Myself As Another

I want to become a great digital media writer. There’s something that just seems a bit “off” with that phrase. Digital. Media. Writer. I don’t know. I want to produce texts that have pictures and videos and sound and alphabetic text, and formatting, and layout, etc.

And lately, I’ve come to the conclusion that in order to be great at this, I need to do treat this practice like a craft. A great photographer needs to take a lot of photographs. A great cinematographer needs to take a lot of footage. A great writer needs to write a lot or words. A great audio producer needs to record a lot of dialog and sound effects. I would say that each of these enthusiasts (amateurs, professionals, beginners, sages) is a sort of craftsman. Someone who needs to think about, at least to some degree, technique for the sake of itself. Taking pictures and video footage not in order to capture great images, but to get to know the techniques of aperture, shutter speed, ISO, composition, timing, directing, vision, editing, and image and video storage formats. Recording audio to learn about microphones, windscreens, monitors, position, interviewing, and again editing.

The same should go for software. Working with Premiere. Working with Audacity or Soundbooth. Working with Photoshop. Working with Flash. Working with HTML. And accruing new skills, curiosities, habits, and voices as one matures as a digital media writer. I don’t just want to produce these texts. I want to become someone who produces them. I think there’s a bit of a difference.

And so, in the spirit of  craft-honing, I’ve decided that at least once a week, I’m going to set out to learn at least one, simple thing about my production technique, equipment, or software. All as they might relate to digital media writing.

I’ve already produced a post about the pics I took this afternoon down the block. I’ll be posting that shortly.

Stay tuned.

A large portion of my dissertation is going to focus on the work of Writing Program Administrators as Rhetorical Workers. Yes, with all of the baggage (thanks, Karl) that comes with “worker.” In order to start putting together the theoretical frame for the research, I’m going to be drawing significantly from Cultural Materialist theory (Bruce Horner, Raymond Williams, Anthony Giddens) and ecological theory (Daniel White, Marilyn Cooper, Gregory Bateson). But as I understand this whole “research process” thingamabob, researchers usually build theoretical frames in order to interpret data which might yield answers to particular questions. (Do you know how long I worked on that sentence to put it as succinctly as possible? Ugh.)

My dissertation is going to be focusing on the the rhetorical work performed by WPAs regarding shifting institutional definitions of writing in response to emerging digital technologies. My plan is to gain three types of data.

Administrative Documents
One group of data will consist of documents created by WPAs related to changing defintions of writing (in some case responding to changes; in other cases arguing for new notions of writing). (More on this later in this post)

WPA Interviews
Another type of data will be interviews with the WPAs who produced those particular documents. I’ll be asking them about their perceptions of the material working conditions from which these particular documents emerged: exigencies, opportunities, crises, and other conditions consituting what a WPA percieves as a particular Kairos. These interviews will likely lead to more WPA-produced documents, interviews with directly related actors, and …

Non-WPA-produced Institutional Documents
Though which influenced thier rhetorical work. These sorts of documents will hopefully help to frame the context of the documents and interviews I’m collecting. I don’t see myself getting to invested in much rhetorical analysis of these documents, unless that’s a thread I’m following because one the WPA’s mentioned it as an influence, or because it is directly referenced in one of the WPA-produced documents. Something like an institutional initiative, or a call for grant proposals, or an alumni fundraising document.

Now, back to those pesky administrative documents…

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(photo credit: gregory james walsh. some rights reserved. see creative commons license.)

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(note: this entry also appears on my professional blog @ Writing Material. If you’re interested in following my dissertation progress, make sure to visit that blog regularly or subscribe with an RSS feed.)

Ahhh. For at least a few days now, the writer’s block has been absent. Hopefully, I can keep this momentum.
A few items I want to share:

• I’ve set a goal for myself: 1000 words every day. Indefinitely. They don’t all have to be related directly to the dissertation, but at least some of them do. And revision doesn’t count. Some will be blog posts here. Some will be posts to my other blog.
• To keep a public record of my daily pace, I’ve adopted a tool that you’ll be seeing in the sidebar. It’s a plug-in (Tally Graph), that tracks all sorts of different avenues of progress. It’s really hard to use, and not particularly attractive, but I couldn’t find anything better. If anyone out there has any ideas, I’m all ears.
• And, for the first time in my life, I’m trying to keep a writing schedule to keep me on track with at least some momentum. That means:

8:00 – Gym
10:00-11:00 – Brunch, email, status updates, rest
11:00-3:00 – Dissertation work: some reading, mostly writing
3:00 – Bike Ride
5:00 – Dinner, email, status updates, rest
6:00 – academic projects, blog entries, television, movies, friends

• Debra Journet is amazing. Very, very supportive with the ways I’ve been struggling. Support that helps me get past or fix the struggles. I can’t thank her enough.
• Thank you, Robert Boice. I’m reading your book on professors as writers (and writer’s block), and it has been enormously helpful getting me thinking clearly about why I’m having trouble lately. In a way that I wasn’t able to get at for myself.
• Don’t expect this much output everyday. Like I said, this work is supposed to be for the dissertation. If it ends up on the blog, that’s all the better.

• Today’s Word Production: 1454

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(photo credit: eleanza. some rights reserved. see creative commons license for details.

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(note: this entry also appears on my professional blog @ Writing Material. If you’re interested in following my dissertation progress, make sure to visit that blog regularly or subscribe with an RSS feed.)