Colloquium: “Composing, Reviewing, and Preserving Multimodal Scholarship”
with Jentery Sayers, English, University of Victoria
Thursday, February 16th, 9:00 AM
Research Commons, Presentation Space (University of Washington Libraries)

This talk serves two distinct but related purposes. It introduces the audience to a particular strain of digital humanities research, namely the field of multimodal scholarly communication. It also digs into some everyday issues faced by practitioners in the field. During the first half of the talk, Sayers surveys examples of multimodal scholarship and articulates their relation to histories of print in academia. He also distinguishes, at least rhetorically, between the terms “multimedia,” “web-based,” and “multimodal” scholarship. He then concludes by engaging a vexed issue in the field: whether it produces “data” and, if so, then what data might imply and how it might be better managed (especially by the “lone” humanities scholar). The second half of the talk is aimed more specifically at the iterative process of multimodal scholarly communication. Here, Sayers points to some common platforms and tools, stressing a widespread investment in “writing with new media.” He then unpacks how such forms of argumentation are peer reviewed and conjectures about how peer review could be changing, with some brief commentary on his editorial review role with the open access journal, Kairos: Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, as well as his use of the authoring and publishing platform, Scalar. At the talk’s end, he addresses some concerns about the preservation of multimodal work by looking at the materiality and material culture of digital objects (e.g., workflow, metadata, emulation, and interoperability). Based on his experiences thus far, he makes a series of recommendations for engaging multimodal scholarship, framed (such as they are) by a practitioner in English studies.

Talk: “Scholarly Communication in a Digital Age”
Jentery Sayers, English, University of Victoria
Thursday, February 16th, 2:30 PM
Mary Gates Hall 420 (University of Washington iSchool)

How are the ways in which scholarship is produced, circulated, reviewed, and preserved changing? To what effects on our perceptions of writing, collaboration, research, archives, history, and culture? With these questions in mind, this talk begins with a fifteen-minute review of how digital humanities practitioners variously do the work they do, giving the audience a cursory survey of existing digital humanities methods, projects, and issues in both the U.S. and Canada. Sayers then transitions into a forty-five-minute account of his hybrid (i.e., part print, part digital) book project, which is a cultural history of magnetic recording (1878 to the present). There, he speaks to the ways in which the project uses the Scalar platform to integrate D3 data visualization, the Resource Description Framework, Dublin Core metadata, and annotated audio and video into a long-form argument anchored in comparative media studies, literary criticism, and science and technology studies. Ultimately, this approach to the book raises questions about where and how digital scholarly communication is published, how it is accessed and interpreted, who is involved in its development and when, and where all of the components are stored. Ultimately, Sayers argues that changes to the book necessarily imply changes to scholarly labor and inquiry, and those changes also foster new speculations about (rather than mere re-presentations of) the stuff and conditions of history and culture. He then concludes with a fifteen-minute overview of other scholarly communication projects to which he is currently contributing, including the Modernist Versions Project (a large-scale collaboration invested in comparing and visualizing modernist novels), the Seattle DIY Exhibit (an online exhibit of the UW’s Crocodile Café Collection), and Humanities Physical Computing at UVic (a series of micro-controller workshops at his home institution). In ways arguably novel to humanities traditions, each of these projects demands collaboration, multimodal communication, and the combination of technical competences with critical theory.

Panel: “Approaching Public Scholarship from Diverse Disciplines”
with Tom Ackerman, Tad Hirsch, Kari Lerum, and Jentery Sayers
Friday, February 17th, 3:30 PM
Communication 226 (Simpson Center for the Humanities / Public Scholarship GIG)

This panel will bring together panelists from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to ask how we as scholars from these different contexts approach a public scholarship (community activism/partnerships, public policy, etc.) praxis. What are the common threads between the work that we do? What are the challenges faced by our unique positions within the academy? Thus far in the certificate program our conversations have revolved around how we use artifacts and evidence about our scholarship, how we can make claims about our public scholarly identities, and how we define our public/audience. The panel will focus on these issues with an emphasis on self-reflexivity (i.e., how you use these themes in your own disciplinary background). A secondary goal of the Public Scholarship GIG is to cultivate interest in public scholarship from diverse perspectives – thus, we target the natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, and design.

Together with Shana Kimball and the CLIR fellows, I discussed issues raised in the Scholarly Communication Institute’s ninth and most recent report. I especially enjoyed our conversations about graduate training and digital humanities curriculum development, not to mention considerations related to the trajectories of humanities dissertations.

As someone invested in new models for scholarly communication (e.g., at Kairos and HASTAC), such pressing issues are central to my research and teaching. And it’s always a fantastic opportunity to unpack them with other people who are equally invested.

Example Work

How Text Lost Its Source: Magnetic Recording Cultures 

—my multimodal dissertation (now a book project), which used Scalar for (among other things) the annotation of historical audio, the enactment of boundary object theory, and non-sequential approaches to scholarly argumentation

“Writing with Sound”

— a “middle state” publication on producing scholarly communication with dynamic media; written for Rough Cuts: Media and Design in Process (Ed. Kari Kraus, forthcoming in The New Everyday)

English 507: Digital Literary Studies 

— a University of Victoria graduate seminar where students use Scalar to collaboratively document the trajectories and intersections of their learning

Humanities 250: How to Network a Novel

— a University of Victoria undergraduate digital humanities course where students use Scalar to: (1) collaboratively annotate James Baldwin’s Another Country and related media (e.g., video and images), (2) express multiple interpretations of and contexts for the novel, and (3) visualize relationships across those interpretations and contexts

“Authoring and Publishing with Scalar: Some Considerations for Context-Sensitive Design”

— an essay I wrote with Craig Dietrich; it is currently under revision

What I Have Learned

Scalar compellingly demonstrates why we are in an exciting moment for scholarly communication. Thus far, the platform has become a vehicle for me to compose, argue, speculate, and teach through new media, graphical expression, collaboration, context-sensitive design, metadata, and various ontologies. While I still have much to learn, at this juncture in my research I have realized the degree to which such platforms facilitate interpretation via dynamic content and computation, which need not be rendered positivist, determinist, or value-neutral in character.

(All images on the left are screen shots of Scalar projects to which I am currently contributing.)

Also, for the balance of the academic year, I will be co-mentoring six HASTAC Scholars at the University of Victoria (UVic). All six of them are graduate students in UVic’s Department of English, and each of them is (in one way or another) engaging digital scholarly communication.

Design: Jentery Sayers

Full Title: “Standards in the Making: Composing with Metadata in Mind”

Official Description of the Collection

Edited by Debra Journet, Cheryl Ball, and Ryan Trauman, The New Work of Composing (Computers and Composition Digital Press, screen shot left) is a “book-length” collection that examines the complex and semiotically rich challenges and opportunities posed by new modes of composing, new forms of rhetoric, new concepts of texts and textuality, and new ways of making meaning. In particular, this multimodal, digital book will explore how digital media are shaping our understanding of scholarly projects within composition studies. In so doing, it will address the need to re-think what constitutes the “book” in an era of “born digital” scholarship.

Essay Description

“Standards in the Making: Composing with Metadata in Mind” contributes to the collection by arguing for the relevance of metadata (especially folksonomies or descriptive metadata) to the future of new media composition. Using the Library of Congress’ pilot project with Flickr as a case study, we show the various ways that metadata can be interpreted as an ambivalent social practice, which both accommodates and resists formal standardization. Through a non-sequential design (screen shots left), the chapter “animates” or visualizes the processes through which we individually, collectively, and collaboratively authored the chapter.

What I Learned

Given the impulse of The New Work to re-think the book, one of the first things I learned while authoring this chapter was how to design digital humanities scholarship and a humanities interface. I also learned how to design while co-authoring content with three other people (all in different academic fields) from a distance. That is, a bulk of the chapter was written and designed when all four of us were in different physical locations (across countries and states), and that distance necessitated our re-configuring what it means to collaborate. For that reason (among others), the chapter itself stresses the importance of outlining a workflow for digital collaboration and making that workflow transparent for audiences.

Looking forward!

I am in the process of translating the “Five Reasons” talk into an essay, which I hope to publish in the near future. In the meantime, here is a PDF version of my “One Course, One Project” slides. Throughout the talk, I referred to a media studies course I taught at the University of Washington Bothell in early 2011.

Thank you to Rosemary Feal for inviting me to the media training workshop, to Priscilla Wald and Matt Gold for moderating the panels, and to Margaret Rhee, Patrick Jagoda, Liz Losh, Jeff Rice, and Matt Gold for presenting with me. And thanks to Mark Sample, you can get a sense of some conversations I had at #MLA12.

Finally, thank you to Joan Lippincott at the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) for discussing my ”One Course, One Project” talk during the January 18th CNI podcast.

DH-Theory Intersections

— Lead: Richard J. Lane (MeTA Digital Humanities Lab & VIU Digital Humanities Research Group, Vancouver Island U). Members: Emile Fromet de Rosnay (French), Stephen Ross (English), Jentery Sayers (English), Sally Carpentier (English, VIU), Ian Whitehouse (English, VIU)

Issues in Large-Scale, Multi-Site, Collaborative Versioning

— Lead: Stephen Ross (English). Members: Jentery Sayers (English), Alison Chapman (English), Janelle Jenstad (English), Constance Crompton (ETCL, English), Brendan Gibb (Britec Computer Systems)

Humanities Physical Computing

— Lead: Jentery Sayers (English). Members: Alyssa Arbuckle (English), Ted Hiebert (Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, U Washington Bothell), Doug Jarvis (Artist), Alyssa McLeod (English), Daniel Powel (English), Emily Smith (English), Michael Stevens (English)

During our meetings and workshops in 2012, we will explore three things in particular: (1) the basics of Arduino and Processing (including workshops on programming), (2) teaching with Arduino (including a workshop on microcontrollers, kinaesthetic learning, and critical practice), and (3) the “reanimation” of junk technologies and media (including workshops inspired by the Scrapyard Challenge Workshops). Ultimately, then, our emphasis will be on praxis, the materiality of digital objects, the development of intelligent research environments, and frameworks for reducing technological waste through creative repurposing and education.

Follow us at #uvichpc.