Converging Assumptions

Conclusion

Allison Warner (2007a), in her dissertation assessing webtexts as a form of digital scholarship for tenure and promotion purposes, remarked that “the ability to engage with the content of a text depends on the accessibility of the form” (p. 145). (Although it can encompass a wider range of meanings, accessibility here refers to the varying levels of ease<-->difficulty readers demonstrate when entering into or engaging with a text.) That readers have to navigate the form of a text, which must be accessible in order for them to engage with the text’s meaning, highlights the fact that form and content cannot be split—even when the form seems transparent—because readers use both form and content to make meaning. When form and content converge and require readers to attend to both aspects of a text—what Wysocki (2004) would call an overt design in a new media text—accessibility issues often translate into issues about the assumptions we make as readers regarding how that text should make meaning. New media texts make meaning with both form and content, as the example of Watkins’ soundtrack indicated. But because he mixed creative and scholarly elements to convey his point, readers—especially those with print-based assumptions regarding scholarship—often react against the piece-as-scholarship, with the soundtrack being the biggest objection. As Warner said so succinctly, “Readers often do not value what they do not understand” (p. 145).

It is not surprising to us that the Modern Language Association’s (2006) Report on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion indicated that in doctoral-granting institutions, 40% of departments, while saying that they count digital scholarship toward tenure, also say that they have “no experience” reading digital scholarship (pp. 45–46). In her dissertation, Catherine Braun (2006) recorded a narrative example of this paradox—in a department that accepts digital scholarship, Braun presented the department chairperson with a peer-reviewed, published webtext to evaluate (for the purposes of the dissertation, not for an actual tenure case), and the chairperson showed difficulty reading it, to the point of being stymied by the text’s presentation because of its mix of creative and scholarly elements (pp. 182–183). It’s not that the department chairperson would never be able to read such a text, we argue, but that s/he—like many readers in digital writing studies as well as those on tenure committees—bring a set of scholarly, print-based assumptions to reading new media, which masks (via the very same belletristic traditions that E.L. Godkin rallied for over 100 years ago) their ability to draw on phenomenological understandings of creative elements during that process. So the question becomes: Is it possible to change the assumptions readers have about what counts as scholarship to attend to the scholarly <---> creative spectrum that new media texts afford? Although we have offered a few ways that readers might span that spectrum when reading new media texts, like Watkins’ (or Wesch’s), we also know that much more research is needed to address, as Warner (2007a) said, the “trends in online scholarship...toward new media studies” in ways that allow readers to shift their assumptions from strictly print-based, or even webtextual-based work such as this piece, to “account for texts that make meaning in non-textual ways” (p. 148).