ABSTRACT REID. GWENDOLYNNE COLLINS. Digital Writing in The

ABSTRACT REID. GWENDOLYNNE COLLINS. Digital Writing in the Disciplines: Imagining Possibilities for Scholarship in the Context of Digital Media. (Under the direction of Dr. Carolyn R. Miller and Dr. Chris M. Anson). In the quarter century since the establishment of the graphically browsable World Wide Web, academic composers and publishers have experimented with the range of affordances presented by networked digital media—affordances such as modularity, interactivity, multimodality, dynamism, associativity, etc. This experimentation, along with the increasingly widespread use of information and communication technologies and digital media across social contexts, has transformed academic rhetorical environments, presenting scholars with new possibilities and constraints. This transformation has substantially complicated the rhetorical knowledge and literacies necessary for scholarly communicators to operate effectively. This transformation, however, is still an emerging phenomenon, with ongoing experiments that continue to alter the genres and sociotechnical relationships that comprise scholarly work. In the last decade, for example, publisher Elsevier launched digital “Article of the Future” prototypes in several of its journals, while several publishers, universities, and organizations have worked to produce platforms for academic publishers and academics to more easily publish born-digital scholarship. The emerging nature of this changing scholarly landscape provides an exigence and opportunity for understanding scholars’ lived experiences of composing during a moment of transition, and specifically for understanding the forces that shape how and why they take up the multiple affordances presented by digital media. This dissertation takes up that exigence, focusing on disciplinarity as a force unique to and particularly influential in academic contexts and asking how scholars’ digital and multimodal composing shapes and is shaped by disciplinarity. This question is addressed through two case studies of research teams developing work for digital journal publication, one in the field of rhetoric and composition and the other in evolutionary biology. These cases were developed using a naturalistic, qualitative methodology, combining an ethnographic framework with textual analysis of writers’ process-related documents and artifacts. Data were collected over a period of twenty-four months and analyzed inductively using techniques from grounded theory, specifically constant comparison, combined with content and rhetorical analysis of documents. Each case was examined through the three compositional lenses of mode, medium, and genre, three interrelated dimensions of communication relevant to understanding digital writing, with categories developed inductively for each lens. Results for the compositional lens of mode revealed three distinct strategies for multimodal composing—meaning compression, meaning expansion, and meaning attention—which writers used according to their epistemological orientations and goals. For example, all three of these strategies were present for the rhetoric and composition case, an epistemologically pluralistic disciplinary area, while the evolutionary biology team primarily employed a meaning compression logic, reserving meaning expansion and meaning attention for public audiences. Results for the compositional lens of medium revealed that some disciplinary digital composing is characterized by hypermediacy (Bolter & Grusin, 1999), drawing attention to media, with others characterized by immediacy (Bolter & Grusin, 1999), rendering media transparent and invisible. Both hypermediacy and immediacy were evident in the rhetoric and composition team’s composing, though choices characterized by hypermediacy came primarily from the member of the team with the most hermeneutic, rather than empirical, approach. The evolutionary biology team’s composing was marked by immediacy, maintaining transparency for their use of media. Based on these two cases, the distinction seems to correspond to disciplines for whom digital media are both subject of and tool for inquiry and those for whom digital media are solely a tool for inquiry. Finally, the compositional lens of genre brought both mode and medium together and tied them to the teams’ social contexts, specifically their disciplinary contexts. This lens revealed that the rhetoric and composition team was writing a generically hybrid text, blending two disciplinary genres, the empirical research report and the hermeneutic scholarly webtext, highlighting the epistemological plurality of this disciplinary context and the challenges and generative potential of collaboration across epistemological traditions. The evolutionary biology case, however, also innovated at the level of text, composing textual elements for anticipated recomposition, but with the express purpose of creating intergeneric and interdiscursive change. Many of their innovative digital composing decisions, including those related to citizen science, were motivated by perceived disciplinary exigences for reaching across discourses, whether toward public audiences or interdisciplinary audiences, suggesting that the way disciplinary writers perceive and take up the affordances of digital media for their composing is affected by a combination of the discipline’s explanatory goals and approaches and the social dimension of this disciplinary work. Together, these two cases suggest that disciplinarity influences how the affordances of media and modes are seen and taken up. They also suggest that the rhetorical possibilities presented by digital media, when taken up by scholars, amount to changed ways of participating in disciplines, and therefore can affect the constitution of those disciplines. The results have implications for academic publishing, suggesting that publishers need to pay attention to disciplinarity when developing platforms and formats for digital journals since the ways digital affordances are taken up vary widely. The results also provide evidence for attention to mode and media in academic writing curricula, including the epistemic uses of each for disciplinary inquiry. © Copyright 2017 Gwendolynne Collins Reid All Rights Reserved Digital Writing in the Disciplines: Imagining Possibilities for Scholarship in the Context of Digital Media by Gwendolynne Collins Reid A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty of North Carolina State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media Raleigh, North Carolina 2017 APPROVED BY: __________________________________ __________________________________ Dr. Carolyn R. Miller Dr. Christopher M. Anson Co-Chair of Advisory Committee Co-Chair of Advisory Committee __________________________________ __________________________________ Dr. Susan K. Miller-Cochran Dr. Deanna P. Dannels __________________________________ Dr. Stacey L. Pigg ii DEDICATION To Jerry, Simon, and Oliver. This is your dissertation too. iii BIOGRAPHY Gwendolynne Reid is a teacher and scholar of writing and rhetoric. Her scholarship focuses on digital and multimodal composing practices with the goal of helping prepare students to write for today’s complex rhetorical environments. Her research interests include writing across the curriculum, writing in the disciplines, genre studies, digital writing, multimodality, and writing program administration. Using qualitative research methods, Gwendolynne seeks to produce “thick data” to understand the lived experiences of writing for contemporary media environments, particularly in academic and professional contexts. Her interests stem largely from her time teaching undergraduates about disciplinary writing and research. Her writing can be found in Across the Disciplines, WPA-CompPile Research Bibliographies, and several edited collections: Composition, Rhetoric, and Disciplinarity; Scientific Communication: Principles, Practices, and Methods; Twenty Writing Assignments in Context; and Contingent Faculty Publishing in Community. She regularly presents her work at national conferences, such as the Conference on College Composition and Communication, the Rhetorical Society of America, the Council of Writing Program Administrators, and the Computers and Writing Conference. Before beginning her doctoral studies, Gwendolynne taught academic writing and research as a lecturer for almost a decade in North Carolina State University’s Department of English, ending her time there as the First-Year Writing Program’s Assistant Director of Program Development. Gwendolynne earned two master’s degrees in 2005: a degree in English with a concentration in rhetoric and composition from North Carolina State University and a degree in film studies and screen writing from Hollins University. She holds bachelor’s and associate’s degrees in intercultural studies and languages from Bard College at Simon’s Rock, one of the nation’s first early colleges. A dual French and American citizen, Gwendolynne was born in Bordeaux, France, and moved to Augusta, Georgia, in 1982. She will be iv returning to Georgia in the fall, joining the faculty at Oxford College of Emory University as an assistant professor of English and the director of the writing program. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS No endeavor of this size is completed alone. To invoke Mikhail Bakhtin, no utterance is uttered alone. While indebted to many, I am first and foremost indebted to my research participants for their generosity,

Load more