Hyperglyphics

In a message on the techrhet listserv late last month, CCC Online guest editor Jenn Fishman posted a CFP for a special issue devoted to performance. As it happens,

this message came across the listserv during Computers and Writing 2010 where I was giving a presentation that really had a great deal to do with performance and social media composition as an interactive performance in which the rhetorical canon of delivery is foregrounded and, in turn, creates an oscillation between what Richard Lanham calls AT and THROUGH vision (see Economics of Attention), or what Jay Bolter and Diane Gromola frame as reflection vs. transparency in their Windows and Mirrors. I used a couple of examples - a spring semester Web Writing student’s Twitter storytelling experiment and my friend Hayden Black’s use of Twitter/Facebook to compose what will be soon turned into an iBook for the iPad and iPhone devices - to explore the way this social media platform allows for the creation of texts that engage the audience with an immediacy that can have a significant impact on the compositional process for the writer. S/he can get instant feedback that can, as in the case of my student last semester, cause a writer to alter her/his composition even as it is unfolding. Ultimately, I connected this to the concept of performance and embodiment in a very brief and un-fleshed-out way by thinking about the way Judith Butler and Katherine Hayles emphasize that bodies are, in a sense, mediated texts that contain information. In Butler’s case, that information is created by performance - by the re-iteration of gendered norms that produce and naturalize gendered bodies. I then connected that to the “bodies” of work - the portfolios - that my writing students produce in order to suggest that these ports represent performances - compositional processes that result in mediated texts - and that social media could be integrated more fully into those bodies of work in order to highlight the process and performance of composition (including the failures that we might analogize to Butler’s abject and unauthorized bodies) and, thus, instantiate a more explicitly reflective rhetorical/compositional project.

So I think my C&W paper really is the foundation of something that I’d like to develop for the CCC Online special issue on performance. Obviously, I think it fits with the theme and I have the theoretical framework set up already. However, what I’m struggling with now is the form the text should take. I’d like it to be a more interactive Web text (as would the journal), but I’m just not sure how that might work. I was thinking about the stuff we discussed at the C&W workshop I attended coordinated by the wonderful editors of Kairos - Cheryl Ball, Douglas Eyman, Mike Edwards, and Madeleine Sorapure - on composing digital scholarship. They talked about the importance of having the design of the text enact the argument (something I’ve emphasized to my own students), so I really do feel like there needs to be an interactive and vividly performative aspect to this text. But I’m not really sure how to go about that in terms of what application or software platform will best enable that. I’ve certainly already got some clear visual metaphors I could use since I’m drawing so heavily on the mirrors and windows concept from Bolter and Gromola and the Prezi I created to go along with my paper at my panel consisted of a lot of images of mirrors and windows and windows as mirrors.

The due date for proposals is 6/15, so I guess I’ve got this coming week to come up with a textual design concept/idea so that I can provide a description of how this text will be mediated/presented. Thinking cap, time to work.