Bruce Ingraham provides a perspective on the writing process when we add multimedia to the compositional mix.  Speaking of multimediated scholarly discourse, he notes:

 

[W]e must…recognize that none of the media that we study is a transparent vehicle for its content.  Each medium constructs its content in its own way…. Finally, we must ask what is the most suitable medium or mix of media in and through which to articulate our arguments…. In short, we must examine, modify and develop the models of discourse that are available to us with a view to devising the most convincing strategies for pursuing our arguments.

 

                                            (emphasis added)

 

 

In other words, when we add multimediation to the textual-creation process, these media have their own impact on the process distinct from the part played, for example, by another medium.  What media we choose affect our meaning, just as what words we choose affect the meaning of a traditional text.  Ingram, then, calls for an examination of the new, multimedia-enriched models of discourse that are available to us.

 

Thus it’s entirely appropriate for Daniel Anderson to ask, in 2005:  “What do we really know about the multimedia writing process?”  So far, the answer seems to be—in terms of a process model: not a great deal.  Indeed, Andrea Lunsford noted in 2006:  

 

Traditional and familiar theories of writing have not focused on the material conditions of production or accounted for the inclusion or aural and visual elements…at every stage of the writing process, much less on effective ways to perform the knowledge produced during those stages.

 

                (176)

 

Thus, since “…we are still discovering what the writing process of newmediation is, [and therefore]... will need to create our own maps as we go” (Whipple), what I propose to do in the remaining space is to posit such a map--a tentative model, similar to Murray’s tripartite scheme, of a new kind of “writing” process, one that includes the richness of media delineated by Wiebe and Dornsife above.  

 

Any written product—whether alphabetic or multimediated—begins at some point in time and is “finished” (a fluid term, but at least for some point in time—often by a grade, as Murray notes (6), or by an externally or self-mandated deadline, or by putting it online to be “live” (at least for a time), for example).  Thus as we exist and create and produce within a chronological matrix, so we often describe processes of production in terms of what we do at the inception of the product, during the creation of the product, and at or toward the (however tentative) conclusion of the product.  

 

The following model, then, will be a way of beginning to understand the multimedia writing process, in the following stages:  preproduction, production, and post-production. I’ve chosen these terms not for any emphasis on the term “product” but rather because “product(ion)” seems to me to connote at least some of the inherent complexity of the process of making meaning in multiple media. And to give us an anchor as we discuss the “newmediation” or multimediated writing process, I will use, as an initial target, my own multimedia writing process—not by any means as a model of any kind of perfection or even standard, or even necessarily as a way to generate a pedagogy of newmediation, but simply as an initial point on what may be a new writing process map.  Perhaps, through this foray through one person’s newmediation process, we can begin to identify preliminary elements, or generate further questions that may, through examination and answering, lead us to a somewhat more directive (yet not too directive) process map.