Methodological Play
Multimodal Performance
While Bolter and Grusin’s investigation of “remediation” took the form of a print book with a limited number of images, Jussi Parikka argues that theories of remediation can also inspire scholarly work that blends academic analysis and media art practice. For Parikka, a media archaeological approach to engaging remediation enables scholars “to investigate intermedial relations and media historical borrowings across time in a fashion that is not only about writing about media. In short, you can critique media through making media” (Parikka 2012, 137). By making works of media art that creatively demonstrate remediation in action, media archaeologists seek to resist the “holistic linearity” of conventional historical narratives in favor of a more “nonlinear way of understanding past-presents” (Parikka 2012, 137). In our multimodal case studies in chapters 4 through 7, we similarly attempt to blur the lines between past and present media by making born-digital texts that self-consciously draw aesthetic inspiration from older media forms. For example, our chapter on listening to audio pedagogies includes two digital podcast episodes that draw inspiration not only from contemporary digital audio work but also from genre conventions of 1930s radio programs and 1970s DIY cassette tape production. Similarly, in our chapter on television, we present a digital video essay that draws inspiration from the genre features of the 1980s public access call-in program. In this way, we seek to show how contemporary digital scholarly production might be enhanced and complicated by refashioning and reimagining older media forms.
In turning to multimodal performance as a methodology of media history, we’ve been particularly influenced by Tara McPherson’s (2009) call for media studies scholars to engage in making and analyzing media as recursive, interanimating processes. We agree with McPherson’s contention that “hands-on engagement with digital forms reorients the scholarly imagination, [. . .] because scholars come to realize that they understand their arguments and their objects of study differently, even better, when they approach them through multiple modalities” (2009, 121). In other words, multimodal composing is itself a way of knowing; scholars will come to understand the media archives we study in more nuanced, complex ways if we have experience making media as well as critiquing it. In more recent work, McPherson has drawn on the work of Jane Bennet (as well as the critical praxis of 1970s feminist media makers) to articulate more pointedly the distinctive and valuable epistemological orientation that participation in making can bring to media studies scholarship: “Jane Bennet writes of the craftperson’s desire to see what a material can do as opposed to the scientists desire to see what a material is. [. . .] This desire to investigate the material and its potentialities is not the same as critique. It also produces different insights” (2018, 15). We definitely have approached our own multimodal composing with a playful orientation to figuring out what our chosen media can do rather than with an orientation that would ask us to attempt to replicate the conventions of print scholarship in a different medium. For example, when we used digital audio tools to compose podcasts about histories of radio pedagogy, we found ourselves attending much more carefully to the challenges and potentialities of audio forms of composing as well as to the differing constraints and affordances of analog and digital tools for composing with sound.
As multimodal composers, we’ve drawn aesthetic inspiration not only from the work of media artists but also from the low-tech production values of the English teachers we’ve gotten to know in the English Journal archive. In particular, we’ve noted that English teachers historically have resisted the need to compose with the latest expensive technical tools, instead encouraging students to compose with whatever tools they had on hand or could easily borrow (from broomstick mics to Super 8 cameras, and everything in between). Similarly, we’ve deliberately composed our digital multimodal texts mostly with free, amateur software, built-in computer recording equipment, and iPhones rather than privileging expensive professional software and dedicated recording tools. We make this conscious choice to embrace amateur technologies, because we contend that if media production pedagogies are to persist in English studies, we must come to embrace low-tech methods of production that can make multimodal composing more accessible to students and teachers in classrooms with limited technological resources.
We’ve also been happily influenced by the playful, “amateurish” approach to media production that we’ve found among English Journal authors. In recovering past media production pedagogies, we’ve taken delight in how often teachers compellingly describe raucous enthusiasm and laughter permeating the classroom as students compose multimodal texts. Seeking to honor this pedagogical tradition of joyful media making, we’ve composed our multimodal case studies in a deliberately playful way. In our video and audio essays, we deliberately play with gimmicky sound and video effects, groan-inducing puns, hyperbolic purple prose, and even the occasional gratuitous profanity. In our computer case study chapter, we revel in the exuberant excess of 1990s hypermedia as we present a portion of our argument in the form of a GIF-laden GeoCities-inspired website. In the coda, we embrace the high-energy bombast of the YouTube countdown video. As we composed our multimodal reimaginings of the English Journal archive, one of our primary goals has been to amuse the inner twelve-year-old both within ourselves and, we hope, within our audience members.
We recognize that there is a risk that our playful approach to media production may cause our arguments not to be taken seriously in the field, and yet we’ve come to see that resisting the supposed seriousness of scholarly production can be a powerful practice of scholarly disruption and reinvention. As queer theorist Jack Halberstam argues,
The desire to be taken seriously is precisely what compels people to follow the tried and true paths of knowledge production. [. . .] Indeed, terms like serious and rigorous [. . .] signal a form of training and learning that confirms what is already known according to approved methods of knowing, but they do not allow for visionary insights or flights of fancy. (Halberstam 2011, 6)
In the context of born-digital multimodal scholarship, the fear of not being taken seriously often propels digital scholars to continue to make webtexts that are weighed down by leaden academic prose or (even worse) to make monotone video voiceovers that sound like a conference paper being read aloud. Far too often, scholars worry that if our digital, multimodal work departs from the staid tone of academic prose, it will not be taken seriously by our colleagues. But Halberstam’s queer rejection of seriousness emboldens us to revel in the disruptive frivolity of multimodal play—to recognize that our conscious refusal of a serious tone in digital multimodal scholarship can potentially open new ways of knowing and being in the field.
This project is also informed by Halberstam’s elucidation of the value of engaging “silly archives” (Halberstam 2011, 2) that resist traditional academic hierarchies of knowledge. For example, Halberstam chose to turn a queer eye towards an archive of animated children’s films that “preserves some of the wondrous anarchy of childhood and disturbs the supposedly clean boundaries between adults and children” (3). We similarly seek to reclaim the “wondrous anarchy” of youth media production in English classrooms as a way to resist the norms of disciplinary seriousness that limit the kinds of multimodal texts that we and our students compose. In our experience, multimodal writing pedagogies have too often been dismissed by colleagues in the university as “childish,” and we advocates of multimodal pedagogy too often respond to these critiques by demonstrating the very serious reflective learning that takes place in our classrooms. But consider if we took a step back from defending the adult seriousness of multimodal composition and instead embraced a childish approach to multimodal production. How might embracing our inner twelve-year-old help us think beyond the academic professional norms that limit the transformative potential of multimodal scholarship? By consciously embracing a childish approach to media production, we ultimately seek to resist the institutional hierarchies that too often prevent university faculty from learning from and valuing the innovative, playful media pedagogies that can be found in K–12 contexts, both historic and contemporary.
But everything isn’t simply fun and games. On a more serious note, we also seek to employ multimodal composing as a strategy to vividly demonstrate how our archival research arises from a deeply embodied, “lived process” (Kirsch and Rohan 2008). While traditional print histories often erase the embodied positionalities of their authors by telling “authoritative” narratives that speak almost entirely in the third person, feminist historians have increasingly called scholars to account more fully for how our own embodied positionalities and experiences shape the work we do in archives (Kirsch and Rohan 2008; Royster and Kirsch, 2012). As Royster and Kirsch argue, a feminist rhetorical methodology necessitates that scholars break with the third-person conventions of historical narrative structure to tell stories about how their inquiries have been influenced by their own “lived, embodied experience(s)” (22) both within the archives and beyond them.
As you watch and listen to us discuss the archive in our audio and video pieces, you can be reminded that our own selection and representation of this archive is necessarily influenced by how our own embodied positionalities influence our work as historians. We are both white, tenured English professors who live and work in Ohio, but grew up in the southern United States. We both share a love of silly humor, obscure old technologies, all things rhetoric, and classic cocktails. Jason is a queer, genderfluid person from a middle class background, who lives with an adorable cat named The General; Jason also lives with the unpredictability of relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis. Ben identifies as a cishet man, as well as a first-generation academic from a rural, working-class background. While we have worked hard to re-see our archives through many different methodological lenses, we recognize well that the story we tell here is very much shaped by our own lived experiences. It’s likely that other scholars would have arrived at very different narratives about the history of new media pedagogy, and we hope this book inspires them to tell those stories.
Our own embodied positionalities also certainly influenced the kinds of relationships we built with the people we came to know in the English Journal archive. Challenging conventional distinctions between person-based and archival research, Royster and Kirsch (2012) argue that historians should self-reflectively account for archival research as a relational process “in which historical figures join the living when they become part of us, when we get to know them like friends or relatives” (85). Like Royster and Kirsch, we too have come to develop close relationships with the teachers in the English Journal archive—at times they are the enthusiastic friends who inspire us to take exciting pedagogical risks, wizened mentors whose imagination and vision far outpaces our own, and even the older relatives who say “problematic” things at the holiday dinner table, among other relations. When we found ourselves transforming the work of the teachers in our archive into data points on graphs in the early stages of this project, we felt a sense of loss, specifically the feeling that we were not conveying the kind of close relationships we have formed over time with them. Our turn to multimodal, multigenre performance in the second half of the book represents an attempt to engage in dialogue with the archival research “participants” from whom we have learned so much.
We also see multimodal composing as a way to reveal some of the embodied process of our “dialogic collaboration” (Lunsford and Ede 1990) as scholars. As Lunsford and Ede have long argued, the process of collaborative writing need not proceed by strictly dividing up work, where each author is solely responsible for their own part. Rather, in a dialogic collaboration, authors engage in dialogue with each other throughout the process from the very earliest stages of invention to the very final stylistic edits, such that it becomes impossible to clearly identify where one author’s contribution begins and the other’s ends. Importantly, Ede and Lunsford emphasize dialogic collaboration as a robustly multimodal process in which spoken conversation plays a key role: “If you can imagine the words talk . . . write . . . talk . . . read . . . talk . . . write . . . talk . . . read . . . written in a large looping spiral—that comes closest a description as we know it” (Ede and Lunsford 1983, 152). Our process has been much the same, though we might sometimes replace the word “write” with other verbs such as “compose” or “code” or “perform.” Importantly, Lunsford and Ede argued that collaborative scholars should make space in their work to document their modes of composing, and they practiced this by telling detailed and engaging stories of the conversations they’ve had and the places they’ve gathered over years of “writing together” (Lunsford and Ede 2012). As much as we love reading Lunsford and Ede’s stories of their collaboration, we find ourselves wishing that they’d been able to audio or video record the conversations that they describe. We see value in multimodal documentation of collaborative process because we recognize that whenever we try to turn a spoken conversation into an alphabetic narrative, some of the semiotic richness or texture of spoken dialogue is lost: the tone of voice, the laughter, the emphatic gesture. By composing video and audio texts that dramatize our collaborative conversations, we ultimately hope to contribute to Lunsford and Ede’s ongoing effort to make the recursive, conversational nature of dialogic collaboration more recognized in an academy that continues to privilege solo-author work and/or to cling to reductive, hierarchical models of collaboration. We also seek to highlight the dialogic nature of collaboration by disrupting conventional notions of author order: you’ll notice that our author names are divided by a “/” rather an “and”; we also systematically alternate the order of our names from page to page in our header. (As such, readers are advised to cite our names in whatever order you feel like—we truly do not give a glass of sugar honey iced tea.)
While it is possible to write personally and reflectively about the embodied, collaborative process of archival research in the pages of a bound book, the conventional print monograph is limited in its ability to reveal the multisensory, embodied process of composing history. On a conventional alphabetic page, we can read descriptions of the historian’s embodied experiences in archives, but we can’t literally see and hear them making meaning through multisensory communicative modes. Recognizing the limitations of print as a medium for self-reflective historical scholarship, the born-digital collection Reconstructing the Archive demonstrated how video production can offer a way for scholars to visually present “archives embodied, powerfully transformed through a combined personal, theoretical, and critical engagement” (Alexander 2016). In the introduction to her video contribution to the collection, Jody Shipka powerfully made the case for the value of video production as a way of visually showing the embodied process of composing archival research:
[V]ideo scholarship affords me the opportunity to document and share with viewers and listeners aspects of the composing process (and indeed, aspects of the composer herself—her hands, her voice, her intentions, missteps, desires, etc.) that have traditionally been erased, downplayed, or rendered invisible, inaudible, in print-based scholarship. (Shipka 2016)
In Shipka’s video, we see her handling and discussing the multimodal archival materials of Dorothy—an everyday mid-century woman who copiously documented her own life in scrapbooks, letters, and diaries. In addition to discussing Shipka’s own personal attempt to “inhabit” Dorothy’s life by taking trips to places Dorothy visited, Shipka also showcased the work of over forty collaborators who digitally recreated and reimagined images captured in Dorothy’s personal archive. These digital recreations or “inhabitations” (Shipka 2016) of the archive blurred the boundaries between past and present in provocative ways, and they also called attention to how the lived embodied experiences of each of the “inhabitors” influenced how they made meaning of the archival materials. Refusing to tell a univocal narrative of Dorothy’s life, Shipka’s video instead repositioned Dorothy’s archive as an inventive resource that could be reinterpreted and remixed in multiple ways. Following the inspiration of Shipka’s “Inhabiting Dorothy” project, we too have sought out collaborators to enliven our attempts to digitally recreate moments in the English Journal archive. For example, we recruited numerous “voice actors” to inhabit the voices of scholars we feature in our audio and video essays, and, like Shipka, we’ve found that inviting diverse collaborators to inhabit our archive with us performatively has added complexity, texture, and a delightful sense of whimsy to our own interpretations. Although we have made a concerted effort to include a diverse range of audio voices in our mulitimedia texts, you will note that the visual tracks include primarily our own embodied performances; if you get tired of seeing us carrying on, you can always choose to read the transcripts instead!
In addition to adapting elements of Shipka’s performative approach to archives, we’ve also been inspired by Trisha Campbell’s contribution to Reconstructing the Archives: “I am Josephine Miles: A Digital Reprocessing.” In this video essay (and accompanying webtext), Campbell offered a digital reimagination of the life of Josephine Miles, a compositionist, poet, literary scholar, and early proponent of quantitative textual analysis. In her video, Campbell drew on archival materials to perform as Josephine Miles; during the course of the video performance, Campbell’s face slowly breaks through an archival photo of Miles and it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish the voice of the researcher from the voice of the archival subject. In this way, Campbell’s video vividly called attention to archival work as a deeply embodied relational process.
In explaining her choice to compose history via video performance, Campbell drew on the work of digital remix artists (Amerika 2011; Miller 2004) to argue for the:
historiographical method of digital reprocessing. As part radical recovery, part digital reprocessing, and part digital performance, I highlight this method for not only thinking about our archives, but also our own role in activating histories [. . .]. The potential of the digital opens a space in which the researcher becomes artist becomes performer becomes processor to recontextualize, remix, and sample the past into something new and present through the digitally recorded outputs of her own body. (Campbell 2016)
Campbell’s work showed that multimodal video performance could be a way for historical scholars to self-reflexively elucidate their own role in “activating histories”—a way for us to show, vividly, how our own embodied experiences have influenced the kinds of arguments we make through sampling and representing archival materials. Furthermore, Campbell powerfully insisted that the work of the video historian need not be confined by the norms of print history writing, but rather that video historians should instead seek creative inspiration from the knowledge-making practices of digital artists and performers who can help us consider different paths for making meaning of archives through video technologies.
Multigenre Performance
In addition to demonstrating the usefulness of re-performing archives with multiple modalities, we also seek to elucidate the value of composing histories using multiple genres. Throughout this project, we engage in dialogue with each other and with the people in our archive using a wide variety of popular genres: the eighties public access TV program, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), the listicle, the typewritten letter, the silent film, the podcast, the TV commercial, the Buzzfeed quiz, and the digital story, to name but a few. In composing this book as both a multigenre as well as multimodal text, we draw inspiration from the tradition of multigenre writing pedagogy in K-12 and college classrooms (Jung 2005; Romano 2000). Resisting the narrow focus on linear forms of academic argumentation, proponents of multigenre pedagogy engage students in exploring a topic by composing about it through multiple genres—making room not only for students to develop a more robust understanding of genre but also enabling them to consider their topic more complexly from multiple perspectives. In many ways, we see our work as a book-length, digital multimodal extension of the classic multigenre “paper.” As Tom Romano defines it:
The multigenre paper arises from research, experience, and imagination. It is not an uninterrupted, expository monolog nor a seamless narrative. [. . .] A multigenre paper is composed of many genres and subgenres, each piece self-contained, making a point of its own, yet connected by theme or topic and sometimes by language, images, and content. In addition to many genres, a multigenre paper may also contain many voices, not just the author’s. (Romano 2000, x–xi)
We find inspiration in Romano’s articulation of multigenre composing here because he notes that the process is not simply one of creative play, but rather a blend of research and imagination that makes room for many different voices to converse.
If we recognize that particular genres both enable and constrain particular kinds of social action (Miller 1984), then it makes sense that proliferating the genres in which we compose our scholarship may enable our field to develop insights and reach audiences that we otherwise might not if we stick with conventional genres of academic argumentation alone. As Julie Jung has persuasively argued, composing multigenre texts can be a way for composition and rhetoric scholars to resist reductive binary thinking and come to develop a more complex and multivalent vision of the work of our discipline. Offering a close reading of multigenre writing by Kathleen Welch and Richard Miller, Julie Jung argues that multigenre composing can enable scholars to enact a “revisionary rhetoric” that necessitates
that we look at our own tendencies to pigeonhole others, to “clean up” messes by resorting to convenient but reductive binaries. For both [Welch and Miller], writing in multiple genres disrupts this readerly tendency; doing so also makes heard the ways in which disciplinary values are reflected in generic conventions. By migrating to new genres, these writers prevent us from pigeonholing them as they invite us to see ourselves and our discipline anew. (Jung 2005, 54)
By taking a playful, multifaceted approach to genres of composing for this project, we similarly seek to invite our readers to think beyond traditional binaries in the field—K-12 vs. college, creative vs. critical, new vs. old, alphabetic vs. multimodal—to reimagine what English studies pedagogy has been and can become in generative, unexpected, playful ways.
