Aldous Huxley believed that technology was creating an "atmosphere of passivity" that stifled artistic expression and suppressed creative culture. Although his thoughts were expressed in 1927, these ideas are particularly interesting today in the context of new media publishing. I will explore these ideas through this flickr photo essay.
This week I have the great pleasure of introducing Kate Pullinger.
Here is Professor Sue Thomas (left), Kate Pullinger (next to Sue) and moi. We were being very transliterate with our Nintendo DS game playing.
A bit about Kate:
Kate Pullinger’s most recent book, The Mistress of Nothing, won the 2009 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, one of Canada’s most prestigious literary prizes, and was long-listed for the Giller Prize. Her digital fiction project Inanimate Alice has also won numerous prizes, reaching online audiences around the world. She is Reader in Creative Writing and New Media at De Montfort University where she co-founded TRG, the Transliteracy Research Group, and she also offers private 1-1 mentoring for emerging writers in both print and new media.
Kate Pullinger is currently working on a new novel that builds on themes developed in her collaborative digital fiction project, Flight Paths: A Networked Novel. You can also read Kate on My Secret Blog.
‘Inanimate Alice’ and Her Other Lives: a mini-case study
Kate Pullinger
I came across this a couple of weeks ago and was amazed by it: it's a fictional
podcast in the style of a radio interview. In it, Alice, the character we created for our online episodic multimedia digital novel (gasp) 'Inanimate Alice', is interviewed by the host of a show called 'The Daily Dose' about a 'giga pet' she's created, 'the Brad Bud'.
It's just over three minutes long but I'm amazed by it on many levels, but mainly on the level of 'wow'. These students have taken the Alice stories far beyond what exists online, developed Alice's character into young adulthood, created a business for Alice that includes a piece of tech kit that Alice has designed herself, the ‘Brad bud’. Then they've gone one step further and created a talk show for Alice to appear in, with its own host, and they've recorded the talk show interview, and broadcast it, along with the transcript, online.
There's very little information on the podcast webpage itself, but I can see from the url that it comes out of 'pitt.edu' which is the University of Pittsburgh in the US. A few tweets later, I'd figured out that these students are working with Jamie Skye Bianco, who is Professor of Digital Media at Pittsburgh (also known online as @spikenlilli). Jamie teaches both 'Inanimate Alice' and 'Flight Paths' to students on her 'Narrative & Technology' class; her students wrote a series of interesting blogposts about Alice and FP earlier this year.
It's been nearly two years since new episodes of Inanimate Alice, created by readers, first started appearing online, and these new episodes continue to proliferate. The pedagogical community around the project continues to grow; if you are interested in having a look at it, a good place to start is the Facebook Inanimate Alice group page. Recent developments include a Scottish teacher, Hilery Williams, who has written a series of wonderful blog posts about using 'Inanimate Alice' with dyslexic teenaged readers; the post linked to here is number four in a series on Alice.
As well as that, another Scottish teacher, Kenny Pieper, has been using Alice in his secondary school classroom and, again, blogging about it in a way that I've found both useful and inspiring. Both groups of students are working on their own episodes of Alice, and Mr Pieper’s class has started posting these online at the class ‘Inanimate Alice’ blog - https://blogs.glowscotland.org.uk/sl/InanimateAliceBlog/
For writers who work in the genre of science fiction, this kind of reader-story interaction is fairly commonplace via 'fanfic', or fan fiction. But for a writer like me, working in both the genre of literary fiction, and with new forms of digital fiction, having readers talk back to my story in this way is an extraordinary experience. Every time I see a new episode, or a new blog post from people working with 'Inanimate Alice' I feel absolutely amazed. To me it seems a very meaningful form of interactivity and I'm thrilled that these stories are being used by students and teachers around the world to find new ways of talking and thinking about storytelling in the 21st Century.
I was interviewed recently for an article called 'Are Midlist Authors An Endangered Species?' that appeared in the Globe & Mail newspaper yesterday - somehow I've become one of the go-to-girls for journalists who want to talk about the future of the book and the future of stories. My conversation with the journalist was, of course, vastly reduced in the context of the article, and I ended up being quoted in the final paragraph, given this as a not-very-bright-sounding last word: “Writers will make a living in a lot of different ways, only some of which are writing,” Uh-huh. I was described in the article as a writer who "publishes both conventionally and online, where she posts fiction for free." While, strictly speaking, when it comes to 'Inanimate Alice' and 'Flight Paths', this is true - these works are available online for free - to see the vast interactive community project that Alice in particular has become reduced to 'fiction for free' is infuriating. This is not to fault the journalist; my point here is that at the moment the argument about the future of publishing seems to be focussing on self-publishers vs real publishers, on 'free' versus 'paid' content. To me this feels like I'm watching a couple of mice argue over a tiny piece of cheese while around the corner a big fat cat (representing the vast potential for multimedia, interactivity, mobile delivery, etc etc etc that digital platforms offer to writers) sits calmly licking her paw.
I’d be interested to hear from you all about what you think about this kind of thing. What are your thoughts about how writing and publishing are changing? Have any of you been in touch with writers you admire via social media? Would you feel able or inclined to contact a writer you like through their website, or their twitter feed or facebook page, for example?
Ximena Alarcon presenting at Visiones Sonoras organised by the CMMAS in Morelia – México. Image from the Sounding Underground blog.
This week Ximena Alarcon will be sharing her expertise with us. Ximena has prepared an interview for a community radio station in Devon (England) with Ariane Delaunois. It's a very detailed explanation of Ximena's Sounding Underground project.
Abstract of Sounding Underground:
Sounding Underground
year of production: 2009
used technology (software etc): Flash CS4 Actionscript 3.0
Sounding Underground is a virtual environment that invites users to interact with the soundscapes of three underground public transport systems: London, Paris and México City. Commuters’ memories and imaginations are represented in sounds and images that have been selected by volunteer commuters through an ethnographic process. These sounds are assembled in a sound score that acts as a multimedia user’s interface. The score contains sonic features unique to each metro distributed into: Entrance, Tickets, Corridors, Platform, and Carriage,correspond to the identifiable spaces recognised by any commuter, as well as some shared sonic spaces: Amplified Voice, Steps, Doors, Trains Arriving. Each metro has a unique space: Paris (air sounds), Mexico (street vendors), and London (announcements). This environment allows commuters, through interactive options, to experience a process of listening and remembering, provoking the expression of an aural urban collective memory, through the narrative of an underground journey.
Interactivity
Each category contains a sequence of sounds that can be triggered by the user. S/he is invited to interact at his/her own rhythm and to feel free to navigate the spaces. In the interaction, sounds overlap both within categories and spaces, creating a sonic texture derived from the humans’ and the machines’ counterpoint of daily life.
In the graphic interface, each category contains a sequence of images. Although they change each time the user triggers a sound, they may not be directly associated with the sounds. They are close-up pictures of the textures from the metro spaces. Most are abstract images allowing one to focus attention on the sounds, which resembles the activity of wandering (as if lost in thought). The graphic spaces overlap to create the feeling of being in a common space that changes because of the movement of sound in space and not because of its graphic structure: the latter is fixed, and serves both as a score and as a user interface.
Sounding Underground also invites you to write memories in text, produced by listening. These memories are being published randomly in the "Listening and Remembering" page.
Sounding Underground is the result of a practice-led research project studied commuter’s perceptions towards their daily life soundscape in underground public transport systems, taking the case studies of Paris and México City as counterparts of the London Underground. Sixteen commuters in Mexico, and sixteen in Paris, contributed to the creation of the environment, and their experiences were linked to the original project in London, in which twenty-four volunteers participated.
Linking urban soundscapes through commuters’ memories invites us to acknowledge symbolic, social, economic and political issues of mobility in contemporary cities, from their perspective. This approach strives to make commuters contributors in the creation of these environments, and furthermore performers (as non-musicians) and narrators of their commuting experience.
Week 10: Writers and Writing
This week we’ll explore contemporary new media writing and examine how it might be different from
*traditional* print-only works. As Andy Campbell notes of his works: “textual narratives are approached by Dreaming Methods as a key part of the multimedia mix rather than as the absolute central backbone – purposely open-ended, ambiguous, short, fragmentary – and are often additionally considered to be a powerful visual element: blurred, obscured, transient, animated, mouse-responsive.”
Key ideas for this week:
• Ways to write and read rich media documents in a networked environment.
• Read the example books made with Sophie: http://sophieproject.cntv.usc.edu/demobooks
• “The interactive nature of the process makes it possible for individual memories to be linked in a creative shared experience; it fosters the development of on-line sound-driven narratives.”
Guest Lecture:
Ximena Alarcon will share with us her ideas on creating and disseminating born digital work.
This week's seed questions:
Q1. Ronni Bennett says that “in the end, it is all storytelling ...all communication is storytelling.” What are some examples in the online environment that support Bennett’s thinking?
Q2. In “Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide,” Henry Jenkins writes that transmedia storytelling works best when each medium is used to tell the part of the story that it’s most suited for and that each piece of this story. Find two examples of transmedia storytelling and explain why each platform and story part works best together (think of Radiohead and Heros as examples).
Q3. In the print world, page layout is largely the job of the publisher. That is, neither the reader nor the writer has much choice about how the text (images/sound/video) appear on the “page.” With digital writing, most writers (and readers) have deep input on how text (etc...) appears. What is significant about this shift? What dialogues are opened up?
“The ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks.”
The word “transliteracy” is derived from the verb “to transliterate,” meaning to write or print a letter or word using the closest corresponding letters of a different alphabet or language.
The idea of transliteracy is really about promoting a unifying ecology. As Thomas explains,
“The concept of transliteracy calls for a change of perspective away from the battles over print versus digital, and a move instead towards a unifying ecology not just of media, but of all literacies relevant to reading, writing, interaction and culture, both past and present.
It is an opportunity to cross some hitherto quite difficult divides.”
Transliteracy asks key questions about communication:
How were people remembering and communicating for the thousands of years before writing?
Where are the similarities with the way we communicate today?
Has our addiction to print made us forget skills we had before?
Can digital media reconnect us with those skills again?
Watch “Social Media Revolution” on YouTube:
Literacy is not linear. ““Part of the confusion about media convergence stems from the fact that when people talk about it, they’re actually describing at least five processes” (Henry Jenkins, 2001).
technological
economic
social or organic
cultural
global
MEDIA CONVERGENCE
Another term which has become widely used about these kinds of experiences, especially by the media and gaming worlds, is “convergence.” In 2001 when Henry Jenkins noted the confusion about media convergence actually is because of the various processes that are at play (it is not one single required literacy). For Jenkins, “these multiple forms of media convergence are leading us toward a digital renaissance - a period of transition and transformation that will affect all aspects of our lives” (Jenkins, 2001).
Sue Thomas often refers to the Asheninka tribe as an example of a transliterate group. For them transliteracy imbues every aspect of their culture:
“Everything we use has a story. Each drawing which is passed from one generation to another is our writing; each little symbol has an immense story. As one learns a drawing, one learns its origin, who taught it, who brought it to us.”
Discussion Questions:
Q1. What is transliteracy? Give examples of how transliteracy appears in your daily life.
Q2. How does Coover’s “The End of Books” (originally written in 1992) align with a contemporary thinking of transliteracy and the development of the web into web 2.0?
Q3. According to Aarseth’s “Nonlinearity and Literary Theory,” “the text...entails a set of powerful metaphysics...the three most important ones are those of reading, writing and stability” (763). Having read about and discussed the idea of transliteracy, would you suggest adding or changing any of the three elements that Aarseth notes as most important? Must “users” (readers) “learn to accept their position as agents of the text” or might they play a more decisive role (as in Andy Campbell’s works)?
This morning, one of the talking heads on a television news program stated that "Twitter is our main source of information" regarding the earthquake in Japan.
UPDATE: It seems that A Million Penguins (the wiki novel), one of our required readings for this week, has been taken offline...
How are web platforms leveraged for the telling of compelling narratives? Jeremy Ettinghausen wonders what will happen to the novel: “is the novel immune from being swept up into the fashion for collaborative activity? Well, this is what we are going to try and discover with A Million Penguins, a collaborative, wiki-based creative writing exercise.”
Some key ideas to consider this week:
Real time
twitter stories
flickr stories
rss feeds and narrative Inanimate Alice
episodic fiction
how to maintain readerly interest
This Week: Blog question and answer with digital creator Chris Joseph!
"You will see--very, very soon--authors become publishers. You will see publishers become booksellers. You will see booksellers become publishers, and you will see authors become booksellers." ~ Stephen Riggio
According to Kate Pullinger, there are seven aspects that we (readers, writers and creators of new media texts) MUST acknowledge:
Writers need to talk about money
Writers, publishers and teachers need to get their heads out of the sand: the digital future is already here
E-books are boring.
We better keep talking about e-books.
Be afraid of e-books.
Always remember that human culture is highly visual.
"The final product itself, now frozen in time, is more akin to something produced by the wild, untrammelled creativity of the folk imagination. The contributors to ―A Million Penguins, like the ordinary folk of Bakhtin‘s carnivals, have produced something excessive. It is rude, chaotic, grotesque, sporadically brilliant, anti-authoritarian and, in places, devastatingly funny. As a cultural text it is unique, and it demonstrates the tremendous potential of this form to provide a stimulating social setting for writing, editing and publishing. The contributors may not have written one single novel but they did create something quite remarkable, an outstanding body of work that can be found both in the main sections as well as through the dramas and conversations lacing the ―backstage pages. And they had a damned good time while doing so. As the user Crtrue writes.
Hi hi hi hi hi! Seriously. This is going to fail horribly. It's still fun."
Discussion Questions:
Q1. Although publishing might seem easier in some senses, what about copyright issues? Think of Apple’s DRM movement.
Q2. Read “A Million Penguins.” How different from a traditional book is this wikinovel? How would you describe it (is it really a “novel”)?
Q3. Digital publishing is in a constant state of evolution. In August 2010, Oxford University Press has decided to relaunch the online version of the OED. They have chosen iFactory as the online
publishing platform. What changes in functionality, access and personalisation do you think might occur from such a shift (offline & static to online & evolving)? Read and article on the change here: http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/OxfordUniversity-Press-ChoosesPubFactory-to-Develop-OxfordEnglishDictionary-1299800.htm
As Howard Rheingold notes, “a participatory culture in which most of the population see themselves as creators as well as consumers of culture is far more likely to generate freedom and wealth for more people than one in which a small portion of the population produces culture that the majority passively consume.”
according to recent studies by the Pew Center on the Internet and American Life, more than half of American teens online have produced media content and about a third have circulated media that they have produced beyond their immediate friends and family.
growing importance of participatory culture in the everyday lives of young people. Work across a range of disciplines suggest that these emerging forms of participatory culture are important sites for informal learning and may be the crucible out of which new conceptions of civic engagement are emerging.
the next techno-cultural shift according to Rheingold
collective intelligence
Required Readings: Adora Svitak “What Adults Can Learn from Kids,” Howard Rheingold, “Adora Svitak: A 12 Year Old on Digital Literacy," Henry Jenkins, “Combating the Participation Gap,” Howard Rheingold, Introduction,“Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution.”
Recommended Readings: Henry Jenkins, “Your Kids on Social Media.”Mark Prensky, “What Makes a Digital Native?”
Discussion Questions
Q1. Rheingold says that media is changing the way we communicate. After reading the introduction to Smart Mobs and listening to Jenkins’ podcast lecture, what in your view, are some of the ways that new media is affecting communication?
Q2. The ability to be critical is at an all-time high if one considers the plethora of information available online.
What are some ways we can be critically literate about texts that are online?
Q3. Henry Jenkins explains that “many kids today” see themselves as not only readers of their culture but as authors of their culture. What examples do you find in your daily life that supports this view? What role would you say new media plays in your own authorship of culture?
Q4. Are there any critical new media skills missing from Jenkin’s list (see lecture notes)?
What exactly is folksonomy and how can we leverage it for education and business? What are the current folksonomic platforms in web 2.0?
Some key ideas to consider during this class:
Folksonomy as social activity
The erosion or at least blurring of hierarchies and oppositions
The impossibility of identity
What are some current views about the emergence and diffusion of media?
Thomas Vander Wal, who coined the term, folksonomy, defines it as:
"Folksonomy is the result of personal free tagging of information and objects (anything with a URL) for one's own retrieval. The tagging is done in a social environment (usually shared and open to others).
Folksonomy is created from the act of tagging by the person consuming the information."
The "f-word" (as Vander Wal puts it) allows "regular" folks to categorise or structure information in a way that is pertinent to them (i.e. personalised).
As the name suggests, it's a taxonomy made by the folks – user generated definitions and information structures. But folksonomy is just a part of a larger idea: tagging. Tagging is the tying of words to objects. I think Vander Wall explains that this method of tagging has less "cognitive load" for users because it’s about key words rather than some kind of overlying systemic planning. I see it more of a free–form way of categorising information – personalising it.
Folksonomy is a subset of tagging – identifying/categorising for personal use, “re–finding” information
This aspect of personalisation has important impacts for the business sector in that it allows businesses a view of their product from the customers' point of view.
Q1. Are their any drawback to employing a taxonomy created by the folks?
Especially if one considers the marketing of products (such as your own book).
Q2. I’ve shared with you my interpretation of what makes a *good* tag cloud. What makes a tag cloud good in your opinion?
Q3. Can tag clouds alter the perception of a text (think of Vander Wal’s Amazon example). Also have a look at Janet Harris’s use of Tag Crowd to analyse the MSNBC Democratic debate and how these tag clouds affect our thinking of the texts: (aside: isn't there loads of interesting stuff here...note who is the only person to mention women..also note the use of "America" but one candidate chooses only to say American, keeping it more personal?)
Q1. How have new media technologies resulted in a more participatory media culture? Give examples of
audience participation and contrast with other theories of the role of the audience. You may refer with examples from your experience at work and at home as you respond to this question.
Q2. How does the shortened character usage (140) of Twitter affect narrative?
Q3. Can Facebook status updates be considered a new form of narrative? Why? Examples?
Q4. What would you say is the greatest impact of web 2.0 technologies on publishing?
Q5. Web 2.0 denotes a shift from “passive use” to “active participation.” If web 2.0 does away with roles of the producer, consumer and end user, where is the text? What is the product? Who is the author?
What is narrative and how is it affected by new media developments. The focus will be on time-based narratives with a close reading of Cruising by Ingrid Ankerson and Megan Sapnar.
Basing our discussion on the week’s readings we’ll critique these main ideas:
feminism
nonlinearity
temporality
transiency
rhizomatic
time-based narrative
multimodality
Discussion Questions:
Q1. How can we define nonsequentiality/multi-linearity, interactivity, narrative?
Q2. To what extent are these aspects determined by the text, the reader, the digital format?
Q3. What kinds of narratives are especially suited for a multi-linear/interactive format? Are there stories that can only be told in an online format?
Q4. Read Cruising. Analyse the structure of the narrative (is it non-linear, multi-linear?). How does it engage the reader? What are the textual mechanisms by which the text achieves engagement?
What are the characteristics, both technical and social, of new media?
How does new media transform and "remediate" earlier media practices?
As noted in the lecture notes, here is an excerpt from Bolter and Guisin's Remediation:
Bolter, J. D. and Grusin, R. (2000). Remediation: Understanding New Media. The MIT Press, 1st edition. (excerpts selected and titled by course instructor)
Immediacy and Hypermediacy
Immediacy is our name for a family of beliefs and practices that express themselves differently at various times among various groups, and our quick survey cannot do justice to this variety. The common feature of all these forms is the belief in some necessary contact point between the medium and what it represents. For those who believe in the immediacy of photography, from Talbot to Bazin to Barthes, the contact point is the light that is reflected from the objects on to the film. This light establishes an immediate relationship between the photograph and the object. For theorists of linear-perspective painting and perhaps for some painters, the contact point is the mathematical relationship established between the supposed objects and their projection on the canvas. However, probably at no time or place has the logic of immediacy required that the viewer be completely fooled by the painting or photograph. Trompe l'oeil, which does completely fool the viewer for a moment, has always been an exceptional practice. The film theorist Tom Gunning (1995) has argued that what we are calling the logic of transparent immediacy worked in a subtle way for filmgoers of the earliest films. The audience members knew at one level that the film of a train was not really a train, and yet they marveled at the discrepancy between what they knew and what their eyes told them (114-133). On the other hand, the marveling could not have happened unless the logic of immediacy had had a hold on the viewers. There was a sense in which they believed in the reality of the image, and theorists since the Renaissance have underwritten that belief. This "naive" view of immediacy is the expression of a historical desire, and it is one necessary half of the double logic of remediation. (pp. 30-31)
As a counterbalance [to immediacy] hypermediacy is more complicated and various. In digital technology, as often in the earlier history of Western representation, hypermediacy expresses itself as multiplicity. If the logic of immediacy leads one either to erase or to render automatic the act of representation, the logic of hypermediacy acknowledges multiple acts of representation and makes them visible. Where immediacy suggests a unified visual space, contemporary hypermediacy offers a heterogeneous space, in which representation is conceived of not as a window on to the world, but rather as "windowed" itself—with windows that open on to other representations or other media. The logic of hypermediacy multiplies the signs of mediation and in this way tries to reproduce the rich sensorium of human experience. (pp. 33-34)
The logic of immediacy has perhaps been dominant in Western representation, at least from the Renaissance until the coming of modernism, while hypermediacy has often had to content itself with a secondary, if nonetheless important, status. Sometimes hypermediacy has adopted a playful or subversive attitude, both acknowledging and undercutting the desire for immediacy. At other times, the two logics have coexisted, even when the prevailing readings of art history have made it hard to appreciate their coexistence. At the end of the twentieth century, we are in a position to understand hypermediacy as immediacy's opposite number, an alter ego that has never been suppressed fully or for long periods of time. (p. 34)
In all its various forms, the logic of hypermediacy expresses the tension between regarding a visual space as mediated and as a "real" space that lies beyond mediation. Lanham (1993) calls this the tension between look at and looking through, and he sees it as a feature of twentieth-century art in general and now digital representation in particular. (p. 41)
Media Con(Media)tent
Again, we call the representation of one medium in another remediation, and we will argue that remediation is a defining characteristic of the new digital media. (p. 45)
The digital medium can be more aggressive in its remediation. It can try to refashion the older medium or media entirely, while still marking the presence of the older media and therefore maintaining a sense of multiplicity or hypermediacy. [ . . . ] This form of aggressive remediation throws into relief both the source and the target media. (p. 46)
Finally, the new medium can remediate by trying to absorb the older medium entirely, so that the discontinuities between the two are minimized. The very act of remediation, however, ensures that the older medium cannot be entirely effaced; the new medium remains dependent on the older one in acknowledged or unacknowledged ways. (p. 47)
[ . . . ] remediation operates in both directions: users of older media such as film and television can seek to appropriate and refashion digital graphics, just as digital graphics artists can refashion film and television. (p. 48)
What is New About New Media?
Our primary concern will be with visual technologies, such as computer graphics and the World Wide Web. We will argue that these new media are doing exactly what their predecessors have done: presenting themselves as refashioned and improved versions of other media. Digital visual media can best be understood through the ways in which they honor, rival, and revise linear-perspective painting, photography, film, television, and print. No medium today, and certainly no single media event, seems to do its cultural work in isolation from other media, any more than it works in isolation from other social and economic forces. What is new about new media comes from the particular ways in which they refashion older media and the ways in which older media refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media. (pp. 14-15)
The Reality of Remediation
The process of remediation makes us aware that all media are at one level a "play of signs," which is a lesson that we take from poststructuralist literary theory. At the same time, this process insists on the real, effective presence of media in our culture. Media have the same claim to reality as more tangible cultural artifacts; photographs, films, and computer applications are as real as airplanes and buildings.
Furthermore, media technologies constitute networks or hybrids that can be expressed in physical, social, aesthetic, and economic terms. Introducing a new media technology does not mean simply inventing new hardware and software, but rather fashioning (or refashioning) such a network. (p. 19)
SEED QUESTIONS - Please Post Comments Here
Q1. After reading Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” think about Bush as being considered the “father” of hypertext (although he did not coin the term). To what extent can we see his concept implemented in the World Wide Web that for many people defines their notion of hypertext? What are the differences?
Q2. Andries van Dam encourages us to approach hypertext as a new medium and not copy “old, bad habits.” What are some news ways to think about hypertext? How might we use hypertext in publishing, in writing, in thinking?
Q3. Joe Levy, in 1993 said: “if information is available, then any (authorised) person should be able to access it from anywhere in the world.”What implications does this thinking have to our own notions of publishing and the current online environment? You can use examples from your own experience.
Transdisciplinarity in this new media environment is a research method that crosses different disciplines. With traditional media meshing with communication technology, the internet opens up more nodes and networks to interact with. This interaction is critical to information sharing and knowledge production for any field.
With the amount of information available increasing because of the web, researchers have to be open to engaging with other disciplines. Tools that allow for tagging digital documents and media opens up the possibility of tapping into a new field that may support an individuals or groups knowledge production.
Combining so many areas of expertise (ex. Teachers, designers, etc) will present challenges when publishing information. Each discipline has its own history and standards of publishing. If knowledge can be produced among different people from different areas, a common approach to publishing has to be established. Not to say that one has to trump that other. Perhaps new methods and standards of publishing altogether can be developed to reflect a transdisciplinary research approach.
Important things to consider when publishing would be the history of each discipline and how it has published articles in the past. What journals tend to publish their work and what standards are in place. New media also has the capabilities of further manipulation. For example, digital media can be personalized and re-coded in the background to reflect what the user wants and/or needs.
