Defining Born-Digital Scholarship

We need to make a distinction between born-digital publications and print publications that have transitioned to digital delivery. Born-digital publications are designed from the outset to be published on the Internet (primarily, but not exclusively, on the Web). If the work was originally destined for print publication—even if it was translated to a digital format—it is not considered born-digital. Although nearly all publications are produced digitally these days, the intended venue and the role of design are key in determining whether a given work should be considered born-digital. To that end, we find the concepts transparent and hypermediated presented in Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s (1999) Remediation: Understanding New Media a useful framework for understanding the relationship between digital publication venues and prior versions designed for non-digital venues (e.g., books, print journals, newspapers). 

Transparency, as Bolter and Grusin (1999) wrote, describes electronic texts that allow us to forget or see through their electronic mediation and view the text as we expect it to be: linear, straightforward, hierarchical, and accessible, like a page from a printed book or journal but delivered online. Readers are not challenged by the structural aspects of transparent electronic texts; years of reading printed books and journals prepare them for reading these texts. The same holds true for examples from other media, such as video. The videos available on YouTube, for instance, are transparent with regard to mediation—they look like the videos available on television, albeit in a somewhat wider range of genres and content. 

In contrast, hypermediated electronic texts draw attention to their own mediation, flaunting their differences from print and defamiliarizing and challenging readers to make their own meanings, or in Kathleen Blake Yancey’s (2004) terms, achieving a measure of coherence, through navigating the hyperlinks, exploring interwoven graphics and text, and experiencing the multiple media, including audio and video, that comprise them. As Bolter and Grusin (1999) explained, 

contemporary hypermediacy offers a heterogeneous space, in which representation is conceived of not as a window on to the world, but rather as ‘windowed’ itself—with windows that open on to other representations or other media...In every manifestation, hypermediacy makes us aware of the medium or media. (p. 34)

This awareness is often present because media enactment is required to actually use the digital text. The key elements evaluated when determining degree of remediation include clear relationships to extant non-networked genres (such as print journals, encyclopedias, television sit-coms, etc.); use of design elements such as color, typography, iconography, moving and still images; hypertext linking structure; number of genres or media interacting within the digital text; and requirement of explicit interactivity (beyond reading and navigating). 

Degrees of Remediation

As an extended example of the usefulness of Bolter and Grusin's (1999) distinctions between transparent and hypermediated digital texts, we'll take a look at four webtexts, identifying the degree to which they have been remediated and how their contexts and features support the  genre ecologies of their particular disciplinary roles within their fields of scholarship (in this case, the Computers and Writing subfield of Writing Studies). These are older examples, drawn from our previous publications (see, e.g., Eyman, 2007) but they are useful as examples of these terms.

The journals from which we chose the texts for analysis are Kairos: Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy (Kairos), Computers and Composition Online (CCO), and the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (JCMC). These are all established, well-regarded journals in their fields: JCMC was started in 1995, and Kairos and Computers and Composition Online were launched in 1996  (although the Computers and Composition Online archive currently only goes back to 2000, and its full-issue publishing begins in 2003). Unlike JCMC and Kairos, Computers and Composition Online began as a companion site to a print journal. Each example analysis is based on the state of the article or webtext at the time of original publication (JCMC transitioned to a commercial publisher, so the current version includes a great deal of new css and javascript, along with HTML updates that were not present in the original; the Wysocki webtext was created in Macromedia Director, which, like its successor Adobe Flash, no longer functions on the Web). 

With the exception of the first example (highly transparent), each of the three remaining digital texts were winners of the Kairos Best Academic Webtext Award: Joyce Walker's “Textural Textuality” was the 2001–2002 winner, Anne Frances Wysocki's “a bookling monument” was the 2002–2003 winner, and Michael J. Cripps's “Hypertext Theory and WebDev in the Composition Classroom” was the 2004–2005 winner. Although Lapadat's article in JCMC has not been the recipient of an award, it fits with the overall disciplinary discourses presented in the range of examples and has a fairly high rate of citation.

Example 1: Highly Transparent

Judith Lapadat's “Written Interaction: A Key Component in Online Learning” was published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication in 2002. Lapadat's article was clearly rendered into HTML by exporting from a Microsoft Word document (although the code was subsequently cleaned up to remove most of the proprietary tags generated by Microsoft's non-standards-compliant markup). Other than the links provided for navigating the journal itself, this text features no external links and no images, audio, video, or interactive elements. The text is black on a cream-colored background, and it can be printed out and easily approached as a traditional print article (the journal in which it is published is online-only, so user-initiated printing is the only way to get a print version). While not as fully transparent as a PDF of a print article, this is a good example of a digital text that mimics print precursors.

In her article, Lapadat (2002) argued that “the interactive textual environment of asynchronous online conferences is particularly facilitative of both social and cognitive construction of meaning” because “the nature of online interactive writing itself, in an appropriately designed conference, supports meaning-making.” The article provided a literature review followed by a discussion of the differences between synchronous and asynchronous communication for writing in online courses, using a few brief examples contrasting a graduate students' discussion in face-to-face (F2F) and online situations. Lapadat concluded that “online written contributions have some of the characteristics of spoken language, in that they are interactive, relatively informal, personalized, and audience-aware, with synchronous messages being more speech-like and asynchronous messages being more formal and conventional.” The article is a rhetorical argument (as opposed to an empirical study), and in that respect it also fits well within the disciplinary discourses typically invoked in rhetoric/composition and computers and writing publications.

The following table reports on the formal features of the digital text; of interest is the fact that this article includes keyword metadata (although no other metadata is provided in the code), and that this digital text is composed of a single web page.

Example 2: Moderately Transparent

Michael J. Cripps’s webtext, “#FFFFFF, #000000, & #808080: Hypertext Theory and WebDev in the Composition Classroom” won the 2004–2005 Kairos Best Webtext Award. The webtext is aesthetically engaging, employing color-based markers to indicate where in the relatively complex hypertext the reader is. Despite this use of color and extensive internal linking, this article follows genre conventions of scholarly articles in the humanities and presents a series of pages that are primarily textual (and while the hypertext structure includes many lexia, or webpages, it is generally hierarchical—although not linear—and thus easy to navigate). The use of color/design and the hypertext structure move this work from highly transparent to moderately transparent. The user can't print out the whole article at once, but each lexia could be printed and collated with no loss of meaning.

This webtext reports on a Hypertext Theory and Practice course taught at Rutgers University from 2001–2003. Students in the course “read hypertext theory, learned about web development, and attempted to build elements of theory into their academic essays” (2004). The main sections of the webtext present the background information about the development of the course, a section on hypertext and visual rhetoric theory, a discussion of the successful and unsuccessful pedagogical practices enacted in the course, a series of student models that illustrate the theory and praxis discussions, and a collection of the course materials. I would classify this work as teacher research, which is a very common genre for work published in rhetoric and composition journals.

The following table details the formal features of the digital text; of note is the extensive internal linking, with 78 links across 34 pages, while there are very few external links. Similarly, the references used in this webtext are primarily print references. No metadata is provided in the code.

Example 3: Moderately Hypermediated

Joyce Walker's (2002) webtext, “Textural Textuality: A Personal Exploration of Critical Race Theory” was the winner of the 2001–2002 Kairos Best Webtext Award. This work is classed as moderately hypermediated because it integrates animation, graphic design elements, and a complex and recursive hypertext structure that is not easily transformed to a printed version. The article is also multi-genre, utilizing personal narrative and contributed stories, poetry, and  traditional academic argumentation and theorization. Although the work features approximately the same number of pages and internal links as the article by Cripps, the actual structure of the hypertexts is far less hierarchical or linear.

Walker (2002) explained that 

The first time I ever tried to ride the bus in a major metropolitan area, I was hopelessly lost. I didn't understand how to read the schedules, and the maps offered a frustrating lack of detail. Those of you attempting to navigate this text may find its mapping system to be similarly frustrating, at least at first.

But, she provides multiple navigational aids for the webtext reader.

The navigation page for Walker’s webtext offers both a site map and multiple link options from each lexia. 

“Textural Textuality” considers self-representation, identity, and racism through a series of narratives, responses to events and texts, and rhetorical arguments that engage contemporary work in critical race theory, framed in metaphors of transportation and movement. The webtext also explicitly addresses the function and use of hypertext as a supporting medium for the kind of dialogic/reflective work that Walker attempted. For example, in one node, labeled “conversations,” the author provided a series of slides that place texts excerpted from other sections of the essay "in an effort to consider how it is we speak to one another. What does it mean to have our words placed in reference to one another? What does it mean to have a conversation?” She then points the reader to other nodes where those questions are taken up.

The following table reports on the formal features of the digital text; like the Cripps text mentioned earlier, there is extensive internal linking and minimal external linking and the references used in this webtext are also primarily print references. No in-code metadata was provided with this article.

Example 4: Highly Hypermediated

Anne Frances Wysocki’s (2002) webtext, “a bookling monument,” originally presented at the 2001 Computers and Writing Conference at Ball State University, was the winner of the 2002–2003 Kairos Best Webtext Award. “A bookling monument” requires the Macromedia Shockwave plugin; instead of using HTML markup to arrange text and other media elements into a webtext, Wysocki built a richly interactive experience using Macromedia Director software. 

This work is highly hypermediated because it requires interaction for meaning to be drawn from the text and because it incorporates and integrates rich visual imagery (both photographic and artistic), animation, and text. This work cannot be transferred to a print genre, although it does evoke other digital genres, notably interactive computer games (such as Myst, which is referenced within the webtext).

When “a bookling monument” first loads, the reader is presented with the image of a body lying in a field; on the landscape of the body (only the back is shown in the initial screen) are several pieces of folded paper and a fly. Clicking on the fly shows a time-lapse video of the person whose body we are viewing getting up and walking away. Clicking the papers leads to texts, different views of the body, different animations, or other illustrations—but in order to find these other components of the webtext, the user must explore and play: There are no navigational explanations or cues (such as those provided in Walker's 2002 text). Wysocki's work took up several themes: books and bodies as common carriers of culture, remediation, memory and discomfort (as evidenced in part from some of the grotesque imagery deployed), and the relationship between new media and books. She noted that what “new media pieces show—in their modifications of the book—is how much the 'content' of the book (including our senses of 'book self') are shaped by and dependent upon and hence inseparable from the material, visible structures of the book.” And this work, indeed, enacts this same dynamic.

The following table reports on the formal features of the digital text. There are fewer data points in this table because there are no pages as such in the main text of this piece. Again, like Cripps and Walker, no metadata is provided with this article.

References

Bolter, Jay David, & Grusin, Richard. (1999). Remediation: Understanding new media. MIT Press.

Cripps, Michael J. (2004). #FFFFFF, #000000, & #808080: Hypertext theory and webdev in the composition classroom. Computers and Composition Online: http://cconlinejournal.org/cripps/index.html

Eyman, Douglas. (2007). Digital rhetoric: Ecologies and economies of digital circulation. [Doctoral Dissertation, Michigan State University]. 

Lapadat, Judith C. (2002). Written interaction: A key component in online learning. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 7(4): https://academic.oup.com/jcmc/article/7/4/JCMC742/4584264

Walker, Joyce. (2002). Textural textuality: A personal exploration of critical race theory. Kairos, 7(1): https://kairos.technorhetoric.net/7.1/binder.html?features/walker/text/index.html

Wysocki, Anne Frances. (2002). A bookling monument. Kairos, 7(3): http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/7.3/binder2.html?coverweb/wysocki/index.html

Yancey, Kathleen Blake. (2004). Made not only in words: Composition in a new key. College Composition and Communication, 56(2): 297–328.