Nutshell: Gottschall reflects on a few  of Peter Guber’s claims (in PG’s book, Tell to Win,  about the power of storytelling in the business world. I know. Snooze-fest. But his prose is surprisingly fair and corporate-speak-free. In fact, he seems to have a great, if not understated prose style and a respect for the texts he engages. Here’s an excerpt from the blog post:

The new gospel of business storytelling offers a challenge to common views of human nature. When we call ourselves Homo sapiens, we are arguing that it is human sapience–wisdom, intelligence–that really sets our species apart. And when we think we can best persuade with dispassionate presentation of costs and benefits, we are implicitly endorsing this view. But we are beasts of emotion more than logic. We are creatures of story, and the process of changing one mind or the whole world must begin with “Once upon a time.”

The post is impressive. I’m really excited to read Gottschall’s book because of my own long-time interest/investment in digital storytelling. However, I’m hoping that The Storytelling Animal offers insights equally applicable to scholarship, especially digital scholarship. Mostly, I’m thinking about relatively subtle narrative devices that can play-well with the dominant logocentric modes, tones, and languages of traditional humanities scholarship. For instance, I’m interested in strategies for introducing dramatic tension scholarly tension early into a text in order to cultivate reader attention. Or techniques of multiple plot lines in order to foster robust connections within a particular discipline. Maybe even techniques like character development, establishing setting, or cliff-hanger ending might be relevant, somehow, to digital scholarship.

For now, I’m not sure, and I can’t point to any examples. But I am a huge proponent of the power of narrative. When told well, stories can compel us to pay closer attention, please us aesthetically, improve memory, and make relevance more clear. And yet, we know very little about why narrative affects us in these ways. Which is where I always return when I remind myself that scholarship is a creative pursuit. With enormous untapped potential for relevance it hasn’t already established.

(note: image cc-licensed by r_rahul) (this entry is cross-posted here at NewMediaScholar.net)

 
Personally, I’m not much of a fiction guy, unless you’re talking about movies. I much rather read scholarship, design books, or modern poetry. However, I am excited about this site because of how it uses “big data” (a phrase more common within the Digital Humanities than Literature) in a way that’s accessible and useful to scholars and non-scholars alike. What I’m really hoping for is that scholars in Rhet/Comp, Computers and Writing, Digital Humanities, etc. begin to see how a similar initiative within a discipline could serve as a sort of “force-multiplier” for humanities scholarship. The potential for efficiency gains are exciting. We could become so much more effective at identifying trends within data which is much more rich (and potentially responsive to our needs) than the sales and production data to which most discussions of books and scholarship are currently limited.

The scholarly potential for the humanities demonstrated by a Small Demons sort of site also might serve as one of the more effective “bridge” examples of more of the benefits of moving books and scholarship over to more consistently digital set of platforms. It should also serve the scholarly universe as a heads-up for why exactly it’s not only worth it, but essential to incorporate fine-grained, atomized metadata into future scholarly texts.

by Ryan Trauman

we have a kind of case of collective false consciousness that people imagine that there is a technological spectrum with the analog on one end and the digital on the other as if they are opposed and are enemies. In fact, I think now what’s happening is that there are a lot of ways in which the electronic book compliments the printed book and vice-versa, and that they’re working together so that this period of transition from a strictly world of prints to one of electronic communication is a world in which the whole landscape is becoming richer and more complicated.

I don’t think the quotation needs much explication, even if you tend to lean harder one way (nostalgia) or the other (feat/hope). The quote comes from an interview of Darnton by Dr. Albert Mohler of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary titled, “The Fate of the Book in the Digital Age.”

Other highlights of the interview include: contentious newspaper editorial meetings; book-smell scratch-n-sniff stickers as ebook accessories, e-textbooks, personal libraries, public libraries, and more. It’s a good read. Take a look.

In her article for The Guardian, Alison Flood reports that Robert Darnton (of the Harvard Library) has promised a free, publicly accessible American Digital Public Library that “will be up and running by April 2013, and its initial holdings will include at least two million books in the public domain accompanied by a dazzling array of special collections far richer than anything available through Google.” If this is true (and Darnton certainly has done nothing that I know of to sully his own reputation), it’s a wonderful development for the literacy practices of millions of people.

Here are a few of the headlines I was considering for this short post:

“Darnton promises functioning “American Digital Public Library” for 2013. Google throws up a little in its throat.” or ”Darnton promises functioning “American Digital Public Library” for 2013. Google to take its ball and go home.”

If nothing else, even the threat of this project should get Google back to work on its book scanning project. Not that they’ve stopped. Scanning books, I mean. But the litigation surrounding the case has certainly stalled, with Google’s hands effectively tied (or at least in risky legal limbo) until they push forward with a newly-structured agreement with authors and publishers. Either way, they’ve significantly scaled back the resources and marketing associated with the project for which I had so much hope. But as Darnton points out in several of his brilliant texts, Google is has a monopoly on the vast scope of its scanning project aaaaaaand its a for-profit corporation. That’s a dangerous mix. And I think the last 18 months of stagnant development (before which it was firmly established that there was little opportunity for another private entity to compete with Google’s project) have shown Darnton’s fears to be at least significantly warranted (although I wouldn’t argue they’ve yet come to fruition. yet).

The only thing trouble about this announcement is that the ADPL just had the first round of its three-part technological development workshop this week. I don’t want to suggest that they’ve really not made much progress with the project. From what I can tell the project is incredibly well-funded from institutions/organizations that will allow them every opportunity to succeed. And they’ve certainly built a solid foundation of theoretical scaffolding on which to build the project. I just don’t know how well-conceived it is to talk about such a HUGE benchmark twelve months from now.

From what I’ve seen, it takes three components to make digital initiatives work: clearly demonstrable need, accessible theoretical foundation for immediate and future action/funding, and momentum. I don’t think it takes a genius to understand the first two components. However, the need for momentum cannot be underestimated. There is an enormous volume of projects whose initiatives are (at least partly) to transition analog media or institutions to digitally operative structures. Unfortunately, even at the most subtle hint of failure or stalling, there are just too many alternative projects to jump to. It may be a chicken-or-the-egg sort of problem, but that’s the point where it’s very difficult for an initiative to regain its momentum.

This is all to say that… Darnton better not be wrong. I want him to be right. Oh how I want him to be right. But if he’s wrong, and the project is really 24 months, rather than 12 months away from functioning, Google will be able to relax again, fat and complacent with its cash and huge digital book database, confident that a digital public library is a technological challenge (which only it can solve), rather than a social challenge (which we as a public, can solve it we put our minds to it).

Tony works at an institution with a faculty significantly more conservative than I work with at the U of Louisville. Although Tony and I certainly share many similar attitudes towards digital scholarship, I thought he might be able to offer some insight into a more resistant attitude. He characterized a more conservative position with a question: “So what, exactly, is ‘scholarly’ about learning Dreamweaver?” What a powerful distillation of one aspect of the conversation…

 (…preview: In my next posts, I’ll reflect on some responses to that question, some possible analogues to print scholarship, and why I think it’s an essential question for bringing issues of labor, disciplinary maturity, and material concerns into the discussion.)

(Note: image is a mashup by Ryan Trauman of two commonplace Web icons.)

contributed by: Trauman

by Will Burdette

In previous posts, I wrote about the porous boundaries between professional and personal spaces, about a personal new media project, and about a genre in the profession that mixes the personal and professional. All that’s left now is the accounting. We owe it to our colleagues, students, and administrators to give an account of our work. It seems to me that incorporating narratives of our experiences into our scholarship is one way to make our personal work accountable to our colleagues. In the DWRL, many scholars use The Learning Record to assess student progress. You can read about The Learning Record elsewhere. I’ll just point out one of the five dimensions of learning used by this form of assessment: “Use of prior and emerging experience.” The idea behind this dimension is that we approach our work with experiences that both govern and transform our process in iterative ways. Therefore, it is important to build on our prior experiences and document how knowledge continues to emerge and evolve from them. Although The Learning Record is for students, the five dimensions of learning might be appropriate for professional scholarship as well. (Hat tip to my colleague Sean McCarthy for some wonderful conversations on this topic. Sean is a great resource for anyone thinking about incorporating The Learning Record-style processes into their scholarship.) The Learning Record allows scholars to position themselves as lifelong learners rather than masters. For those working in new media—that is, for those studying an always-changing field—attempting to profess mastery is the fastest way to an anxiety attack. On the other hand, acknowledging that you are always learning and using prior experience as a way to navigate new media can help you get in the flow.

“Use of prior and emerging experience” is not just a way to count play as work. It is my belief that personal projects actually solve professional problems. One professional problem I have solved for myself is the opacity/transparency problem. When we study new media with new media, like writing about writing, the conversation sometimes folds in on itself and gets super-repetitive. Eventually, it can yield really uninteresting, speculative conversations about the future of this or that: the book, the humanities, English departments, hypertext, new media. These conversations are necessary and good to have, from time to time. But when these conversations come at the expense of actually seeing through new media, they are intolerable. These meta conversations make new media opaque, to use Bolter and Grusin’s terms, in conversation with Barton and Moberly. The media are what we study in hypermediated worlds. But we do not live, nor work, in a pure hypermediated world. Sometimes we want, perhaps crave, the kind of immediacy in which we “forget the presence of the medium” to quote Barton and Moberly quoting Bolter and Grusin. (Forgetting the presence of the medium, or at least trying my best to, is what drives my food podcast project.) The flip-side of hypermediated opacity is the illusion of immediacy that comes from seeing through the media. This is what Richard Lanham calls the “at/through oscillation” in The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information. When we flip to the through side of the conversation, when we try to see through new media, we more fully understand its potential, or what Barton and Moberly call “the rhizomatic possibilities that are produced at the intersections of new media’s inherent contradictions and conflicts” (180). Understanding the possibilities of new media in a transparent way helps with the planning of classes, curriculum, and programs that do not merely adopt new media for the sake of its newness. If we can see through blogs and podcasts, in the same way we see through books, then we can more deftly integrate content-appropriate media into professional spaces.

As an added bonus, in those moments when I find myself seeing through new media I find I worry less about the future of old media. All media work differently and have different features and different bugs. Some media may become obsolete, but most of the time, we are going to be dealing with a rich ecosystem of media layered atop media. If we can perform a rich understanding of how those media interact with one another, it should not matter whether the project developed from personal or professional experiences. Boundaries are important, but the distinction between personal and professional will likely remain porous, and continue to be locally negotiated.

 Works Cited

Barton, Matt and Kevin Moberly. “Across Disciplines: Establishing a New Media Program.” Collaborative Approaches to the Digital in English Studies. McGrath, Laura, ed. Logan, UT: Computers and Composition Digital P/Utah State UP, 2011. Computers and Composition Digital Press. Web. 18 March 2012.

Bolter, Jay David & Richard A. Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Print.

Lanham, Richard. The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006. Print.

by Will Burdette

In other posts, I wrote about the porous boundaries between professional and personal spaces and about a personal new media project that made me again question those boundaries. The intermingling of personal and professional project, although expected and understandable, can present a struggle when it comes to creating our scholarly or professional ethos. Of course, scholars can choose to never bring up personal projects in scholarly places, keeping the distinction between personal and professional separate. But I think for many new media scholars, our skills and ideas are often developed through playful flow experiences—from gaming, to social media, to podcasting. In other words, some of our best work is done in outside traditional academic spaces.

It is fortunate that within Rhetoric and Composition, there is something like a genre of scholarship that fuses personal, professional, and new media. This is not likely breaking news to this audience. (I’m pretty sure feminists have been doing this for decades. Feel free to school me in the comments.) However, for me, situating myself within that genre has been revelatory. Discovering a disciplinary conversation that includes a method for negotiating (and/or exploding) the personal/professional binary allowed me to experiment personal projects and bring them into my scholarship. What follows are just a few snippets of this conversation.

Geoffrey Sirc’s “Nevermind the Tagmemics, Where’s the Sex Pistols?” in CCC 1997 is really useful in thinking about how bringing personal pleasures into scholarship—in his case, punk music—can make for better teaching.

In “Thinking Through Worlds Fair: Evolutionary Rhetoric” in Computers and Composition in 2001 Peg Syverson writes about a how a personal project turned into a kind of exploratory pedagogy. She started out writing a piece of science fiction, but it turned into a sprawling hypertext, which she then brought into her classroom.

Sirc and Syverson write about personal projects moving into the writing classroom and reflections on the effects of that process work their way into their scholarship. But bringing new media projects into the classroom is not the only way to work them into professional work. In “Rhetoric’s Mechanics: Retooling the Equipment of Writing Production” in CCC 2008 Jenny Edbauer Rice writes about a personal project she did in collaboration with the Duke Center for Documentary Studies. It was an audio oral history project on Durham life. She writes, “None of these subjects are my areas of research, and I usually call myself more of a dabbler than a legitimate scholar in oral history and southern cultures. Neither had I wracked up much experience with audio recording and multitrack editing.”

Jeff Rice uses new media to introduce a personal passion, craft beer, into his scholarship. Rice blogs and tweets about craft beer and in a video mash-up roundtable in the online journal Enculturation, Rice published video, called “Craft Hands” that used found footage of the craft beer brewing process.

Finally, in the book Toward a Composition Made Whole, Jody Shipka suggests a “mediated action approach.” One of the benefits of this approach is that it allows scholars and composers to account for the personal and the professional. Shipka writes:

Insofar as it requires that we attend to the individual, embodied, social, and historical dimensions of communicative practice and to examine final products in relation to complex processes, a mediated action framework can also provide us with ways of annealing the personal/academic split that has so long troubled the discipline. (52-3)

It is nice to know that others still find a need to bridge the gap between personal and professional. Even though all the scholars above work with new media, the porous personal/professional distinction is not a new media phenomenon. We might include a couple of old school, old media writers who have used personal projects in publications: Wayne Booth and Jim W. Corder. Corder’s Yonder: Life on the Far Side of Change and Booth’s For the Love of It: Amateuring and Its Rivals are two books that wrestle with the line between the personal and the professional. Arguably, these two books were not written or positioned as “scholarship.” Both authors waited until the end of their careers to write those personal books. But when we situate them within the multimedia conversation in the discipline anyway, it suggests that after all their scholarship, they still felt they had something compelling they needed to write. The narrowly defined scholarship was in some way insufficient. Why must we partition off scholarship and those things about which we are passionate?

At this point, we might ask “Where do rambling personal narratives and amateur cello playing fit in the discipline?” We might also ask, referring to the articles, “Where do punk rock music, oral histories on southern life, craft beer, visually oriented hypertext fiction, and foodways podcasting fit into conventional criteria for professional development?” The short answer is they don’t. Or they didn’t. Or they haven’t.

But, kind of, they did. And they do. Or they could. We can count them if we want to. As we create new kinds of writing spaces, those spaces write us. If the spaces encourage play, we might let it creep into our work. If we get in the flow and the play is productive, we might find new courses to teach. Corder writes “I must make the world, but I don’t know how: in all those schools, I took the wrong courses” (184). Now, if you are anything like me–and I guess, Corder–you may sometimes feel like you are taking or teaching the wrong course. But I think we each have the ability to chart our own course by incorporating our passions into our profession. And we don’t have to do it alone. We can collaborate with one another across time and space. Check back tomorrow for more about assessing the personal in professional spaces.

Works Cited

Booth, Wayne. For the Love of It: Amateuring and Its Rivals. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1999. Print.

Corder, Jim W. Yonder: Life on the Far Side of Change. Athens: The U of Georgia P, 1992. Print.

Rice, Jeff. Enculturation 11 (Oct. 2011): n. pag. Web. 18 Mar. 2012.

Rice, Jenny Edbauer. “Rhetoric’s Mechanics: Retooling the Equipment of Writing Production.” College Composition and Communication 60.2 (2008): 366-387. JSTOR. Web. 18 Mar. 2012. <http://www.jstor.org/‌stable/‌10.2307/‌20457063>.

Shipka, Jody. Toward a Composition Made Whole. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2011. Print.

Sirc, Geoffrey. “Never Mind the Tagmemics, Where’s the Sex Pistols?” College Composition and Communication  48.1 (1997): 9-29 . JSTOR. Web. 18 Mar. 2012. <http://www.jstor.org/‌stable/‌10.2307/‌358768>.

Syverson, M.A. “Thinking through Worlds Fair: evolutionary rhetoric.” Computers and Composition 18.2 (2001): 163–176. ScienceDirect. Web. 18 Mar. 2012. <http://www.sciencedirect.com/‌science/‌article/‌pii/‌S8755461501000470>.

by Will Burdette

As I wrote in another post, getting into flow in new media work is wrapped up in the spaces in which we work and the disciplinary issues that govern those spaces. After reading “Across Disciplines: Establishing a New Media Program” and “Playful Affinity: A Case Study of the Digital Writing and Research Lab as a Collaborative Graduate Student Research Network” in the CCDP collection Collaborative Approaches to the Digital in English Studies. I found myself mulling over how collaborations in new media research spaces change our scholarship. Running through all my posts here is the concept of flow. I mean this in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s sense of the word, which loosely translates to being “in the zone.” But I’m also interested in how ideas flow through collaborative spaces, even when the projects are not explicitly collaborative. (It’s also worth mentioning that what started out as a response to an eBook is turning into an auto ethnography of sorts. But I guess I might as well go with the flow.)

Nahas and McCarthy discussed how the structure of the Digital Writing and Research Lab fosters collaboration. I’d like to further the discussion by documenting how a project that started in the lab spun off into an scholarly project, then to a personal project, then back into other collaborative spaces.

I’ve long be interested in podcasting. As project leader for the communications group in the DWRL in 2009, I created a prototype for a podcast. I hoped that we would turn it into an episodic podcast distributed through iTunes U. In the years that followed, the group moved toward video projects, which left little time for an episodic audio podcast as I had originally envisioned. I hung onto the goal of creating an episodic audio podcast. I concluded that understanding the subtle differences between a group of audio files hosted online and an episodic audio podcast is vital to my scholarship. But creating a scholarly podcast while unsure whether it will count toward publication or graduation or tenure and promotion is not a great way to get into flow. Although my dissertation has audio components, I did not negotiate in the planning stages for the inclusion of a regular episodic podcast.

I built a website called soundwriting.org to showcase bits and pieces of my scholarship as they emerged, to host oral histories from people working in various aspects of audio recording, and to think through parts of the work publicly. But I haven’t been able to get into flow on that site because of its ambiguous relationship to the dissertation. Although I have worked through bits and pieces of the dissertation on the soundwriting.org site, any time I spend on the site is time I’m not spending on the formal dissertation, which will take the form of a linear pdf. Just like our physical and social spaces change the way we write, the interfaces we use also change the way we write. I love blogging and podcasting. But blogging and podcasting are not a dissertation. This is arguable. For sure. But any time I spend arguing these points takes more time away from writing the dissertation.

I tabled the scholarly blog (not forever, just for now). But I still did not feel like I understood podcasting as a genre. So I came up with the more personal, hobby-oriented food podcast and blog called No Satiation. It is about the hunger that we come into the world with and how we deal with it. I’m always  talking about food, anyway. (Often times with my colleagues in the DWRL). The podcast is hosted on a website that I built and also available through iTunes.

The No Satiation project combines as many new media activities as I can possibly cram into it. On the site, the podcasts are played through a customized audio player that uses javascript, HTML, CSS, ogg files, and mp3 files. (To fulfill my language requirement for the university, I had customized an audio player built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I used it on the soundwriting.org site, but I also use it to stream the podcast on the nosatiation.com site.) To create, encode, and transfer the media I use Logic, Audacity, ID3 Editor, TacoEdit, Transmit. I edit images with Photoshop. Sometimes I use Audio HijackPro and Abelton Live. I use web-based tools and services including Libsyn, iTunes, Twitter, WordPress. I developed the site using the same blogging software (WordPress) that I used for the soundwriting.org site (which is the same one I’m using now, to write this). I used an updated version of the same theme that I had developed for the soundwriting.org site.

Although all these tools may suggest a complicated project, the podcast is pretty simple, conceptually. I pick a topic, like cake, and then I interview people who might know something about it or I talk about it. This is not my area of study. When it comes to food and foodways, I’m an amateur. I’m slightly more versed in new media, but this project emerges from a different part of my life. So why bring it up here at all?

Here’s why: I think this project is a good example of how the boundaries between personal spaces and professional spaces are not that clearly demarcated. The skills I used to develop the food podcast grew out of my work in the lab, my personal life, my research into new media practices, and my work on graduation requirements. As an added bonus, in terms of collaboration, the podcast gives me a way to form new relationships with other groups that do food-related oral histories. For example, while many of my colleagues will be at CCCC in the very near future, I’m attending The Foodways Texas Symposium, which is affiliated with The Office of Diversity and Community Engagement at The University of Texas at Austin.

So, for me, personal projects and professional projects are thoroughly intertwined, down to the code used to showcase them and the words used to describe them. Read more about the tradition of integrating the personal into rhet/comp scholarship in the post Personal Projects in the Profession.

by Will Burdette

After reading a couple of chapters in Collaborative Approaches to the Digital in English Studies, I found myself considering a different kind of collaboration, one that happens over a longer amount of time, one that is encoded into the spaces in which we work. I began thinking about how research spaces change researchers. Both “Across Disciplines: Establishing a New Media Program” and “Playful Affinity: A Case Study of the Digital Writing and Research Lab as a Collaborative Graduate Student Research Network” discuss the creation and operation of new media spaces. The pieces reminded me, again, that new media spaces are concomitant with questions of discipline and indiscipline. When we design and build new media spaces, we are not just collaborating with current colleagues; we are also changing the disciplinary conversations for those who pass through those spaces in the future. In writing about both new media environments, Barton and Moberly and Nahas and McCarthy mention “play” as an ideal, or at least a “progressive” idea. Both articles also note that there are institutional constraints that make the idea of play difficult to achieve. Underlying the difficulties are, I think, debates (or at least confusion) about what counts as new media scholarship. I’d like to use the notion of building play into a place as a jumping off point to discuss how new media environments are changing scholarship.

Once we create these spaces that combine playfulness and new media, we must also account for the kinds of scholarship that is going to be generated by those who work within those spaces. I think Kairos, CCDP, CCCs Online, HASTAC, and, yes, right here at The Scholar Electric are all examples of that accounting. But as Barton and Moberly write:

[T]he disciplinary structure of American Universities is itself an obstacle; this is particularly true when dealing with matters of hiring, tenure, and promotion. One problem faced by any new media scholar is where studies of Second Life, Wikipedia, or the procedural rhetoric of ‘serious games‘ fit into conventional criteria for professional development. (176)

As Barton and Moberly and Nahas and McCarthy point out, the disciplinary structure is built into the places in which we work. The decisions that we build into those spaces alter our work. If we build playful spaces, the play will very likely creep into the work. I think to Barton and Moberly and Nahas and McCarthy and I are all in agreement that play is not a bad thing. But it does present a challenge when it comes to accounting for the work that comes out of those spaces in professional and institutional ways.

When the work looks like play, how do we count it? Because of the potential for misunderstanding “play” as something to outgrow, the first step is always complicating notions of play. Building on the work of Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute for Play and TED alum, Nahas and McCarthy complicate the play/work binary. (Full Disclosure: Nahas and McCarthy were colleagues of mine in The Digital Writing & Research Lab.) They quote Brown who writes, “Though we have been taught that play and work are each the other’s enemy, what I have found is that neither one can thrive without the other”(126). Nahas and McCarthy also cite many scholars in Rhetoric and Composition who have taken up the idea of play. Perhaps the adoption of play in the writing disciplines is a foregone conclusion. Many of us have encouraged play in our classrooms. But to what extent do we encourage it in our scholarship? I think one of the best ways to facilitate play in our scholarship is to think of it in terms of flow.

As Nahas and McCarthy note many, like Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, have talked about play in terms of flow. In Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Csikszentmihalyi states that the self grows through personal experiences of flow. We can call it play if we want, but the point is that we learn through personal, not just professional goals. For Csikszentmihalyi it does not matter whether the learning happens in work mode or play mode, on the clock or off the clock; what matters is how to set up the conditions for getting into a state of flow. Some may be able to get into flow while experimenting with new media on topics related to their scholarship. But very often projects will flow into one another. A project that starts out in a lab may turn into scholarship, get jettisoned in an panicked editing session, and get reinvented as a personal project.

In another post, I write about specific examples of personal projects that grew out of work in the Digital Writing and Research Lab.

Works Cited

Barton, Matt and Kevin Moberly. “Across Disciplines: Establishing a New Media Program.” Collaborative Approaches to the Digital in English Studies. McGrath, Laura, ed. Logan, UT: Computers and Composition Digital P/Utah State UP, 2011. Computers and Composition Digital Press. Web. 18 March 2012.

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Toronto: HarperCollins e-books, 2008. Google Books. Web. 18 March 2012.

McCarthy, Sean and Lauren Mitchell Nahas. “Playful Affinity: A Case Study of the Digital Writing and Research Lab as a Collaborative Graduate Student Research Network.” Collaborative Approaches to the Digital in English Studies. McGrath, Laura, ed. Logan, UT: Computers and Composition Digital P/Utah State UP, 2011. Computers and Composition Digital Press. Web. 18 March 2012.

Several pieces in the fall issue might be of particular interest to scholars working in digital spaces: Andy Campbell and Lynda Williams’ “Changed” is a stunning narrative that functions on a horizontal plane, with many interactive elements, without relying on Flash. Another piece, Andy Bigelow’s “Mythwatch.org,” is Flash-driven, but Bigelow couples that technology with imported RSS feeds and user contributions. Each of these writers seems to be pushing past plain text, considering how multiple media and modes help to complicate narrative or shift user experience.

And just as we’re trying to push past book-ness and consider the opportunities for digital scholarship, The New River is asking those same questions of digital creative writing and of art. The new issue is definitely worth a read.