Discovering Digital Dimensions at C&W 2003 If I Only Had a Chance to Write It All Over Again . . .Of course, there were hundreds of outstanding presentations at C &W 2003, many of them exploring digital dimensions, some exploring them in beautifully imagined forms. The seamless present of digital work often hides the tremendous amount of effort it takes to create such illusions. Take, for example, the C&W 2003 film, "Computers in the Movies" on opening night. We watched only for a few moments as slides of C&W people from past conferences flashed on the screen in concert with Sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spake Zarathustra) by Richard Strauss, anticipating the next moment, certainly on the edge of our seats (well, okay). Instead, we only caught a glimpse of John Anderton (Tom Cruise) running down his eyeballs in Minority Report before there was a hardware crash in the landscape of the North Ballroom. If you'd like to watch that movie to full effect, here it is, in RealMedia format, for a short time. Christopher Berry is the director and designer of the film, with only grip help from me. Computers in the Movies (Real Player; download RMP free here) If you can imagine watching this among friends on a big screen in digital surroundsound, I think you'll realize what was missed. The technical challenges of creating video like this, capturing clips from other sources, remixing sounds, and repurposing it for different players are enormous. I know it took Chris many, many hours to prepare this short film. Can we afford the time it takes to learn how to manipulate media like this? What do we gain? What else should we be doing? I have no easy answers to these questions except to say that for me, it's well worth the time. What are we doing after all? Composing and communicating in new forms, to new and eager audiences, while learning new ways of expressing and exploring ideas. Isn't that what we like about our profession? Isn't that what we should be doing with our students? Isn't that what they want to do as well? Once you've gained some experience working with new media, the technical challenges diminish. That doesn't mean, however, that working in multimedia ever gets easy. On the first day of C&W 2003, the fine graduate students in my "Rhetoric and Digital Publishing" course and I hosted a preconference workshop in which we, along with about 15 participants, managed to create and publish a "real" book, Digital Publishing F5 | Refreshed in about four hours, complete from the selection of the title to the composition of the first chapters, the slide show, the video, and the research bibliography. We had spent a substantial amount of time preparing some of the content we would ultimately fold into the book, including securing permission rights. It was an intense four hours. Bob Stein and Karl Stolley leveraged the content the rest of us provided them into TK3 Author, often frantically since we were on the clock. The rest of us wrote, talked, conducted peer review of work we'd just written, and even managed to figure out how to print an 11 x 17" contributor's contract on a printer not designed to do it. You can read the results and download a free copy of the book at Parlor Press: http://www.parlorpress.html/digital.html. If you watch some of the video included ("Digital Production: A Multimedia Tour"), which was also shot during the workshop, you will hear Bob Stein worry that three hours would not be enough (it wouldn't) and that the articles had "hundreds of links in them. They all have to be made by hand." (Bob showed us how elegant TK3 Author is as a multimedia authoring program the next day when he delivered his keynote address.) A workshop participant, and contributor to the collection, exclaimed at the end of the workshop, "Now I know what digital publishing involves. If only I could write my opening statement all over again!" (Each participant wrote an opening statement for the book on the topic, "What do you think the future of digital publishing will be?) Therein is the opportunity of digitality. She can write it all over again, either in the same book (if there's another release) or somewhere else, this time starting from a new place, with deeper insight and a sense of urgency that is hard to explain but commonly experienced by those who composing in multimedia. In closing, I want to say a few words about digitality as a concept. In my my opening remarks at C&W 2003, I spoke about the emerging complexity of the present, having in mind both the type of emergence of which Mark C. Taylor speaks in The Moment of Complexity: Emergent Network Culture, but also the sense of growth and development I always feel about our work in computers and writing. The latter feels a lot like the unending conversation of history of which Burke speaks, and we're lucky to be here, now, when the emergence of our field and these new technologies crackle with potential. Here's what I said:
What I like most about discovering digital dimensions is the feeling it gives me of being in a bubbling caldron--a great molten mass, as Burke would say--with the possibility of being refreshed daily, congealing on the surface of the present for a moment, then watching it happen again and again, forever. Works CitedTaylor, Mark C. The Moment of Complexity: Emergent Network Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001. |