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"Cultural Materialist Critique and Digital Scholarship"

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Computers & Writing Conference Presentation -

2009 - Ryan Trauman

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1. Introduction

• Citation as Material and Social Practice• editing work on The New Work of

Composing– born-digital scholarship

• citability?

• Subtopic

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2. Texts and scholarship are changing

• Hypertext/Websites• dynamic sites• user-generated content• N. Katherine Hayles. How We Became Posthuman - Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and

Informatics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999.– "flickering signifiers, characterized by their tendency toward unexpected metamorphoses,

attenuations, and dispersions" (Hayles 29-30).• Matthew G. Kirschenbaum. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge, MA and

London: MIT Press, 2008.– "the ontology of digital phenomena" (4)– "In what...does the materiality of electronic texts consist?" (9).

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2. Texts and scholarship are changing (2)

• Christing L. Borgman. Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet. The MIT Press, 2007.

– "This is a critical juncture of scholarly information infrastructure. The technology has advanced much more quickly than has our understanding of its present and potential uses. ... Design decisions made today will determine whether the Internet of tomorrow enables imaginative new forms of scholarship and learning" (3)

– "Building a technical framework for scholarship is much easier than understanding what to build, for whom, for what purposes, and how their usage of the technologies will evolve over time." (3)

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2. Texts and scholarship are changing (3)

• Cheryl Ball - Show, Not Tell• CELJ - "Best Practices for Online Journal

Editors"

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6. How do scholarly digital texts cite other texts?

• citation/bibliography– Susan H. Delagrange. "Wunderkammer,

Cornell, and the Visual Canon of Arrangement." Kairos, 13.2, Spring 2009

• Urls and Email links embedded– Sean Zdenek. "Accessible podcasting:

College students on the margins in the new media classroom." Computers and Composition Online. Fall 2009

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8. Functional notions of traditional citation practices (aka

interface designs)• Interface elements

– citation– quotation, paraphrase, summary, stills– bibliography– page #

• scholarly work– citation

• connects texts rhetorically• maps to a static text

– quotation, paraphrase, summary, stills• conjures immediate reproduction• reduces the need to physically locate source material

– bibliography• embeds a text within a discourse

– page #• delineates scope and location of source material

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8. Functional notions of traditional citation practices (aka

interface designs) (2)• data storage/proximity

– citation• one text stored outside another text• points away from text toward others

– quotation, paraphrase, summary, stills• stores one (partial) text within another

– bibliography• embeds a discourse within a text

– page #• delineates scope and location of source material

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13. In what specific ways do scholarly digital texts complicate

citation practices?• PDF

– Sean Zdenek. "Accessible podcasting: College students on the margins in the new media classroom." Computers and Composition Online. Fall 2009

• Flash Text– Susan H. Delagrange. "Wunderkammer, Cornell, and the Visual Canon of

Arrangement." Kairos, 13.2, Spring 2009• YouTube

– theamishaugur. "English Downfall." Kairos, 13.2, Spring 2009.• Flash Movie

– Bonnie Kyburz. "Bones." Kairos, 13.2, Spring 2009.

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16. What are our best current options for citing digital texts?

• alphabetic citation– of alphabetic texts– of movies– of flash texts– of Web sites– of still images

• Still images– screen capture– embedded images

• moving images– video screen capture

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16. What are our best current options for citing digital texts?

(2)• audio

– audio capture– download files

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17. What might we do as producers and editors of digital texts to better facilitate certain

types of citation?• Portable citation assets.

– movies• Digital Mirrors: Multimodal Reflection in the

Composition Classroom

– Project Files• Flash texts• Sophie books

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19. Concerns for continued exploration

• copyright and circulation– licensing options– trackability statistics

• burden on producers/editors/hosts/presses– increase in scope of what consititutes a "text"– server space, traffic, maintenance, archives

• proprietary software (politics)– politics– economics

• software versioning– avoiding obsolescence