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Session I3

The Tide is Turning: A New(er) Genre of Academic Scholarship
reviewed by Missy Nieveen Phegley

Unable to cut short the pleasant experience of inspiring intellectual conversation, I arrived late to the session titled, “Writing Ourselves in a Global World.” I chose a seat near the front and settled in for Spencer Schaffner’s talk entitled, “Desktop MCing and the Gaming Informatics of Electronic Composition,” which was already mid-presentation. Unfortunately, I think my tardiness caused me to miss a few key elements of the presentation in regard to a defining of terms and the context for his work. So, as I tried to absorb the content of the presentation, my attention was quickly drawn to the actual performance of the presentation. Schaffner was seated alongside the other two presenters and the session chair. He was intently watching the computer in front of him while his presentation played out on the large screen to his left. At any one time, there was a minimum of three videos playing simultaneously, each of which appeared unrelated yet all worked together to create a cohesive piece. In the second half of the performance, Schaffner spoke directly to the audience from the upper left corner of the screen, referencing the other videos, as they each took a prominent on-screen position when a subject of discussion. As an observer of this presentation, I kept thinking how cool this was to take a new media approach to the genre of scholarly presentation. Even though I may have missed a chunk of the message, I still enjoyed the performance.

It should be clear by now that this is not so much a review of Schaffner’s work, but more a pondering of the role of new media in academic scholarship, with Schaffner’s work being the catalyst for this pondering. In by-passing the conventional format of scholarly presentations at an academic conference, Schaffner certainly complicates our notion of academic scholarship. As the foundation of academic scholarship is shaken, new media presents us with multiple questions about our commonly-accepted traditions:

• How might the genre of new media presentations alter the landscape of the academic conference?
• Why must we meet in a particular destination to share our work? Why not simply create a space online to meet and share?
• How will a cyber-sharing of our work alter the creation of knowledge?
• How does the social construction of knowledge “engage” with the passive nature of an audience during an academic performance?
• When academic work is presented digitally, is there room for interaction with the audience? It would appear there is no longer any give and take. Certainly, an online conference can allow for audience comments, but the presenter is no longer influenced by the engagement of the audience (think about how your teaching differs when your audience is alert and fully engaged in comparison to when your audience is sluggish and unengaged).
• What happens to the rhetorical nature of the act itself (the presentation) when the audience is only imagined in the creation of the presentation? Certainly, the presentation remains unaltered in its delivery, and the author has complete control over the message he imparts, but is the direction we want to take our scholarly presentations?

These questions lead to further questions about departmental and institutional requirements for scholarship:

• How does the genre of academic digital performance find a place in tenure and promotion?
• Many tenure track faculty are still struggling with T&P committees who do not value scholarly work published in peer-reviewed online journals as highly as work published in traditional hard copy journals. Will the academic digital performance receive the same wariness and/or disregard?

Schaffner’s work, and the work of emerging scholars employing new media as a vehicle for their scholarship, challenges our perception of academic scholarship and requires us to redefine it, both in how we recognize what constitutes “valid” scholarship and in how we reward it through tenure and promotion review processes. While the implications of this redefining of scholarship are far-reaching, the immediate implication for future CCCCs is a reexamination of how we negotiate access to technology for those scholars who have been invited to present their work. As it stands, they are being marginalized by the many barriers they are forced to overcome in order to present their work in a genre that fully conveys the essence of their scholarship. These barriers include limited or a complete lack of internet access as well as limited access to various technological tools such as LCD projectors, speaker systems, laptops, projection screens, etc. At times, presenters are required to pay an additional fee to have the privilege of using technology during their presentation. Other presenters have chosen to borrow or purchase their own equipment, bringing it with them from home, but this sometimes results in compatibility problems that cannot be resolved in the brief time between sessions. Even worse, depending on the contractual agreement CCCC has with the conference hotel, presenters may not be allowed to use their own equipment. Clearly, we can see how presenting new media scholarship may become cost-prohibitive for some, while the logistics and trouble-shooting become such a distraction for others that the research itself, which should be the heart of the conference, is lost. CCCC has taken a progressive stance in encouraging new media scholarship and its use in instruction, but we must work harder to provide an environment in which conference presenters can share their research in the intended genre and format.

(Ed note: Schaffner's presentation is available on youtube: Part 1, Part 2)