Digital WRTC

As a graduate student, what captured my attention right away in the Introduction of Derek Mueller’s book, Network Sense: Methods for Visualizing a Discipline (2017), was his sympathetic characterization of the sheer quantity of material those in English studies (or history, philosophy, sociology, political science, etc.) are encouraged to read:

“When scholarship and conversations are piling up en masse, how does one grasp the insurmountable complexity sufficient to participate in disciplinary conversations? There are any number of plausible responses to this question, the most commonplace of which involves vague truisms about diligent attentiveness and hard work. No one would argue that being an active, engaged reader by conventional methods is anything short of requisite to a life as a rigorous scholar. But such as time-honored adage as “read everything” or “read steadily” (i.e., all day, every day) does little to acknowledge the unbridled accumulation of disciplinary materials—the too-muchness of entering conversations that started many decades (even centuries) ago and that, therefore, demand back-reading while also tuning in to current conversations . . . ” (p. 6).

Mueller introduces two methods in his book: distant reading and think description. Both methods address the daunting volume of stuff (scholarly books, anthologies, Festschriften, textbooks/guides, articles, conference papers, dissertations, etc.) in a field Mueller identifies as RCWS: “rhetoric and composition/writing studies” (here one might add technical communication: RCWSTC). Distant reading is contrasted with close reading. Thin description is contrasted with thick description. “Distant and thin treatments,” argues Mueller, “foster primary, if tentative and provisional, insights into what I refer to as network sense—incomplete but nevertheless vital glimpses (later on he calls it an “epistemological capacity”) of an interconnected disciplinary domain focused on relationships that define and cohere widespread scholarly activity” (p. 3). It is focused on discerning patterns. Network sense, in large part, aims to steer us away from lore, specialization, and niches (p. 21). Network sense complements “a generalist’s wherewithal,” and helps to minimize (if not eliminate) “homophily bias” (p. 21).

Although I focus on thick and thin description in this blogpost, the picture below reminded me of close reading and distant reading. The dock is close; the mountains are distant. The person could swim towards them, sticking the water’s surface. The swimmer, however, could also get sucked into the depths of the water.

Let’s begin with thin description. Thick description is, no doubt, a term with which many reading this weblog are familiar. Clifford Geertz, the famous anthropologist, used this term to mean ethnographic participant-observation “which . . . pursues investigative empirical depths and provides and interpretive account, in effect regarding human activity as suited to text-like hermeneutics” (p. 10). Geertz was the anthropological inspiration of Stephen North’s famous book, The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field (1987). North’s Making is an example of what Mueller calls “discipliniography,” a term inspired by Mary Daly Goggin’s description of journal editors and article writers as “discipliniographers” in her 2000 book, Authoring as Discipline: Scholarly Journals and the Post-World War II Emergence of Rhetoric and Composition (p. 13). Reading about North, incidentally, reminded me of Jody Shipka; she used an anthropological approach in her book, Toward a Composition Made Whole (2011), based on the work of James Wertsch. Students’ detailed statements of goals and choices for their multimodal tasks may have something of a thick-descriptive feel to them—come to think of it. Thin description gets us away from an anthropological framework.

Thin description was coined by philosopher Gilbert Ryle. Heather Love, Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, uses the term as her answer to something Mueller phrases as “depth fetishism” (p. 28). Depth fetishism essentially means “interpreting deeply and more deeply still . . . as the hallmark of rigorous engagement with any variety of objects of analysis, from literary texts to discourse communities” (p. 29). The irony here cannot be gainsaid. Does Mueller want me to read his book deeply? Does he want me to skim and scan, skip and flip? His writing style suggests one read slowly and carefully; it is not written in an easily digestible manner. At any rate, back to Love. “Thin description names Love’s attempt to refocus literary studies on the positive epistemological gains located in empirical noticing, reconcilable sensory experiences, and techniques for sampling, selection, and reduction” (p. 29). Love’s focus is on texts and our feelings about them—how we approach them and what we do with them as scholars. It reminded me of how much we can get from an article by reading an abstract, how much we can get from a book by reading a review of it, an how much we can get from a movie by watching the trailer—activities that Mueller himself mentions. Thin description “insists on the value of other ways of knowing that . . . establish first impressions and operate as important sites of initiation for further inquiry” (30). Distant reading, which I’ll discuss more in my next blogpost, is Franco Moretti’s term describing “means of comparing, historicizing, and apprehending . . . large-scale phenomen[a] to differentiate patterns spanning” the enormous and the complex (p. 25). As aforementioned, Derek Mueller’s book is a challenging read. His style of writing is erudite (perhaps to a fault), and there were several places where I thought he could have put things more simply. The block quote above is one of the more straightforward (one of the least recondite) passages of his book. Again, the irony here is that the more difficult the prose, the more one must engage in close reading. In a particularly clear section of the book where Mueller discusses the introduction of blind peer review in CCC and how it changed submissions to that journal, I did find myself wondering if Mueller is familiar with Price’s law of research activity (which is similar to the better-known Pareto Principle). According to Price (if my understanding is correct here), half of the number of journal articles written in any field are produced by the square root of all the scholars in that field. This means if there are 1000 scholars in a given field or area of study, approximately 32 scholars produce 50% of the journal articles.

In Chapter Four, “Making Things Fit in (Any Number) of New Ways,” Jody Shipka opens with the view that writing should not be approached by composition teachers as a “generalizable skill that, once successfully acquired, will serve students equally well irrespective of what they are attempting to accomplish . . .” (p. 83). Earlier, she writes that there are composition courses in which “skill sets . . . are often erroneously treated as static and therefore universally applicable across time and diverse communicative contexts” (p. 83). In her multimodal, process-centered approach to composition, however, the importance of “flexibility, adaptation, variation, and metacommunicative awareness” is underscored (p. 83). In deciding on an image that I feel fits well the spirit of Shipka’s words, I chanced upon this photo of white, uniform chimneys taken by Jan van der Wolf. It represents what she is trying to avoid in her classes.

Shipka spends much of Toward a Composition Made Whole (2011) pointing out the similarities and differences between her approach to composition versus others’ approaches. Shipka proposes that composition students reflect in a rigorous manner on their projects, crafting (per text/task) what she terms, in Chapter Five of her book, statements of goals and choices (or SOGCs). As she points out, these pieces go by various names depending on the instructor: self-evaluations, explanatory paragraphs, process logs, writers’ memos, letters of compositional intention, etc. (The full list and the compositionists connected to the various terms can be found on p. 115.) While Shipka does not consider her students’ SOGCs “the most important texts they produce all semester . . . they do substantially alter students’ production practices” (p. 116). Interestingly, these texts do not require SOGCs be written about them, although this type of infinite regress seems theoretically possible.

Unlike other similar reflections on one’s process as a composer, SOGCs are treated by Shipka as “formal” texts “worth 50 percent of a student’s grade for a task” (p. 116). In other words, she places just as much importance on how students “account for their goals and the rhetorical, technological, and methodological choices they make in service of those goals” as she does on the final, finished product itself (p. 116). Because of the significance of the SOGCs, I, as an educator, found myself wanting to know more about assessment. I agree with Brandy Dieterle when she writes that “[e]ven though Shipka stated how much weight the goal statement had in the assignment grade, it would have been more helpful to me, as a reader, if she had provided concrete strategies for assessing multimodal texts or even the goal statements” (Dieterle, 2015, para. 3). Dieterle goes on to say that “[r]eaders who are newcomers to multimodal composition may similarly be seeking a rubric or other guide for assessment” (Dieterle, 2015, para. 3).

That Shipka sees both the SOGCs and the final product helps to explain her pride in and understanding of her students’ work. But the man who saw only the ballet shoes—but not that particular student’s SOGCs—did not really see everything Shipka saw. Similarly, the woman who did not fully understand/appreciate the student’s board game project (described on p. 140), also did not have access to that student’s SOGCs (nor was she or the man told about these statements, at least from what I read in the book). Shipka’s frustration with these two individuals, therefore, may not be entirely fair.

The title and first epigraph of Jody Shipka’s book, Toward a Composition Made Whole (2011), comes from a 2004 article by Kathleen Blake Yancey published in Computers and Composition, “Looking for Sources of Coherence in a Fragmented World: Notes toward a New Assessment Design.” The phrase “a composition made whole” is represented by the word coherence, although Shipka suggests that Yancey’s coherence does not contain as much as it could (or perhaps should). Yancey and Robert Samuels, author of Integrating Hypertextual Subjects: Computers, Composition, and Academic Labor (2007), understandably focus on technology as in computer technology. I write “understandably” because of where Yancey chose to publish her article and the limited scope Samuels assigns himself as shown in the title of his book. Still, Shipka’s point is a compelling one: technology enjoys a larger ambit than this term might evoke these days. She reminds us that in a conventional school classroom one certainly finds technology outside the computer screen’s glow (as a dual enrollment instructor, I know this well): “books, light switches, light bulbs, floor and ceiling tiles, clocks, watches, water bottles, aluminum pop-top cans, eyeglasses, clothing, chalk, pens, paper, handwriting, and so on” (p. 20). Here one might add technology similar and dissimilar to vintage desktop computers: pencil sharpeners mounted to the wall (as well as an electric pencil sharpener on the teacher’s desk), motion-sensitive lighting that makes the classroom dark if you are quietly reading for too long, air conditioning, a printer, a flat screen TV that can connect to students’ school-issued laptop computers, a cellphone in every pocket, the school’s extensive intercom system, and a button next to the door that can alert the nurse’s office in case of health emergencies.

Shipka’s list of non-computer technology items was prompted by Carolyn Handa’s introductory chapter to an anthology called Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World: A Critical Sourcebook (2004). As with Yancey and Samuels, Handa’s purview could but should not be expected to include technology outside of computer technology. But why does Shipka focus on this kind of technology? Shipka connects technology outside of computer technology with composition outside of traditional, linear, written texts (as in personal essays and research papers). She tells us her “concern is that narrow definitions of technology fail to encourage richly nuanced views of literacy by ignoring the wide variety of technologies—both new and not-so-new—informing the production, reception, circulation, and valuation of texts” (p. 40). Moreover, Shipka is highly interested in the process of composing (and not just the final product). It is in the composer’s process that we discover a potentially rich variety of multimodal elements. She offers as her book’s first example a pair of pink ballet slippers covered in writing. When she was met with skepticism regarding this project (while discussing it in a workshop), she concluded that such doubt may very well be the result of misplaced focus: product versus process. Here I wondered why Shipka does not just embrace the idea of combining art and composition studies—inviting a scholarly dialogue between the two disciplines. The slippers (in the Introduction), the drawings illustrating the composition process (in Chapter Three), and Muffie’s dance (also in Chapter Three) all reminded me of art projects.

In Chapter Two, Shipka explains that she draws upon the mediated action framework of James Wertsch to “provide us with a way of examining final products in relation to the complex processes by which these products are produced, circulated, and consumed” (p. 40) and “with ways of attending to the wide range of representational systems and technologies with which composers work and to examine the role that perceptions, purposes, motives, institutions, as well as other people and activities play in the production, reception, circulation, and valuation of that work” (p. 40). Curiously, Shipka does not mention that Wertsch is an educational psychologist who currently serves as a professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. It isn’t that she had to discuss Wertsch’s varied intellectual identity and how it impacts his work, it’s just that the more readers know about an important figure, the more they themselves can explore cross-disciplinary possibilities. (She does, I should note, identify Edwin Hutchins as a cognitive anthropologist on p. 101.) Also, that Wertsch’s work is critical to Shipka’s project but that he himself is not part of the writing/rhetoric/technical communication field is, I think, interesting in and of itself.                                                                                                                 

As someone with a background in communication studies, I appreciated Shipka’s admiration of communication as a discipline and her advocacy of communication-based approaches to composition. What Shipka describes in Chapter One reminds me of what in secondary education is known as English language arts. As I understand it, the basic idea behind ELA is that communicating well involves improving one’s reading, listening, speaking, and writing skills, all of which go together. When Shipka writes that “[i]t remains tempting . . . to imagine what composition scholars might have accomplished had they worked to forge a tighter alliance with communication scholars—had they not, in other words, made the study and teaching of written discourse the field’s raison d’être” (p. 28), I immediately thought of Maxine Hairston’s 1985 Chair’s address, “Breaking Our Bonds and Reaffirming Our Connections,” at the CCCC. Hairston told her audience of fellow English professors, “I think that as rhetoricians and writing teachers we will come of age and become autonomous professionals with a discipline of our own only if we can make a psychological break with the literary critics who today dominate the profession of English studies” (p. 273, in College Composition and Communication, Vol 36, No. 3, Oct., 1985).

Comments on first half of Jody Shipka’s Toward a Composition Made Whole forthcoming.