Video Scholarship and Screen Composing

Daniel Anderson

Winner of the 2013 Digital Rhetoric Collaborative Book Prize

For decades, we have heard about the potential of multimedia to transform scholarship, teaching, and composition. Most of these claims, however, have been articulated using the text-centric materials of the printed word. Video Scholarship and Screen Composing foregrounds the moving images, sounds, and words that come together in digital video, presenting an alternative to print’s linearity, logic, and argument, and opening rhetorical possibilities linked with emotions and open-ended readings.

Consisting of twelve videos, this collection asks questions about traditional composition approaches, calling attention to the competitive ways that scholars typically engage one another; the ways that scholarship often aims for closure rather than opening up meaning; and the ways that media shape understanding through complex emotional registers. As it explores these questions, Video Scholarship and Screen Composing demonstrates digital rhetoric’s potential to reach learners in ways that augment and enhance what text can accomplish.

Video Scholarship and Screen Composing can be read on either the Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative website or on Fulcrum.

Daniel Anderson is Professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.