“Profiles in Digital Scholarship & Publishing: Douglas Eyman”

Interview by Elizabeth Barnett | Xchanges 14.1, Spring 2019

Future Work: A Theory of Digital Rhetoric

Xchanges: You’ve explored a lot of definitions of digital rhetoric and as yet its study lacks an integrated theory. In 2015 you wrote, “this lack of ‘an integrated theory’ seemed to me a perfect opening for my own work toward understanding, defining, and shaping a vision of digital rhetoric (although I have moved from seeking an integrated theory to articulating digital rhetoric theories and methods).”

Will you, or have you, ever come back to trying to put together an integrated theory?

DE: I’m thinking about it. I have some thoughts on this, but I haven’t put them out anywhere yet. As a scholar, I tend more toward being the person who provides the infrastructure or comes up with a way to produce the thing you want to do. That’s what I really like about being a director of a Ph.D. program. All these great students come in, and I say, “How can I help you do this really interesting project?” I see that as my goal: to be the person that builds things to support people so that they can put new things in the world. That being said, I am working on a project that I think I’m going to call “Rhetoric, Design, Code” and look at how those practices and those theories interoperate.

I’ll just say thanks very much for the opportunity to talk about things that are really interesting to me. I love to see more people thinking about and finding new models for producing digital scholarship. I’m so excited to see people building the infrastructures and the models for keeping those sustained.