IYLSSIF 5: What Media Studies Makes: Forms of Scholarship ...

The fifth in an epic, six-part series of lectures from my intro to graduate studies lecture course, which I'm posting online in the hope that others will find them useful. [Part 1 Here, Part 2 Here, Part 3 Here, Part 4 Here; the lectures are unedited -- hence, you might be a bit confused by a few inexplicable notes and slides about administrative issues]. We started off by describing the premise of the class; then discussed how students could find their own position surrounded by the program and the meadow; then helped students map that meadow, appreciate its breadth and the various intellectual and make traditions it draws from; then talked about practical methods for maintaining one's orientation surrounded by the meadow and surrounded by one's own work. Now we talk about the various forms one's scholarship can take, ranging from traditional academic prose to more experimental prose forms, to "multimodal" scholarship and theoretically informed, research-based media production.

UMS5_Oct3

[SLIDE 1] LOCATION OF SIGN-IN SHEETS!

[SLIDE 2]

• Academic Sources?
• Next Week: start w/ visit from GPIA re: IFP – Deadline: 10/15

[SLIDE 3] WHAT MEDIA STUDIES MAKES: FORMS OF SCHOLARSHIP

In our meadow, media studies, we take a cross-platform, comparative approach to studying various modes of communication. This comparative approach characterizes not only our subjects of study, but also our methods and our means of presenting the outcomes of our work.

[SLIDE 4] Just as, last week, we talked about different platforms and software for taking notes, organizing projects, etc., we also have to reckon about what technologies can supply us as research tools – as methods – and what can help us present our work in the most effective way possible. That's in part what multimodal scholarship is about: thinking about how different media might allow you question new research questions, engage your theme in new ways, and share your in-progress or refined work in ways that "do justice" to your theme and your argument, that give appropriate form to your content.

As your reading for this week suggested, media studies makes scholarship in traditional written forms and in "multimodal" forms. Film, meadow recordings, databases, etc. can all function as research tools and as platforms for presenting our research-based, theoretically-informed work. Or course there's still room for using these media as creative forms – as means of pure artistic expression – but today we're going to focus on how these technologies might shape the forms of our research and theorization.

[SLIDE 5] Guest: Amir Husak

[SLIDE 6] DIGITAL HUMANITIES

McPherson

• Researchers are more than "content providers" – they "fully engage with the platforms and tools of the digital era" (120)
  • Computing humanist
  • Blogging humanist
• "Who better to reimagine the relationship of scholarly form to content than persons who have devoted their careers to studying narrative structure, representation and meaning, or the aesthetics of visuality (and aurality)?" (120)
• [SLIDE 7] Remember Henry Jenkins from our 2^nd Lecture, on History of the Meadow: "New media literacies include the traditional literacy that evolved with print culture as well as the newer forms of literacy surrounded by mass and digital media…. [We] must expand [our] required competencies, not push up your sleeve ancient skills to make room for the new.

Beyond core literacy, students need research skills…. Students also need to renovate technical skills…. Yet, to reduce the new media literacies to technical skills would be a mistake on the order of confusing penmanship with composition….

• [SLIDE 8] "The multimodal humanist…brings collectively databases, scholarly tools, networked prose, and peer-to-peer commentary while also leveraging the potential of visual and aural (and interactive) media that so dominate contemporary life… She aims to produce work that reconfigures the relationships among author, reader, and technology while investigating the computer simultaneously as a platform, a medium, and a visualization device. She thinks carefully about the relationship of form to content, expression to thought" (120)

• [SLIDE 10] "The multimodal scholar explores new forms of literacy that include authoring and analyzing visual, aural, dynamic, and interactive media….[and imagines] what it would be like to immerse yourself in a scholarly argumentas you might immerse yourself in a movie or a video game. She investigates what happens when scholarship looks and feels differently, requiring new modes of engagement from the reader/user" (120)
  • "'How do you 'experience' or feel' an argument in a more immersive and sensory-rich space?' 'Can scholarship show as well as tell?' 'Will in place of data differently change the ways we know, collect, or interpret it?' 'What happens to argument in a nonlinear environment?'" (121) – AFFECTIVE dimension

   

• [SLIDE 11] "…hands-on engagement with digital forms reorients the scholarly thoughts, not because the tools are cool or new (even if they are) or because the audience for our work might be expanded (even if it is), but because scholars come to realize that they know their opinion and their objects of study differently, even better, when they approach them through multiple modalities and emergent and interconnected forms of literacy. The ability to deploy new experiential, emotional and even tactile aspects of argument and expression can open up fresh avenues of inquiry and research" (121)
• [SLIDE 12]Book vs. Database:
  • Book calls for linear organization
  • Database allows for tangents – allows us to "present multiple lines of thought in relation to the materials at hand and to invite others to join us in this process in extended collaboration and convention. Working with databases allows us both to present our opinion differently and to know our materials differently. Thus, the database might itself be understood das an interpretive platformthat can support and extend the core methodologies of the interpretive humanities…" (121)
  • [SLIDE 13] Wunderkammer: even though it's organized like a book, it allows for tangents, links etc.: http://www.technorhetoric.net/13.2/topoi/delagrange
  • [SLIDE 14] Thinking/Making
• [SLIDE 15: Korsakow] New forms of argumentation: "multiple, associative, digressive, even contradictory" (122)
• "navigating new pathways through scholarly materials that can transform the questions scholarship might question" (122)
  • [SLIDE 16] John Snow's 1854 Cholera Map of London

These claims are not unique to the database!

• [SLIDE 17: Audio/Video] "…imagine very different scholarly 'outputs'at the surface of the screen – we might make powerful simulations, visualize space and time in compelling ways, or structure data that the user can then play like a video game, richly annotate on the glide, or capture and speak for in fascinating new ways" (122)
  • [SLIDE 18] Mark Kann's "Deliberative Democracy and Difference" on Vectors: http://www.vectorsjournal.org/projects/index.php?project=81

• STILL NEED A METHOD – Topic for next week!

Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0

• [SLIDE 19] Process (research AND design!) over product! Collaboration, Interdisciplinarity, distributed networks of knowledge production
• McPherson: "imperative that we be involved in the design and construction of the emerging networked platforms and practices" – design our own tools (123)
  • [SLIDE 20] Manifesto: "…not only to seek to know and interrogate the cultural and social impact of new technologies, but to be engaged in driving the creation of new technologies, methodologies, and information systems, as well as in their détournement (turnabout, derailment), reinvention, repurposing, via research questions grounded in the Arts and Humanities: questions of meaning, interpretation, history, subjectivity, and culture" (6)
  • [SLIDE 21]: URT + Mapping the Social Life of Zines

• "determining and designing the interface to information, data, and knowledge becomes just as central as the crafts of prose, curating, and coordinating" (7)
  • [SLIDE 22: Dr. Strangelove] Faden on Media Stylos: "In 1998, on the 50th anniversary of French critic and filmmaker Alexandre Astruc's inspiring essay "The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: Le Caméra Stylo," I started making small films and videos in lieu of academic conference papers. Astruc's essay called for a new film practice that went beyond both avant-garde abstraction and narrative tale telling and embraced a full range of intellectual practicesfrom filming philosophy to emulating the 17th century literary essay."
    • Would not advocate misrepresenting your presentation in a conference or workshop proposal – or aiming to alienate your fellow panelists
    • Still, Faden has taken cues from Astruc in thinking about film- or video-making as a means of thinking through theory, or making media that critiques itself or its own process of construction
    • Mix of media formats and rhetorical modes
    • Allows for consideration of form in relation to content– format of argumentation parallels format of its theme
      • [SLIDE 23] Issues of FAIR USE
      • [SLIDE 24] SCMS Honest Use

• [SLIDE 25] Evaluating Multimodal Work
• [SLIDE 26] CUNY DHI
• [SLIDE 27] Communities of Digital Humanities-inspired graduate students: HASTAC: http://www.hastac.org/scholars

IMPORTANCE OF WRITING – EVEN IN PRODUCTION WORK

• Production faculty claim that the largest problems with students production projects are (1) problematic conceptualization, which is related to weak prose and (2) signal design
• [SLIDE 28: Book of Hours, 1460] Grad students tend to write in a way that constitutes what they reckon is "academic" prose
  • Gerald Graff, education historian, author of "Scholars and Signal Bites" in PLMA: "When students write ponderously and evasively, it is often not because they could not do otherwise, but because they are convinced that such prose is what their professors want" (1041)
  • Becker, sociologist well renowned for his work on "art worlds," also addresses the compulsion grad students feel to "signal academic," to place on a fastidious "writerly persona" – advocates for simplicity

[SLIDE 29] Toor on Orwell:

• "A scrupulous writer, in each sentence that he writes, will question himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will prompt it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably question himself two more: Could I place it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably hideous?"
• Toor: 83 comments!

[SLIDE 30-31] Graff's Tips:

• "Be dialogical. Start your text by directly identifying the prior conversation or debate that you are entering" (1050)
• "Make a claim, the sooner the better, and flag it for the reader"
• "Remind readers of your claim periodically, especially the more you complicate it"
• "Summarize the objections that you anticipate can be made (or have been made) against your claim." (1050)
• "Say explicitly – or at least imply – why your thoughts are vital, what difference it makes to the world if you are right or incorrect, and so forth" – "So what?" (1051)
• "Generate a metatext that stands away from each additional from your main text and puts it in perspective" – "I do not mean to suggest that…" "Here you will probably oppose that…" (1051)
• "you are probably so keen to prove that you've left no thought unconsidered that you find it hard to resist the temptation to say everything at once, and consequence you say nothing that is understood while producing horribly overloaded paragraphs and sentences" (1051)
• "Be bilingual. It is not necessary to avoid academese – you sometimes need the stuff… [But] try to say it in the vernacular as well" (1051)
• "If you could not clarify it to your [friends], the chances are you don't know it yourself" (1051)

[SLIDE 32] Most "tips" focus on the style, and take for granted the "how" – how to start a paper when you're not given a fastidious assignment, a paper that might be longer than persons you've written in the past, a paper that serves a different purpose than persons you've written as an undergrad or for work…

DIFFERENT WRITERS HAVE DIFFERENT TIPS FOR GRAD-LEVEL WRITING

[SLIDE 33] Moxley, Publish, Don't Perish:

• Audience Analysis
• Purpose Analysis: reporting, critiquing, objecting, investigating, persuading?
• Voice Analysis
  • Becker on Persona & Authority: language in imperatives, passive voice, etc
• Process Analysis
• • "What are your prose rituals? What is the best time of day for you to write? Where do you like to write?" (Moxley 39)
  • Becker: "you have already made many choices when you sit down to write, but probably don't know what they were" (17)

[SLIDE 34] DRAFTING MODELS

• "…some academics believe that they are violating the rules when they write without an outline. Or, more sadly, when they cannot come up with an outline, some academicians dread that their thought is weak and insignificant, that they lack the critical thinking skills necessary to write well. In fact, recommending that one always outline before prose is based on the foolish assumption that thinking and prose are not related, that first one thinks and then one writes" (Moxley 27)
  • Becker: You needn't work out everything before starting to write; "Prose can…shape your research design" (Moxley 18)
• [CLICK]Freewrite Drafts: write without hesitation – "try to ignore critical thoughts and focus on generating thoughts" (29)
• • Helps you "(1) renovate thoughts that you otherwise would not renovate, (2) overcome the tightness and frustration associated with beginning new prose projects, and (3) make a flow that helps establish a voice in your prose" (29)
  • "…when you let your thoughts about the research flow, they often gain a forcefulness, a significance of directness and insight, that they otherwise might lack" (29)
  • "When reviewing your freewrites, identify the fine points that seem most significant. Place brackets around the sections that you believe are worth keeping." (29)
  • Zinsser on Style

• [CLICK]Dictate Drafts
• • "sometimes dictated drafts have a strong, natural voice" (31)
  • "can speak quicker than you can write" (31)
• [CLICK] Draw a Cluster Diagram
• • "Rather than trying to force your thoughts into a formal outline, you can pictorially speak for them on the page and then draw lines linking thoughts that seem somewhat related" (31)
  • Remember discussion on CONCEPT MAPPING
• [CLICK] Draw a Pie Diagram
• • "…allows you to estimate visually how much tie you should spend addressing each aspect of your / theme" (31, 33)
• [CLICK] Make a Formal Outline

[SLIDE 35] FORMATS

• Intro / Methods & Materials / Results / Discussion / Conclusion
• Intro / Subheaded Sections / Conclusion – with Transitions!

Gregory Colon Semenza, Graduate Study for the 21^st Century:

[SLIDE 36] TYPES OF PAPERS

1. The Controversy Paper: "claim that purports to end a controversy or debate" (93)
2. The Textual Crux Paper: "for years readers have pondered the meaning of an ambiguous, unclear, or even a missing part of a given text…Your research leads you to a strong conclusion about the meaning of the problematic text or term.." (93)
3. The Gap in Scholarship Paper: "in reading the scholarship about a fastidious theme, you are struck that no one has said anything about a related and seemingly vital matter. You choose to widen the scope of the conversation" (93)
4. The Past Contextualization: "clarify the meaning of a fastidious work or clarify its provenance, immediate reception, of shape on additional contemporary texts" (94)
5. The Pragmatic Proposal: "more interested in praxes than theory for its own sake" (94)
6. The Theoretical Application

• The "so what?" question + Situating your argument

MORE INFORMAL DH-INSPIRED FORMS OF ACADEMIC WRITING – Work through some thoughts before formal publication

[SLIDE 39] Revision

• Zinsser's revised m.s.: pp. 10-11
• Becker on necessity for prose multiple drafts – "prose need not be a one-shot, all-or-nothing venture. It could have stages, each with its own criteria of excellence" (14)
• [SLIDE 40] Use of Prose Center

[SLIDE 41] Giving Credit Where It's Due

• Plagiarism – Don't do it; honor the collective thought and creation that inspired your own thoughts – just as you would have others do to your own work
• [SLIDE 42] Crediting Photos
• Make sure you're familiar with what constitutes academic honesty and dishonesty
  • "Piece-mealing" an argument is plagiarism
• Style Guides

[SLIDE 43] MULTIPLE WAYS TO MAKE SCHOLARSHIP IN MEDIA STUDIES

• Each has affordances and limitations
• Choice should be guided by what "tool" is right for the job (must cultivate "material consciousness") – We'll talk more next week about methods.
• In this week's discussion section, you'll look at various platforms for multimodal scholarship.

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