“Profiles in Digital Scholarship & Publishing: Justin Hodgson”

Interview by Elizabeth Barnett | Xchanges 13.2, Fall 2018

Multimodal Composition

Xchanges: What place does multimodality have in the college composition classroom today? Has it expanded in the ways you would have liked or expected in 10+ years you’ve participated in this composition ecosystem as a professor of digital rhetoric?

JH: When I interviewed at the University of Texas, I had just finished my PhD (about 2009). An interviewer asks, “Who’s going to teach these things? Who’s trained to do this stuff?” Of course, my answer was, “Me. That’s what I do.” Of course, the professor group is not that small at this point anymore. At this point in time, there’s a larger set of folks in composition studies and rhetoric more generally who do things in and around the technological production side.

Digital rhetoric is rhetoric at this point. We’re so saturated by the technology that to separate them is somewhat problematic already. While we don’t all bring technical expertise, we bring rhetorical expertise. If you think it’s late in the game, just give it a shot. You’d be amazed at what you can do.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot: “What [ten years ago] did I really expect to happen?” We had this sense that technologies were going to continue to grow, become more ubiquitous, and be more prevalent, but I don’t think anybody fully understood what was going to happen with mobile writing, mobile production, and the app-based world.

I really thought that by now more universities would have the digital writing component or digital literacy as a core curricular value, in the same way that they have writing, speaking, and math. There are universities that have done this and colleges that have done this. But, yes, I’m a little shocked that it hasn’t become a curricular value. The more writing becomes digitally oriented, the less time you have for more traditional writing things. The fact that we define the sense of writing by word counts and a peer review process means we got half of it right. But students who can make amazing videos, or design a really informative web text, or learn how to write a series of blog posts for critical or public service purposes, that’s just as much development of writing skill as is writing the essay.

The essay model is actually a very brilliant model for when it was invented and what it was doing. But it’s harder and harder for students to see how readily something like the essay and essay-based practices help them now and then transfer to other areas. It’s not just transfer skills that I’m after. It’s really critical awareness of the moves or strategies or maneuvers that work rhetorically in different contexts.