Digital publishing as a liberal art
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This talk was part of Wabash College's 2016 visiting lecture series. It addresses how reading and writing changed with the expansion of digital modes of communication in the 20th century, and argues that interdisciplinary training gives students the skills to be successful readers and writers the 21st century.
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Digital publishing as a liberal art
- 1. Digital Publishing as a liberal art Dr. Cheryl E. Ball West Virginia University @s2ceball
- 3. GTD
- 4. Now
- 5. Then
- 6. Then
- 8. GTD ≠ Getting Things Right
- 13. Then
- 16. Publishing Studies creative writing + technical writing + textual studies
- 18. #vindication
- 19. Digital Humanities is just another name for Digital Publishing
- 20. Publishing Studies has taught me… - editing praxis for media-based texts - the arbitrariness of style guides - the ethics of access/ibility and preservation - the importance of building communities & infrastructure - the importance of global communication practices - the necessity of teaching writing in use-contexts - the necessity of teaching multimodal communication - that vocational training isn’t a dirty word for liberal arts
- 21. THANK YOU.
Editor's Notes
- When I was 12, I learned one of the most important lessons of my life. My parents were out of town one weekend, so my two older sisters had to take me to the overnight camp where they worked in the kitchen. With nothing else to do, and so they could keep an eye on me, I was asked to pitch in. I was used to doing chores at home: vacuuming, washing the dishes, emptying the dishwasher, scrubbing toilets, etc., but in this new space of an industrial kitchen, I was lost. So Cathy Tuberson, the head cook, would assign me things to do: mix that kool-aid. And I would go off and ask three other people about each step in the kool-aid mixing process: Where to get the water from, which container to put it in, what utensil to use to stir kool-aid that was being made in, no joke, a 55-gallon plastic trashcan that turned my arm red or blue or purple with dye, until I realized I was using the wrong length of pizza spatula. After each task Cathy assigned me, I would return to her and ask “what next?” After an hour or two of “what nexts?” Cathy finally turned to me in a huff and said, “Cheryl, take some initiative.” It stunned me. I was embarrassed that I hadn’t known I could take initiative—that all I had to do was look around, see what needed to be done, and do it. Without asking. That was the beginning of my transformation into a person who Gets Things Done. [slide: GTD]
- However, GTD isn’t the same as having a vision that extends beyond individual tasks. I was really good at GTDs and quickly worked my way up in the ranks of the kitchen, and back in town, at the community theater where I transitioned from acting to stage managing adult productions and directing other teen productions. I had great mentors, and while I followed their lead, I didn’t always know where they were leading me. And my shortcomings came out later that same year when, as an all-star softball player for the community team, I was practicing to try out for the junior high school team. In the cul-de-sac across from my house, on one of my father’s rare days off, we played catch. I was the youngest of three daughters, and in that role, was daddy’s little girl, a position I played well. On the field, I played first base and pitcher and had a good arm, or so I thought. But, to put me to the varsity test, dad kept backing up farther and farther after each throw, until I yelled, “I can’t throw that far!” He yelled back, “We’re done!”, and left me standing in the cul-de-sac, full of regret. This was a lesson about vision that I failed to fully learn until nearly twenty years later.
- NOW: editor of leading international journal in digital writing, Fulbight scholar and international lecturer on digital publishing, director of a new cross-disciplinary, library-wide Digital Publishing Institute at WVU, exec dir of CELJ, $1m grant for Vega, one of four grants to move WVU to RVH Carnegie status—all by 42. Over the last decade, I began to have a vision for what publishing studies is, how it intersected with disciplines across the university and in the community, and I figured out how to enact that vision thus, putting my GTD to the future-test. So, how did I get here and why is this history important to you? Well, the personal parts of the history may not be all that important, other than to trace a path of GTD to leading a field of research and praxis. But the choices I made along the way, at key moments in my career, helped me build an area of research, teaching, and service that moves our understanding of publishing forward while also giving back to the disciplines and communities in which I have worked.
- THEN: Throughout high school, college and even my graduate work, I was the kind of student who was more interested in GTD, but not necessarily when it came to my academics. In high school, I was barely an honors student. I paid more attention to my afterschool activities and my part-time job working at a restaurant than I paid to my studies. In part because studying came easy and in part because I am my parents’ daughter: more interested in the practicalities and logistics of work and customer service, even in volunteer positions. As an undergrad, I was a transfer student who worked full time and found more joy in waiting tables than attending class. I even failed out one semester and had to start paying my own way, which meant it was time to get serious: no more easy cash—I couldn’t waitress my entire life, even though that had been my dream job as a kindergartener. One of my regular customers at the coffee shop worked at the large, local newspaper and told me about a secretarial opening for an editorial assistant. As an English major, I knew I had the communication skills, so it was time to turn professional. The problem was that the same week I interviewed for the job at the Pilot (the name of the newspaper), I also got called up for a temporary, part-time job at the local Ford plant, where my dad worked. In 1993, the Ford plant paid $23 an hour while the Pilot was a full-time job with benefits but paying only $8 an hour. My family was a Ford family, so the moment I had to tell my father that I wanted to take the newspaper job, to further my professional career—mind you, as an English major, which was as far in thinking about my career as I had gotten by that point—the disappointment was high.
- But what I learned at that job proved invaluable, looking back on it. I worked the night desk in the newsroom, routing calls and typing up obituaries and weather reports while watching the copy-editing staff and page designers put the reporters words into print. I learned how to use Quark to layout the obituaries page, and I watched as the guys in the composing room printed off film of those pages, stripped it with ads, and sent the completed page via laserwriter to the press—a 20-minute drive—where the film was developed and inked onto newsprint. The process was phenomenal. And years later, became important knowledge about actual publication production that I could teach students in a print production class. While earning my BA in Creative Writing, I worked in the newsroom, the classifieds department, and later, once I started my MFA program in poetry, at a glossy sports-collectibles magazine, where I learned how to spell all of the Russian and Canadian hockey players’ names by memory. I also learned how to use a Mac, how to edit in stages (passing drafts back and forth between proofers and designers who updated the copy in their page-layout programs), and how to ask for more project-based work when I GTD too quickly.
- My boss, also a graduate of my MFA program and thus putting his advanced poetry degree to use managing the production staff at this international magazine, taught me the production process from his perspective—how to work with the press, mark-up blue lines, assign errors, which turned into dollars, to either the publication or the press. Again, all of which I would use when I taught publication production later in my career. And when I had learned everything I could so sat at my desk waiting for more assignments while reading a book for school, the senior publisher walked by, thought I was goofing off on company time, and—despite the fact I worked three times faster and more accurately than any other proofer they had ever employed—fired me first when the company started downsizing later that year.
- That was a lesson in how GTD ≠ Getting Things Right. Getting fired allowed me to pursue my studies more closely, which I was getting more and more excited about as the Web and digital media became part of what I was learning in my MFA program. I built my first website in the Fall of 1997 and was introduced to e-lit and Kairos in 1998.
- Electronic literature was creative writing designed for reading in digital environments—the history of this work dates back to the first formal publication of e-literature in 1987, called afternoon, a story by Michael Joyce. [DISCUSS HYPERTEXT THEORY BRIEFLY > ELECTRONIC LITERATURE].
- At the same time I was learning about e-literature, I heard about Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. [1996, HT principals in scholarly form, webtexts, MET DOUG,
- E-LIT ISSUE/FIRST PUBLICATION]. SHOW current webtext. This was the beginning of my understanding of the relationship between Creative Writing and Computers and Writing. Digital writing was the connector, especially through hypertextual theory and practice.
- first grad student to teach in a computer lab. first MFA student to be president of PW club. first ETD at VCU Out of this practice, I began theorizing visual rhetoric and pedagogy—how to study (and teach) writing through multimedia, particularly digital media. I knew I’d never get a full-time job teaching creative writing, and I enjoyed teaching academic writing with computers, so I pursued a PhD in Rhetoric and Technical Communication at Michigan Tech—one of only a half dozen PhD programs around the country that specialized in digital writing in the early 2000s. (Now, that number has doubled, if not tripled.)
- PhD: - new curriculum allowed for digital based multimedia projects. - Combined e-lit interest with writing studies/rhetorical interests. - Began learning/teaching iMovie and basic HTML (via Dreamweaver) so that students could produce mm projects. - Continued my publication training: o C&C asst editor: learning how to line-edit scholarly work; about communicating with overseas production centers; basically a focus on editorial workflows for scholarly print journals o Kairos editor within first year,
- - Diss about Kairos webtexts and Flash poetry texts, despite advice from my supervisors not to. I was starting to turn GTD into a research agenda in reading and writing new media texts. Quickly, this work turned into providing professionalization to others who wanted to learn how to teach digital media texts to students and evaluate digital media texts for T&P purposes.
- First job: - Took the lesser option that made me happy and allowed me to grow Kairos, - Began adapting the scholarly print processes from C&C to Kairos, - promoted to lead editor within five years - Creating training materials (copy-editing) & Began profdev workshops for Kairos staff. - My research agenda had moved from writing about the teaching of multimodal composition to the evaluation of mm texts (such as Kairos and DH-type projects)
- Second job – Where I developed my vision: - went on the market as an editor-scholar. - Worked with Publications Unit and coordinated the Publishing Studies program. That program, which combined CW, TC, and textual studies (methods branch of lit studies), was hottest program and attracted the best undergraduate students. Its goal was to mix the theory of textual studies and tech comm with the practice of composing in digital spaces from tech comm and in print spaces from CW into a paraprofessional and liberal arts degree. The primary focus had been literary and nonprofit publishing, and when I joined the faculty, it delved into digital publishing. - Taught classes in digital media composition, where students built webtexts for journals like Kairos (as a form of academic research-based writing for the Web)
- - Digital publishing & editing classes: students mined metadata from Kairos, where we could talk about OA, copyrights, Fair Use, Creative Commons, technical infrastructures, pay-to-publish systems, editing experimental writing and media, and accessibility and preservation issues for long-term sustainability of Web-based publications. At the time, even the LOC had no preservation strategies for digital media (born-digital) artifacts, even while Kairos had been publishing these types of texts—and maintaining them—for over 15 years at that point. So, students were learning the cutting edge of digital publishing studies and went on to immediately get jobs as social media managers or metadata project specialists for major and minor publishing houses in the Chicago area. I was thrilled that the combination of hands-on practice and theory that focused on the ethical liberal-arts aspects of access, democracy, and preservation was getting our smartest students jobs. Yet despite these classes rich academic and professional reading lists, the classes were labeled vocational, as if that were a bad thing, because they culminated in hands-on projects. (Some) colleagues even said there was no such thing as “publishing studies” because it wasn’t a discipline one could get a PhD in. My last year there, the first tenure-track position in Publishing Studies hit the MLA job list.
- - There has been at least one job a year in publishing studies since then. But we have also seen a huge increase in non-PhD jobs that require the same qualifications that (digital) publishing studies offers: A quick scan of the DLF job list shows ads being posted daily for folks with experience and education in digital publishing—this might be in subject-specific disciplines or, in most cases, a liberal-arts and more broadly humanistic approach to designing, managing, and producing digital projects,…
- - often under the name Digital Humanities, that are otherwise digital publishing jobs. My push towards making publishing studies a field may be self-serving, but I’ve seen its practical use, grounded in the liberal arts aims towards excellence in reading, writing, and ethical outreach towards a global citizenry have everyday effects on students at the undergraduate and the graduate levels. It has also helped me theorize my everyday editorial practice through interdisciplinary lenses that have most recently culminated in several international teaching and publishing projects I am currently leading: - AHO teaching (writing for publication/funding) - Vega - Digital Publishing Institute - CELJ - (locally) PhD in Writing, Editing, and Publishing at WVU These projects all came into my field of vision in 2010—25 years after Cathy Tuberson told me to take some initiative. And it was in 2010, that I finally learned the difference between GTD and having a vision and a method for throwing the ball out of the park.
- Publishing studies (and digital publishing in particular) has taught me about the world: • editing praxis for media-based texts, • the arbitrariness of style guides, • the ethics of access/ibility and preservation, • the importance of building communities and infrastructures, • the importance of globally thoughtful communication practices, • the necessity of teaching writing in use-contexts, • the necessity of teaching multimodal communication practices in all disciplines, • that so-called vocational training isn’t a dirty word for the liberal arts