“Profiles in Digital Scholarship & Publishing: Douglas Eyman”
Interview by Elizabeth Barnett | Xchanges 14.1, Spring 2019
As an exclusively digital publisher, Xchanges is naturally subject to and keenly interested in the practical issues surrounding the future and preservation of digital scholarly work. In the exploration of issues surrounding digital scholarship, we’ve produced a series of three interviews with prominent academic scholars and editors whose work spans the intersections of rhetoric, pedagogy, publishing, and technology. We hope that Xchanges readers enjoy the viewpoints looking both back at what’s happened in the field of digital publishing and pedagogy in the last decade or two and forward to what lies ahead.
Here, in the current installment of this series, University of New Mexico English MA student Elizabeth Barnett shares a video interview she conducted with Professor Doug Eyman of George Mason University. In addition to teaching courses in digital rhetoric, technical and scientific communication, editing, web authoring, advanced composition, and professional writing, Dr. Eyman is the senior editor of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. This issue of Xchanges focuses on graduate-student research in writing and rhetoric. Elizabeth and Doug began their discussion of issues with digital scholarship in the 21st century with a focus on the nature and definition of digital rhetoric.
Digital Rhetoric: Expanding Definitions
Xchanges: In your 2015 book Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice, you wrote, “the term ‘digital rhetoric’ itself has been applied to rhetorics of technology, network rhetorics, social media use, the use of rhetorical appeals in online discussion forums, website design, multimodal composition, and the study of new media (itself a contested term).”
Is “new media” still new? Has Digital Rhetoric moved beyond an emerging techne into an established realm of study as well as a means of production of persuasive communication and culture?
DE: I’d say the first question about new media is one that comes up quite a lot, especially for people newer in the field. “Is new media really new anymore?” is a refrain I hear often. “New Media” is a standardized phrase at this point, which indicates a kind of hybridization of media. We’re looking at how image media, motion media, interactive media, and textual media all come together, and that hybrid version, that synthesis, is “new media.” We can almost call multimodal composition a form of new media as well, except that multimodal, currently, in the way it’s theorized, actually bends quite a bit beyond the digital, whereas new media tends to stay rooted within the digital, in terms of the way people handle it. Multimodal composition is becoming a more expansive term in a lot of ways.
Xchanges: You talk about digital literacy being a prerequisite for understanding digital rhetoric. Let’s go back. Is digital rhetoric concerned with new media, or is it concerned with all things multimodal?
DE: I think it’s both and more than multimodality. There’s a follow-up piece to the book that ended up in the journal Enculturation that came out of the Indiana Digital Rhetorics Symposium, where I talk about what’s not in the book. Digital rhetoric is concerned with how rhetoric operates in any digital realm. That includes new media and multimodal work but also includes the interaction between humans and algorithms, the ways code creates and operates as infrastructures for the activities that we engage in or that are engaged in by systems as well as people.
The idea of networks and the connectivity of networks is an important key for digital rhetoric, but we also don’t want to lose sight of the embodied nature of people using technologies. At one point, people were saying, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” People were saying, “The body’s no longer there.” It turns out, that’s not actually true. Coming back to the body and how the body operates is really an important component of where digital rhetoric is going. I would make the argument that rhetoric itself is a uniquely and innately human approach to communication. I don’t really hold with the idea that we have animal rhetorics or computer system software agents that are creating rhetorical action on their own. I think, at the root, there’s embedded humanness in it.
Those are the conversations that are happening around digital rhetoric: Can a non-human actor or agency operate rhetorically? Can they make rhetorical moves on their own? That’s a really interesting space right now. Justin Hodgson actually has a book out on post-digital rhetoric. We’re moving from human to post-human, from digital to post-digital. I’m not sure what comes next. Maybe just post-rhetoric rhetoric.
One of the things I think is really fascinating right now is a real push toward de-colonizing digital methods, opening up space to different kinds of theories, different kinds of methods, and different kinds of communities, and then using some of these digital humanities methods to do social justice work. I’m thinking of work by Roopika Risam, Liz Losh, and Dorothy Kim, among others, who as scholars are leading us in this direction.