viz.

Image Credit: Jason Dockter 'Going Multi-Modal'

Click play, and you're smack in the middle of composing, as Jason Dockter, PhD student at Utah State University, creates a digital ethnography of skateboarding sub-culture. His website Going Multi-Modal documents, as Dockter writes, "the process that I went through creating multimodal composition similar to what I might ask students in my first-year composition course to create in a future semester." You can watch the digital iMovie take shape from the beginning, through several...different...stages of production, and through to the end. (The example piece is embedded after the break.)

Image Credit: Jason Dockter 'Going Multi-Modal'

I recently came across the skateboarding project while trying to answer--"What exactly is mediated content?"-- a question raised (for me) by compositionist Cynthia Selfe.Last year, Selfe came to UT-Austin campus to give a talk "Stories That Speak to Us: The Intellectual and Social Work of Literacy Narratives & Digital Archives."At a morning coffee with graduate students, she offered some advice about publishing, New Media, and composition. She said that a key to getting hired in today's market was working in "mediated content." To explain what what she meant, she talked about the digital press she had recently founded, and she commended the work of Cheryl Ball of Illinois State University.

Selfe, speaking to graduate students about publication, was talking about mediated scholarship. She was indicating that our work should be crafted in digital formats with critical reflection on media available to communicate our arguments. But as a influential scholar in composition and literacy, I assumed that Selfe also meant that we should be teaching students to produce mediated content. The continuum between the work of our teaching and the work of publication, I inferred, should foster these same skills and concepts. And it's the work of Cheryl Ball that perhaps best illustrates the connection between research and pedagogy (see her teaching philosophy). In a 2007 interview below, Ball argues for greater attention to scholarly publication in online formats, and she also discusses student New Media work in her English classes.

Video Credit: Ben McCorkle

I won't attempt to summarize the extensive contributions Cheryl Ball has made to Computers and Writing, but the Kairos online journal she edits, along with Doug Eyman, is possibly the site for sorting out what mediated content means in our field.And it was Ball's online tenure application that led me to (among other productions) the skateboard-ethnographizing by Jason Dockter. Dockter produced the website for Ball's online graduate class Multi-Modal Composition in the Spring of 2009. The meme continues forward from here. 

On viz. this year, we'll continue to ask: "What exactly is mediated content?"Although a seeming commonplace in Computers and Writing, defining mediated content is not simple. The skills, aesthetics, and ethics of this kind of production are not readily apparent, although these modes are in existence and better known to some of us than others of us. For those of us whose scholarship still seems framed by residual print concepts, we're eager to learn more about what the shift to "mediated scholarship" means for our thinking and our teaching. In the Visual Rhetoric project this year, we're hoping to answer the questions of mediation through action: producing mediated content with our students and, as well,producing research for digital formats. We'll document these activities on the viz. blog, so stay connected. Please send your comments our way, as well, as we attempt to tap in to discourses others of you are so intrepidly trailblazing.