The group was responsible for a dancing protest demonstration at

Michigan State University. As a group member, Ridolfo composed a press release and circulated it to Michigan newspapers, hoping for “positive appropriation” via “favorable news coverage”

(90) of the group’s press release and flash dance that followed in an MSU admin building.

Positive, in a sense, means emotions that do not run counter to that of the student protest group.

The group saw coverage in news media, got wider attention on their efforts in the anti-sweatshop movement, and, in the end, seemed happy about the multimodal effort.

Furthermore, Ridolfo et. al cite an example of “negative appropriation” by the magazine

Newsweek. David Hume Kennerly’s photograph of Dick Cheney at a family dinner was appropriated into a cover image of Cheney, sans family, knifing a bloody steak. Kennerly, as cited in Ridolfo et. al’s book, thought Newsweek framed Cheney as “sinister, macabre, or even evil,” decontextualizing the seemingly innocuous nature of dinner with family (95). The example demonstrates that visual texts produced for public consumption can take on new lives and give way to unwanted emotional resonance, especially if taken on by an organization or rhetor with a different ideological frame. The example suggests that Newsweek, with its wide circulation, intensified negative emotions toward Cheney.

However, unlike Ridolfo and his co-authors, scholars such as Laurie Gries and Sean

Morey go beyond mere suggestions of affective and emotional consequences. As Gries writes in

Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetorics, human and nonhuman actors contribute to the Obamicon movement and to its affective circulation. For Gries, affect accounts for “energy transfer and sense appeals that are material, autonomous, and dynamic that register in bodily experience before cognition takes place” (176). Affect, in other words, is pre- linguistic. Gries’ definition of affect coincides with her principle of “virality,” or when things

“propagate affective desires that induce unconscious collective identifications and unconscious imitative feelings, thoughts and desires” (130). Put differently, her view of affect accounts for ways in which texts––such as the Obama Hope––resonate with and move publics to action, even if publics don’t quite have words to describe their feelings behind a transformation.

The aforementioned scholars and their investigations are indicative of studies of digital production and delivery. Numerous studies have built on Ridolfo’s and Gries’ texts in efforts to augment delivery’s––and thus, circulation’s––presence in studies of digital production (see

Edwards, Silvestro, Stedman). Yet few have drawn on affect theory to account for, in Edbauer

Rice’s words, “shocked, angry, delighted, and feeling-full bodies” that accompany a digital production (“Metaphysical Graffiti” 133). The same goes for several studies outside the composing practices and canons under study, as I discuss in the next subsection.

Moving Self-Studies

In composing this review of scholarship, I recognize a number of scholarly texts that do not fit neatly within process and rhetorical theory research. I treat this brief sub-section, then, as a space to discuss process narratives, reflections, and multimodal designs on digital media production, again leaving doors open to a more affectively centered intervention in rhetoric and composition research. Such studies were useful to me as I sought to address the absent presence of emotion in digital media scholarship.

In 2007, Kairos editors Madeline Sorapure and Karl Stolley introduced the “Inventio” section of the journal. “Inventio” webtexts take readers inside the processes and rhetorical work of scholars composing digital media texts. One example is VanKooten’s video and webtext referenced at the beginning of this chapter; it is through “Inventio” that we see VanKooten’s thinking about her video, how much time she spent on it, what emotions she worked through and with, how it enacted the idea of “chora.” In a sense,”Inventio” authors let their guard down when they compose for this section. As Sorapure and Stolley, explain:

Inventio authors can also choose to bring us into their production studios, describing not

just the “how” of their digital production work, but the important “why” of the rhetoric

behind these production choices, including the software they decide to use, visual and

interface design choices, uses of different kinds of media elements (text, sound, image,

video). (“Introducing Inventio”)

Since 2007, Kairos has published 12 webtexts in the “Inventio” section, which means it is the least featured section of the journal. Authors discuss anything from successes and failures with equipment and software, to thoughts of what they would do upon another revision. And they often do this with their bodies and voices on screen. In a webtext on the constraints of

PowerPoint, for example, David M. Sheridan presents a video that situates his animated avatar in a dreamland amidst the Microsoft slideware. Over a jazzy soundtrack, warped and colorful shapes give way to a house, though not exactly in the way Sheridan imagines. In the accompanying commentary, Sheridan notes that the video he presented to his digital composing class offered lessons in play, experimentation, and control in relation to invention. “Our storehouses of words are always threatening to dissolve into nonsense; pie charts will turn into

butterflies and fly away. It can be frustrating at times, but also fun in its own way” (“Click to

Add Ideas”; emphasis mine).

Process narratives on digital media productions, like VanKooten and Sheridan’s, are spaces for emotioned reflections. Emotions are the social glue between composers and their compositional objects and partners. By paying attention to emotional words and subtle emotional phrases in narratives and process reflections, we can locate what enables and constrains composers––what helps them get work done or turns them away from an idea, project, an approach. Take another example, this time from Jennifer Sheppard’s recollection of a science- based website project, published in a 2009 Computers and Composition article. Sheppard admits she had trouble translating what ecologists wanted on the web pages and managing conflicts with stakeholders and school resources. “More astonishing and disheartening to me, though, was the fact that the lab administrator for this school had set up the network to prevent students (or any unauthorized person) from downloading and installing anything on the machines, including plug- ins” (126; emphasis mine). Emotional language heightens her––and our––attunement to the administrator as well as the equipment and students in question. In other words, she has put into language an affective encounter that manifested along the way to a completed production (e.g., website).

Encounters like Sheppard’s are detailed in other issues of Computers and Composition

(see Bray; Skains) and other digital sections of Kairos as well as Composition and Composition

Digital Press (see Berry et al.’s Provocations). As a graduate student, I’m drawn to a collaborative webtext by Danielle Nicole DeVoss and graduate students from the University of

Louisville. Under the “Praxis” section of Kairos, “On Multimodal Composing” takes viewers inside the authors’ composing processes and habits, including the tools, embodiments and human

partners necessary in their digital (home)work. One vignette depicts a student who works through and with her chronic inflammation and pain (Ray), while another emphasizes the liberating nature of “black noise” that surrounds her composing practices (Echols). The group contends that “writing is sedimented and intersected by life experiences occurring during our composing,” and that “the body has demands; the body interrupts, intervenes, processes, digests, and more.” Life experiences, bodily demands and movements––previous research has told us that affects and feelings are embedded in these activities (see Micciche; Kirtley). If life experiences, for example, imbue a digital media production, then so too do feelings that stem from such life experiences. This is one idea I hope to make more visible.

An Affective Intermezzo

I treat this section as an intermezzo between my review of studies of digital media production and rhetorical theory, and digital media and affect theory. Indeed, my theoretical framework, driven by theorists such as McLeod, Micciche, Rice and Shousse, helped me expose gaps, fissures and opportunities in rhetorical studies of digital production and processes. In table

3, I connect writing and emotion studies to those of digital media and rhetorical theory. I build on table 2 presented in my opening chapter.

Table 3

Another Synthesis of Affect Theories across Disciplines

Category Affect Feeling Emotion Terms • Sensation • Embodied • Public • Value sensations • Socio-cultural • Intensity • Bodily and • Sticky • Energy mentally • Swirling • A gateway to processed • Signals affects and feelings and • Pain feelings emotional • Pleasure expressions • Affect put into language

Key thinkers Brennan, Massumi, Brand, McLeod, Aristotle, Ahmed, Rice, Stewart Murray, Shousse Micciche, Rickert Rhetorical “Because the body-of- “Feelings, in other “We should see that music Commentary sensation is always words, can be thought of and emotion are connected stubbornly present in as part of an emotional through their emergence scenes of writing, there experience, but not within an ambient can be no affectless synonymous with that situation, conceived compositions” (Rice experience” (McLeod ecologically and materially 133) 97) as well as socially” (Rickert 148) Enriches Anderson, Golson, DeVoss et al. Sheridan, Faris and Moore, Mason, work by Kolosseus Van Kooten Sheppard

However, presenting table 3, I note here that previous theories and studies of writing and emotion have elided digital media. Micciche, Rice and others have largely paid attention to non- digital contexts in which emotions accumulate and swirl. Minds, bodies, rooms, book acknowledgements, stickers––affects, feelings, and emotion subsume all. But what about affects in relation to computers and digital environments?

As I note in an above section of this chapter, Murray, Laflen and Fiorenza; Morey, and

Campbell are among recent scholars who have drawn on theories of emotion to elucidate studies of digital production. For Laflen and Fiorzenza, writing teachers ought to become more attuned to ways in which tools, such as discussion forums and emoticons, transmit and cultivate emotions (307)––a swirl of negative and positive connotations and (de)attachments in which authors find themselves entangled. For Campbell’s research on prisoners, digital empathy arises between researcher and audio software. Like Ratcliffe’s “rhetorical listening,” it is “the close and intimate act of production—making—which offers a literal space for not only hearing the voices of the Other but also picturing and imagining a ‘response’ to alterity.” Laflen and Fiorzenza, along with Campbell, underscore the sensuous and emotional encounters that accompany digital productions. They also echo Murray’s concerns over the mind-body and reason-affective splits

that have troubled our field for decades. For Murray, non-discursive rhetoric ought to acknowledge that “reason and affectivity are not inimical to one another … emotions make up what are often labeled as “cool” or “rational” affective states—intellectual interest or excitement, motivation, and concentration or attention are just three examples” (104). I take this to mean that for authors, emotions are always already present in relation to their digital production practices.

Put differently, if reason and affectivity are not inimical to one another, then digital arguments swirl with embodied sensations and emotional expressions. Gries’ theory of virality supports this conditional observation, as does Morey’s contention that a delivery is an extension of the affective body, “even when that body becomes technologized through ink and paper or electricity and silicon” (101). Feelings, that is, are transient yet significant to rhetorical action.

Interdisciplinary Affects

As mentioned in previous sections, rhetoric and composition has a long history of emotional inquiries, and it also has a long history of eliding emotion theory in relation to studies of digital media production. This section looks to promising studies outside rhetoric and composition, drawing from communication, cultural, and media studies. I suggest that rhetoric and composition’s emotional frameworks (or lack thereof) can be enriched by related disciplines that study emotions and affects in digital spaces (Dean; Gregg; Papacharissi).

In social contexts like Twitter, affect, with its intensities, moves us to respond with emotion, which feeds back into such intensities. This is Papacharissi’s line of thinking in

Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics. Her recent work examines the circulation of affect on Twitter in response to political unrest and interventions. From the Arab Spring to the

Occupy movement, Twitter has served as a platform for circulating affect and sticking emotions to textual and visual production, generating what Papacharissi calls “affective publics.” She

argues that journalists have resources, a global reach and objective news values, but everyday citizens who compose on Twitter have the freedom to transmit anger, shock, fear, etc. When I consider my former work as a journalist, what’s interesting to me is that CNN tends to use ground-level composers in its reportage––one form being its tendency to “retweet” or recast more affective tweets by citizens. In a sense, through Twitter, citizens who are not tied to news values can transmit sentiments on a global scale, and those sentiments––or emotions––continue to intensify when they see response and uptake from publics, whether news reporters or concerned parties. Intensification leads to what Papacharissi calls affect’s ambient streams, or affective ambience, a kind of always-on flow of affect and emotions across social media like

Twitter. “[T]his ambience is essential in providing constant updates, even when not much is happening or other media are not covering the story” (130). She suggests that such an ambience doesn’t go away when we turn off our screens; rather, affective texts and their publics continue moving, evolving, subsiding, intensifying. From a global view, Papacharissi’s book is important in examining the power of affect in relation to Twitter and political change that follows.

Papacharissi’s investigation of affective circulation illuminates a view of emotion brought forth by Melissa Gregg’s “On Friday Night Drinks: Workplace Affects in the Age of the

Cubicle.” Gregg hones in on the emotional work of the main character, Claire Fisher, in the now- defunct show Six Feet Under, as well as a website that features office Post-It Notes. A workplace has social conventions and rules of engagement. As Gregg shows, workplaces that privilege positive affect(s)––”serve with a smile”––can run counter to the emotions of workers. Gregg describes Claire’s emotional work that unfolds in a bathroom stall as well as among cubicle- ridden colleagues, positing that we see a breakdown of her “professional cool” demanded by the workplace. Gregg uses the case of Claire to position analyses of online and analog

communication that reinforce and circumvent the positivity reinforced by workplaces. Her primary example includes emails and later Post-It Notes remediated on a website. In the genre of email writing, a primary genre of the workplace writ large, “The smiley face (or the signature kiss [x] among women) is a temporary resolution as much as it is an index of the problem of conveying affect through the screen” (254). Elsewhere in the office, anonymous Post-It Notes allow affects to proliferate without “local criticism or other embarrassing displays of affect that face-to-face confrontation might threaten” (258). I should say at this point that I read Gregg’s

“affect” as emotion, socially performed and located across the office. Without a doubt, one Post-

It note that reads “PELASE [sic] DON’T LET ME CATCH YOU STARVING MY CHILD

(UNBORN OR NOT) BY TASTING, EATING, OR STEALING MY FOOD” (258) stems from an emotional center: that of anger.

Beyond Affective Publics and The Affect Theory Reader, new inquiries into digital affects continue to surface. In 2015, the journal Fibreculture released the special issue “Apps and

Affect,” in which the editors asked, “If apps are micro-programs residing by the hundreds and thousands on cell-phones, mobile-devices and tablets, and affects are corporeal excitements (and depressions) running beneath and beyond cognition, what is the relation of apps to affects?” (2).

The 2017 book collection Networked Affect offers a range of theories and studies about intensity, sensation, and value––three key terms that, as the editors claim, encompass affect theory.

Susanna Paasonen examines online debates and their affective intensities, while Jennifer Pybus looks to Facebook as an archive of feeling. Jodi Dean offers a promising theory about the movement of affect between bodies and digital media. As Dean argues,

Affective networks express/are the expression of the circulatory movement of drive—the

repeated making, uploading, sampling, and decomposition occurring as movement on the

Internet doubles itself, becoming itself and its record of trace. (98)

In varying respects, the works I present here, from Papacharissi to Dean, address writing:

Emotions shape, course through, intensify and subside in the production and circulation of public compositions across spaces, whether Twitter or a webpage. Twitter users aim to create change by reporting discontent for political powers; workers try to manage their emotions by moving to spaces (e.g., the bathroom stall, the bar) and leaving notes, which are then reposted on a website for public view. My review of such scholarship, at the very least, further underscores the transitory nature of emotion––again, socially performed and transmitted across digital spaces.

We need more of this work in our field––a more explicit mixing of rhetorical theory and affect theory in order to study digital media production from an author’s perspective.

Situating Feelings in Digital Media Production Research

In this chapter, I have focused on digital media production studies in rhetoric and composition, later drawing on writing and emotion theories as well as interdisciplinary approaches to affect and digital media. My aim is to partner previous studies and make a case for investigating authors’ composing and rhetorical practices, including the affective relations they cultivate with and through digital media tools and various entities. Thus, I leave this chapter with three important takeaways and discuss their use in my own research.

1) Studies of digital media production are ripe with acknowledgements of negative and positive feelings and various embodied sensations that impinged on an author and said production.

When someone says they suffered from “techno-angst” (Mason) or that they “laughed, and got a little choked up” (VanKooten), humans and nonhumans are contributing to those

feelings. The acknowledgements and emotional language in works by Mason, Sheppard,

Sheridan and others are only scratching the surface of a deep investigation into the affects that pulse through a digital media production. I contend there is more to be learned when Sheppard says she is “disheartened” and when Sheridan finds threats among his digital media tools.

Looking deep between their lines might tell us even more about Sheppard’s and Sheridan’s relationships––with tools, peers, and beyond.

2) Furthermore, rhetoric and composition scholars who study digital media have hardly worked with theories of emotion to amplify felt experiences in relation to a production.

Ancient rhetorical canons have been redefined and extended; rather than redefine them again, I want to enliven them with a rhetorical-affective theoretical framework. We don’t exactly have Doing Emotion in Digital Writing Spaces or Notes on the Digital Heart, but we do have existing frameworks to make those inquiries if we ever choose to do so. Thus, in order to pursue such an inquiry, I’m inserting my research between two long-standing categories of scholarship–

–computers and writing, and writing and emotion. I see mutual benefit, as emotion is amplified in one; digital media, the other.

3) Lastly, I acknowledge that Morey, Murray and Campbell in addition to Dean and Gregg are among scholars who are making emotion visible in digital media studies.

Unlike their research, my target population is authors who compose digital media scholarship. Finding an intervention among the aforementioned group, my research aims to make a significant contribution to production studies because it exposes the often-unacknowledged practices and “affective charges” and “jolts”––for example, the anxiety of delivering an experimental argument, the turmoil that comes with editorial feedback––that writers work through as they draft digital media scholarship. I am bringing behind-the-scenes work to the

forefront by conducting case studies of writers. Put differently, making use of previous studies and theories of rhetoric and affect positions me to examine extents to which feeling courses through that behind-the-scenes work, whether at the invention, arrangement, or delivery stages of what I later call a rhetorical-affective workflow.

Chapter Three

Studying Digital Media Practices and Feelings

Rich: In the process of making a digital media text and responding to reviewer letters,

what parts of those letters jump out in your mind?

Henry: I wish the positive stuff jumped out but it’s always of course the negative things,

the things you didn’t like. They did say nice things too, I swear. But the things that jump

out were a sense of disorganization. And a sense that it was too long. And both things, the

two things together were really interesting to me. The original version that I turned in had

this table of contents that looked kind of like a word cloud where there were these little

sub clouds. It was really, really, to me, well-structured, but there was a lot of structure to

it. Maybe overly structured. (Henry)

In the previous chapter, I demonstrated the absent-presence of feelings in studies of digital media production. My intervention emerged by demonstrating the affective work of rhetorical studies, placing scholars of digital rhetoric in conversation with scholars of digital affects. With my invention articulated, this chapter addresses a methodology that helped me answer my primary research question: for authors, what is the relationship between digital media practices and feelings? I studied and analyzed stories of digital media production by humanities and rhetoric and composition scholars. In brief, working toward case studies, I recruited participants who have published digital media texts in the last three years (since January 2015). I asked authors to discuss their digital composing experiences and feelings related to a project. In order to capture the rhetorical complexities and affective, dynamic surround of authors who composed digital media texts, mixed methods were necessary for my research. A confluence of methods from journalism, participatory rhetoric and literacy studies, and emotion studies

positioned me to interview authors, take stock of their composing practices (e.g., sharing screen recordings and processing artifacts), and co-review data generated from interviews and observations (i.e., participants were encouraged to review transcripts and respond). Mixed methods were ideal because they enabled me to seek out multiple data sources and integrate audio and visual evidence into subsequent chapters.

In terms of limitations, which I address later in this chapter, I realize any interview with a composer has the potential to invite performed, artificial, and unreliable responses in terms of composing practices and feelings––especially if the authors’ data is not confidential and composed in hindsight. I address those concerns by re-articulating the value of stories and multimodal, participant-reviewed data, which together provide clues and insights into composing practices that are useful for digital media production.

Methodologies

Journalism Methodologies

For my qualitative study, I started by revisiting journalistic ethical standards and methods that stemmed from my past work as a full-time reporter and freelance writer. When I was a reporter, I write about a range of topics––from city council policies and bar menus, to video games and music festivals.10 When I left a newspaper for graduate school, I freelanced for magazines, and I covered writing technologies and authors of fiction, comics, and multimedia. I interviewed and wrote features on acclaimed authors such as George R.R. Martin and Chuck

Palahniuk, and more recently wrote stories of independent comics creators such as Nidhi

Chanani and Katie O’Neill who experiment with webcomics and address gender issues (see

Shivener, “BookExpo 2017: Graphic Novels Heat Up at Javits”). Even though newspaper and

10 I still remember, almost feel, the searing concrete and constant roar of Austin in 2007, when the Cincinnati Enquirer sent me to the South by Southwest Music Festival.

magazine work has all but faded into my professional background, I am still energized by interviewing authors and conveying their stories, ethically, to larger audiences who might empathize with or emulate the authors. As an author who has been working on a book series for more than 20 years, Martin admitted to me his struggle with composing a single page in a day while he answered endless interview requests, attended media events, and encountered demands and pressures from fans about his next book (Shivener, “George R.R. Martin at the Top of His

Game”). Elsewhere, Chanani explained that her coming-of-age graphic novel Pashmina emerged from her testy relationship with her mother. In our interviews, Martin and Chanani acknowledged the pains and pleasures of composing––whether that pain or pleasure arose from relationships with audiences, tools, or family members.

For my qualitative study, journalistic reporting and multimedia tools were critical. Ten years ago I learned how to use microphones, video recorders, image-editing programs, cloud documents, HTML code, and blogging platforms. These tools are commonplace in today’s digital and online news outlets, for which multimedia stories are increasingly common. Multimedia tools helped me produce information-rich case studies for this project. When composing stories and using multimedia tools, today’s journalists are “charged with the responsibility … to publish and publicize their work across their networks (as well as to enrich their stories with features such as maps, infographics, timelines, etc.)” (Beckett and Deuze 3). In keeping with that charge,

I began thinking about the following questions while designing my study:

• Who is composing digital texts and digital media scholarship? Who has composed work

in the last three to five years? Who do they collaborate with?

• What are the effects of digital composing on a writer’s print-bound practices?

• When did a writer start conceptualizing their digital text, and when was it delivered?

• Where is/did/does the writer compose their digital media work?

• Why do writers work with digital media? Why is digital media work [insert feeling]

for/to that writer?

• How might I represent their work through multimedia?

As I composed such questions and moved forward with my project, I tried to embody the

Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics. Presented as a guide and not an edict, the society encourages journalists to uphold ethical actions such as:

Take responsibility for the accuracy of their work. Verify information before releasing it.

Use original sources whenever possible.

Boldly tell the story of the diversity and magnitude of the human experience. Seek

sources whose voices we seldom hear.

Explain ethical choices and processes to audiences. Encourage a civil dialogue with the

public about journalistic practices, coverage and news content.

Be wary of sources offering information for favors or money; do not pay for access to

news. Identify content provided by outside sources, whether paid or not. (“SPJ Code of

Ethics”)

However, when designing my qualitative research and taking an ethical stance, questions of reciprocity nagged me. In many journalistic settings, when subjects agree to participate in an interview, they surrender their comments and information “on record,” the data of which can be used by the reporter and transposed for public display and circulation. Newspapers and magazines value fact-checking and copyediting, but they often place barriers between reporters and participants. They do not permit participants to review transcripts, quotes or story drafts that a reporter culls from an interview. The embargo between reporter and participants is a matter of

ethics (Beaujon; Wilder). This ethical stance raised two important questions for me. Who benefits when we tell stories? Who has the most at stake? By not allowing subjects to review data they generate with me, I am effectively, and perhaps affectively, asking participants to trust my reporting skills and editorial judgements––to trust that I reported with the utmost accuracy in drafts and final publication. In turn, I trust that an editor or graphic designer or web producer won’t sensationalize my words. But if they take a remark out of context, it reflects poorly on my reporting and the editorial team writ large. In newsrooms, moments like these have happened to me more than once, challenging my ethos and inviting me to reassess my reportage strategies.

Because my qualitative research is outside of journalistic contexts and editorial policies of news media, I addressed my ethical quandary by drawing on practitioner and participatory methodologies from rhetoric and composition. By involving participants in the review process of transcripts and story drafts, I am, in a way, upholding the SPJ’s recommended responsibility of responding “quickly to questions about accuracy, clarity and fairness.”

Participatory Rhetorical Methodologies

In rhetoric and composition studies of digital media, it is commonplace for researchers to engage in textual and discourse analyses from what some have more or less called a bird’s eye view (Isaacs and Knight; Feak and Swales), rarely engaging directly with participants or subjects. Researchers turn books over and over, and they collect surveys and rely on other instruments that allow for data gathering from a critical distance (see Gries, Palmeri and

McCorkle, and Denson) on “distant reading” methods). While such methods have proven useful for context building and data gathering with less intrusion, I departed from them by turning to researchers such as Jean Mason, Jim Ridolfo, Cynthia Selfe, and Gail Hawisher. They argue for studies that immerse a researcher in the communities and spaces of participants. For

“Hyperwriting: A New Process Model,” Mason drew from her network of digital media artists and writers, studying the hypertextual and rhetorical activities of seven participants (Mason,

“The Hyperwriters”). Mason’s approach is similar to Ridolfo’s “practitioner stories.” Presenting a case study of the rhetorical delivery and circulating physical and digital messages of an activist group to which he belonged, Ridolfo explains that practitioner stories, which emerge from interviews and observations, bring us closer to a rhetor’s “role and rhetorical intentions,” including intended audiences. Ridolfo contends that “… we cannot rely on merely studying the location of texts at different points in time (movement and speed) as a means to understand delivery in the twenty-first century. The missing element, a rhetor’s own perspective on her strategy, needs to be at the forefront of our delivery research” (127; emphasis mine). Practitioner stories create more space for voices other than the researchers, enriching case studies.

Through a similar lens, Selfe and Hawisher have taken a feminist methodological approach to studying the digital literacies of marginalized and transnational composers. They too value immersion, interviews, artifacts and follow-up methods that lead to an information-rich case of a composer. Selfe and Hawisher have even augmented the roles of participants by offering them co-authoring roles. To the researchers, this reciprocity is a feminist approach to sense-making. As they explain:

Such feminist understandings of the interview-based work in which we were engaged

encouraged us to leave behind many of our more structured, interviewer-directed research

goals and to commit—philosophically and pragmatically—to more-interactive

exchanges, in which we encouraged participants not only to tell us stories but to help us

make sense of them. (Selfe and Hawisher, “Exceeding the Bounds of the Interview” 41)

Working on a dissertation, I admit here that I was not in a position to co-author this project with my participants. However, like Ridolfo and Selfe and Hawisher, I was in a position to connect with practitioners and allow room for follow-up, revisions and reinterpretations of data. Collaborative sense-making on digital media and feelings was critical for this project.

The philosophies driving Mason, Ridolfo and Selfe and Hawisher emerge from a larger and long-standing context of case study methodologies concerning authors’ composing processes and practices. From Emig and Flower and Hayes, to Pigg and Leon and Takayoshi, rhetorical scholars have studied composers in situ, meaning they record composers in action. In situ methods were outside of my scope because I was conducting retrospective interviews, but close study was not. In addition to the aforementioned researchers, I find Jody Shipka and Paul Prior’s collaborative research as well as Shipka’s research in Toward a Composition Made Whole useful as methodological models. As explained in “Chronotopic Laminations,” Shipka and Prior asked participants for sketches, artifacts, and interviews in order to capture the rich, distributed actors and activities that surround literate activity. They sought “a thick description of literate activity”

(185). For Composition Made Whole, Shipka relied on artifacts and what she called the

“Statement of Goals and Choices” to study students’ material, embodied, distributed processes related to her assignments (113). I’m over-simplifying their research methods here, but I have been impressed by their vivid portraits of composers and themes of composing. They demonstrate that qualitative research isn’t easy; it requires time, observation tools, and extra work by participants.

To be clear, I’m not discounting textual analysis as a research method. I’m simply saying that when I enact case study methodologies, I often come away with more energy and perspectives on rhetorical work. As a means to tapping into more energy and perspectives, then, I

composed the following questions to guide my case study research process in the vein of participatory rhetorical and literacy methodologies:

• Besides me, who else benefits from my qualitative research?

• What activities reflect the moods, feelings, energies of digital composing?

• When does a digital media production break down, fail, etc., and why?

• Where are authors most productive when they compose digital media texts?

• Why is digital media production challenging for rhetoric and composition scholars?

• How do people theorize the production, delivery and circulation of digital media texts--as

opposed to print?

Affective Methodologies

In the previous chapter, I discuss a range of scholars who have theorized relationships between writing and emotion. For the majority of such scholars, they have synthesized extant data to offer new insights about emotion’s role in writing scenes and environments. Edbauer

Rice, for example, traced the circulation of a slogan in Austin, archiving a range of material manifestations and variations, whereas Gregg looked to Six Feet Under and the website Passive-

Aggressive Notes to theorize location-based workplace affects. Elsewhere, Papacharrisi followed protests such as Occupy Wall Street on Twitter, drawing on network and content analysis methods to study 279,597 tweets (76). More recently, in the opening chapters of Acknowledging

Writing Partners, Micciche analyses a corpus of acknowledgements from academic books in rhetoric and composition and the humanities. Textual data collection and analysis put critical distance between the aforementioned researchers and their subjects. Distant research methods created in-roads to new theories of writing and emotion.

As I note earlier in this chapter, I value textual collection and analysis in the later stages of a research project, but I place more value on qualitative methods by which I interview and generate new data with participants. In a way, I’m following the footsteps of Mary Ann Cain, and

Faith Kurtyka, both of whom have studied writing and emotion, and sociology researchers such as Arlie Hochschild and Ada Wingfield. In “Moved by ‘Their’ Words,” Cain argues that “when research is constructed as a singular, neutral perspective through which the research subject is made visible, it perpetuates an opposition to the subject’s presumed partiality” (54). In her case, dance was a middle ground between participant and observer, a space for moving and understanding “ways emotions are socially constructed and regulated” (54). In other words, emotions are better understood through participatory research because they immerse the researcher in a social environment. Similarly, Faith Kurtyka contends that semi-structured interviews and subsequent “conversion narratives” can reveal good and bad feelings that imbue participants’ social lives before, during, and after they join a community (e.g., a sorority, a composition classroom). As she writes, “Narrating conversion allows the speaker to craft an engaging story from the tangled, messy, often difficult-to-articulate web of emotion that characterizes entering a new community” (114). In both Cain’s and Kurtyka’s research I see commitment to immersive data collection that makes effable what is often ineffable in composition scholarship. Critical emotion studies, as some call it, is contingent on qualitative methods and dynamic exchanges between participants and observers; the latter’s binary is often dissolved as participants and observers connect before, during and after data collection.

Connection, in fact, was important when Micciche formed a Facebook group with survey participants to study animal partners involved in writing scenes. In the group, “we catch glimpses of what ‘withness’ means to the participants and how those meanings might be linked to

acknowledgments: feelings of gratitude, indebtedness, emotional and physical reliance” (98). As explained in chapter four of Acknowledging Writing Partners, Micciche’s case studies of

Facebook participants illuminated her textual analyses of acknowledgements.

In an earlier passage, I note that case studies of composers is nothing new to rhetoric and composition research. The same holds true for case studies and empirical methodologies related to emotion, especially in the field of sociology. Hochschild’s theories of “emotion work” and

“feeling rules” for managed professionals (e.g. airline attendants are expected to smile) emerged from interviews, memo writing, and field notes. She writes the following about her methods:

“I watched recruits learning passenger handling and meal service in the mock cabin. I got

to know the trainers, who patiently explained their work to me. They were generous with

their time, on duty and off; one trainer invited me home to dinner, and several repeatedly

invited me to lunch” (14).

A contemporary of Hochschild’s sociological approaches, Wingfield deployed a snowball sample methodology to recruit and interview a range of people of color who suppressed emotions in workplaces for the sake of keeping their jobs or saving face (255). Wingfield writes that such a methodology was a gateway to understanding the “ways black workers negotiated emotional performances in the context of their work environments” and “cases when they had to produce emotions in themselves or other colleagues in order to work effectively” (255). What strikes me about the sociological approaches of Hochschild and Wingfield is their tenacity for unearthing fresh insights about emotions that are unacknowledged but felt by professionals.

Without sociological researchers who spent incredible amounts of time with subjects, we wouldn’t have information about background feelings that layer office and social lives.

Reading affectively oriented studies across disciplines, then, I also composed the following questions to guide my research process:

• Who feels comfortable composing digital media texts, and why?

• For authors, what emotions imbue digital media production?

• When do authors feel ready to start composing a digital text? Do they?

• Where do authors go for help if they are struggling with a digital text?

• Why do some authors find digital media scholarship difficult, terrifying, etc.?

• How do writers cope with the pains and pleasures of digital media?

Ultimately, when designing my study, I constructed a broader research question that would serve as an umbrella for numerous questions I pose above and in my interview guide for participants.

Piloting Methods

For this project, I wanted to interview and study authors of digital media texts, especially rhetoric and composition teachers and researchers who have composed webtexts for publications such as Kairos and Computers and Composition Online. As noted in an earlier chapter, this population of authors is underrepresented in studies of digital media practices and processes, even as publications in our field announce that “rhizomatic structures that disrupt traditional linear forms are welcome. Artful use of graphical interfaces and hypertext are also encouraged”

(Computers and Composition Online, “Submission Guidelines”). Thus, before I recruited rhetoric and composition authors, I piloted my study with two authors with whom I had prior connections, mainly as colleagues. Rhetorical and sociological research has demonstrated the effectiveness of “snowball sampling”––starting from a known network of potential participants and moving out to the unknown (see Mason; Wingfield). For me, beginning with colleagues

allowed me to test questions about digital media and feelings that would get at a participant’s embodied sensations, writing decisions, digital tools and the like.

For the interview guide, my intent was to move from questions about practices and processes to reflections on feelings (see Appendix A for my revised version). Pilot participant

Carla11 was instrumental in helping me refine a number of questions. In my initial question set, I asked her to answer the following about her work, a webtext on teaching with a social media platform:

• How did you prepare for this text?

• What tools and resources did you draw on to publish this text?

• As a result of this project, what have you learned about digital composing?

• What will you remember about the process of this text?

• What was interesting about this project?

• What was challenging?

• How would you characterize this experience emotionally?

Speaking as a peer in the field, Carla recognized that the above questions could follow a logic of invention to delivery. In a follow-up interview, she said that questions of “affect and feeling” were useful, but they might be challenging in an online setting. As she offered:

Your questions about emotions or feelings …. I struggled to answer those in writing

because I went through so many revisions and there were times when I was like, “fuck

this, I can’t do it” .... I feel like in a conversation I can build up to tell you about [feeling],

whereas in the questionnaire, it’s hard for me to say that because the questions didn’t

really lead me to be able to express [them]. I understand questions about emotion or

affect to gauge how they felt about [a production], but I don’t know, I guess with the

questionnaire … if you’re going to get the most earnest answers. Does that make sense?”

(Carla; emphasis added)

In response, I refined my practice and process questions by turning to Ridolfo’s questionnaire in his dissertation, Practice and Theory: A New Approach to Rhetorical Delivery.

Ridolfo’s questionnaire is useful because it encompasses introductions, collaborators, invention strategies, physicality, and most importantly for his scope, delivery. When I asked Ridolfo for permission to adapt his interview questions, I also asked if he would have done anything differently in his study of activists at Michigan State University. He responded as follows:

What I would probably have done in retrospect is more talk-aloud protocols with

particular digital media/campaign scenarios that involve, say, examples of their work on

the table, and participants talking out loud about those examples. I did that with some

projects after my dissertation, and I think that would have yielded some additional

questions. If you don’t know your participants especially well, I think that sort of prompt

can help get answers to the rest of your instrument. (Ridolfo)

Ridolfo’s correspondence further prompted me to seek out mixed methods similar to those of Selfe and Hawisher, as well as Prior and Shipka. I sensed that a participant interview alone could only go so far. For information-rich case studies, I needed to pair interview answers

(in any form) with screen recordings and production artifacts (e.g., drafts and final productions) whenever possible.

And what about getting to those earnest answers about affects and feelings? Following

Carla’s recommendation, I decided that I would structure my interview guide to move from invention to emotional questions––to build up from the practical to the seemingly abstract and ineffable. For pilot participant Jared, in fact, I ended his questionnaire with the following two

11 Pseudonym used.

questions. Jared was answering questions about a “big data” project that maps lynching in the twentieth century. His answers below are marked with “X.”

How would you describe your composing experience in affective terms? Check all

applicable terms from the following list or add your own. The following terms stem from

recent digital media texts and pilot participants of my study. The terms account for a

range of sensations and emotional language. At the end is a textbox if you wish to include

terms and the like not listed here.

• Amazing

• X Ambiguity

• Anger

• Angst

• X Anxiety

• X Astonishing

• Calmness

• Choked up

• X Confidence

• Discomfort

• X Disheartening

• Enchanting

• X Fear

• X Frustrating

• Happiness

• Harmony

• Intimidating

• Laughed

• Nostalgic

• Resentment

• X Resistance

• X Satisfying

• X Shame

• Surprise

• Terrifying

• Tough

• Threatening

• Trembling

• Wonder

• Worrisome

Looking back at your “Composition” responses, what parts or moments of this composing experience contributed to the affective states you listed?

X My responses span the range of emotions. My frustration usually came from technical difficulties. The nature of lynching and its reporting made me feel at times ashamed, disheartened, and fearful for a country that felt like it was slipping into dangerous territory with its actions and rhetoric. The violence and spectacle were often shocking.

Still, I also felt confident in the project’s goals, its potential to inform and inspire people.

(Jared)

As the above except shows, Jared was prompted to reflect on a range of emotions.

However, I felt that listing such a range of affects, feelings and emotions might be putting words in the mouths of people who have their own ideas and names for feelings. As Jared explained in a follow-up interview, “your questions were good and broad enough that I could insert some interesting ideas, and then you’ve got specific [questions and terms about feelings]. It made me just think about my range of emotions” (Jared).

In response, I elected to integrate a range of feeling-based questions, so that participants had multiple ways to talk about digital media and feelings. For authors, a retrospective narration of their practices, such as tool choices and re-design strategies that lead to a publication, might prompt them to characterize their experiences emotionally––even when they aren’t speaking directly to a question about emotion. Like Kurtyka, I would have to analyze those “engaging” stories for emotion talk, rather than rely on what authors say directly in response to questions about emotion. Furthermore, to be consistent with participatory methodologies, I would have to follow-up with authors so we could reach shared understandings about such practices and feelings.

Recruiting Authors

When I set out to recruit rhetoric and composition teachers and researchers who have composed digital media texts, I first assembled a list of articles and books published between

January 2015 and January 2018. My plan was to expand my scope if I ran into problems recruiting at least six authors to participate in my case studies. Upon first pass, my list encompassed publication titles, authors, and their respective URLs from two major journals and two publishing houses for digital books: Kairos, and Computers and Composition Online, and

Computers and Composition Digital Press, and the Digital Rhetoric Collaborative series through

University of Michigan Press. My initial list yielded more than 75 texts, including articles,

books, and chapters in edited collections. From there I filtered the list according to criteria based on previous digital media scholarship:

• The publication must be peer-reviewed; I wanted to know what feedback from reviewers shaped the final publication. Therefore, texts in Kairos’ editorially reviewed series “Disputatio” were excluded. • The publication must be a “webtext,” or appear in an online environment, using coding (e.g., HTML5) and take advantage of video, sound, and images. • If a publication had a “behind-the-scenes” discussion of an author’s processes and practices, it was excluded. For example, Kairos’ “Inventio” texts and Campbell et. al’s book Provocations through Computers and Composition Digital Press were excluded because they devote sections to process work (see Hidalgo’s “Family Archives and the Rhetoric of Loss” in Provocations). I wanted fresh commentary from authors who haven’t discussed process work about a project. • For edited collections, one publication and its respective author(s) was selected.

My filtered list resulted in 23 single-authored publications and 30 collaborative publications, or those with two or more authors. Following my IRB-approved recruitment protocol, I then searched and gathered the public email addresses of “single” authors as well as corresponding authors of collaborative publications12 (see Appendix B for a sample letter sent to single authors and Appendix C for multi-authored works). Upon receiving my recruitment emails, 32 authors expressed interest in my online questionnaire or a semi-structured interview:

12 for the questionnaire, and 20 for a semi-structured interview. As I detail in the next section, recruitment emails were followed by a three-stage research protocol.

Research Methods and Stages

12 Per IRB-approved protocol, I looked up the authors’ professional or university-affiliated webpages.

In order to capture a range of my potential participants’ practices and feelings about digital media production, mixed qualitative methods were necessary for my study. From January

2018 to August 2018, I moved through three stages of research.

Stage 1a: Questionnaire

When 12 authors expressed interested in participating through an online questionnaire, I emailed two items: a consent form, and a link to the online questionnaire designed to take no more than one hour to complete. (See Appendix A for the final form.) As of June 1, 2018, 10 participants completed questionnaires.

Stage 1b: Semi-structured Interviews

When 20 authors expressed interest in participating in a semi-structured interview, I scheduled in-person and online meetings in locations and times of their choosing. By semi- structured interviews, I mean that ahead of the meetings I emailed the aforementioned consent form and my interview questionnaire. I met participants on chat platforms such as Skype and

Google Hangout, and at professional gatherings such as the 2018 Conference on College

Composition and Communication, the Digital Media and Composition Institute (DMAC) at The

Ohio State University, and the Computers and Writing conference. As of June 1, 2018, 16 authors completed interviews, answering questions for one hour or more. On several occasions, our chats would begin in-person and develop organically, later unfolding through text messages,

Twitter and email. Comparing my interview data with that from my online questionnaire, I realized that I was getting richer data and developing better relations with my participants through interviews. We are, after all, peers in the field. While I was grateful for any and all questionnaire responses, I realized that the interviews were more in line with my project’s purpose––to gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between practices and feelings that

limit and drive digital media scholarship. Therefore, I decided to limit my case study participants to those who participated in interviews.

Stage 2: Artifacts of Production

For the 16 semi-structured interviews I conducted, I asked participants to share artifacts of their production. In some cases, artifacts couldn’t be recovered––they were buried deep in said participant’s overstuffed or defunct email inboxes and hard drives. Artifacts might be draft notes, emails from editors, review board letters, and version histories of their article or book. The more the better. Artifacts were significant to me because I could refer to them during our interview or during a follow-up. They were also significant in my goal to make practices and feelings visible to prospective authors of digital media scholarship. Readers need to read about the practices and pain, for example, but they also need to see both evolve into a final production.

As of July 1, 2018, 10 participants provided artifacts, thus completing this stage and fulfilling my goal of recruiting at least six participants for case studies.

Stage 3: Transcript Sharing and Follow-Up Commentary

This stage was significant to my research ethics. Ridolfo and Selfe and Hawisher have emphasized the importance of doing follow-up interviews and sharing transcripts with participants. In order to close the distance between researcher and participant, shared understanding of a topic was critical to their research, as it is mine. To that end, my participants were sent transcripts and questions we could address over email, phone or web chat, depending on their preference. I started with email lest I draw even more time away from the participants, especially because they were participating without pay. Part of the goal here was to make sure we were on the same page about feelings involved with their practices. All participants responded in some fashion, acknowledging the receipt of the transcript, approving it for review, making corrections, or participating in a follow-up interview by my deadline of August 1.

On the whole, the three-stage protocol helped me gather a range of data on practices and feelings, and it also helped me narrow down my participant pool to those who could provide several points of data (e.g., artifacts and follow-up commentary). However, the data generated by participants who responded to my online questionnaire and completed at least one interview were not lost to me. Their responses and comments were useful for contextualizing and adding gravity to the case studies featured in the next chapter.

Analyzing Practices and Emotions

When analyzing the reviewed transcripts of my participants, I treated “digital media practices” and “feelings” as the primary categories of analysis. In order to enliven practices and feelings that “stick to” such practices, I also created a category titled “materials.” Put together, the categories enriched the authors’ stories and case studies I would elucidate in this project.

“Digital media practices” was a flexible unit of analysis. Practices could encompass

“rhetoric, design, and code” (Ball and Eyman 114-117), by which I mean that I paid attention to authors’ discussions of anything from content writing, image and paragraph arrangement, to revision, HTML coding and file hosting. “Practices” included but were not limited to strategies and terms from Western rhetorical canons and technical communication, such as invention and accessibility.

For “feelings,” I started by accounting for a range of terms and phrases used by the authors, from “interesting” to “terrifying.” In addition, I paid most attention to what authors said in response to two questions in my interview guide: What parts of this process have been/were painful (physically, mentally)? Why? What parts were most pleasurable? Why?

I later folded terms and phrases into sub-categories by using Kurtyka’s coding of

“positive,” “negative,” and “conflicted” emotions discussed in conversation narratives of sorority

women (Kurtyka 107). Kurtyka, Micciche and others have drawn from Ahmed’s theories of positive and negative affective values that stick to and swirl with objects, bodies and signs (see

Ahmed “Happy Objects”). By and large, critical emotion studies researchers have paid attention to what and whom we assign affective values in lived experiences, namely writing projects and community building. To that end, I paid attention to the affective values that authors assign to practices and materials.

Designed to add context to my primary categories, my “material” category accounted for any human and non-human actors and actants involved in an author’s practices and associated feelings. That means I paid attention to discussions of the author’s body, fellow bodies (e.g., peers, editors), and specific composing tools. This category took cues from recent theories on the

“thickness” and “withness” of composing scenes and spaces (see Rule; Micciche; and Alvarez et. al). My assumption was––and continues to be––that digital media production is not immaterial but is lively with full-feeling bodies and entities that shape production. Materials writ large are entangled with practices and feelings. Put differently, practices are always already in relation with materials and feelings.

Table 4 depicts the way I arranged my categories on a coding sheet, in which I placed interview excerpts and wrote commentary under each category.

Table 4

Example of Coded Interview Transcript, Based on Kurtyka’s Coding Scheme

Interview Transcript Practices Feelings Materials The longer this process went on, the harder it Time, design was to keep going, so I was like, “it’s not Revision Worry, and content even relevant anymore after I put all this concern work work into it.” (negative) I hated [website builder Wix] for lots of Coding, Hate Wix, article reasons. The choices I made when I created it arrangement (negative) text, images,

the first time for the seminar paper…it’s a interface drag-and-drop platform. I basically had written the text and copied and pasted it in and then the template would only let you put pictures in certain places. When I started working with him I rewrote it … he was really good about … “think about Working this system think about it visually––what with a Good Kairos editor, each paragraph should do, what each section mentor, (positive) text should do, and that will help you make your revision points from a webtext ….” Most of the most of the feedback after I changed that new template, the feedback on Designing the design was ‘it’s fine, it’s better design, Stress, Template the webtext, you don’t need to focus as much on that, it’s Weird (from HTML 5 writing the the content,’ which is funny because my (conflicted) UP), reviewers content stress was the design not the content, so it’s weird that ended up being the focus.

My two primary categories of analysis––digital media practices and feelings––helped me achieve two goals: to provide a snapshot of common practices and feelings among all participants, and to help me focus on moments of affective values and intensities that I could elucidate in my case studies. What about a production was most painful for participants? And pleasurable? How might I show, through thick description, that pain and pleasure?

Limitations

There are three important limitations I discuss here. First, though my qualitative research was contingent on empirical and case study methodologies, it does not aim to produce generalizable insights about digital media practices and feelings. Similar to participants in

Ridolfo’s and Shipka and Prior’s research, my limited participant pool and methods afforded depth rather than breadth. I compare my pool and methods to satellite imagery. From a global view, I see everything and nothing at once, a flattened landscape of data: texts, practices and

feelings.13 This view often emerges from surveys and other instruments used for collecting data from dozens and hundreds of respondents. However, I prefer a ground-level view. When I zoom in and go deep with participants, even sampling their practices, the data becomes multidimensional, even felt.

Secondly, retrospective views––from practitioner’s stories to literacy narratives––are inherently reliant on the participants’ memories and saved material from a digital media article or book. Consider what one participant Jonas said when I asked what reviewers said about a drafted webtext:

It was something along the lines of, “why does this matter?” Bring this home, tell us what

the takeaway is…. Tie the pieces together into some final thing. That was more about

content. I don’t think I got a tremendous amount of pushback on the visual design or

structure. (Jonas)

This moment helped me realize the significance of artifact collection as a research method and stage. I could cross-reference review letters, for example, with a participant’s discussions of what they remember and how they felt about the review process. Put differently, review letters could add gravity to the feelings that authors discuss. However, for authors who composed digital media work in 2015 and 2016, artifacts were more difficult to recover. Most of my participants in the case studies, then, had composed a webtext within the last two years. I argue this participant pool makes my study kairotic and relevant to the latest forms of field publications and composing technologies.

Last but not least, my third limitation concerns the study of feeling. Kurtyka echoes previous concerns that emotions are difficult to study and code because they are socially

13 Recently, Gries as well as Palmeri and McCorkle have advocated for “distant reading” for purposes of synthesizing copious data.

constructed and subjectively understood; she elected to work with collaborators to reach agreements on emotional coding (see Kurtyka 106-107). Rather than work with collaborators, I attempted to remedy that difficulty by sharing transcripts and preliminary coding so participants understood what feelings I was recognizing in their work. The transcript and coding samples were places to find common ground, resolve misreadings, revise excerpts (e.g., typos and intentions) and add new thoughts on feelings as well as practices. For example, here is a follow- up comment from one participant:

Rich: My research question concerns the relationships between digital media practices

and feelings. You will notice that I underlined passages with green, yellow or red to code

for positive, mixed, and negative feelings that accompanied this project. How does this

coding strike you?

Participant: Coding seems fine. I added some places that I thought you could mark as

green/positive. I am not sure negative is the way to best describe my feelings about the

research, but that works fine enough. Beneficial, neutral, painstaking or difficult seems

more apt, but again I’m fine with it. (Emily)

The participant’s above commentary indicates the challenge of interpretation in qualitative research. Readers and participants won’t always agree––and the former is a given for anyone who has published an article or book. Though the above participant didn’t entirely agree with my coding, that participant had a chance to express their opinions before I wrote up my analyses. We’ve agreed on a transcript, and we’ve agreed to disagree without much contention. This interaction reflects the critical questions of what Endres et. al call rhetorical fieldwork. As they write about studying rhetorical encounters, “How do we come to experience, participate in, and represent everyday vernacular experiences? What are the power dynamics involved in analysis of the vernacular?” (511-524). My decision to share coded transcripts is a way to collaborate on representing an author’s experiences and, in effect, give that author more agency in the research process.

Revisiting Deep Embodiment

Finally, after collecting and analyzing data, I took one final research step that helped me compose deep case studies of authors of digital media. In what one reviewer called a post- qualitative move14, I revisited Micciche’s “deep embodiment” pedagogy, as discussed in her

2007 book Doing Emotion. Deep embodiment is speaking and performing through another body, an author’s text, to understand emotions that imbue said text (Micciche 54). Deep embodiment helped me recognize bodies and emotions entangled with code, design, and writing. It was a means to feeling my data, to recognizing that “…economies of feeling are always in circulation, moving among bodies and objects, and generating attachment as well as detachment” (Micciche

57). For Micciche, deep embodiment was a pedagogical exercise, but to me, it’s worthy of consideration as a follow-up research method that increases a researcher’s sensitivities toward a webtext. When I interviewed a digital illustrator and web designer, for example, he offered:

Drawing is one of those things … it’s pleasure and pain. I can get into a zone what I’m

drawing and I’m dead to the world. Julie [his wife] will come up into my studio and I’m

just like, “I don’t want to talk to you, I love you, but I don’t want to talk to you.” I don’t

want to be near my cats, and I don’t want any distractions because I’m just in the zone.

That happened Sunday night, going into Monday morning. I was doing a cartoon and I

was in the zone, and she’s like, “Why are you coming to bed at two o’clock in the

morning?” I was having so much fun.

14 For the conference Computers and Writing 2018, I proposed and later presented a presentation titled “Revisiting Deep Embodiment.” One reviewer of my proposal asked the following: “As an aside, has the presenter looked into post-qualitative research as a possible method to position this work as well? The work is already situated along accepted qualitative methods of course but would post-qualitative work be advantageous considering the materiality involved in developing digital scholarship?”

To understand the cartoonist’s zone, I felt compelled to compose this project in the twilight zone, in darkness, chill hip-hop music flowing in the air, my partner and toddler sound asleep upstairs. Deep embodiment meant I could get closer to feeling what the cartoonist participant felt, and that I could follow up about that experience. Since then, I’ve posed follow- up questions to the cartoonist. Among them: “Can you tell me more about what your “zone”—or your studio—looks like? What is that place closed off to everyone but you? Why does it keep you up at night?”

I could have asked the aforementioned questions regardless of replicating his approaches, but deep embodiment felt like an important move that also affected my credibility in the eyes of participants. And frankly, it was just interesting to me. By trying to replicate an author’s practices and feelings, I learned a great deal about digital media production. I came away with a deeper understanding of tools, locations, and “the stickiness of emotion—how emotion resides not in things or people but is produced between them” (Micciche 55). To update Micciche’s claims, I maintain that “deep embodiment (research) makes interpretation from the position of what a text makes me realize about myself (and participants) unsatisfying, leading instead toward what it is like to move around the world in a different body” (60; emphasis hers). By moving around, I felt more equipped to make claims that digital media productions are ripe with fear, anger, and various embodied sensations. I’m also more confident about composing rhizomatic structures and multimodal arguments similar to participants featured in the next chapter.

Chapter Four

Authors on Digital Media Practices and Feelings15

I want people to keep working on the digital production side. At the same time we need to be

acutely aware that we’re working under these very constrained, temporal constructions in the

academy that don’t give us room to play.

––Emily, webtext author

My chapters thus far have followed a pattern. Each starts with an epigraph from an interview with an author of a digital media text. The excerpts were conceptualized as previews of what I present here, an expansive chapter that comprises case studies of authors who have published digital media texts in the last three years. As my methodology chapter covers in detail,

I interviewed and solicited questionnaires from more than 20 authors with publications in peer- reviewed, digital journals such as Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy and

Computers and Composition Online. In our conversations, authors spoke about digital media practices––whether about collaborating with peers or revising an HTML file––and their feelings as they reflected on their respective publications. Reflecting the approaches of researchers such as Mason, Ridolfo, Rule, and Shipka and Prior, I begin this chapter with thick descriptions of six participants from my qualitative study. I then offer insights that emerged in conversation with the six participants, using additional respondents to illuminate common composing practices and feelings and productive differences among the participant pool. Overall, my goal is to foreground practices, pains and pleasures that authors described when discussing a project. My goal is a bit like showing the bonus features of a Blu-Ray disc, in which a production team’s raw material

(e.g., drafts, outtakes) and reflections are presented to viewers. In this chapter, my analyses are

woven with participant commentary and narrative bits to offer portraits of authors who compose with digital media.

Case Study Participants

In “Hyperwriting: A New Process Model,” Mason argues for “purposive sampling” in order to illuminate the range of authors’ practices and opinions on composing in digital and online environments. In her case studies, fiction writers, educators and visual artists discuss the challenges and affordances of non-linear writing, where “techno-angst,” “comfort” and

“frustration” swirl alongside code, images, and alphabetic writing. More than 10 years after her fascinating study, I follow her lead by describing six case studies that reflect a range of authors’ composing practices and feelings.16 From a graduate student and junior faculty member collaborating on a webtext, to a tenure-track professor authoring a digital book, I show ways in which digital composing moves and stops during the rhetorical-affective workflow, a concept I discuss in an explanatory schema section that follows the case studies.

Brooke

Brooke is a PhD candidate at a large Midwestern university and author of a recent webtext for Kairos. Her webtext examines the anonymous social media platform Yik-Yak in the writing classroom, drawing on a sample of students’ interactions with problematic posts on the platform. Brooke started writing about the experience in a seminar paper in 2014 and was later encouraged by a faculty member to compose it as a webtext. As she started planning, she noticed that “there’s all these affordances of a web platform that wouldn’t translate the same way in a

15 During the defense phase of this dissertation, media based on findings from Feeling Digital Composing were hosted on my site under the URL: richshivener.com/researchtalk. I chose not to embed media in the PDF manuscript lest it become an excessively large file. 16 I have assigned pseudonyms to my case study participants. While all participants permitted me to use their real names and reference their public texts, I followed Mason’s method of assigning pseudonyms in order to create some distance between readers and participants.

print. You can do screenshots but [print] doesn’t have the same feel or engagement as a digital text” (Brooke). At the time of composing her webtext, Brooke had little experience with HTML coding, so she drafted the webtext through Wix, a drag-and-drop platform that promises a user they develop a website in minutes. However, even to a novice web designer like Brooke, Wix was limiting to the extent that “the template would only let you put pictures in certain places”

(Brooke). This limitation meant that Brooke had few choices about ways to juxtapose multimedia and her textual paragraphs. To wit: there wasn’t much room for innovation. Brooke eventually abandoned the Wix version, then she converted her argument to a Creative Commons

HTML5 template provided for free by the site HTML5 Up! (AJ). In the spirit of Creative

Commons content, the site and template designer AJ17 only asks for an attribution. AJ’s service proved useful for Brooke, as she explained in an interview, during which we looked at her drafts.

I think about this [HTML5 Up! template] like “suggestions” rather than “I can only put

this box here,” or “the template has this image here,” but if I can figure out how to

manipulate the code, I can move that image, right? It’s a more open-ended template for

me. It’s still a template; I didn’t craft it from the beginning, but I’ve been able to change

it so much more. It’s just been a very different experience template-wise. (Brooke)

Before the webtext was published in a spring 2018 issue of Kairos, she received a “revise and resubmit” three times, meaning she received editor and reviewer feedback three times before it was accepted (with minor changes) for publication. Regrading Brooke’s webtext drafts, reviewers had little concern about the design of her webtext and more about the content, the argument she was making and the examples she was providing. A letter from reviewers on

September 2016 asks Brooke to do the following:

17 AJ is his preferred name, as seen on his website, Twitter, and beyond.

Tighten the focus on Yik Yak throughout and make the webtext’s main argument clearer.

The reviewers felt your webtext was exciting in its ambitiousness—it covers a lot of

ground and there are many compelling elements considered. However, this ambitiousness

means that the reviewers had a difficult time knowing what the main argument or thrust

of the entire webtext would be. (Brooke)

On the fourth draft, per Kairos’ editorial development, Brooke was assigned a mentor, in her case a senior editor with the journal. Emails, Facebook messages, and Google Hangouts between Brooke and the senior editor guided her revision process. Brooke developed new insights into arrangement and writing style when composing on a webpage, and she decided to draw on an ecological framework to explain what students were doing on Yik-Yak. She took her mentor’s advice seriously: Paragraphs don’t need to be long; they need to be concise. Don’t lose sight of the data and what the students were saying. “And that stuff seems really obvious but when you’ve been embroiled in this piece for four years, it’s really easy to lose sight of it; it’s really easy to get caught up in just addressing what the reviewers say” (Brooke; emphasis mine).

Fig. 1: Screenshots of Brooke’s first draft (left) and third drafts (right). Used with permission by the author.

For Brooke, the final result is a webtext comprised of several webpages with concise paragraphs, colorful icons, and fluid navigation. It was her first publication for the web, even though she has composed traditional print articles in the interim between her Wix draft in 2014 and the final version published by Kairos in January 2018. In a moment of reflection, as we discussed her recent publications, she talked again about composing for print versus an online format. “Trying to take something that you wrote linearly and making it so that people can navigate it, though not linearly, especially if you are talking about pedagogy, an assignment you taught, is really hard” (Brooke). Echoes of that sentiment appear in participant profiles that follow.

Grace and Eric

Grace is a recent graduate from a PhD composition and rhetoric program at a large

Midwestern university, and she is a frequent collaborator with Eric, an assistant professor of writing in a research-intensive university in the southern U.S. In 2017, the two pitched an article to the guest editors of a Computers and Composition special issue on technofeminism. Their abstract was rejected for the print version, but the guest editors invited them to compose a webtext for the special issue’s online component that would be published in Composition and

Composition Online. The two accepted the editors’ invitation, then initiated a DIY approach to hand designing and coding a webtext. Grace and Eric had little experience designing a site.18 In addition, the guest editors didn’t recommend any resources for composing a webtext, except for pointing to C&C guidelines for an effective webtext (“Submission Guidelines”). In response to

18 Eric admitted that his coding skills were limited to the background changes he made on his old MySpace homepage in the early 2000s.

the opportunity, they first wrote much of the textual content in Google Docs and during Hangout sessions because they worked remotely. In consultation with peers who had web design experience, Eric took the lead on designing and coding the webtext. Like Brooke’s case, the site

HTML 5 Up! proved useful because it provided templates of responsive, or platform adaptive, webpages.

As far as hosting, Eric used the site GitHub to host their full draft of the webtext. The landing page presents six windows, like a table of contents, and each window leads to lengthy scrolling pages that unpack their argument about technofeminist methodologies and platforms. It is a rather simple design, with an interface intended to guide the reader through each section replete with paragraphs and images. Still, it required considerable time, given that Eric learned

GitHub hosting procedures, vetted Creative Commons images, and wrote in HTML code through the open access program Brackets. From Grace’s perspective, “it was just intimidating to think about specifically submitting it to the online version because it would just be kind of making more work, you know?” (Grace). For Eric, questions loomed, as he said over our Google

Hangout interview, during which we look at an early draft before it was sent to editors.

[E]ven before we started doing the coding or thinking about what this is going to look

like, I wanted to talk to people who have done it before because I feel like even my

personal website is much different than a webtext. What does that look like, how do you

do that, how do you host it, and how do you share it with people? These were questions

that I had. We reached out to somebody who’s published in Kairos. That was a very

helpful first step, seeing what I need to download, and how I can go about it. I didn’t

even know how to view source code. This person really helped me out with very basic

stuff.

Like Brooke’s webtext, Grace and Eric’s draft webtext was critiqued more for its alphabetic content than its design. In a review letter to Grace and Eric, editors call on the authors to draw more explicitly on technofeminism in their discussion of platform rhetorics, and to

“revise the examples so they resonate very clearly and directly with claims made in the three preface sections” (Grace). Regarding design, the editors close by suggesting they parse examples into two separate webpages “rather than including the extensive examples discussion on one page alone with the opening discussion of the tenets” (Grace). In other words, the editors’ review letter shows that arrangement and page length are two concerns in the design stage of this project.

Fig. 2: Grace and Eric’s first draft (left) and second draft (right) of a webtext for Computers and

Composition Online. The first draft outlines the “tenets” on long scrolling pages, whereas the second draft places tenets such as “social inequalities” and “labor” on separate webpages.

The revised webtext was submitted on May 15, 2018, again hosted through Eric’s GitHub account. At the time of composing this chapter, Grace and Eric were awaiting copyediting requests. The two discussed their webtext with peers who contributed webtexts to the collection.

As Grace remembered, “they were talking about how their feedback from editors was mainly about design and I felt like ours was kind of opposite” (Grace). Still, she was curious about why their webtext’s design was approved. “I want to know more from the editors about what they’re looking for in terms of the functionality of the webtext and the design of it” (Grace).

Henry

Henry is an assistant professor of English at a southwestern university, where he teaches courses on digital rhetoric and new media writing. Henry joins a long list of authors who have published online and born-digital books in the last 15 years through our field venues, and his just might be the most experimental. In 2017, University of Michigan Press’s Digital Rhetoric

Collaborative book series published his born-digital book. The book project stretches back to his dissertation that he defended more than five years ago, and since that defense and years that followed, Henry has transformed his dissertation into a rhizomatic digital book, complete with a video introduction, ink-based drawings and interactive pages flush with text and dissolving images. Henry (re-)composed much of his digital book’s paragraphs in Microsoft Word and designed the book’s interface in the website program Adobe Muse, which cuts down on “hard coding” pages and instead allows a designer to manipulate the front-end interface. The result? A project that comprises more than 50 networked pages, according to Henry’ reflections in his

Kairos “Inventio” webtext “Making Rhizcomics.” Integrating ideas of comics theorists such as

Scott McCloud and Thierry Groensteen as well as Jean Lyotard to argue for non-linear, symbolic composing, Henry acknowledged that his book pushes against normative composing and reading practices in relation to academic argumentation. In our interview, he said the argument of

Rhizcomics is not really contained in any individual page. “The argument exists between the

pages and the reader constructs the argument by reading the pages, often in an order that they created because the book encourages you to read the separate pages out of order” (Henry).

Challenging epistemological traditions in academic writing and production, Henry designed his digital book by focusing on feelings of surprise and disorientation. Throughout the book’s sections, readers can use the scroll bar to interact with objects; other times, images materialize and dissolve without a reader’s consent. As Henry told me, “There’s this nice feeling of embodiment as they get to play with the text. And then there are other moments where I try to wrestle control from the reader and really surprise them or make them feel like they’ve lost control in a way” (Henry). At the same time, he said, the primary shades of green that color the pages offer something “very tranquil” and “I wanted people to feel comfortable reading. The book should not be a traumatic reading experience just opening it up. It should feel like home. It should feel safe” (Henry).

Needless to say, like many digital projects, this wasn’t an easy project, let alone quickly produced. After graduation and a two-year stint as a visiting assistant professor at a research university, Henry came back to the project. He sustained interest in the project by rotating what he called distinct composing processes. “I found that I had some really nice systems where the work of coding, the work of writing, typing words into a page, and the work of drawing are really distinct processes. To be able to switch those modes was always a refreshment for me”

(Henry).

Henry’s process work, of course, preceded reviewer feedback and a range of technical issues that he encountered along the way. Reviewers found his table of contents and chapter orders confusing. As Henry recalled, “the reviewers said, ‘You know, this is really long, and it’s difficult to keep your organization in mind’, and I’m like, ‘I told you not to read it in order. I told

you to jump around. It’s meant to be a repository’” (Henry). In response, Henry recomposed his table of contents, numbering each section, and he composed a video––“a digital apologia”––for the introductory page (“Making Rhizcomics”). To his surprise, readers strayed from reading in a numbered order after he revised the table of contents.

And this was amazing. When I had all of these different systems to try and encourage

people to just read it out of order––‘here are some different places that you could try

things out and just move around’––people stuck to that linear system and just went next,

next, next, next, and they wouldn’t jump out of order when they were reading. (Henry)

Fig. 3: Henry’s introduction page, as published. The video embedded in the page was composed in response to reviewer feedback about navigating the book.

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Looking back on his digital book and the contradictory habits of his readers, Henry said he is “much more comfortable with composing non-linearly. Compose the section I’m passionate about now, and I can fill in the rest later. Whatever the thing is that I care about, let’s start from there” (Henry). This sentiment applies to speeches, print articles, and presentations. Even better,

Henry feels safe about pursuing more digital projects while going up for tenure and promotion.

In his words, his department does not “distinguish between digital and print scholarship in terms of academic value. We judge based on monograph, university press, peer review, scope … these kinds of things. These are the things we care about” (Henry). The next participant I discuss here has a similar support system at her university.

Helen

Helen is an assistant professor of English at a research-intensive university in the northeast. In 2017, Computers and Composition Digital Press released her digital book that comprises six video essays on feminist filmmaking. Like Henry, as well as many newly minted tenure-track professors, Helen transformed her dissertation into a book proposal. As she explained during our interview at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, her book proposal was first rejected by a publisher, and it was a wake-up call about her scholarly publishing.

They sent it out to reviewers and when it came back, and they rejected it. And they

rejected it because, [as one reviewer said], “I like it, but there’s not enough story.” And

the other reviewer said, “If you’re talking about video, it should be video.” So that

rejection showed up four days after I gave birth to my second son, and I freaked out

temporarily, licked my wounds for a while. And then my mentors, [three senior

professors], all came to my house actually to cheer me up and helped me think through

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and ways to get out of this. And by the time I was done talking to them, I decided they’re

right. Why am I doing this as text when it’s all about video. Shouldn’t it be a video?

(Helen)

There was another silver lining that emerged from that disheartening feedback. Helen spoke with two editors and Computers and Composition Digital Press. One Skype call and a sample video chapter later, she had the green light to compose a book of video essays. In the months that followed, Helen first wrote the transcripts of her six chapters. She wanted reviewers to approve the transcripts before she started recording voiceovers along with filming. Experience in film made her cautious about recording prior to reviewer feedback. As she told me during our conversation:

I knew that re-writing a video essay once you’ve recorded it is the most awful thing in the

world because your voice changes. So you can’t re-record those two sentences that you

need to re-record. You need to re-record the whole thing. And re-edit the whole thing, and

it’s like your whole soul dies when you have to do that. Because you’re looking at a

month out of your life that just went away. But if your thing has six chapters, then you’re

looking at six months out of your life that just went away. (Helen; emphasis mine)

What followed was a back-and-forth process behind the video essays, reviewers offering

“immensely generous” feedback and Helen responding accordingly, the process unfolding over several months. One reviewer said of a video draft that “the technical quality of this video is stronger than what was originally submitted for the previous review; indeed, it felt so professional and well-executed” (Helen). In addition, the reviewer was moved by the visual-aural juxtapositions, saying the following:

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As I listened to it, by the end, I was weeping a bit, in a good way, and then what sort of

jarred me out of this was the language of transition to the next chapter, which of course,

is the right thing to do in theory for a longitudinal project such as this, and especially in a

modality that might need such verbal/aural signposting. (Helen)

As the opening of this section indicates and the above reviewer commentary suggests,

Helen didn’t think of this project as painful, but “there were moments of frustration. One of the mics that I had for recording narration wasn’t great. And it added all these click [noises] and then

I had to work on the clicks. That was annoying” (Helen). She regards herself as an optimist, and

“the most profoundly pleasurable part is after I’m done with recording and editing narration–– which I hate doing––I get to add images to the narration. And it comes to life, and it becomes so beautiful. And it’s the joy of that––I can’t explain it” (Helen).

Fig. 4: Helen’s dissertation introduction (left) and opening video chapter in her digital book

(right). The key ideas in her dissertation made it to the book.

Add to that joy her “fabulous” feeling when people watch her productions and receive it well. Upon its release, her video book saw favorable reception in the field and at her university,

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winning the 2017 Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award and becoming the center of a feature article of faculty accomplishments at her university. There was a groundswell of support, a reason to keep finding pleasure in filmmaking. As we ended our interview, walking through her video essays, she summed up her approach like so:

I love to be behind the camera and see something and make it, and frame it, and use the

available light, and make something either beautiful or eerie or confounding, through this

little piece of equipment. And then I love to sit down and put it next to these other things

that have been filmed and create something that gets people to have feelings about

whatever it is, whatever story I’m trying to tell. (Helen)

Lane

Lane is an assistant professor who teaches professional writing and digital media at a large Midwestern university. While he has article-length publications under his belt, one of his most recent projects is a webtext co-authored with two senior scholars and published in enculturation’s sister series Intermezzo. Lane has considerable experience editing and working on the technical side of digital publishing houses, including Computers and Composition Digital

Press and Kairos. When Lane was a visiting assistant professor at another university, two senior scholars approached Lane about helping them compose a multimodal book based on an annotated white paper they were co-authoring. The PDF they sent to Lane “was pretty incredible, with all of these Adobe Acrobat annotations of possible mediated elements that could be added.

It was like a thing that they had bounced back and forth. ‘What if we put this here, and what if we put this there?’” (Lane). That is, the senior scholars’ dialogue in the margin was rich and interesting, and “I didn’t want the document just to be notes for Lane. It felt to me like that

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should be a central component of the text” (Lane). Put differently, Lane “was also caught up in the music of these two scholars playing point and counterpoint to each other” (Lane).

Thinking of the senior scholars and their sonic metaphor, Lane began prototyping frameworks for a digital monograph, using HTML and another programming framework,

Bootstrap. The three co-authors––of which Lane was one––agreed that a horizontal scrolling framework would reflect musical bars and overlapping conversations between three scholars.

However, the initial design didn’t quite work out, Lane said.

The more we started doing it, the more I thought, “Oh, this is really messy, and this really

feels like a slideshow.” We submitted a version like that for peer review, and it sort of

came back with that same feedback of, “This feels like a slideshow that you’ve tried to

wrangle into something else,” so I abandoned that, and just said, “I’m just going to make

it in HTML myself”. (Lane)

Fig. 5: The first (left) and second versions of Lane’s collaborative webtext that he co-authored with two senior scholars. Layered with textual paragraphs and multimodal elements, the pages

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contain ellipses that readers can click on to reveal the meta-commentary by the three co-authors

(see right).

In 2014, the collaborative webtext saw a complete overhaul. Lane layered vertical pages with images and video that illustrate their arguments about translinguality. He and the two senior scholars revised the webtext asynchronously, meaning they never met in person to collaborate on the document. Files were uploaded to Dropbox and reviewed by the team.19 As we spoke and reviewed the project, he remembered feeling overwhelmed in 2014, his first year as an assistant professor at a large university. “Although we started over with version 2.0, it was a really productive thing to do in my first semester as a faculty member, because I felt like I had my head in this project long enough to know what we were trying to do. It was just a matter of bringing it to life” (Lane). Its final life-form offers much to explore. Layered with textual paragraphs and multimodal elements, the webtext’s pages contain ellipses icons that readers can click on to reveal the meta-commentary by the three co-authors. Simply put, with an emphasis on marginal- as-scholarly-text, their collaborative piece is a rare example of a webtext that brings its behind- the-scene work to the fore, perhaps becoming a model for future scholars who are planning a digital production. For Lane,

It was a very, very special publication. I felt like I had the opportunity to collaborate with

two people whose work I really respected and I felt like I arrived at this interesting

moment where they’re both entering the latter parts of their careers and having this

conversation about the span of their work. (Lane)

But he acknowledged that the vision for a digital monograph or webtext doesn’t always become a reality. The more technical knowledge an author gains, the more they might want to

19 Lane remembers that he didn’t meet one senior scholar until a chance encounter on a shuttle to a conference venue. Still, he valued the time to collaborate as a junior faculty member.

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do, and the more work they might find themselves taking on. Still, Lane encourages less technically savvy authors to pursue multimodal projects. “It feels really good when you solve a problem and you make this thing that reflects how you’re thinking about the mediated potential of the message. And that to me is just tremendously satisfying” (Lane).

Emily

Emily is an assistant professor of rhetoric and communication at a large western university. In 2015, Utah State University Press published her book tracing the reception and circulation of an illustration depicting President Barack Obama, an investigation stretching back to her dissertation research several years prior. Adding gravity to her interests in the political subject and amplifying actor network theory as a valuable research method, Emily then composed a webtext for Kairos that features a number of data visualizations concerning the

Obama Hope illustration––also known as “Obamicon.” As she explained during an interview at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, this webtext was the result of a three-year endeavor, like composing three articles or another monograph. Emily first opted to code and link to a range of digital manifestations of Obamicon, coding more than 1,000 items for genre and location. She admitted, “The tagging and coding took a very long time. I was not trained to do this kind of empirical research, so I’ve had to teach myself how to tag and code and create databases and everything. I didn’t even know which software would be best to use”

(Emily).

She went on to describe it another way, this time in more affective and spatial terms:

I did it pretty much all at my desktop. I have a fantastic office, but still ... On the days I

code I can only code for 4 hours because then by the end of it I get very mad, stressed

out, and angry. I am worried that I can’t keep this kind of research up. And it’s like, if I

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have to only keep doing this for the rest of my life, I’m not gonna make it. I’m gonna

quit. (Emily)

After that exhaustive tagging and coding process, she was assisted by rhetoric and composition colleagues who specialize in data visualization, such as a spatiotemporal heat map that calls attention to hotbeds of Obamicon activity. “I also had to figure out how to visualize circulation and actor networks …. I also had to teach myself some software to create some of my own, such as the ‘actor network map’” (Emily).

Fig. 6: A screenshot of Emily’s webtext. Reviewers thought the first draft had too much text and a revision should take more advantage of digital design.

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Fig. 7: A screenshot of a map composed by Emily and colleagues.

When Emily submitted the webtext to Kairos, reviewers came back with comments about the design more than the findings. They wanted something different than a mirror image of her 2015 book. As she said in an interview, “The biggest critique was that our initial web design was it didn’t take enough advantage of a digital design. It looked too much like a book, and they really wanted me to match up the form and the concept. So [a colleague in rhetoric and composition] and I came up with the idea for building the design around the Obamicons, and then he designed the cool front page” (Emily). She added that “part of the difficulty was choosing what to include in terms of content. I did not want to simply repeat what I wrote in [her print book on a related topic], so I underdeveloped some parts of the webtext. But they were like, ‘You need to flesh this out’” (Emily). More specifically, one reviewer had this to say about Emily’s webtext:

The text of this project reads like a print media piece with observations at the end of each

section. The density of the text across the screen is problematic. I am teaching a grad

course in visual literacy, rhetoric, and design this term and just finished reading half of

White Space is Not Your Enemy. Great design book and a quick read. I encourage the

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author to pick it up and read the whole thing. Recommendation: There should not be

large chunks of text running the entire width of the screen. Columns would help, callouts

would help, and less material per page would help. More hypertextual design would be a

huge help both for modularization and readability. (Emily)

After making numerous changes to the design and content, Emily and her collaborators delivered the revised webtext to reviewers by July 1. Upon its publication in January 2017, she left with more certainty about the research project writ large. The project “provided verifications for some of the claims that I was making,” she told me. One map, for example, “helped me find connections between various people that I had no idea were socially connected and between various events that were more coordinated than I thought. So this map helped complicate the story that I told even in [her first book]” (Emily). As I discuss later, the pains of revising and finishing a webtext often lead to some pleasurable revelations about said project.

Findings Insights: Pains and Pleasures in the Rhetorical-Affective Workflow

In the previous section, I let the seven case study participants do most of the talking about their practices and feelings about digital media production, whether for Kairos or a notable publishing house such as the University of Michigan Press. We know about their challenges.

Their felt experiences. Their reflections. Their commentary, combined with my descriptions and visual evidence of their drafts and reviewer feedback, amount to findings that novice authors might attune themselves to as they conceptualize digital media projects. In other words, the evidence-based, interview-driven practitioner stories of digital media authors are practical, and perhaps pedagogical, for teacher-scholars in English Studies, rhetoric and composition, professional writing and beyond. This section builds on the six case studies by discussing insights that emerged from the case study participants as well as ancillary interviews and survey

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data I gathered in 2017 and 2018. Here I position the rhetorical-affective workflow as my explanatory schema and draw on participant data to discuss the most painful and pleasurable parts of a digital media production.

As I was envisioning ways of representing and explaining the insights from my case study participants who discussed digital media composing practices and feelings, I thought about a number of metaphors: a long journey across a treacherous but rewarding landscape, one with gateway and barriers; Dante’s seven circles of hell; removing and adding layers in a Photoshop project. While those metaphors helped my thinking, I ultimately landed on a term that is familiar to Kairos editors and rhetorical theorists: workflow.20 Workflow implies a sequence of events––a sequence of point A to point B, and maybe back again. This term is useful to me because work is an abstract way to define practices (e.g., I’m working on the design) and flow suggests that a project––and every thing and body involved in it––is always already in motion, whether that motion involves a forward or backward flow. As respondents explained their processes, I imagined a rhetorical workflow encompassing digital media practices (which are inherently rhetorical) and affective values that move a project forward and backward. These practices and values flow into each other as a draft changes hands between authors and editors, moves to cloud storage, and becomes a permanent fixture on a website. In rhetorical terms, a webtext draft is delivered to editors and reviewers, whose commentary flows back into an author’s invention and arrangement strategies, among many other practices and events. For instance, Kairos’ copyediting workflow involves six stages, moving from design and accessibility checking all the way to a final proofread by the lead editors. In many cases, editors write query letters that ask

20 According to Ball and Eyman, a Kairos webtext moves through an “editorial workflow” (see their article “Editorial Workflows for Multimedia-Rich Scholarship”). In “On Circulatory Encounters: The Case for Tactical Rhetorics,” Dustin Edwards argues that rhetors invent new content by working from the backflow of circulation.

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authors to review changes and make changes as needed (e.g., the author needs a transcript written for two of her videos). Based on my experience as a Kairos assistant editor, I can say that the copyediting workflow––among the larger workflow of digital media production––takes months to complete.

Workflow, in other words, helped me organize and see my participant data in a new light, to see what practices were most affectively charged as authors moved to and from new and final drafts of a project. Figure 8 represents the rhetorical-affective workflow as an explanatory schema for this section. Moving from invention to final delivery and featuring example practices from participants, the schema effectively organized my codes and helped me determine what practices were most painful for authors, and what practices were most pleasurable.

Rhetorical Invention Style and Initial Reception Final Delivery, terms arrangement Delivery Publication and Circulation Production Getting Drafting Sharing Revising Publishing terms started Researching Composing Reading Sharing the content reviewer final draft on (typing words feedback social media on webpages, (reject, accept, filming, revise and Example speaking) Sharing resubmit) practices Coding Coding and drafts with Addressing Explaining (described (qualitative) programming editors and editorial review work (to by (technical) reviewers (copyediting for colleagues and participants) (Dropbox, style, grammar, administrators) Discovering Designing GitHub) references, Teaching the site (images, technical text (e.g., to templates sounds, page requirements, graduate and layouts) and students) workable accessibility designs Collaboration

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Fig. 8: A depiction of a rhetorical-affective workflow of a digital media project. Authors spoke of reception and technical coding as the most painful; collaboration and distribution, the most pleasurable.

Notice that the rhetorical-affective workflow I present above does not list affective values. As suggested throughout this project, each practice is laden with affective values, as told by the participants. Affective commentary from participants, in other words, enlivened my study of authors’ digital media practices, calling my attention to pains and pleasures associated with invention, revision and the like. In the analyses that follow this section, pains, pleasures and terms of feelings surface from within the flow.

Reception Woes

According to participants, responding to reviewer feedback was a common practice in which negative feelings bloomed in the rhetorical-affective workflow, flowing back into drafting practices, such as writing and coding. During the drafting stage, authors write content, code webpages, design accessible interfaces and arrange media. Authors write the alphabetic content and serve as the article’s printer and temporary publisher when they host it on a server. In response, reviewers often have much more to say about a draft of a digital media production than an author might see in a feedback letter from a more traditional journal or publishing venue (e.g.,

Computers and Composition versus Computers and Composition Online). A number of participants spoke about lengthy review letters that cover the various elements of a web project.

Consider what Brooke said when she described reviewer feedback on her Kairos webtext in contrast to feedback she received on a submission to a community writing journal.

For my [community writing] piece it was shared [and the editor letter said,] “This is the

overall concern [based on reviewer feedback], and here’s my annotated version of your

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piece––fix it.” Whereas Kairos [reviewers discuss] design concerns, content concerns,

and how they play together. That’s so different to me, because when you’re rewriting the

content you have to think about how it’s gonna look on the page … especially with

Kairos that doesn’t necessarily want everything to be linear. (Brooke)

Of all participants, Brooke perhaps felt the most, in her words, “embroiled” and pained by revision––as indicated by her willingness to speak frankly about her experiences from her initial text to final draft. The pain of revision was amplified by an embodied moment, a social gathering with peers in her graduate program. One advanced graduate student, also a part-time

Kairos editor, told Brooke that he knew the status of her revised webtext before she learned of it.

Somebody asked me, “Hey, have you heard about your Kairos piece?” And I said, “No, I

haven’t.” And then this guy [, the editor,] had to be “Mister Guy” was like, “Oh I know

what’s going on with it,” and told me things that I probably shouldn’t have known, and

then later I got the feedback and so I already knew it was going to not be accepted again,

and I also had this weird-like orientation of well, “This person didn’t like it and thought

we shouldn’t publish it.” It made me take the feedback a lot harder. (Brooke)

Mister Guy wasn’t doing Brooke any favors but was giving her a reason to physically stop composing her webtext. He didn’t help her move forward. Brooke isn’t alone in harboring negative feelings by several rounds of reviewer feedback that moved her project back to drafting––four time periods in which she re-wrote-recoded, redesigned, and edited her webtext.

Remember that in Lane’s case, his vision for a digital monograph took a totally different turn when reviewers said “it looks like a slideshow.” In Henry’s case, reviewers “hated” what they called his “expressive table of contents.” Furthermore, in an interview at the Digital Media and

Composition (DMAC) Institute, two scholars, Ian and Nick, who collaborated on a recent

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webtext for Kairos spoke of their surprise to see 14 pages of single-spaced feedback from the review board, of which five members wrote critiques. This webtext went through a Tier 1 review and then a Tier 2 review, during which all Kairos board members can provide feedback. Here is an example from the opening pages of their feedback letter, sent by a senior editor on behalf of the board.

Earlier reviewers at the Tier 1 level did indicate that they found your webtext fairly

text-heavy. At the Tier 2 (Editorial Board) level, readers seemed to focus more on the

content than the design, but did have some suggestions for tweaks to the design to make

the webtext more user-friendly throughout.

For example, one reviewer suggested “you might consider enabling users to adjust

the size of the graphs to adapt to their display. (Mobile display looks great in both iOS

and Android.)”

Also, regarding your photos, you will need to provide ALT text, captions, and APA-

style citations on your references list for these images (please see our style guide at

http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/styleguide.html). A reviewer also suggested, “It would

also be nice if one could access a higher resolution image by clicking on the thumbnails.”

(Ian and Nick)

The above passage is striking because it shows that reviewers want something less “text- heavy” and more reflective of an interactive webpage with multimedia elements. However, text- heaviness is something many participants have significant training in for print contexts21; the multimedia elements, such as interactive graphs and high-resolution images cropped in

Photoshop, are products of their independent learning and tinkering. And that learning has its

21 Indeed, nearly all participants of this project were close to finishing a traditional dissertation manuscript or had publications in print journals.

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own set of frustrations, according to several participants. Consider what Ian told me at DMAC when he discussed his experience learning the programming language Javascript, a programming language that runs underneath interactive graphs and many websites. “I remember three eight- hour days of just banging my head against the wall, trying to get like a dot on top of a line; it wasn’t even my graph; I was just trying to make any graph to get the syntax and I was like, ‘This is never going to happen’” (Ian).

Considering Ian’s technical challenges and the reviewer feedback on his article, negative feelings––such as banging one’s head against the wall––flow between drafting and reception practices, such as responding to reviewer comments. Ian and Nick spent weeks writing content and tinkering with the technical requirements of the webtext, and reviewers sent back requests that would require more time. My next section thus dwells in the drafting stage and discusses negatively charged practices, such as designing and coding during the drafting stage.

Though most authors described reviewer feedback in relation to negative feelings, a few reflected on positive outcomes. Grace, for example, said she was grateful for the feedback from two reviewers who were editing a special issue.

I really agreed with all the things that they said about it and that’s not always the case.

Sometimes you get feedback back from editors and you’re like, “Oh god, I don’t want to

change that or do that thing that you’re suggesting.” It was kind of fun to go through and

like take a machete to it. We changed a lot and they may very well ask us to make more

changes too, but to see the growth has been really cool (Grace).

Grace’s commentary on the reception stage raises another sub-theme among participants: time. Not one person described reviewers and editors as intending to be evil, malevolent or anything negative. For Brooke and Ian and Nick, the common message is that lengthy feedback

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can be overwhelming and time-consuming, even if it’s intended to be formative for junior scholars. The time to engage with the feedback and revise a webtext can be considerably more than that of a print article. My next section on coding further articulates such a claim.

Fear and Coding in…

Designing and coding a webtext are entangled composing practices, practices that authors return to by addressing reviewer feedback. When an author composes media, such as an edited image or a streaming movie, she needs the coding know-how in order to place it (in the appropriate area) on the webpage. As Brooke’s case shows, online journals often dismiss drag- and-drop web platforms, such as Wix and Squarespace, because of their design constraints (e.g., image placement is constricted) and proprietary licenses and watermarks. She described it this way: I hated [website builder Wix] for lots of reasons. The choices I made when I created [the webtext] the first time for the seminar paper. I basically had written the text and copied and pasted it in and then the [Wix] template would only let you put pictures in certain places. I realized later when I wanted to submit I was like [hahahaha], “I can’t submit a Wix site. I can’t hard code something, I don’t possess that [knowledge]” (Brooke).

Brooke’s experience of finding a template then scrapping it, as well as doubting her coding skills, shows that the onus of designing and coding is thus placed on authors, cultivating negative feelings as authors encounter errors in the rhetorical-affective workflow. Consider what a tenured faculty member, Jonas, told me in an interview about his article that he converted from the web platform Wordpress to HTML5 webpages that the journal could host. “Once it was accepted, they said, we will not take a Wordpress site and run Wordpress on our server” (Jonas).

Wordpress platforms installed on a server require constant security updates, and if left unchecked, the platforms are susceptible to hackers, according to Wordpress.org (“FAQ My site

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was hacked”). Frustrated about the editors’ request, Jonas “scraped” the code from the Wordpress site and migrated it to HTML5. It wasn’t an easy task. Affectively, the Wordpress site was a site of depressing energy and negative feelings that formed between editors and Jonas as well as between Jonas and HTML code. “I had to go through and clean up a lot of the HTML that it produced,” Jonas said of the Wordpress conversion, noting that it took a number of hours to clean up. “There was a bunch of garbage [i.e., extra code] in there.” Jonas’ case suggests that moving from print to online, or from one web platform to another, doesn’t boil down to simply copy-pasting text and code. It can be a burden of digital media production, especially for the novice author of production. A platform’s architecture and programming language, especially those of the drag-and-drop variety, at times do not agree with another platform’s. Figure X offers an example of a Wordpress site and its code, which is often restricted to the company’s templates.

Fig. 9: The source code of Rich’s Wordpress site. Simply moving this offline and to another platform isn’t an easy task, according to participant Jonas. You need the media asset, and you need to make sure the code plays nicely with other platforms.

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Besides Brooke and Jonas’ platform issues, Henry is a critical example of an author who dwelled in negative feelings in the drafting stage of his digital book. Henry and the editorial team of University of Michigan Press’ Digital Rhetoric Collaborative series had numerous exchanges about the technical requirements and challenges of the book. There was a point at which he and the press were working out the copyedits for his book and a more traditional “sustainable” version. Henry recalls a discussion with an editor while he was re-coding and copyediting his pages:

Since all of the hyperlinks and images had been left out of the copyediting documents, I

was asked to put them back in. I resisted this request and there was what I recall as a

somewhat heated discussion with an editor about why it was important that I do it this

way. My own feeling was that such work was unnecessary and even counterproductive. I

proposed instead that the web designer could rely on my web version to create theirs

instead, thereby keeping the interactive elements, layout, and images handy and clear.

Transferring these visual elements to Word documents would likely result in confusion. I

lost the argument and went about integrating the visual elements into the Word

documents to the best of my abilities…. (“Making Rhizcomics”; emphasis mine)

Interestingly, according to Henry, the above exchange was eventually moot. The Press has abandoned the idea of a sustainable version at the moment, waiting until the release of the digital book as originally intended (“Making Rhizcomics”). Nevertheless, the editorial exchange was indeed a time period when negative feelings imbued Henry’s drafting and reception practices. Henry’s experience has echoes of technical writer Barbara Kolosseus’ frustrations with editing hypertext and code for a graduate program website. Taken together, Henry and

Kolosseus’ commentary demonstrate that a web can take strange affective turns when author,

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collaborators and editors disagree on design, hosting protocols, and various technical requirements. Things can break, disappearing in the ether of a server or hard drive, never to be recovered. They underscore that design and technical requirements are higher priorities for online journals, whereas as print journals that have pagination and layout presets have lower priorities in those areas.22 The same goes for print books. In fact, in those spaces, authors rarely see the conversion process in-process––as the text moves from a double-spaced manuscript to a galley, for example. They see the galley, but not how the text gets to the galley.23 That’s a job for in-house designer, editorial assistant, or professional in a similar role. In contrast, webtext authors embody several roles in the production cycle: they are writing, designing, coding, and hosting a production before it moves to reception. Eric described the “embodied knowledge” that helped him overcome some anxiety about his co-authored webtext. The idea of sitting in the same chair and using the same tools and tutorials helped him complete a draft.

I think I experienced a lot of anxiety, which maybe speaks to why it took a little bit of

time to get things up on the web. As I went and I got kind of comfortable with [coding

and hosting] and I was looking up tutorials … I was going and I had everything kind of

there and I had that kind of embodied knowledge to do it in that particular moment, right?

But then time happened and when we got the reviews back, I kind of forgot even what I

was doing. (Eric)

Eric went on to further describe that embodied action as time-consuming yet productive.

I really enjoy the kind of design work and tinkering with Brackets and and trying

different things out. I’m just tinkering and my neck is kind of hurting, and my body’s

22 For instance, Composition Studies and College Composition and Communication have design conventions that appear across issues. 23 For instance, as I write this, I’m waiting for a galley of a book chapter that was accepted in July.

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kind of hurting. I just kind of lose track of time …. I don’t know if it’s because it’s kind

of stimulating or engaging in some way that traditional kind of writing isn’t that made me

kind of just keep at it until I look down and I’m like, “shit three hours have gone by.”

(Eric)

Fortunately for Jonas, Brooke, Henry, Eric and several authors not mentioned here, collaboration through all workflow stages was a solution to problems (e.g., loss of time, physical pain) and negative feelings related to the reception and drafting practices of webtext production.

Collaboration: Embodied Intensities

In the rhetorical-affective workflow, drafting practices such as writing, coding, and designing material were gateways to feelings of frustration and irritation because of feedback from reviewers. Here I discuss collaboration, a collection of practices that several authors framed as imbued with good feelings. Collaboration means talking out ideas and strategies with co- authors, seeking out peers and mentors, and assigning workflow practices to co-authors.

Consider what participant Kris said in my survey when discussing a webtext she co-authored with three scholars. Together they “wrote the intro, lit. review and conclusion and edited the entire piece. However, I wrote the aural section, [L] wrote the tactile section; and [C] wrote the visual section. [F] edited and did the web design.” Kris’ commentary underscores that many webtexts are highly collaborative. In the rhetorical-affective workflow, collaboration-as-practice was a constant source of pleasure, a counteragent to the pains of drafting and revising a project in light of reviewer feedback.

What’s most surprising about collaboration is that it is often hidden behind final publication of a webtext, a footnote or brief mention. Many webtexts I examined do not feature acknowledgements, which, as Micciche argues, often reveal partners involved in composing

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practices and felt experiences (4). Yet my research shows that all case study participants and several more authors couldn’t complete a webtext production without some form of collaboration, even if a webtext was listed as created by a single author. Henry relied on research assistants to convert his Word documents into webpages (“Making Rhizcomics”), whereas two senior scholars asked Lane to transform their commentary into a webtext. Emily hired two data visualization and coding experts in the field to help her design a webtext and compose maps of

Obamacon’s circulation. Similarly, Helen employed her partner and several students when she was filming for her video book. As she told me in an interview, “I love collaborating. It’s very hard to make films without help …. I hire people who I know are kind and helpful, and I try to be kind and helpful in return” (Helen). Helen also spoke of mentoring undergraduates. “I love collaborating with undergraduate students. It requires a level of mentorship on one’s part. But they also bring such energy and such amazingness. And then you can also put that on your merit review as part of your teaching” (Helen).

For Helen, this undergraduate focus is vertical mentorship, a collaborative act that several authors spoke of. While drafting a webtext, for example, Ian and Nick attended KairosCamp, a two-week bootcamp for scholars interested in learning webtext production practices, taught by editors of Kairos. (KairosCamp is like the Digital Media and Composition Institute insofar as both scholarly institutes assume that authors will learn and grow as digital media producers.) Ian and Nick’s reviewer feedback came in when they were attending KairosCamp. The timing was fortuitous, they said, as the two were surrounded by Kairos editors and peers with similar interests. Their proximity alone, Ian and Nick told me, made their significant revision practices less painful. Nick described the KairosCamp experience this way:

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That was huge in terms of motivators and terms of affect and stuff like that. We were in

an isolated place for two weeks. We had an idea of an agenda [related to the webtext]

when we got there and it was still related to this project, but when we got there we got

feedback about this article, and so we kind of diverged course and decided to just tackle

these revisions head-on. We had a lot of steam; we had a lot of energy; we were excited;

we had access to [Kairos editors] to bounce questions off of .… (Nick)

In response to reviewer feedback and editorial support at KairosCamp, Ian and Nick produced a video lit review and integrated it into the second draft of their webtext. Their commentary and outcomes suggest that bodies in proximity, in shared time and space dedicated to digital media production, can be noticeably positive. The body’s significance to digital composing and positive affect was even more apparent from my interview with one senior scholar, Alex, who traveled across the country to compose a digital book with a frequent co- author. As Alex explained with some laughter, “many of these things you can do from a distance but it is helpful to have some some face-to-face contact. It’s just more fun when you can actually share a bottle of wine.” He emphasizes proximity, of being with others to get digital work done.

I don’t want to let go of is the sense that actually physically being with other people is

another way of knowing and … while I’m in love with many digital forms of

communication and technologies, I’m also in love with actually being in the same room

with people and exchanging ideas and sharing and thinking about bodily cues. (Alex)

However, it’s important to acknowledge that participants placed positive affective value on collaborative composing––including vertical mentorship––that more often occured in distant forms. Let’s go back once again to Brooke’s case. For all the pain and negative feelings that imbued her project, which saw three rounds of reviewer feedback and revisions, she found

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considerable positive affective value in her mentor, a senior editor for Kairos who was assigned to Brooke later in the process. They were introduced over email. Connecting over Skype and social media, the editor helped Brooke re-see her design and recompose her paragraphs for the conventions of academic writing in digital environments. How does she sum up their relationship? “It wouldn’t be published if it weren’t for his help.” The editor’s mentorship and helpful commentary on Brooke’s content were collaborative acts on which Brooke could rely for encouragement, a source of good feeling that helped her see the webtext project through to publication.

While this kind of editorial-based vertical mentorship is interesting (and uncommon for rhetoric and composition journals), what’s even more interesting is what participant Eric described as “horizontal mentorship.” As their case study shows, Eric and Grace were uncertain about what Computers and Composition Online editors were looking for in terms of design.

According to Eric and Grace, the editors seemed open to design possibilities, pointing to the general guidelines for Computers and Composition Online (“Submission Guidelines”). Grace felt like she needed more direction from the editors: “I felt like I was doing something wrong or that we were gonna get to the end of this and there was gonna be some major disaster or something, so that was kind of scary, I guess.” Fortunately, as I note in their case study profile, Grace’s fear was quelled when she and Eric found support through peers who had published webtexts. In our interview, Eric has more to say about one peer to whom he is indebted.

I feel like something that was important … it was kind of the horizontal mentorship of

having to go through and do a webtext. I contacted somebody who had done one for

Kairos and we talked on the phone for maybe an hour and she really walked me through

everything. I had really basic and what I perceived to be dumb questions and she was

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like, “No, that’s not a dumb question. Here’s what I did.” If I didn’t have that

[mentorship] from the start, we wouldn’t have been able to finish the project. (Eric)

Put differently, Eric’s newfound knowledge helped he and Grace divide the labor behind their webtext, writing in Google Docs and sharing prototypes over GitHub; Grace could focus more on content writing, while Eric could take charge of coding and designing the webtext in

HTML5. Eric’s commentary on horizontal mentorship calls attention to peer-to-peer supports that made several webtexts possible. Recall that Helen had support from her peers when her book proposal was rejected by a print publisher. Their encouragement to reframe the book into a video book was a catalyst for her project. Emily was also indebted to her collaborators, who indeed taught her basics in data visualization and helped her feel more confident about the claims of her argument. Among other participants who completed my survey data, graduate student Ryan collaborated with faculty as well as five peers on a webtext. “Each of us created our own depiction of our multimodal composing processes, and also offered feedback on each other’s work during the composing stage,” he wrote in my survey. He added that “most of what I learned throughout the project had more to do with collaboration and working with other people than with digital technologies.”

It’s quite surprising how various forms of collaboration––whether at a distance over the web or in the same room––helped many participants maintain positive feelings around a project, and that collaboration was a motivator to work through bad feelings associated with drafting and revising digital media. Collaboration is a solution to a range of bad feelings and difficult composing practices, from anxieties about using HTML5, to uncertainties of visualizing data.

For scholars who decide to co-author a text, maybe collaboration keeps bad feelings at bay early on in the composing process. Kris, for example, admitted that “I need to brush up on my coding

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skills.” Thus, she and fellow co-authors invited another scholar to help with technical editing and coding. An author, as Kris indicated, is less likely to feel anxious about coding for the web if her collaborator already has that skill. She doesn't have to worry about it.

Delivery and Delights

Beyond collaboration, authors described delivery practices in relation to good feelings.

By delivery practices, I mean seeing the final publication in said journal issue and sharing the publication on social media as well with peers and administrators. When I asked participants to tell me the most pleasurable part of their project, they most often said something along the lines of:

“It was nice to see it published.”

“Publishing the piece! Having it finished! Having people see it and read it and appreciate

it!”

“Collecting data. Imagining together. Seeing it published.”

“It was really helpful for me on the job market. It helped me apply for digital literacy

jobs.”

“I think the most pleasure was just seeing the final whole web text. I love [one

collaborator’s] front webpage thing that he did, and I love the spatiotemporal circulation

map that [another collaborator] and I worked out together. The whole intellectual process

of figuring all this out was very pleasurable” (Emily).

While it’s no surprise that many authors feel good when a text is finished and published (don’t we all?), what is surprising are the ways in which delivery practices, just like collaborative acts, complicate feelings about drafting and revising practices. I want to return once again to Helen’s case and specifically the moment she said: “Rejections can be the biggest gift you’ll ever get, because a good rejection with good feedback on it can make for an incredible project

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somewhere else. So, I’m very, very thankful to whoever it was who rejected my book.” Perhaps Helen’s sentiment didn’t exist before her video book’s publication and the accolades that followed. The same idea applies to Brooke and Andy, two graduate students whose works helped them on the job market. Now an assistant professor, Andy told me in a Skype interview that his webtext was “huge” on the job market. “Everyone said this article got me hired or offers.” In affective terms, Andy also said the publication helped him gain “confidence in approaching other editors and just sending stuff out because I had one in the bag. Having that first publication or two in the field, makes you feel like, ‘Alright I might actually prove myself to be part of the club.’” After delivering his text, job hiring committees wanted to meet him, forging new relationships. The authors I feature in the above passages underscore that delivery is a gateway to affective reflection, a moment to think through the value of painful composing and otherwise negative experiences with writing and coding. Working through those drafting and revising pains, authors gained lines on CVs, accolades, jobs, and merits in tenure and promotion portfolios. In the rhetorical workflow of digital composing, pain’s value, that is, isn’t exactly clear until publication. Alex, for example, composed a multimodal memoir on a troubled childhood. The pain of re-living his formative years parlayed into pleasure when he presented excerpts to a public audience at university. When he met a department chair in the humanities after, “I was so touched when he said this is deeply moving and theoretically sharp” (Alex; emphasis mine). Alex had more to say about the entanglement of pain and pleasure in his composing process.

I love trying new things with writing, and I think that we learn to write by trying to write

in ways we’ve never written before, by trying out new genres of writing, trying out new

audiences or publics to write to. I love that about writing. So for me, while it was hard

and sometimes painful, emotionally evocative, and rich [to compose a multimodal

memoir], it was also very pleasurable to see that come together, and to understand that I

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could write both in a theoretically sophisticated way but also in a personally powerful

way. (Alex)

Among all participants, there was only one instance in which delivery took a negative albeit somewhat comical turn. Teaching a visual rhetoric course to graduate students, case study participant Henry decided to assign his own digital book, which intervenes in the scholarly landscape of rhetoric and comics studies. According to Henry, his assignment was a means to demonstrating what a digital book can do that print can’t. He opened the discussion with a question, a prompt that led to self-induced terror.

I started off by saying, “What kind of argument does [the book] make?” I sat back and I

said, “Oh, that tastes bad. I hate myself for saying that. Hey, guys. Um. I just realized I’m

wildly unprepared to teach my own book. So, let’s just talk. What did you think? Don’t

spare my feelings.” I had this, like, existential crisis of faith. It was great. It was terrifying

to my core and I was like, “Oh. Nope. Can’t do that.” (Henry)

Speaking of talking about one’s own digital book, Helen argues that authors need to share their digital media work with public audiences and educate those less familar with its approaches. Some target audiences? Tenure and promotion committees who evaluate scholarship and service. “And I know it’s annoying, but one has to educate others so they can evaluate [a digital project] accordingly. So that’s something that … it’s an added annoyance to the work, but it’s also great because then you’re opening doors for others to do that work” (Helen). Put differently, talking about your final publication, as participants of my study have done, might show aspiring authors and evaluators that digital composing isn’t as scary as it might seem on the surface. However, perhaps there is an intellectual cost to educating audiences. Take Henry’s response when asked about composing a video walkthrough on the homepage of his digital book.

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Oh, I’ve got such mixed feelings on it. I love it and I think it’s so necessary to teach

people how to read what you’re doing. The things I don’t like about it are the sense to

which I’m prescribing things to people and telling them the way that they have to do

something. And so luckily, I had that discovery that the more I prescribe, the less people

follow my rules, and that’s fantastic. I’m less scared about giving people those rules now,

because I know that they’re going to not follow them. They’re going to misbehave.

(Henry)

Beyond educating audiences, Helen suggests that authors need to take pride in their digital work and the excitement that surrounds its release. In her words,

My god, [her book] is a peer-reviewed publication at one of the oldest and most

prestigious digital presses. It is 100% a book. [The university] recognizes it 100% as a

book, and they are thrilled by this. The department loves it, the college loves it, they

wrote an article about it. The college wrote a big time story about it and then it became a

[university] “pride point,” which is when [the university] features the most exciting

things that our professors have done. (Helen)

In a way, Helen is inviting future composers to anticipate common feelings––confusion, disinterest––that peers and publics have when they encounter, review or simply read digital media projects. If a book unfolds in a non-linear, digital environment, then its final delivery and subsequent promotion might raise its profile and prestige in the academy, thereby creating an economy of good feelings around it. My study participants suggest that authors of digital media simply have to do more work to create such an economy––to prove the value of their work, to keep the lights on in their offices when they go up for tenure and promotion.

When Authors are Awash in the Rhetorical-Affective Workflow

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Supported by a bevy of author commentary and project artifacts, the findings and insights

I present in this chapter underscore the most affectively challenging and rewarding practices of a digital media project workflow, a rhetorical-affective workflow in which authors move toward and away from the completion of a project. As I write this, there is no telling how many authors have been embroiled in painful practices such as coding and revising, abandoning a project shortly after. It is likely that many get stuck in what filmmakers and game developers often call

“development hell,” a space in which a project is under perpetual revision and might or might not see a release (see Douglas, “No Pain, No Game: Tales from Development Hell”). As this chapter demonstrates, some authors nearly found their works in such a hell, but all found their way to higher ground and good feelings by way of collaboration, mentorship and more. Authors withstood the crashing waves of the rhetorical-affective workflow, even if they were at times lost again at sea and rarely saw a driftwood to save them. Despite the pain of finding the shores of publicationland, it was worth the effort.

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Conclusion

Feeling the Future of Digital Composing

“Your brain responds to disembodied particles of fear, meaning, you know when you get

a kind of bad feeling about a person or a place? …. Which makes me sort of start to

picture the world differently, as though there’s this sort of mist of emotions waiting out

there that can change you depending on where you happen to step.”

––Lulu Miller, “Fearless”

When I was writing much of the content for Feeling Digital Composing, I often listened to Alix Spigel and Lulu Miller’s NPR podcast Invisibilia. In every episode, reporters tell stories based on months of research about “the invisible forces that shape human behavior—things like ideas, beliefs, assumptions and emotions” (“About ‘Invisibilia’”) From a blind man who rides a bicycle, to a woman who feels the physical pain of others, listeners are invited to feel the forces that imbue everyday life.

You know where I’m going with this. Based on my process of conducting a qualitative study over two academic years and writing up practitioner stories and insights, Feeling Digital

Composing is significant because it makes the invisible visible. The ineffable effable. For this project, I felt those affective forces that shape writing, tools, and authors who enact rhetorical strategies––from invention to delivery and back again. By participating in my study and looking back on their productions, authors supported my goal of making the inner workings of digital media productions more visible. For future use by authors, the findings present concrete examples of how an author might navigate the challenges of writing and designing a digital media argument from scratch. In addition, the findings give the readers a sense of the

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consequences that follow such a production, such as a tenure-track job, university accolades, and or negotiations with an editorial team.

In chapter one, I unpacked the terms used to describe digital media scholarship and affect, as theorized by scholars in rhetoric and composition and related fields. Cheryl Ball,

Douglas Eyman, Kris Blair, and Jason Helms were instructive as I synthesized definitions and practices of digital media scholarship, which I conceptualized as scholarly work in the form of audio, video and hypertext hosted by online journals such as Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric,

Technology, and Pedagogy and Computers and Composition Online. In the second half of the chapter, I took care in parsing out definitions of affect, feeling, and emotion, recognizing that such terms are always in flux and used differently across disciplines, including rhetoric and composition. Working from Aristotle’s view on emotions that unfold in public life, as well as

Teresa Brennan’s theory of circulatory affect, I discovered that the three terms are often about the relational. For affect theorists, felt experience and emotional expressions are cultivated between a writer’s body and fellow bodies and objects (e.g., HTML code). Feelings, in other words, are socially constructed and constituted by rhetorical action. They might begin in one’s body, but feelings pulse through multiple bodies and objects in relation.

Chapter two reviewed previous studies from areas such as professional writing, writing studies and digital rhetoric that have touched on emotion but have largely elided theories of emotion. I argued that theories of affect enliven studies rooted in process and rhetorical theories and, as a result, better elucidate digital media production. In the last 30 years, process and rhetorical scholarship have told us about “techno-angst” (Mason), “disheartening” feedback on multimodal projects (Sheppard), and positive and negative appropriations of digital texts

(Sheridan, Ridolfo, and Michel). When writing chapter two, my goal was to emphasize that such

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words––disheartening and techno-angst, for example––ought not to be overlooked, for they are keys to gaining a deep understanding of affectively charged relationships that limit and drive digital production. In other words, I claimed that “economies of feeling” (Micciche 13) are significant to digital media production, for they can––and often do––create gateways and barriers to a delivered text. In summary, I wanted to intervene in rich disciplinary conversations invested in digital media and writing and writing and emotion. The next task was to explain how I studied rhetorical-affective phenomena in relation to digital media production.

Chapter three was my opportunity to describe and justify my target participant pool and methods that amounted to a qualitative study of authors who compose digital media articles and books. Pilot studies with colleagues in 2017 shaped my interview questions about digital media practices and feelings, helping me devise a questionnaire that opened rather than closed emotional responses. As noted in the chapter, I recruited authors who have published digital media articles and books since January 2015, three years before my recruitment started. While I appreciated authors who completed my online questionnaire, I found that the most fruitful responses came from interviews over Skype and at professional gatherings such as the

Conference on College Composition and Communication and the Computers and Writing conference. After a three-stage research protocol, in which I spoke with authors, recorded our screens and collected production artifacts, I came away with seven case study participants, whose data I would later contextualize with data from other interviewees and survey respondents. All told, more than 20 authors from writing studies and related disciplines discussed their practices and feelings behind digital media scholarship.

Writing chapter four, I articulated authors’ diverse approaches to digital media scholarship. Nearly all authors spoke for the first time at length about their behind-the-scenes

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work that shaped their articles or books. Brooke spoke at length about drafting and revising a webtext over the course of four years, grappling with uncertainties about her technical skills along the way. Eric’s embodied knowledge, enacted by sitting at the same chair whenever he hand-coded a webpage, helped him finish a collaborative webtext, while Alex found a mix of pain and pleasure when he threaded his memoirs and voice throughout a digital book. As noted in the chapter, collaborative acts, such as dividing labor and offering advice on digital scholarly writing, cultivated positive affective values between authors and mentors, and very much so when authors shared physical spaces. Conversely, bad feelings were afoot when authors, such as

Lane and Jonas, scrapped an entire project and coded a new webtext; they were again awash in what I called the rhetorical-affective workflow, committing hours and weeks again to a revised digital project. But as scholars such as Helen and Emily suggest, the process of composing a digital media article or book, for all its mental and bodily consequences, is worth it when a work is finally published and circulated. As Lane tells me in the closing of our interview, “I’m still pretty happy with the way the conversation [in his webtext] is represented through various branches and elements. And I think that for me, I hope that the pleasure of the experience is communicated in the design of the artifact” (Lane).

Implications: Theorizing the Rhetorical-Affective Workflow of Digital Media Scholarship

This section offers three tenets for what I’m calling a theory of the rhetorical-affective workflow, which is animated by my case study findings and insights. As detailed in chapter four, the rhetorical-affective workflow is depicted as a series of composing practices and feelings authors move to and from when they work on a digital media production; like other process and practical constructs of our rhetorical past, the workflow assumes that authors move recursively as they complete a production, but it places greater emphasis on embodied sensations that limit and

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drive its final draft. Feelings are layered within each composing practice and shift over time.

Weaving theory with praxis, this section also offers two practical applications that might help future teachers and authors enact, and thus test, such tenets.

A theory of the rhetorical-affective workflow for production studies emphasizes the following:

Digital media production has serious rhetorical and affective consequences, asking more of the body than that of its print counterpart.

In the rhetorical-affective workflow, feelings, from embodied sensations to emotional expressions, pulse through an author’s code, platforms, text editors, collaborators, reviewers, and material conditions that make digital media production possible––and sometimes impossible. As argued in chapter two and elucidated in chapter four, rhetoric and composition researchers have only scratched the surface of discussing the affective consequences of digital media production.

Theorists of writing and emotion studies helped me question the pains and pleasures that shape a past production; authors made those pains and pleasures real and felt by showing that digital media is not simply an add-on to print. From sharpening a technical skill to placing one’s body on the screen, there can be so much more involved rhetorically and affectively in the former. Add to those demands long hours at the computer as well as time spent arguing for the value of a webtext (i.e., for a tenure and promotion case) and explaining how a reader (i.e., a peer) might navigate it. These are two practices that authors often feel compelled to do in order to be well- received. Furthermore, authors are more vulnerable to criticism when they compose digital media articles and books. In contrast, the field’s familiarity with a print article’s design and genre conventions creates comfort for reviewers. When a reviewer is confused about a webtext’s design, and is thus confused about the overall argument, that confusion flows back to the author.

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Coding a webtext and addressing reviewer feedback are practices layered with bad feelings.

Due to a lack of formal training in digital argumentation or design, many authors take a

DIY approach to coding a webtext, hitting technical snags, doubts and frustrations along the way.

For authors, it doesn’t exactly feel good when they get a rejection, for they are not simply dealing with writing in a Word document and sending it to an editor. The more they are involved in a production, and the more code and media they layered with the alphabetic, the more rejection hurts. We need to better recognize the rhetorical-affective weight of lengthy negative reviewer feedback, for example, that impinges on an author or collaborative team producing a webtext––that, in other words, cultivates depressing energies an author must deal with. My findings demonstrate that reviewers often have much more to say about a webtext than that of a traditional manuscript submission, thus producing more negative or positive affective value. As of early 2019, this is perhaps the only study in digital rhetoric and computers and writing to feature numerous and lengthy excerpts of reviewer feedback.

Collaborative practices are layered with good feelings.

Vertical and horizontal mentors and hired hands are critical for solving problems related to a webtext. When a novice author is assigned a vertical mentor, such as a senior editor or experienced writer/designer, she betters her chances of completing a webtext. Kairos, for example, has a tiered review system because they want authors to finish a webtext. However, vertical mentorship can put novice authors in a vulnerable situation, especially if they’re not comfortable with revealing their shortcomings related to coding and designing content. Looking at the rhetorical-affective workflow, we must also pay attention to horizontal mentors––such as fellow doctoral students––who are rich sources of good feelings. As collaborators, horizontal mentors help demystify editorial expectations, technical requirements, and more. As one author

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told me, “my more practical advice is to seek out pockets of support at your institution, or however you find your sphere of influence” (Nick). And another: “Don’t do this alone. Get help”

(Emily).

Two Practical Applications

So how might teachers and practitioners enact tenets of rhetorical-affective workflow? I propose two low-stakes approaches, with the understanding that such approaches are contingent on factors such as time, departmental resources, and editor interest.

First, as a field, writing studies needs more articles and statements in the vein of Kairos’

“Inventio” series. From replicating Shipka’s “Statement of Goals and Choices” (Shipka 113) to assigning multimodal project rationales and literacy narratives, rhetoric and writing teachers have asked students to reflect on recent writing projects. Such documents put a student’s rhetorical thinking and felt experiences on the page, and they help a teacher understand a student’s intentions. Teachers learn a great deal from them, and according to Shipka, a reflective assignment like the SOGC encourages students “to attend to the impact of their writerly choices as well as to the visual, material, and technological aspects of their texts and practices” (116). So as editors and peers, why aren’t we asking authors to do this kind of reflective work for digital media productions? I am not talking about a full webtext like “Inventio” but rather a few hundred words that cover the technical or rhetorical strategies of a digital media project. A short statement is a low-stakes approach to meeting the original goals of “Inventio,” intended to be “a forum for discussing production choices that have gone on behind the scenes, in essence allowing authors to guide the interpretation of their work by highlighting the hows and whys of its creation”

(Sorapure and Stolley, “Introducing Inventio”).

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Here are two examples of what I mean by a low-stakes approach. In his webtext

“Instagram, Geocaching, and the When of Rhetorical Literacies,” Brian McNely offers a note about its design:

As a scrolling, responsive site, this webtext directly supports the central claims of the

academic argument, to wit: rhetorical literacies unfold in trajectories and continua of

everyday practice. These literacies are often seamless—moving from family, to

professional, to leisurely pursuits in a recursive, continuous fashion.

In addition, the photographic interludes between sections are liminal spaces in the

webtext, representing the liminal spaces of a geocacher's world. The attentive participant

in this webtext will see these liminal stories unfold underneath the primary argument—a

different reality peeking through from time to time. (McNely)

A scrolling, responsive webtext. Photos. We know a little more about what McNely is doing. In “Looking in the Dustbin: Data Janitorial Work, Statistical Reasoning, and Information

Rhetorics,” Aaron Beveridge has the following footnotes:

The infographic below was created at easel.ly—a site that provides free and easy-to-use

cloud tools for creating, hosting, and embedding infographics.

This webtext was drafted with Markdown, Pandoc, and GitHub. GitHub also provides the

free hosting as well—including images. For collaborative web-publishing, GitHub is a

fantastic resource. (Beveridge)

This kind of process writing might help aspiring digital media authors make better decisions when selecting tools and creating designs. It might also help review boards and tenure and promotion committees better understand and appreciate a webtext. By and large, process statements might serve well as a resource and labor guide for future authors and reviewers.

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Secondly, writing studies ought to create more low-stakes workshops and professional development gatherings that reflect the approaches of Digital Media and Composition Institute and KairosCamp. Held when many schools begin summer break, DMAC at The Ohio State

University hosts teachers and practitioners in English studies and beyond who want to sharpen their digital media composing practices. Situated in the Department of English, DMAC participants create audio and visual texts and consult with experienced teacher-scholars and graduate students. Participants in 2018 paid $1,900 to attend on a first-come, first-served basis.

Similarly, KairosCamp is a professional development workshop created by Cheryl Ball, editor of

Kairos; supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and West Virginia University’s

Digital Publishing Institute, recent KairosCamps spanned two weeks in a university space.

Rhetoric and composition scholars conceptualized and workshopped webtexts and digital humanities projects. Participants applied to attend KairosCamp, for which participation, travel and lodging was provided free of charge (“About”). DMAC and KairosCamp have been useful for writing studies scholars not previously trained in composing digital media scholarship.

However, the problem with DMAC and KairosCamp is that they serve students and professors with means of funding support or extended travel (especially in the latter's case).

DMAC’s website has archived past schedules and resources amassed over the years (see

“SCHEDULE (2018)”), while KairosCamp has an archive of its 2017 author workshop (see

“Author Workshop Archive”). These archives might be useful for aspiring authors, but I think organizers of future institutes and workshops can attempt to lower funding and travel barriers even further. When participants are rejected or unable to attend for financial or geographic reasons, hosts might later amass a list of potential participants and help facilitate a peer network in an online setting. Help people find other people for technical, rhetorical and emotional

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support. Help facilitate horizontal membership. Similarly, hosts might consider creating online equivalents to DMAC and KairosCamp. Platforms such as YouTube, Twitch and Skype have made synchronous and asynchronous collaboration and support quite accessible to a range of viewers and authors. A video archive of a webtext workshop might be enormously useful for an aspiring author. My point: We need to explore more ways to get people together or in contact with writing studies’ leaders in digital media production and scholarship.

However, I anticipate that some will take issue with my suggested approaches. My case study participant Eric, for example, spoke of the pleasure of losing track of time when composing his webtext. There is positive affective value in building a webtext organically, in losing oneself in the assemblages of content writing, design, and code, or stepping in the mist of emotions of confusion, frustration, and wonder in order to forge a new digital draft. In

Technologies of Wonder, Susan Delagrange argues against simple design prescriptions and reductive suggestions for digital media. Wonder, in her words, is significant for material, embodied production. “In digital media, the piling up of print, image, sound, pattern, movement, and association can be as unsettling as the juxtaposition of flowered wallpaper and the Brooklyn

Bridge—and as potentially productive” (175). She goes on: “Rhetorical techné is mobile and strategic. It does not conform itself to already-made discursive space and subjectivity; it shapes its discursive and embodied form and content in response to the kairos of the moment” (175).

Considering her view of digital media production, I recognize that HTML5, Creative Commons templates and process narratives for aspiring authors might close off certain rhetorical avenues for scholars. Lane, for example, learned a great deal about his digital media composing practices by scrapping a project and drafting a new one. His initial failure was more than potentially productive––that emotional moment of getting rejected by reviewers was a gateway to what

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would be an exciting collaborative digital monograph that he co-wrote with two senior scholars.

Allow me to reframe Lane’s experience through the words of Collin Brooke and Allison Carr:

“Failure (and thus success) is one of the most valuable abilities a writer can possess. The ability to [compose digital media scholarship] well comes neither naturally nor easily; the thinkers we praise and admire are not the lucky few born with innate talent (63).

Still, if the field wants more scholars to author digital media texts and articles, we need a healthy mix of scholarly reflections, suggestions, and organic compositions. We need more lifelines for authors who find themselves unable to escape developmental hell. Between organic invention and credible suggestions, an author might find a way out.

Overall Limitations of My Study

In light of proposing tenets and practical applications related to the rhetorical-affective workflow, I want to recognize at least three limitations of my study: my participant pool, my research methods, and my narrow focus on digital media scholarship.

First, my target participant pool was relatively small. By studying authors who have published texts in the last three years, I left more than 50 texts from Kairos and Computers and

Composition Online on the cutting room floor. In addition, I excluded authors who published editorially reviewed articles for Kairos’ “Disputatio” section, and I also excluded numerous authors who contributed to edited collections. Had I recruited authors of the last five years, as well as every single author who published in a journal or book, I might have doubled my participant pool, accounting for more than 100 texts. However, as noted in chapters three and four, my intent was to take a deep dive into digital media scholarship by composing case studies.

For this study, expanding my participant pool wasn’t necessary, as I had recruited several

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participants who were willing to speak frankly about drafts and reviewer letters. Feeling Digital

Composing is a gateway to a larger project, proposed in the next section of this chapter.

Secondly, my research methods were retrospective, not in situ. Composition and rhetoric researchers such as Linda Flower, Janet Emig, Stacey Pigg, and Pam Takayoshi have produced information-rich studies of novice and professional writers in action, in spaces such as Facebook, blogs, labs, and classrooms. In contrast, I studied authors who recently published digital media texts, and I learned about webtexts that evolved from concept to final draft. I relied, in part, on authors’ memories and available artifacts of the recent past. I didn’t have access to real-time thoughts and emotions that surround an author’s composing process. My decision to go with retrospective methods was purposeful for two reasons:

1) Due to all the entities involved in digital media scholarship, texts can take months and years to complete, meaning I would have been at the will of authors who had the time and energy to see a project through to completion within my timeframe. I wanted authors to be in control of their production timeline, not mine.

2) Recruiting authors who have in-progress texts was an ethical challenge for me and might have been an emotional challenge for authors. If I were to reach out to professional and disciplinary listservs and ask for participants, I suspect my participant pool would have been much lower than the numbers I present above. Furthermore, when I was designing my study, I imagined a recruitment method by which I would ask editors to reach out to authors who had texts in progress because they had already established relationships. When I spoke with editors about the method, they said it could create a conflict of interest between editors and authors.24

Ultimately, I was decidedly “icky” about asking editors to help me recruit authors. Authors are trying to get something published, and even if they trust my research protocol, they don’t need

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additional affective forces––a concern that an editor will know of their participation––impinging on their in-progress work.

In terms of my third limitation, my study focused on a disciplinary area of digital media articles and books––generally speaking, that of writing studies. While my decision to study digital media articles and books authored by writing studies scholars was narrow in scope, it was designed to be of future use to authors in the field. In other words, it was designed to work from inside the discipline and branch out to other professional writers and authors at a later time. As a field, we’re familiar with studying authors not affiliated with the discipline, but we’re less familiar with studying authors of our field. The participants of my study, in addition to those who authored “Inventio” articles and participated in Christine Tulley’s study How Writing Faculty

Write, suggest that such in-house studies have an audience.

Suggestions for Future Research

Addressing the limitations to a greater extent, I have two suggestions for future research regarding the rhetorical-affective workflow.

Review Board Focus

My study was informed largely by the perspectives of authors. A future study might focus more exclusively on the review process for a webtext, speaking with reviewers at Kairos,

Computers and Composition Online, the Digital Rhetoric Collaborative and beyond. How do reviewers go about reviewing a webtext? How much time do they spend reviewing it? What feeling swirl(ed) with their review process? What, generally, are they paying attention to? And what exactly makes a “good” webtext? In light of such a study, a researcher might arrive at common terms and practices that reviewers deploy when they experience a webtext. This information might help authors compose webtexts that better align with the expectations of

24 This discussion happened over email, and I was given permission to summarize the discussion.

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reviewers. This information might also help authors create a disruptive webtext, or one that chafes against the expectations of reviewers. After all, as Henry told me in an interview, surprise can be a powerful affect evoked by digital media scholarship. Floating words, naked bodies, modulated vocal tracks––all might be surprising and refreshing for reviewers.

In-Situ Research

An in-situ study of authors who compose digital media scholarship isn’t impossible.

Perhaps an intense study of one author or a collaborative team who is conceptualizing a webtext is a great starting point. A researcher could make contact with graduate program directors and inquire about graduate students who are interested in webtext production. Recruitment through a professional listserv is another possibility, especially if a researcher’s enrollment quota is low or flexible, the latter applying if many potential authors step forward to participate.

An auto-ethnography seems quite promising as a research method. Erin K. Bahl has contributed work in the auto-ethnographic vein in her webtext review of webtext scholarship

(“The Magpie’s Nest: A Webtext Review of Webtext Scholarship”) and her recently completed dissertation Refracting Webtexts: Invention and Design in Composing Multimodal Scholarship.

And again, “Inventio” articles by Helms, Sheridan, and VanKooten might serve as models for research. My research suggests that, in the flurry of teaching, composing new projects and changing jobs, scholars don’t meticulously document and archive their drafts, review letters, and email correspondences. A researcher, such as a doctoral student, might chronicle the process of converting a seminar paper to a webtext. How might such a method reveal more felt dimensions of development hell, for example? An entire “Inventio”-style dissertation might be useful for future scholars (and me).

A Final Positive Note

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Ellen Nold’s 1975 article “Fear and Trembling: The Humanist Approaches the Computer” implores us to give digital composing a chance. It’s not a stretch to claim that many authors are still hesitant about doing digital media work. Let me echo Jason Helm’s tweet featured in my introduction. “Yikes. Just got a real harsh DECLINE from a journal. Gonna try to figure out a way to salvage what I made. It’s extra disheartening with new media work because it takes so much additional time to do in the first place. Ugh.” To Jason I say: Keep at it and consider what authors told me when they reflected on their practices.

From Lane

One of the driving factors in why I like this kind of work and why I want to encourage

others to do it and make space for others to do it: Because it feels really good when you

solve a problem and you make this thing that reflects how you're thinking about the

mediated potential of the message. And that to me is just tremendously satisfying. (Lane)

From Henry

Some of the time will not be well spent, in the sense that you’ll go down a whole path

that ends up being closed to you, that you realize, “Oh, that’s not the way I want to do it.”

Even that time is well spent in that you couldn’t have gotten to your eventual conclusion

without it. We get dead ends in our research all the time. We just don’t think those are

going to show up in the form of our scholarship. (Henry)

From Eric

Most of the time revisions are what I despise the most out of a publication process. It’s

just the hardest thing to do, but I felt like in many ways this [digital media project] wasn't

that challenging, and I think it was because like I could bounce ideas off [my co-author]

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and she could bounce ideas off me. I think our plan really meshed and worked out in the

end. (Eric)

And Finally, from Me

I still fear and tremble when I edit and compose webtexts, but now I know dwelling in those sensations is commonplace in digital media production. They might be barriers to a final draft, but they might also reveal turns and gateways to supportive peers, mentors, tools, and good feelings.

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Appendix A: Online Questionnaire

The following is slightly edited version of the online questionnaire that I sent to authors. I also sent a version of this to authors who participated in semi-structured interviews over web chat and at professional gatherings. Once again, I appreciate Jim Ridolfo’s willingness to let me adapt and build on his questionnaire in his dissertation, Practice and Theory: A New Approach to

Rhetorical Delivery.

Feeling Digital Composing: A Questionnaire on Digital Media Texts and Scholarship

Thank you for considering participation in my study. The following questionnaire on digital media should take no more than one hour to complete. If you are interested in participating in my case studies, please contact me at [email protected] or indicate your contact information at the end of this survey.

To begin, review the information sheet sent with this questionnaire, then complete the questions that follow. In requesting responses, I want to be flexible. That said, feel welcome to:

• Type your responses below

• Upload an audio response

• Upload a video response/screencast

Background

1. What is your status or job title (e.g., undergraduate, graduate student, non-tenure-track faculty, tenure-track faculty, tenured faculty)?

2. What is the title of your published work? If it is a work in progress, feel welcome to write “WIP.”

3. If your work has a public URL, please list it here:

4. What sorts of digital media work do you do/have you done?

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The Composition

5. Could you talk a bit about the writing/composition you have selected for this survey?

6. How much time did you spend on this text (from conception to working on final publication)?

7. Were there any other authors of this writing/composition? What role did they play?

8. Who is/are the audiences for this writing/composition?

9. What was the goal for the writing/composition?

10. What was your long-term goal?

11. Were these goals realized? Why? Why not?

12. What situation prompted the need to compose this writing/composition?

13. This question regards rooms and spaces. Where did you compose this writing/composition? Why?

14. What tools and resources did you use to draft and publish to this text?

15. Did you have to learn any new programs, software, etc.? If so, how did you learn to use them?

16. How would you describe your arrangement of this text? Why arrange the text this way?

17. Talk me through your font choices, colors and more. Why those?

18. How did you/others distribute the writing/composition? Could you talk a bit more about this?

19. What sort of physical work/labor did you have to do to produce and deliver the writing/composition (printing, carrying, etc)?

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20. If this text was peer reviewed for a journal or book chapter, what did the reviewers say about drafts?

21. How did you feel about revising the work?

22. What did you think about delivering the text (that is, publishing the work in public, on the web) early on?

23. Was the writing you did re-used, re-appropriated, re-written by someone else later?

24. Was this appropriation positive or a negative? Could you talk a bit more about this?

Looking Back

1.What would you have done differently with this text?

2. As a result of this project, what did you learn about digital composing?

3. What parts of this process have been/were painful (physically, mentally)? Why?

4. What parts were most pleasurable? Why?

5. How would you describe your composing experience in affective terms? By affective terms, I mean sensations, feelings, and emotional language.

6. Looking back at your “Composition” responses, what parts or moments of this composing experience contributed to the affective terms you listed?

7. How did you deal with affects you listed?

8. Considering what you noted about your production and affective work, what will you do in the future when facing a similar task of production?

Thank You!

Thanks for participating in this study that covers a range of practices and affects in digital media texts and scholarship! If you'd like to participate in a follow-up interview about your responses, please enter your email below.

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Appendix B: Recruitment Email for Single-authored Works

The following is an example of a recruitment letter sent to an author of digital media scholarship.

Dear [author],

I hope this reaches you well. For my dissertation research, I am studying the composing practices of authors who have published digital media scholarship, and I am contacting you because you published an electronic article or book chapter in the last three years. By digital media scholarship, I generally mean webtexts, hyperlinked articles and interactive works that have appeared in publications like Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology and Pedagogy and

Computers and Composition Online.

I am interested in speaking with you about your work [title here]. I'd like to ask you about your practices, feelings, and reflections on the project. This information could help future scholars who are interested in digital media work.

Would you be willing to participate in my research study (study #: 2017-5444)? I am asking authors to complete a questionnaire and/or participate in an interview (electronic or in- person).

The questionnaire/interview should take no more than one hour and you will be invited to participate in a follow-up. Participants will not be paid or given anything to take part in this study.

Thank you for considering and helping me with my research.

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Appendix C: Recruitment Email for Multi-authored Works

The following is an example of a recruitment letter sent to authors who collaborated on digital media scholarship.

Dear [author],

Computers and Composition Online.

I am interested in speaking with you about your work [title here]. I'd like to ask you about your practices, feelings, and reflections on the publication. This information could help future scholars who are interested in digital media work.

Would you be willing to participate in my research study (study #: 2017-5444)? I am asking authors to complete a questionnaire or participate in an interview (electronic or in- person), depending on preference. The questionnaire/interview should take no more than one hour and you will be invited to participate in a brief follow-up. Participants will not be paid or given anything to take part in this study.

I realize this is a collaborative text with [number] co-authors. Are you the corresponding author? If so, please feel welcome to forward this request to your co-authors. I am collecting responses between now and June 2018.

Thank you for considering and helping me with my research.

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