“Profiles in Digital Scholarship & Publishing: Justin Hodgson”
Interview by Elizabeth Barnett | Xchanges 13.2, Fall 2018
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.
In the first of this series, University of New Mexico English MA student Elizabeth Barnett conducted a video interview with Professor Justin Hodgson of Indiana University, who heads up the editorial board of The Journal of Undergraduate Multimedia Projects, or, TheJump+. This issue of Xchanges focuses on undergraduate research, and the two began their discussion of issues with digital scholarship in the 21st century, particularly as it involves undergraduates in the academy.
Showcasing Undergraduate Work
Xchanges: TheJUMP+ showcases some astounding undergraduate multimodal composition work, highly creative and technically advanced. You have a submission formula that includes the student’s and instructor’s reflections, peer responses, and assignment prompts.
Why focus on undergraduate composition? Was the decision to include the supplemental materials solely based on THEJUMP+’s goal to also be an instructor resource? Or is there more to including these in a critical sense? Or to more fully situate the compositions regarding authors’ rhetorical choices?
JH: I graduated from Clemson in May of 2009, and I started at Texas that fall. One of the first classes I was teaching was a “Writing for Digital Environments” class. I had this assignment, a weird little video remix assignment. A student made this project called “Communism.” Much like you, I was amazed and thought, “My goodness. What? Who? I didn’t teach you any of these things and this is genuinely amazing.”
I shared it with my graduate cohort from Clemson and some folks I’ve known outside of there, and I asked, “Well, where would these projects go?” If a student writes a really brilliant paper or poem or argument, we have journals for that. But not for these kinds of projects. I said, “You know what? We should just start a journal,” and they said, “Yes, sounds great.” That was Friday, and by Monday, I had mocked up a prototype. That’s how we started.
This inherently filled two roles, and because of that, I knew early on that I wanted to do a couple of things with student work as I was mocking up this project. One was that it had to facilitate a pedagogical value because, let’s be honest, there’s not a widespread interest in undergraduate journals. I knew it had to have a pedagogical value, and they need to be built partly around that because that’s who the audience is going to be. So it wasn’t for undergraduates as much as it was for undergraduates in classes working with faculty.
The second part was, and this is the rhetorical part, that these projects that are amazing or engaging or dynamic, by design, make me want to make things. I knew that in going in, we wanted to create responses from our editorial board to each piece such that each part of the project would form its own medial ecology. The reason for undergraduate work is very simple. One, they do amazing things, and there’s no place for that to go, and two, while I do teach graduate classes, I have far more experience and exposure to undergraduates doing weird, wonderful media stuff, so that’s why the undergraduate focus.