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DIGITAL RHETORIC: ECOLOGIES AND ECONOMIES OF DIGITAL
CIRCULATION

By

Douglas Andrew Eyman

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Rhetoric and Writing

2007

ABSTRACT

DIGITAL RHETORIC: ECOLOGIES AND ECONOMIES OF DIGITAL
CIRCULATION

By
Douglas Andrew Eyman

Digital networks, digital media, and digital production all carry their own
affordances, practices, and economics, but to date there is a gap between the
methods available for theorizing and analyzing digital works and the analytic
tools that digital texts and networks themselves make possible. This dissertation
project, situated in the ﬁeld of digital rhetoric, aims to develop methodologies for
research in digital rhetoric: these new methods are needed because current
research methods are grounded in print-based literacies. Researching digital
rhetorics and digital literacies requires an epistemological shift in focus that is not
easily supported by current methods. For this project I have built a web-based
tool that applies digital analytics to digital work, rather than relying on the
application of analog (print-based) methods. One of the key affordances of
networked communication is that work can circulate through increasingly
widespread knowledge ecologies; the initial object of analysis for the digital
methods I am developing is the role of circulation within the rhetorical practices of
digital production, using a baseline case study that traces and visualizes the
circulation, citation, and use of published online scholarship from Kairos and the
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, followed by a series of case

studies that evaluate how writers may deploy and apply these methods to their

online portfolios of work.

The aim of this dissertation is twofold: to articulate a theory of digital
rhetoric that features circulation as a foundational element that effects each of
the ﬁve classical canons of rhetoric (invention, organization, style, memory,
delivery) and to develop both methodology and methods for tracing the
circulation of rhetorical objects across and through various knowledge domains
and networks. This methodology is supported by a theoretical foundation that
sees circulation as a rhetorical activity that takes place within and across multiple
ecologies and that is driven by economic functions particular to digital production.
A key element of this methodology is understanding how to build digital systems
whose function is to make visible the connections described by the theoretical
framework; additionally, I argue that creating and documenting such systems is
itself part of the methodology and not simply a tool whose use supports the

activities of inquiry.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial-ShareAIike 2.5 License. To view a copy of this
license, visit http://creativecommons.orgllicenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/ or
send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor,

San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

This work is dedicated to my parents, Bill and Janet Eyman, for all of the love

and support they have offered; I would not have made it this far without them.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am very grateful to have been part of the ﬁrst cohort of students in
Michigan State University's Rhetoric and Writing graduate program: my fellow
students, the faculty, and the support staff have all been, by turns, excellent
friends, mentors, collaborators, and colleagues. I am especially thankful for the
support, feedback, and hard questions provided by my committee members,
Danielle DeVoss, Jeff Grabill, and Julie Lindquist, and to my chair, Jim Porter, for
the encouragement and advice he provided throughout the process.

The originality and innovativeness of the program at MSU has been
coupled with deep support for its graduate students, and although there is not
room here to properly thank everyone who helped, I would like to extend thanks
to Malea Powell and Bill Hart-Davidson, who have been the kind of mentors that I
hope to be when I grow up.

Special thanks also are due to my collaborators, whose work with me have
helped toshape this project, especially Colleen Reilly and Jim Ridolfo. I. must
also thank my co-editors at Kairos, Cheryl Ball, Beth Hewett, and James lnman,
for providing me with extra time and space to do this wOrk.

Finally, I would like to thank my wife Raquel for her support and patience,
and the forbearance she exhibited by not throwing my laptop out a window, no

matter how tempted she was.

vi

DIGITAL RHETORIC: ECOLOGIES AND ECONOMIES OF CIRCULATION

TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF TABLES ................................................................................................... x
LIST OF FIGURES ............................................................................................... xi
CHAPTER 1
DIGITAL RHETORIC AND/AS CIRCULATION ...................................................... 1
Ecologies and Economies: Theories of Circulation ................................... 10
Digital and Rhetoric ................................................................................... 13
Invention ......................................................................................... 15
Arrangement .................................................................................. 16
Style ............................................................................................... 17
Memory ........................................................................................... 17
Delivery ........................................................................................... 18
Developing Methods for Tracing Circulation ............................................. 19
Chapter Outline ......................................................................................... 23
CHAPTER 2
THEORIZING ECOLOGIES AND ECONOMIES OF DIGITAL CIRCULATION....26
Appropriation, Remix, Circulation ............................................................. 27
Textual Appropriation and Remix .............................................................. 27
Audio Remix and Mashups ....................................................................... 28
Video Appropriation and Editing (Remix) .................................................. 29
Ecologies of Circulation ............................................................................ 33
Ecologies and Ecosystems ............................................................ 35
Energy Flow and Material Cycling .................................................. 36
Applying Ecology as Metaphor in Writing Studies Research .................... 39
Economies of Circulation .......................................................................... 47
CHAPTER 3
METHODS AND METHODOLOGIES FOR DIGITAL RHETORIC ....................... 57
Research Methods in Writing Studies ....................................................... 62
Digital Wn'ting Research ........................................................................... 68
Digital Rhetoric Methods Addressing Ecologies, Economies, and
Circulation ....................... 75
C.O.D.E and Network Administration Tools .................................... 75
Studying Web Usage via Server Log Analysis ............................... 79
Social Network Analysis (SNA) ...................................................... 81
Hypertext Network Analysis (H NA) ................................................ 86
Bibliometrics and Cybermetrics ...................................................... 87
Content Analysis ............................................................................ 91

vii

Data Visualization .......................................................................... 96

Complicating Factors for Digital Research Methods ................................. 99

CHAPTER 4

A DIGITAL-NATIVE METHODOLOGY: CIRCULATION ANALYSIS ................... 101
Circulation Analysis Methods .................................................................. 106

Formal and lnfonnal Citation ........................................................ 111
‘Sitations: Links to Source Texts .................................................... 113
Quotation or Appropriation .................................. ’ ......................... 115
Ownership as a Measure of Circulation ........................................ 117
Deﬁnitions and Data Coding ................................................................... 118
Analysrs ................................... 122
Blogs and “Digital Fingerprints” ............................................................... 123

CHAPTER 5

CIRCULATION ANALYSIS AND THE ELECTRONIC PORTFOLIO

ECOSYSTEM .................................................................................................... 126
Genre Ecologies and Electronic Portfolios .............................................. 128
Mapping Relationships Between Documents / Tracing Re-Assembly ..... 134

Seminar Papers ........................................................................... 136
Conference Proposals .................................................................. 138
Book Chapters ............................................................................. 139
Moving from Local to Global Connections .............................................. 143
Methodological Reﬂections ..................................................................... 147
Rhetorical Value and Economic Value .......................................... 147
Circulation Analysis as Research Tool ......................................... 149
Shifting from Micro-Ecologies to Macro Ecologies .................................. 152

CHAPTER 6

CIRCULATION ANALYSIS AND ONLINE SCHOLARSHIP ............................... 153
Electronic Publication and Online Scholarship ....................................... 154

Example 1: Highly Transparent .................................................... 159
Example 2: Moderately Transparent ............................................ 169
Example 3: Moderately Hypermediated ....................................... 176
Example 4: Highly Hypermediated ............................................... 182
Conclusions ................................................................................. 189
Methodological Reﬂections ..................................................................... 192

CHPATER 7 .

DISCIPLINARY ECOLOGIES: FUTURE RESEARCH ...................................... 194
Mapping Digital/Rhetorical Ecosystems .................................................. 195
Circulation Analysis and Discovery ......................................................... 199
Rhetorical Analysis and Digital-Native Methods ..................................... 203
Developing Digital Rhetoric Methods and Tools ...................................... 205

viii

A Caveat: Methods for Working with New Media .................................... 208

Conclusion .............................................................................................. 208
APPENDICES ................................................................................................... 210
Appendix A: Evaluating Degree of Remediation ..................................... 210
Appendix B: ATaxonomy of Digital and Digitized Genres ...................... 215
REFERENCES .................................................................................................. 220

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1. Example Metadata Collection .............................................................. 109
Table 2. Genres present in a PhD student electronic portfolio ........................... 135
Table 3. Formal Qualities of Lapadat, 2002 ....................................................... 161
Table 4. Formal Qualities of Cripps, 2004 .......................................................... 171
Table 5. Formal Qualities of Walker, 2002 ......................................................... 178
Table 6. Formal Qualities of Wysocki, 2002 ....................................................... 185
Table 7. Comparison of 4 Articles ...................................................................... 190

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1. lntersecting Fields Synthesized by Digital Rhetoric .............................. 59
Figure 2. Example Sociogram showing strength of relationships between co-
workers (Magis, 2005) ......................................................................................... 84
Figure 3. Tag cloud from College Composition and Communication.
http://tagline.earthwidemoth.com/cccexp/volumes.html ...................................... 98
Figure 4. Ecosystem boundaries for digital circulation analysis ...................... I ...108
Figure 5. Mydropbox.com Search Results ......... _ ................................................ 116
Figure 6. Copyscape.com Search Results ......................................................... 116
Figure 7. Copyscape.com Results - Detailed View ............................................ 117
Figure 8. Sitations over time for Eyman, 1996 ................................................... 123
' Figure 9. TouchGraph map of texts on “digital rhetoric” available at Amazon.cog.i
Figure 10. Seminar Paper Text Cloud ................................................................ 137
Figure 11. Conference Paper Text Cloud ........................................................... 138
Figure 12. Book chapter text cloud .................................................................... 140
Figure 13. Text cloud of seminar papers, proposals, and book chapters ........... 141
' Figure 14. Circulation over time through re-use and self-appropriation ............. 142
Figure 15. Links over time for Eyman, 1996 ...................................................... 146

Figure 16. Explicit relationships between digital texts in an electronic portfolio.
The gaps between projects are clearly visible, as are the “orphaned” works in the
lower right-hand comer. This represents a different view from the generally more
coherent text cloud visualization. Both forms of analysis are required in order to
avoid seeing the portfolio ecosystem as either overly coherent or overly
disaggregated .................................................................................................... 1 51

Figure 17. Screen Capture of Lapadat, 2002 .................................................... 160

xi

Figure 18.
Figure 19.
Figure 20.
Figure 21.
Figure 22.
Figure 23.
Figure 24.

Figure 25.

Links per year for Lapadat, 2002 ...................................................... 163

Genres, link types, and engagement levels for Lapadat, 2002 ......... 165

Screen Capture of Cripps, 2004 ....................................................... 170
Links per year for Cripps, 2004 ........................................................ 172
Genres, link types, and engagement levels for Cripps, 2004 ........... 174
Examples of navigational structure in Walker, 2002 ......................... 177
Links per year forWalker, 2002 ........................................................ 179
Genres, link types, and engagement levels for Walker, 2002 ........... 181

Figure 26. The initial screen of “A Bookling Monument” (Wysocki, 2002) ......... 184

Figure 27. An internal screen of “A Bookling Monument” (Wysocki, 2002) ........ 184

Figure 28.
Figure 29.

Links per year for Wysocki, 2002 ..................................................... 186

Genres, link types, and engagement'levels for Wysocki, 2002 ........ 188

Figure 30. Links to social bookmarking sites are increasingly appended to online
texts ..................................................................................................... 202
Figure 31. Yale CIAIM Link Structures ............................................................... 212

xii

Chapter 1: Digital Rhetoric And/As Circulation

Blood circulates. In each body, blood follows deliberate paths, collecting
and transporting oxygen and nutrients to the various organs in a systemic cycle
that fuels the body's economies of motion and activity. Changes in circulatory
rhythms can have profound effects on the body, nearly all of which are
detrimental. Water circulates. It moves between states of matter, from the glacial
ices in which water is archived, to the liquid ﬂows that support planetary life, to
condensation that is abstracted into the atmosphere, waiting to be re-released as
rain. Changes in the global circulation of water may also have profound effects,
although the economies of scale at work within a global framework mean that
such effects may not be immediately obvious. In both cases—the blood and the
water—the activities of circulation engage the medium in complex interactions
with actors, contexts, and other systems. Shifting focus from the physical to the
digital, it is possible to trace similar circulatory systems at play in the ﬂow of
binary digits carried between and among digital networks in similarly complex
interactions. Unlike the circulatory systems of bodies and planets, however,-
information and data move not through a foundation of natural phenomena, but
via the actions of people who use the information, information infrastructures,
and the nonhuman actors (servers, routers, search engines, spiders) that
promote circulation on those networks.

Tracing circulation through natural ecologies can be accomplished by

using tracers: in the Brazilian rainforest, radio collars are attached to golden lion

tamarinds and their movements are tracked and recorded using global
positioning systems; in the hospital, radioactive isotopes are introduced into the
blood and their ﬂow through the body's system is measured via CAT scan; in
municipal water systems, marker elements are added at speciﬁc points and
downstream samples are extracted and chemically analyzed. In each of these
cases, direct measurements are possible and the results of these measurements
provide meaningful data that can be utilized to better understand the systems in
which the circulation takes place. Tracing circulation of texts, however, whether
print or digital, is a much more complex task. Although direct measures of textual
circulation are not yet technologically feasible, indirect measures are available:
the circulation of newspapers-and journals is reported based on the number of
subscribers or units sold but without access to library records and mechanisms
for ﬁnding out which subscribers pass on their journals and papers to others,
even this picture of circulation is incomplete. Relatively new projects, such as
BookCrossing (http://bookcrossing.com) and Where's George
(http://wheresgeorge.com), provide social-networking systems that allow people
to record their place in the circulation of books and dollar bills, respectively, in
effect also providing a window onto normally obscured processes of circulation
that take place through personal interaction.

In a knowledge economy, understanding the interactions of texts and
contexts can yield a more comprehensive picture of interaction than the

traditional approach of rhetorical invention, composition, and delivery; it can also

provide a map of the relationships between work and activity that are often
hidden because we simply don't have the means to uncover them. This is
particularly useful for professional writing and technical communication because
the activities in this ﬁeld are based on rhetoric-as-action and because circulation
analysis provides a means to more clearly view how professional writing works
within institutional ecologies and through global knowledge economies (for more
on ecologies and ecologies, see chapter two). I ﬁnd the question of circulation a
particularly compelling one for professional writing in part because I see
professional writing and technical communication as grounded in rhetorical
activity, and the development of a theory of digital rhetoric has the potential to re-
shape the foundational systems through which professional writing activities are
realized (and how professional writing and technical communication courses are
taught). But it also has immediate applications to several areas of interest to
professional writing research: visualizing circulation at the micro-ecological level
of an individual institution can help build best-practice models for creating content
within single sourcing systems; mapping the relationships of texts and actors
through circulation provides another mechanism for viewing workplace
communication activities in context (as, for instance, an extension of Spinuzzi
and Zachary's [2000] genre ecology approach); and it furthers the professional
writer's notion of audience to include not just people, but the network systems
that move, collect, and link the written products of rhetorical activity.

Digital networks, digital media, and digital production all carry their own'

affordances, practices, and economics, but to date there is a gap between the
methods available for theorizing and analyzing digital works and the analytic
tools that digital texts and networks themselves make possible. The goal of this
dissertation project is to develop methodologies for research in digital rhetoric:
these new methods are needed because current research methods are grounded
in print-based literacies. Researching digital rhetorics and digital literacies
requires an epistemological shift in focus that is not easily supported by current
methods. One of the key affordances of networked communication is that work
can circulate through increasingly widespread knowledge ecologies; the primary
object of analysis for the digital methods I am developing is the role of circulation
within the rhetorical practices of digital production. The initial tests of these digital
methods include (1) an investigation of how they may be applied to individual
authors' online portfolios of digital texts; and (2) a baseline case study that traces
and visualizes the circulation, citation, and use of published online scholarship
from the journals Kairos, Computers and Composition Online, and the Journal of
Computer-Mediated Communication.

The aim of this dissertation is twofold: to articulate the role of circulation
within a theory of digital rhetoric, and to develop both methodology and methods
for tracing the circulation of rhetorical objects across and through various
knowledge domains and networks. This methodology is supported by a
theoretical foundation that sees circulation as a rhetorical activity that takes place

within and across multiple ecologies and that is driven by economic functions

particular to digital production.

At the core of the project are two deceptively simple questions: What
happens to writing/scholarship/knowledge once it is delivered? How and where
does it circulate, and what are the effects and consequences of its circulation?
My hypothesis is that circulation will have differential effects depending on the
ecologies in which rhetorical objects circulate (that is, different economies of
circulation will be at work within the various contexts of distribution and uptake),
but a circulation analysis will also provide evidence of the inﬂuence of both
human and non-human interaction with digital texts—circulation analysis, in other
words, will provide a method for seeing and engaging multiple audiences - not
just the human audiences that rhetoric has heretofore addressed, but also (in a
very Latourian move) non-human actors such as spiders, scrapers, data-mining
aggregators and the very networks that carry our work.

I'm interested in the answers to these questions of circulation as they
apply to the ﬁeld of rhetoric because I see circulation as an undertheorized
rhetorical activity; John Trimbur (2000) argued that circulation should be re-
introduced in writing instruction, but as with much of the work in rhetorical theory,
he sees circulation as an element or result of delivery. Trimbur argues that

neglecting delivery has led writing teachers to equate the activity of

composing with writing itself and to miss altogether the complex delivery
systems through which writing circulates. By privileging composing as the

main site of instruction, the teaching of writing has taken up what Karl

Marx calls a “one-sided” view of production and thereby has largely erased
the cycle that links the production, distribution, exchange, and
consumption of writing. This cycle of interlocked moments is what Marx
calls circulation. (190)
My view of circulation as distinct from but effected by delivery is at odds with
Trimbur's conﬂation of Marx's concept of circulation and the rhetorical practice of
delivery. This is partly due to complications that arise from addressing the issue
of consumption of social capital and partly due to Marx's use of circulation to
refer to the entire process of production, distribution, exchange and consumption;
I see circulation as inﬂuential in each of these activities, but not as a container for

them.

Much of the recent work on recovering memory and delivery that has been
spurred by an interest in developing a digital rhetoric has not addressed
circulation as anything but an extension of delivery (of. DeVoss 8 Porter 2006;
Porter, 20005b; Ridolfo. 2005). I see circulation, as a separate process; as, in
effect, a rhetorical meta-canon that derives its analytic and productive powers
from the contexts and movements of rhetorical objects themselves (as a form of
post-rhetor agency). Theorized thus, the circulation of texts (which I designate
rhetorical objects because they may be composed of several media and modes)
through digital networks offers one possibility for realizing a comprehensive
digital rhetoric that is based on the interactions between digital networks and

media and classical principles of the rhetorical canon—circulation becomes the

glue that ties rhetorical production and post-production activity .

Because I do not see circulation as simply an effect of delivery, it is
important to understand how I articulate my deﬁnitions of delivery, distribution,
publication, and circulation, and their relationship to both classical and digital
rhetorics. In classical terms, delivery is “right management of the voice to
express various emotions" (Honeycutt, 2007/Aristotle, 1404a) and is tightly
coupled with style; current approaches to delivery as rhetorical activity address
“the choice of tools for production, reproduction, and distribution of digital
‘information,’ knowledge of systems which govern, constrain and promote
publishing and awareness of the ethical and political issues that impact
publishing practices” (DeVoss & Porter, 2006, p. 26). Following DeVoss and
Porter (2006), then, I use “delivery" to speak of rhetorical activity that is
embodied in the deliberate choices made by the composer of a given text— and it
is clear that the rhetorical canon of delivery becomes far more important for a
digital rhetoric than it was considered in classical rhetoric (Aristotle, for instance,
argued that “delivery is not regarded as an elevated subject of inquiry"
[Honeycutt, 2007/1404a]). Distribution is the path or mechanism by which a text
is delivered and circulated, whereas publication is the process of delivery which
makes texts available to the public. Within particular contexts, a given text can
said to be distributed (as, for instance, an intra-ofﬁce memo), but not necessarily
published. Conversely, a text may be published (via posting to a web page), but

not necessarily distributed. Circulation constitutes both the movement of a text

through a network and its use by other actors'once it has been delivered. The
rhetoric of delivery includes the choices made in the production of the text,
distribution is the mechanism, publication is the process, and circulation is both
movement and effect. Reproduction, particularly in digital networks, is an
instance of circulation.

This theoretical model of circulation is valuable because it can be applied
as both analytic and heuristic with regard to digital production. There are also
practical applications that can beneﬁt a wide variety of ﬁelds: understanding
circulation can help us to map the development of scholarly discourses and ﬁelds
of study as rhetorical constructs; it can help both distinguish and blur the
boundaries of disciplinary domains and surface trans- and interdisciplinary
activity across these boundaries; applied to rhetoric/composition, engaging
circulation in terms of ecologies and economies can help students recognize and
visualize the connections within the work they do between and across courses; it
can add a further dimension to the tracing of genre ecologies (workplace
writing/knowledge-building activities); and it can help to articulate coherent
research projects (for individuals) and institutional identities (for social networks).

Investigating the interrelationships among memory, delivery, and
circulation can also help producers to make informed decisions about the most
appropriate means and methods of communication when coupled with a theory
of the (sometimes unintended) consequences of circulation; this is essentially the

argument made by Trimbur (2000), but applied with, not as part of, delivery.

My own interest in circulation was initiated by an investigation into whether
works published in Kairos (the journal of which I am co-editor) have been valued,
either by virtue of linking (in digital networks) or citation (in print bibliographic
networks). Thus, as a technorhetorician and editor of an electronic journal, my
particular goals for the work I've done to date have been to examine the
circulation of academic work with the aim of improving the use and inﬂuence of
digital scholarship, and following this initial area of inquiry, I became interested in
how bibliometrics and cybermetrics (as the primary current forms of circulation
analysis) can be used to visualize relationships between the work of authors
whose publications cited some of the same references, regardless of whether
these individual authors were aware of each other's scholarship. In these cases,
the relationships between the knowledge production of these authors is not
visible except by tracing the circulation of their publications; the effects of the
work they have taken up would remain invisible if not for the connections
revealed through the bibliometric method.

Bibliometrics, however, has a very limited scope: it only traces circulation
that is, in effect, branded by an author function (by way of citation in journals that
achieved a highly-rated journal impact factor) and has thus far only been used to
trace evocations of authors rather than a more direct assessment of what work
(what ideas or knowledge disseminated in the publications of those authors) has
been appropriated and used. Moreover bibliometrics is primarily a method

without a rhetorical basis; that is, it functions quantitatively (measuring numbers

of citations) but rarely qualitatively (engaging motivation, genre affordances, or
the rhetorical choices of the authors of works that appear in the citation-counting
metrics)—l therefore have begun to articulate a rhetorical theory that can account
for the effects of circulation by examining the contexts and the motivations that

both constrain and propel circulatory action.

Ecologies and Economies: Theories of Circulation

The theoretical basis of my investigation of circulation is derived from a
two-part framework: ecologies of circulation represent the contexts of activity
(and serve as the boundaries for the scope of the study, set at increasingly wider
ﬁelds) and economies of circulation represent the value-exchanges that motivate
and animate the circulation of rhetorical objects (these exchanges also take
place between the objects and other actors in the ecologies in which they
circulate).

Ecologies represent speciﬁc, bounded locales where circulation takes
place; and although circulation occurs across and through multiple ecologies, the
effects are best observed within particular localized systems; thus, ecologies
represent the scale at which research on circulation may be most proﬁtably
undertaken. In describing circulatory activity as taking place within an ecological
context, I am drawing heavily on two speciﬁc works that also use the ecological
metaphor: Nardi and O'Day's (1999) “information ecologies” and Spinuzzi and

Zachary's (2000) “genre ecologies.” Each of these formations plays a role in the

10

structure of circulation ecologies, as both “information” and “genre” inﬂuence and
are inﬂuenced by circulation, but I would suggest that information is too broad
and genre is too narrow to effectively describe the interaction, movement, and
exchange that occurs with the digital circulation of rhetorical objects. Information
implies an object but does not incorporate use as an intrinsic component of that
object's character. Genres shift and change not only over time, but through the
processes of circulation. What is useful here, however, is the articulation of how
both information and genres function within complex networks of interaction:
ecologies.

Ecologies can be described in terms of the speciﬁc interactions between
people, texts, and technologies. Thus, any method for examining or researching
circulation must take into account not only the actors, networks, and interactions,
but also the speciﬁc articulation of media and technology within those networks.
Ecologies, then, have rhetorical, technical, and social dimensions that inﬂuence
the possible routes of (and interactions made possible by) circulation. Ecologies
can be framed as networks within speciﬁc and situated institutions (such as a
department within a university or workplace) but they can also be framed in terms
of digital spaces that are bounded by genre and activity (e.g. Ebay, Flickr,
Citeshare, Wikipedia).

Economies of circulation represent the mechanisms that motivate
circulation, primarily through the process of production, distribution, and

exchange (using Marx's terminology). The key to how and where a given text will

11

circulate is based upon the value of that text, which can be assessed in terms of
either use-value or exchange-value. Because Marx's work is concerned with
material production, his framework includes consumption as an integral (and
cyclical) component of the production process (which is also required for the
establishment of value). Consumption, however, becomes useful only at a
metaphorical level when the object of the exchange is digital: exact reproductions
can be made that do not consume the original products. Consumption can be
described in terms of external resources (such as the living expenses of the
scholar(s) who develop digital texts), but it not longer plays a direct role in the
economies of circulation (although one might substitute “use” for consumption in
order to fulﬁll all of the requirements of production in Marx's theory). It is
important to note at the outset that I will not be using Marx's notion of circulation
here, because his use of circulation is both limited in scope and is divorced from
production (which is the opposite of my contention that, rhetorically speaking,
circulation plays an important role in all of the processes of classical rhetoric,
from invention to delivery). Instead, because digital circulation does not function
in the same way as material production, it is better to approach the question of
exchange-value not through Marxist theory, but via Bourdieu's theory of cultural
capital. Particularly in terms of scholarly work and knowledge management
ecologies, digital objects are not typically traded for material or monetary gain;
instead, the exchange-value of the work comes from the accrual of cultural or

social capital.

12

Social and cultural capital operate at the level of activity: although it is A
possible to exchange social and cultural capital for material capital, gaining social
capital is not as simple as purchasing material goods. Social capital — academic
capital in particular -- is, like material capital, a product of labor. The difference
here is that the labor is intellectual and self-motivated, rather than physical. The
circulation of rhetorical objects is part of the process of production that leads to
greater or lesser degrees of social capital for the composer (as well as for others
who appropriate and use the compositions as the basis for further production).

Economies of circulation, then, must account for both the use-value and
exchange-value acquired by rhetorical objects as they circulate through digital
networks as well as the social capitol these works are exchanged for by their
authors and appropriators. As with circulation ecologies, these processes are
complex and interdependent, relying on the relationships between human and

non-human actors who are connected via digital networks.

Digital and Rhetoric

Because I view professional and technical communication as a ﬁeld that
takes rhetoric as its epistemological foundation and primary research
methodology, one of the initial connections that I make for circulation is to use it
as a remediating force for classical rhetoric. While a comprehensive theory of
digital rhetoric should engage and reconﬁgure both contemporary and classical

rhetoric, l have chosen to focus on the implications of circulation for classical

13

rhetoric for this stage of my investigation.

In 2002, Michael Cohen argued that no one had yet successfully
articulated a “rhetoric of the digital arts”; that, indeed, for digital texts, there is
“nothing like the tradition of classical rhetoric, which, among other things, served
to contain, arrange, and codify the choices available to an author" (online). But
since the advent of networked, multimedia communication, critics and theorists
have been struggling to develop a rhetorical theory that can account for multi-
modal communication, and the rapid development of digital networks and media
has brought forth several attempts to harness the power of rhetoric as both an
analytic and a mode of production for creating persuasive communicative works
enacted via these new forms of media and distribution. The focal point, however,
of Cohen’s complaint, is the lack of a comprehensive digital rhetoric. While
several attempts have been made to construct such a program, most have
focused on particular aspects of digital production or the critique of digital works.
As James Zappen (2005) notes, current work toward developing digital rhetoric
has thus far resulted in “an amalgam of more-or-less discrete components rather
than a complete and integrated theory in its own right. These discrete
components nonetheless provide at least a partial outline for such a theory,
which has potential to contribute to the larger body of rhetorical theory and
criticism” (323). I suggest that the circulation of texts (rhetorical objects) through
digital networks offers one possibility for realizing a coherent theory of digital

rhetoric that is based on the interactions between digital networks and media and

14

classical principles of the rhetorical canon. Here then is a brief overview of the
relationships between the classical canons of rhetoric and the activities of
circulatiOn that are the object of study in this dissertation, and to which I will

return in successive chapters.

Invention

In Aristotle’s famous formulation, rhetoric is “the art (techné) of ﬁnding out
the available means of persuasion” (1991, p. 37), and the primary means of
ﬁnding these means is through the faculty of invention, which describes “how
individuals might employ a theoretical framework to discover arguments that
might be effective in public deliberation and judgment” (Sauer, 2003, p. 3).
Casting invention as a process of discovery ﬁts neatly with current practices of
digital production, as writers now seek out materials to inspire-«and in some
cases to incorporate into—their own digital work. Invention, as a function of digital
rhetoric, includes the searching and negotiation of networks of information,
seeking those materials best suited to creating persuasive wOrks, as well as
knowing which semiotic resources to address and draw upon (aural, visual,
textual, hypertextual) and what technological tools are best suited to working with
those resources. The availability of semiotic resources is dependent upon
circulation; for without both distribution (or publication) and circulation, such
resources would not be usable for appropriation and re-use within the process of

invenﬁon.

15

Arrangement

Once materials, arguments, and media have been selected, the rhetor
needs to consider the organizational schema that would best serve the purpose
and audience of the composition. Arrangement in classical rhetoric is typically a
formal system of organization that delineates each part of a speech based its
purpose: Aristotle (who was more concerned with invention than arrangement)
recommended four parts, Cicero suggested six divisions, and Quintilian divided
the oration into ﬁve parts (the genesis of the ﬁve-paragraph essay). For classical
rhetoricians, though, this system of organization was not ﬁxed and orators where
not bound to follow the conventions in every case. Doug Brent (1997) suggests
that in classical rhetoric, “arrangement is determined more by the context, the
audience, the rhetorical purpose--the cluster of exigencies that rhetoricians refer
to as kairosnthan by a ‘logical’ progression of propositions.” For digital rhetoric,
arrangement is also a productive art—not just a method for carrying forth a
logical, cohesive argument. A theory of digital arrangement must include the
practices of manipulating digital media as well as selecting ready-made works
and reconstituting them into new works. As Lawrence Lessig (2005) points out,
culture is made through the process of re-mixing, which is a conﬂuence of
invention and arrangement. Thus, unlike Aristotle’s formulation, where
arrangement appears less important than invention, for a theory of digital

rhetoric, the two are intimately tied together—and, as Lessig's work on

16

appropriation and re-mix as the progenitors of culture shows, circulation again

plays a crucial role in the availability of resources.

Style

Style takes on new importance for digital rhetoric, particularly in terms of
visual style: for a' digital rhetoric, style is equivalent to “design”; thus, digital
rhetoric must be concerned with understanding all the available elements of
document design, including color, font choice, layout, as well as multimedia
design possibilities including motion, interactivity, and appropriate use of media.
These choices can affect the distribution or publication of a given rhetorical
object, and, by extension, the scope of its circulation within or through particular
ecologies (contexts). Style in this sense is also an important quality in terms of a
given texts use and usability. The economies of circulation are driven in part by
the use-value of texts; in this context, a rhetorical approach to style can have a

signiﬁcant impact on circulation.

Memory

In classical rhetoric, memory is a faculty of the individual orator; digital
technologies have moved the faculty of memory out of the individual and into the
network, providing external means of storing, tagging, and sorting information. As
Julia Romberger notes (2007), “memory in many instances has been

extemalized to the technology. and rhetors must take into consideration not only

17

how they navigate and use technologies as their memory for the purposes of
invention but also how others who are using the information being communicated
might also be developing their own memory” (online). Circulation plays an
important role both in the communal development of memory via technological
interaction and for the establishment of (digital) archives (Yates, 1966; Ong,
1982; Romberger, 2007). Memory, in fact, plays a critical role in my use of
circulation because it mediates the temporality usually associated with
descriptions of ﬂow and movement. Much like ice trapped in glaciers may
eventually reenter the global circulation of oceanic water currents, so too have
texts entered into archives only to be retrieved and re-circulated later. (Consider,
for instance, the case of Ward Churchill, whose writings about the Wor1d Trade
Center bombings were re-discovered years later, with signiﬁcant political
consequences)

Foucault's notion of the archive is also useful here, not just as a form of
memory but as a system that interacts with the statement: statements are a
dynamic part of communication and will change the archive - both physically, with
new requests changing the substance of the rhetorical objects in the archive, but
also by changing the conceptual frames through which we can interpret the
archive (Foucault, 1972, p. 135). This interaction is a core principle of a digital

rhetoric of circulation.

Delivery

18

Delivery and circulation are interconnected: the rhetorical choices affecting
delivery also affect circulation. Delivery, like style and memory, takes on a new
importance when considered as an element of digital composition. Digital rhetoric
needs to provide methods for understanding and using systems of distribution
and publication (including the technical frameworks that support varying
protocols and networks), but this must be coupled with a broader theory of
circulation. James Porter (2005a) has also delineated several important facets
digital delivery, including access, interaction, and economics; he argues that a
theory of digital delivery must include both productive practices and a method of
developing ethical phronésis. Digital delivery also needs to take into account the
perforrnative aspects of digital composition (particularly with regard to
multimedia work). However, he notes that the individual elements of his theory
“don’t have very much generative or productive power unless you put them into
dynamic interaction with each other and with other rhetorical topics. In other
words, you connect up questions of delivery with rhetorical invention, with
audience, with design of a web site, and so on” (Porter, 2005a). I would add that
circulation informs delivery and these other rhetorical topics, but it also
supersedes them once the work has been distributed and/or published via digital
networks. Thus, any theory of digital rhetoric must account for circulation as well

as engaging the traditional canons of classical rhetoric.

Developing Methods for Tracing Circulation

19

In order to apply my theories of circulation and operationalize the effect of
circulation on the traditional canons of rhetoric, it is ﬁrst necessary to examine
and articulate circulation as it occurs in practice; thus, in chapters four, five, and
six I provide my initial attempts to develop a method of circulation analysis and
apply the results to the theoretical model outlined above (and detailed in chapter
two).

As a test case, I selected the ﬁrst peer-reviewed article that I had
published online, “Hypertext And/As Collaboration in the Computer-Facilitated
Writing Classroom” (published in Kairos 1.2, 1996) and began to apply the
methods that I thought would produce the most complete picture of circulation
available, including citation analysis, cybermetrics (tracing the links that point to
this work), and keyword analysis (tracing works that use similar phrases and
ideas but that might not have provided a link or citation). I provide a more
detailed explanation of these methods in chapter four.

As I performed the analyses, l was immediately able to see connections
that I wouldn't have otherwise been aware of, including the ways that the use of
particular theorists in my work (Bakhtin and Kristeva) led to circulation in speciﬁc
knowledge domains related to the work of those theorists; the global nature of
digital circulation, and the outcomes of automated circulation processes driven by
the capitalization of information in the knowledge economy.

Because the work in question is a hypertext, the link analyses had to be

performed on each page of the article separately. As I checked the links to each

20

page, I found that the circulation patterns were not related to the work as a
whole, but to the individual parts that were represented on each page. In other
words, digital works have a tendency to be cited and used in a decontextualized
manner, which complicates traditional methods of citation analysis. For instance,
different parts of my article connect hypertext and Bakhtinian theories and make
distinctions between hypertextuality and intertextuality as invoked by Julia
Kristeva; each of these parts are cited and circulate distinct from each other —
each has been found and used within the particular knowledge domains of
Bakhtin scholars and Kristeva scholars, but no connections or relationships
between these domains occur with respect to this single article.

I was also surprised to ﬁnd the extent of the circulation, both
geographically and quantitatively. In the ﬁrst case, I found references to my
article appearing in several different languages (including Icelandic, Bulgarian,
and Spanish) and locations (including Brazil, Canada, Spain, and France).
Circulation analysis, then, surfaces the global nature of digital networks. But I
also found a related phenomena that is tied both to the globalized network
structure and to the role of information in knowledge economies: I found 170
identical instances of a particular reference to my work repeated across a wide
variety of sites, many of which appeared to have no relation to each other or to
any topic addressed in my work. Closer inspection revealed that these sites were
all using the content of a single database (the DMOZ Open Directory Project) so

that anyone searching for particular keywords would be directed to the

21

information resource on these sites. In each case, the same three links to
Bakhtin related sites would appear (the entry for the link to my work included the
following annotation each time: “Notes by writing teacher Douglas Eyman, on the
pertinence of Bakhtin's analyses of discourse to the hypertext situation”). Thus,
the economies of circulation may be complicated by the nonhuman actors that
work to provide data to sites regardless of relationship to the information needs
of the audiences of the sites that choose to manipulate search engine trafﬁc in
this way.

Chapter four details the speciﬁc methods I am using to perform a
circulation analysis; chapters ﬁve and six provide two case studies of circulation
analysis in practice. The three case studies engage the form of professional
writing with which I have the most familiarity and facility: academic writing. Each
case engages the (digital) writing of academics that circulates in successively
wider ecological contexts.

The ﬁrst case study applies circulation analysis to a micro-ecology of one
individual's electronic portfolio of academic work — in this case, my own work.
This has the advantage of familiarity, as well as an established baseline of
relationships and citations against which I can compare the results of the
analysis. This case also shows how the methods I have deployed might be
applied as a component to any electronic portfolio, extending the functionality of
the portfolio in order to provide evidence of how one's work is received, cited,

and used.

22

The second case study, addressing the much larger ecologies of
scholarship in the disciplines of rhetoric/composition and communication studies,
applies circulation analysis to a selection of published texts from the peer-
reviewed electronic journals Computers and Composition Online, the Journal of

Computer—Mediated Communication, and Kairos.

Chapter Outline

In each of the following chapters I describe in greater detail the theories,
methods, and research of circulation analysis as applied to a series of
sequentially larger ecological frameworks; in each chapter I also return to the
overarching theme of digital rhetoric as the foundation for both the project and as
the beneﬁciary of the project's results.

The second chapter, “Ecologies and Economies of Digital Circulation,”
develops a two-part theoretical framework that may be used to understand the
activities of circulation, using circulation “ecologies” to represent the places,
spaces, movements, and complex interactions of digital texts as they are
produced, reproduced, exchanged, or used. The exchanges and uses that take
place within those spec'rﬁc ecological circumstances are governed by an
“economics” of circulation (which in turn is subject to the constraints and
affordances offered by the situated ecologies in which the texts circulate). The
theorization of economies of digital production is heavily indebted to Bourdieu's

notions of cultural and social capital; actor-network theory also plays into the

23

theoretical construct by providing a theory of agency for rhetorical objects (thus
allowing them to become actors within digital economies).

The third chapter, “Methods and Methodologies: Investigating Digital
Rhetorics,” examines current and proposed methods for investigating digital
rhetorics and provides assessments of these methods with a focus on digital
circulation. Key methods discussed and critiqued in this chapter come from
usability, social network mapping, and cybermetrics.

Chapter four, “Circulation Analysis Methods” provides details and
documentation of the three methods used for circulation analysis: reference
tracking (formal and informal citation), backlink tracing, and full-text searches
aimed at uncovering quotation or appropriation. In addition to a detailed
description of methods deployment, this chapter considers the challenges and
obstacles presented by the ways in which networked information is (intentionally
or unintentionally) rendered inaccessible.

Chapter ﬁve, “Circulation Analysis and the Electronic Portfolio Ecosystem”
applies circulation analysis to an individual electronic portfolio in order to show
how an ecological view of even a small sample of texts can yield productive
results. In chapter six, “Circulation Analysis and Online Scholarship,” a corpus of
published electronic works from Kairos, Computers and Composition Online, and
the Joumal of Computer-Mediated Communication is evaluated for both degree
of remediation and paths of circulation, thus moving the analysis from an

individual, local ecosystem to the larger ecosystems of peer-reviewed online

24

publication of scholarship in a particular ﬁeld.

The concluding chapter suggests how the overall methodology ﬁts into
various disciplines' structures and needs, making explicit arguments about the
value of this work for composition/rhetoric, digital rhetoric, and
professional/technical writing. Because the dissertation represents the initial
theoretical and methodological development necessary to carry out a large-scale
study, the ﬁnal chapter also outlines the trajectory of future research and

development of digital rhetoric methods and tools.

25

Chapter 2: Ecologies and Economies of Digital Circulation

I became interested in the metaphor of ecology for the investigation of
knowledge circulation because, at its core, ecology is the study of the
relationship among organisms and the environments in which they live, including
all living and nonliving components (in the science of ecology, these components
are classiﬁed as biotic and abiotic, respectively). For rhetoric, the audience — the
living components in what might be considered a communication ecology — have
always been assumed to have greater agency (and are therefore of greater
concern to the rhetor) than the nonliving components such as the medium of
delivery and the immediate context of the rhetorical act (although these elements
do play an important role; rhetoric derives a great deal of its power from the fact
that it engages medium, mode, and context). Ecology struck me as a particularly
appropriate method for the consideration of digital contexts because it places
equal emphasis on those living and nonliving components: I take a Latourian
view of the systems and networks that comprise the context of this study in that I
see these systems (networks, routers, software agents) as having a “post-
rhetorical agency” that inﬂuences the movement and circulation of digital
discourse. The method that I have developed in this dissertation aims to reveal
the ways that the interaction between living and nonliving agents of digital
rhetoric inﬂuence the circulation of digital texts (I discuss the role of Actor-

Network Theory in terms of methodological development in chapter 4).

26

Appropriation, Remix, Circulation

Before addressing the question of ecologies and economies, I want to ﬁrst
provide a few examples of new and emerging genres that are currently in
circulation on the Internet. What these examples have in common is a focus on
remediation, appropriation, and remix as practices of rhetorical production.

Consider the following examples of:
Textual appropriation and re-mix

0 At http://www.spam-poetry.com, Kristin Thomas produced poetry from the
subject lines of spam email, a practice she began in 2003. On her site,
she notes that she sees her work as “a little bit Found Art, a little bit
Whimsy, and mostly, just to ﬁnd a wayfor me to ﬁnd a peaceful
intersection between digital communication and my life” (Thomas, 2007).

0 Jonathan Lethem, author of You Don't Love Me Yet, is offering several
stories on his website
(http://jonathanlethem.com/promiscuous_materials.html) for others to
appropriate, remix, and adapt (but not copy in their entirety). On his site,
he explains that he likes “art that comes from other art,” and likes to see
his stories adapted into other forms: “My writing has always been strongly
sourced in other voices, and I'm a fan of adaptations, apropriations,
collage, and sampling.”

0 Michael Ian White's “Propaganda Remix Project”

27

(http://homepage.mac.com/leperous/PhotoA|bum1.html) presents classic
wartime propaganda posters with new, anit—war slogans replacing the
originals. In this case, the remix happens at the littoral zone of contact

between text and image.

' Audio remix and mashups

A blogger who goes by the handle “Canis Lupus” has created a parody
remix (http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/valentiRemix) of Jack Valenti's
"Moral lmperative" speech, given at Duke University February 24, 2003;
this remix converts Valenti's anti-piracy message into a pro-fair-use rights
message.

Peter Gabriel has created a site that promotes the remixing of his and
other artists' work; at Real World. Remixed
(http://www.realworldremixedcoml), users are encouraged to “to
download our 'sample packs' - multitrack recordings from Real World
Records and Peter Gabriel” and use them to create remixes which are
then uploaded to the site and voted upon by other site users.

An anonymous artist has created a mashup of rapper 50 cent's “In Da
Club” and “Yakkety Sax” (better known as the theme song from the Benny
Hill show); this is considered a mashup rather than a remix because
neithersong was edited for content, they were simply layered one atop the
other (although the 50 cent song was sped up just a bit). The mashup,

accompanied by the original video for “In Da Club” is available on

28

YouTube. (httpzllyoutube.com/watch?v=jkyc1de3N0).

In 2006, Luis Hernandez and Paul Holcomb
(http://www.boldheaded.com/podcastl) created a techno-dance track that
featured and edited and remixed version of Senator Ted Stevens's
commentary on net neutrality (they later created an even more pointed
parody remix using more of Stevens's words to create another techno-

dance song called “The Internet Must Die").

Video appropriation and editing (re-mix)

Working in both audio and (music) video Alanis Morisette has produced a
parody video of the Black Eyed Peas song “My Humps.” Although she
does not change the lyrics, her ballad-like rendition certainly provides
pointed commentary on those lyrics, and the video itself has many
elements of the original video for the 'song, thus qualifying as remix. This
example is also available on YouTube

(httpzllyoutube.c_om/watch?v=W91 qus-_—g)

Johan deerberg created a parody that synchronizes several different
video clips of George Bush and Tony Blair in a way that appears to show
them singing Diana Ross and Lionel Richie's "Endless Love" to each other
(httpzllpoliticalhumor.about.com/od/bushvideos/youtube/bushblairlove.htm)
A popular form of video remix for anime fans is the creation of music

videos: clips from anime cartoon serials or ﬁlms are edited together to

29

create a video that thematically represents (or even lipsynchs to) whatever

song the remix producer has chosen.

So what does this mean for rhetoric and writing? First, composition is no
longer restricted only to alphabetic text — in the examples above, writers are
using a wide range of media to. create commentary on cultural and political
issues. Second, digital composition practices are changing the traditional
emphases of classical rhetoric: as l have argued elsewhere, digital rhetoric “shifts
the productive techné of the rhetorical process (as typically instantiated in
composition and other writing courses) from primarily invention-driven to a
broader rhetorical approach that privileges arrangement as a focal activity and
reclaims the importance of delivery and memory as key areas of rhetorical
practice” (DigiRhet.Net, 2006, pp. 242-243). Finally, once a digital text has been
placed on the Internet, the media of delivery and the rhetorical context itself may
change as the work is appropriated and/or re-mixed, or via the circulation
activities of software agents whose programs decouple a text from its original
rhetorical situation. And perhaps most importantly, the always-in-circulation
nature of digital texts help to make explicit the fact that rhetorical activity is
always situated within an economics of production (although a clear picture of the
ecosystems in which those eConomics are at play is not always immediately

available).

Following the work of James Porter, I see the rhetorical process as

30

intrinsically (if not explicitly) engaging an economics of production that is at play
for any given rhetorical context (Porter, 2003; Porter, 2005a; Porter, 2005b); as
Porter (2007a) notes, “rhetorical contexts themselves rely on an economic
system of exchange. The exchange is not always a commercial one, but there is
an exchange of value that serves as the motivation for the production and
circulation of rhetorical objects.” Acknowledging the economic systems engaged
in the process of rhetorical production is particularly important for the
development of a theory of digital rhetoric because the rhetorical activity that
takes place in internetworked digital systems does so as part of a larger
ecosystem that serves as the backdrop for both digital and material production;
this larger, global ecosystem is currently expressed by economists as “the
knowledge economy.”

Economist Paul Romer (1986; 1990) has argued that knowledge is now
the basic form of capital and that economic growth is driven by the accumulation
of knowledge; similarly, Paul Shrivastava (1998) suggests that the knowledge
economy “both enables and requires organizations to continually learn new

knowledge and systematically deploy it for value creation.”

Both economics and rhetoric provide powerful mechanisms for
understanding the development, discovery, and use of knowledge: whereas
rhetoric can function as both analytic and heuristic (helping people to ﬁnd the
best ways to be persuasive as well as providing methods for determining how

persuasion is being used), economics is purely analytic (as Levitt and Dubner

31

(2005) deﬁne it, economics is concerned with “explaining how people get what
they want,” [p. x]). Economics and rhetoric, in other words, approach the same

questions, but with different methods.

In a report prepared for the New Zealand Minister for Information
Technology's IT Advisory Group addressing the question of deﬁning the
knowledge economy, Ernst and Young (1999) posits that there are qualitatively

different forms of knowledge:

Know-what, or knowledge about facts, is nowadays diminishing in
relevance. Know-why is knowledge about the natural world, society, and
the human mind. Know-who refers to the world of social relations and is
knowledge of who knows what and who can do what. Knowing key people
is sometimes more important to innovation than knowing scientiﬁc
principles. Know-where and know-when are becoming increasingly
important in a ﬂexible and dynamic economy. (emphasis in original)
While rhetoric has traditionally been quite good at helping people think about
know-why and know-who, economics offers a complementary framework for
investigating know-where and know-when — both of which are key elements of a
rhetorical theory of circulation.
In the remainder of this chapter, I provide a two-part theoretical framework
that may be used to understand the activities of circulation, but that also situates
and delineates the methodology I am employing to investigate those activities.

And while I address two distinct means of talking about circulation, I should note

32

that these are not clear or clean divisions: while circulation ecologies represent
the places, spaces, movements, and complex interactions of digital texts as they
are produced, reproduced, exchanged, or used, the exchanges and uses that
take place within those speciﬁc ecological circumstances are governed by the
economics of circulation (which in turn are subject to the constraints and

affordances offered by the situated ecologies in which the texts circulate).

Ecologies of Circulation

In one of his last works, Walter Ong suggested that
The age in which humans existence is now framed, the age in which
human life and technology so massively and intimately interact, can well
be styled not only the information age and the age of interpretation, but,
perhaps, even more inclusively, the. ecological age, in principle an age of
total interconnectedness, where everything on the earth, and even the
universe, is interconnected with everything else, no only in itself but,
ideally, in human understanding and activity. (qtd. in Walter, 2006, n.p.)

A scientific term originally applied to research on interactions in speciﬁc natural

environments', “ecology” as a metaphor for complex, interconnected

relationships has a rich history of use in writing studies (Cooper, 1986; Syverson,

1999; Nardi & O’Day, 1999; Spinuzzi & Zachry, 2000; Spinuzzi, 2003; Blythe,

2007). The basic scientiﬁc deﬁnition of ecology is “the study of the relationships

 

1 In 1866, zoologist Enrst Haeckel coined the term “ecology" to define an area of biology that

aimed to study of interrelationships between organisms and the environment (Bramwell, 1989).

33

of organisms to their environment and to one another. The key word is
'reIationships.’ Ecology is a study of interactions”I(Brewer, 1988, p. 1). Another
key aspect of the science of ecology is the study of the ecosystem: ecology can
be applied as the “ecology of the individual organism [or] the ecology of groups of
individuals or populations,” when taking the latter approach, it is important to
acknowledge that “populations live together in communities - the community
along with its physical setting or habitat is a single, interacting unit, the
ecosystem" (p. 11). Thus, the key elements of ecological study: relationships,
interaction, complexity, and community easily map onto qualitative studies of
writing and rhetoric in both epistemological and ontological terms.

Ecology is also a useful framework for circulation analysis because it
provides a systems-based view of both the environments and relationships that
take place through digital circulation mechanisms. Systems are characterized by
their compositions, environments, and structures (Bunge, 1979); in Applied
Systems Ecology, Friedrich Recknagel (1989) explicates these systemic
elements:

The composition denotes the set of system components, the environment

denotes the set of environment components which inﬂuence the system

components. The deﬁnition of the composition and environment in turn
implies the marking of the system boundary. The structure denotes the set
of relations between composition and environment as well as within

composition. (pp. 13-14)

34

Networks, particularly the digital networks in which the texts in this study
circulate, are also systems, and in this way they can be similarly seen as
elements in a digitally networked ecology of overlapping (and networked)
ecosystems. Zan, Zambon, and Pettigrew (1993.) argue that a “network is a
system and not only a nexus of relations. Due to its systemic nature, a network is
a working entity, which continuously reproduces its relationships and changes
forms and contents over time. Therefore, networks are evolutionary systems,
living organizations”; in other words, networks are ecological entities. The
science of ecology uses this sense of system architecture to articulate its key unit

of analysis: the ecosystem.

Ecologies and Ecosystems

Ecology as a ﬁeld of study looks at both ecclogies and ecosystems.
Ecologies are internetworked and interacting systems made up of discrete
ecosystems. An ecosystem can be “any size so long as organisms, physical
environment, and interactions can exist within it” (Pickett & Cadenasso, 2002);
thus replicating the systems approach outlined above. As I use the terms,
“ecology” is the super-structure and the theoretical lens; “ecosystem” is the
speciﬁc system that a digital work originally belongs to when it is ﬁrst distributed
or published, but it is also the interconnected composition and environment that
can be mapped and articulated through its circulation (and, indeed, that is one

aim of circulation analysis).

35

Ecosystems represent specific, bounded locales where circulation takes
place; and although circulation occurs across and through multiple ecosystems,
the effects are best observed within particular localized systems; thus, ecologies
represent the scales at which research on circulation may be most proﬁtably

undertaken.

Energy Flow and Material Cycling

Two important properties of ecosystems are that they have energy ﬂows
and they cycle materials (Kling, 2006); these two ecological properties can also
be articulated as economic properties when applied to digital environments such
as the lntemet (indeed, Stephen Adler [1998] describes the Internet itself as an
“information ecosystem”). In material ecosystems, such as ponds, forests, or
oceans, the cycle of materials is enacted through the uptake, use, respiration,
reformation, and reuse of the basic ecological'components (e.g. plants, animals,
water, carbon, nitrogen); the energy ﬂows provide the engine for these material
cycles though input and consumption (of solar/heat energy). These same
essential processes can also be seen at work in digital production. The
circulation of materials occurs in the use, re-use, re-mix, and appropriation of
digital texts and the energy that drives this circulation comes from the rhetorical
activity of digital bricoleurs, often operating within particular social networks (in
ecological terms, these are communities that inhabit speciﬁc ecosystems). In

other words, the rhetorical activity of writers and the material labor of production

36

is analogous to the input of energy per se into a natural system; once that energy
(and the digital object that results from the deployment of that energy) is added to
any given digital ecosystem, the interaction of environment (network) and other
inhabitants (other digital texts) in that ecosystem generates relational links and
instances of material cycling (aka re-mix in terms of digital practice).

For example, YouTube (http://www.youtube.com), a digital video ﬁle-
sharing service, allows users to post and circulate digital videos they have found
or created. But a common practice in the YouTube community is to appropriate
and re-use the materials that have been posted there. In some instances, the re-
mix is not complex: simply adding subtitles to videos (as translations, or to add
information, or providing a parody of the original content). Other videos represent
more complex interactions: players of massively multiplayer online role playing
games (MMORPGs) such as World of Warcraft and Guild Wars have created a
number of music videos that feature choreographed in-game activity set to songs
such as the Village People's “YMCA” or MC Hammer's “U Can't Touch This.” For
a particularly involved example, see YouTube user GraveD1gger's “Guild Wars
vs. World of Warcraft,” httpzllyoutube.com/watch?v=YcWXL8ijGs, which pits in-
game choreography from two different MMORPGs as a dance contest set to
' Hammer’s “U Can't Touch This” (which in turn samples Rick James's 1981 hit

"Super Freak").

Cross-community and cross-media appropriation and circulation is fairly

common in digital environments: in January of 2007, Clemens Kogler, Karo

37

Szmit, and Andre Tschinder posted “Le Grand Content"
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWWKBY7gx_0) to YouTube, describing it as

an examination of

the omnipresent Powerpoint-culture in search for its philosophical
potential. Intersections and diagrams are assembled to form a grand
'association-chain-massacre'. which challenges itself to answer all
questions ofhthe universe and some more. Of course, it totally fails this
assignment, but in its failure it still manages to produce some magical
nuance and shades between the great topics death, cable tv, emotions

and hamsters.

The graphs and Venn diagrams that provide the content for “Le Grand Content”
were originally published in Jessica Hagy’s blog, Indexed

(http://indexed.blogspot.com), which features scans of diagrams that she draws

on index cards.

But material cycling is certainly not limited to video production. Consider
the case of Fark.com, whose users collect and aggregate headlines from
newspapers and other online news sources, annotating them with amusing
headlines; unlike the other examples, however, there is also an editorial
mechanism that allows some headlines to be promoted to the main site while
rejecting others—in ecological terms, this process may be understood as a
“limiting factor”; that is, an environmental factor that inﬂuences the maximum

population of plants or animals in a given ecosystem.

38

Applying Ecology as Metaphor in Writing Studies Research

In The Wealth of Reality: An Ecology of Composition, Peg Syverson
(1999) provides a richly-detailed articulation of ecology as a theoretical and
methodological framework for composition studies. Syverson argues that an
ecological system is “composed of numerous interrelated complex systems” (p.
2), and, in an echo of the heterogeneous networks of Actor Network Theory, she
posits that “in a complex system, a network of independent agents—people,
atoms, neurons, or molecules, for instance — act and interact in parallel with each
other, simultaneously reacting to and co-constructing their own environment” (p.
3). She applies the ecological framework to writing studies by arguing that
“writers, readers, and texts form a complex system of self-organizing,
adaptive, and dynamic interactions. But even beyond this level of complexity,
they are actually situated in an ecology, a larger system that includes
environmental structures, such as pens, paper, computers, books, telephones,
fax machines, photocopiers, printing presses, and other natural and human-
constructed features, as well as other complex systems operating at various
levels of scale, such as families, global economies, publishing systems,
theoretical frames, academic disciplines, and language itself” (p. 5). Syverson
elaborates four attributes of ecological systems: distribution, emergence,
embodiment, and enaction. Of these four attributes distribution and enaction are

most immediately relevant to the theory I am building for a digital circulation

39

methodology.

Syverson uses “distribution” as a key element of ecological systems;
however, she generalizes distribution to include all of the activities that I delineate
below as discrete processes of circulation. She explains that “in complex
systems, processes...are distributed, that is, both divided and shared among
agents and structures in the environment. Complex systems are also
distributed across space'and time in an ensemble of interrelated activities” (p. 7).
Enaction, in Syverson's framework, is “the principle that knowledge is the result
of an ongoing interpretation that emerges through activities and experiences
situated in specific environments” (p. 13); she goes on to note that “our activities
and practices as readers and writers generate effects in the environment, which
includes other people; and, at the same time, the same environment is affecting
our activities and practices” (p. 17) — in other words, the environment is itself an
actor in the ecological network.

Drawing on Syverson's work, Edbauer (2005) sees distribution,
emergence, embodiment, and enaction as key mechanisms for engaging
writing-as-process:

Syverson thus points to the ways that writing is more than a matter of

discrete elements (audience, a writer, text, tools, ideas) in static relation to

one another (a writer types her ideas into a computer for an audience who
reads the text). Rather, writing is distributed across a range of processes

and encounters: the event of using a keyboard, the encounter of writing

40

body within a space of dis/comfort, the events of writing in an

apathetic/energetic/distant/close/etc. group. The importance of discussing

“distribution” lies in the ways that it points us to how those elements are

enacted and lived, how they are put into use, and what change comes

from the in-processes-ness itself. (pp. 96-97)

The methodology I am articulating in this dissertation, however, is focused on the
post-process/post-distribution (in Syverson's terms) circulation of texts within and
between the ecosystems that comprise information, genre, and disciplinary
ecologiesFl believe that Syverson and Edbauer's works are complementary to
the methodology that I am proposing here, but that their focus is on the activities
that precede the initiation of circulation, whereas my focus is on the activities that
follow that initiative moment.

Another, more recent, ecological framework has been proposed by Julia
Romberger (2007). She argues that “a rhetorical ecology, in keeping with
ecofeminist principles, is capable of seeing language and ideological
relationships similar to those of the physical sciences. Such an ecology must
accomplish tracing these relationships without losing sight of the human beings
involved in the rhetorical construction of environment and in the use of electronic
environments” (n.p. - in press). She uses ecology as a metaphor that “operates
as an analytical tool to map inﬂuences, exchanges, and evolutions of
relationships, and, further, to analyze ideologies and discourse communities

embedded in writing technologies”; for Romberger, “ecologies are systems of

41

resource exchanges between environment and inhabitants, mapped over time”
(n.p. - in press). Romberger‘s framework has much promise, but it focuses on the
ecological context itself and does not engage circulation as such (her initial
application of this method is a critique of interface design, thus focusing on a
particular location of interaction, not a whole system of development,
deployment, and distribution).

Syverson's (1999) work focuses on the writer as the central ﬁgure in
ecologically-based writing research: “by privileging the individual writer
composing in isolation, we have slighted or ignored compelling evidence that
writing, like other cognitive processes, occurs in ecological systems involving not
only social but also environmental structures that both powerfully constrain and
also enable what writers are able to think, feel, and write” (p. 9). While I ﬁnd her
use of ecologies of writing useful at the metaphorical level, my approach places
the text (the inscription) as the focus of circulation methodology; Syverson's
approach works well for examining what happens prior to distribution; however,
my focus here is on what happens after distribution. Similarly, Romberger (2007)
engages the ecological primarily as location-speciﬁc interaction between people
and interfaces; I am interested in the movement of texts (which engages these
interactions, but it is the text and its movement that is the object of analysis
rather than individual human-interface interactions).

In describing circulatory activity as taking place within an ecological

context, I draw on two approaches that also use the. ecological metaphor, but that

42

do so in ways that support my focus on text and movement: Nardi and O'Day’s
(1999) “information ecologies” and Spinuzzi and Zachary's (2000) “genre
ecologies.” Each of these formations plays a role in the structure of circulation
ecologies, as both “information” and “genre” inﬂuence and are inﬂuenced by
circulation, but I would suggest that information is too broad and genre is too
narrow to effectively describe the interaction, movement, and exchange that
occurs with the digital circulation of rhetorical objects. lnforrnation implies an
object but does not incorporate use as an intrinsic component of that object's
character. Genres shift and change not only over time, but through the processes
of circulation. What is useful here, however, is the articulation of how both
information and genres function within complex networks of interaction: how they
interact within speciﬁc ecoSystems.

Nardi and O'Day (1999) deﬁne an information ecology as “a system of
people, practices, values, and technologies in a particular local environment. In -
information ecologies, the spotlight is not on technology, but on human activities
that are served by technology” (p. 49). This notion of information ecologies does
two things particularly well: it shifts focus from technology as tool to technology-
in-use (that is, activity can be seen as a synergistic relationship between digital
media/technologies and human actors) and it focuses the lens of inquiry on a
ﬁnite context (which is useful for the development of research methods). And I
agree with Nardi and O'Day (1999) when they posit that “the ecology metaphor

provides a distinctive, powerful set of organizing properties around which to have

43

conversations. The ecological metaphor suggests several key properties of many
environments in which technology is used. An information ecology is a complex
system of parts and relationships” (p. 50). They go on to provide an extended
metaphor, taking into account habitations, niches, speciation, and other biological
components of an ecological framework, but for my purposes, the two most
important elements of the ecological metaphor are that “an information ecology is
marked by strong interrelationships and dependencies among its different parts,”
(p. 51) and that “locality is a particularly important attribute of information
ecologies” (p. 55).

Strictly speaking, what Nardi and O'Day (and later Spinuzzi and Zachary)
term “ecologies” are actually ecosystems: ecologies are the larger contexts in
which these individual ecosystems reside and interact. And while Nardi and
O'Day have established perhaps the most well-known use of an ecological lens
for rhetorical practice, their insistence on locating “ecologies” in speciﬁc material
locations (such as libraries, schools, and hospitals) actually places artiﬁcial
boundaries on an ecological perspective, thus robbing it of a fully-realized vision
of interconnectedness and the interrelationships that can occur across both local
and global environments. The other drawback to Nardi and O'Day's approach to
applying an ecological metaphor is that they disassociate the ecological view.
from the systems-level view (despite the fact that ecology is essentially a study of
biological systems); if “the technological system is the water we swim in, and it

has become life-sustaining and almost invisible to us” then occupying a position

44

within a particular ecosystem (or, more accurately, multiple ecosystems) and
larger ecological structures is no less an invisible framework — until it is
articulated and applied. So while I am indebted to Nardi and O’Day for applying
the metaphor of ecologies to information use, I do not follow through with their
metaphorical approach because it ultimately limits the scope of the analytic
methods I aim to develop.

Spinuzzi and Zachary (2000) begin with the information ecology metaphor
and extend it to their own work with what they call “genre ecologies.” As they
deﬁne it, a “genre ecology includes an interrelated group of genres (artifact types
and the interpretive habits that have developed around them) used to jointly
mediate the activities that allow people to accomplish complex objectives. In
genre ecologies, multiple genres and constituent subtasks co-exist in a lively
interplay as people grapple with information technologies” (p. 172), and they
argue that genres “are not static forms; they are dynamic, organic, and messy. To
account for variations across instantiations of a given genre, a more robust,
ecological perspective is required, one that accounts for the dynamism and
interconnectedness of genres” (p. 173). It is in this same vein that I therefore
argue for an ecological perspective with respect to circulation in order to account
for the dynamism and interconnectedness of rhetorical processes and the
economics of production and circulation of digital work.

Whereas Nardi and O'Day's notion of information ecologies helps to frame

the overall interaction between people, texts, and digital networks, Spinuzzi and

45

Zachary’s work on genre ecologies provides a description of how genres interact
within specific ecosystems.

Circulation takes place both within and across speciﬁc, situated
ecosystems; as l have noted, these ecosystems can be described in terms of the
speciﬁc interactions between people, texts, and technologies. Thus, any method
for examining or researching circulation must take into account not only the
actors, networks, and interactions, but also the speciﬁc articulation of media and
technology within those networks. Ecosystems, then, have rhetorical, technical,
and social dimensions that inﬂuence the possible routes of (and interactions
made possible by) circulation; these ecosystems can be framed as networks
within speciﬁc and situated institutions (such as a department within a university
or workplace) but they can also be framed in terms of digital spaces that are
bounded by genre and activity. For example, Ebay represents a particular
ecosystem that engages a speciﬁc form of trade that is framed by Ebay's
interface, user communities, and system of ratings. Similarly, communities of
users form networks within Flickr's social networking and image-sharing system
that do not correspond to networks outside of the Flickr ecosystem (although
there are connections across and through other networked ecologies). Some
digital systems are also tied to speciﬁc user networks, such as posting links to
del.icio.us that serve a particular course at a speciﬁc institution; in these cases,
there is a connection between local (physical) communities and public digital

networks; the intersection of local use and public digital spaces represents an

46

important area of inquiry for the study of circulation.

Ecological systems as I engage them in this study can also be articulated
in terms of scale (that is, the methodological lens can be focused narrowly or
widely): digital ecologies can be identiﬁed as micro-ecologies (as in the
work/portfolio of a single individual), midrange ecologies (which contextualize the
work of‘collaborators, departments, research groups), or macro-ecologies
(institutions, ﬁelds, disciplines, nations). The two case studies that appear in
chapters 5 and 6 apply circulation analysis methods at the micro- and macro-

ecological levels, respectively.

Economies of Circulation

If “ecologies” represent the contexts of circulation, “economies” represent
the mechanisms that motivate circulation, primarily through the process of
production, distribution, and exchange (using Marx's terminology). The key to
how and where a given text will circulate is based upon the value of that text,
which can be assessed in terms of either use-value or exchange-value. Because
Marx's work is concerned with material production, his framework includes
consumption as an integral (and cyclical) component of the production process
(which is also required for the establishment of value). Consumption, however,
becomes useful only at a metaphorical level when the object of the exchange is
digital: exact reproductions can be made that do not consume the original

products. Consumption can be described in terms of external resources (such as

47

the living expenses of the scholar(s) who develop digital texts), but it not longer
plays a direct role in the economies of circulation (although one might substitute
“use” for consumption in order to fulﬁll all of the requirements of production in
Marx's theory). This is not to say that digital objects are immaterial — they have
material value by virtue of use and exchange. But it is useful here to depart from
a strictly Marxist interpretation of capital and consider the role of what Bourdieu
calls “cultural” and “social” capital in the economies of circulation.

It is important to note at the outset that I am not using Marx's notion of
circulation here, because his use of circulation is both limited in scope and is
divorced from production (which is the opposite of my contention that, rhetorically
speaking, circulation plays an important role in all of the classical rhetoric
processes, from invention to delivery). In his “Introduction to a Contribution to the
Critique of Political Economy,” Marx states both that “circulation is merely a
particular phase of exchange or of exchange regarded in its totality,” and that
“exchange is simply an intermediate phase between production and distribution.”
This view of circulation is particularly limited as well since Marx asserts that
“circulation time and production time are mutually exclusive. During its circulation
time, capital does not function as productive capital, and therefore produces
neither commodities nor surplus-value” (Capital, p. ll:203)2.

Marx's view of capital itself is closer to my use of circulation, as he

describes capital as “a movement, a circulatory process though different stages,

 

2 This makes sense insofar as Marx would say that circulation adds no use-value, and thus no
surplus value; the limitation that I see here is the insistence on separating the processes of
production and circulation (the “time" part of the equation).

48

which itself in turn includes three different forms of the circulatory process. Hence
it can only be grasped as a movement, and not as a static thing” (Capital, p.
"2185). Patrick Murray (1998) argues that capital is indeed “not a thing, and not a
historical constant, but a bizarre and astoundingly powerful (asocial) social form
of wealth turned ’automatic subjec (p. 37). Murray’s odd turn of phrase in
declaring capital an “(asocial) social form of wealth” seems particularly apropos
when applied to circulation—it invokes both the human activity that motivates
circulation as well as the independent work of both human and non-human actors
that facilitates the paths and mechanisms of circulation. Murray goes on to say
that “the circulation of capital involves not simply a ﬂow of materials but
metamorphoses, a ﬂow of forms” (p. 37, emphasis in original); substitute “digital
texts” for “capital” and this neatly describes my description of the process of
circulation in digital communication networks.

Marx does recognize that circulation “is just as necessary for commodity
production as is production itself, and thus agents of circulation are just as
necessary as agents of production” (Capital, p. "2205), but again, his theory is
grounded in material production; thus requiring a kind of translation into a form
that might be useful for understanding economies of circulation. Marx notes that
transportation adds value (and surplus value) because it affects the use-value of
commodities: “the use-value of things is realized only in their consumption, and
their consumption may make a change of location necessary, and thus also the

additional production process of the transport industry" (Captial pp. ll:266-267).

49

One might reframe this for digital networks: circulation (transportation) adds
value because digital texts can be appropriated (although not consumed); this
kind of use increases use-value, although the real change wrought by digital
circulation is always better expressed as exchange-value (which is possible
without having to include consumption as a necessary component of production
or necessary outcome of distribution). And this reframing shows where I must
most sharply disagree with a Marxist interpretation of circulation. As Murray
explains, “no value and, a fortion', no surplus value is created in the restricted
sphere of circulation for a simple reason: in this sphere no use-value is
(preserved or) added to the commodity, and if no use-value is (preserved or)

I added, no value is added. For, while a use-value need not be a value, value
depends on use-value” (p. 46, emphasis in original). I would contend that
circulation is the principle mechanism not only for enabling exchange-value but
also for adding use-value to the rhetorical object via its reproduction,
appropriation, and use within a particular circulation ecology or through
interactions across multiple circulation ecologies.

Circulation makes the rhetorical object available for appropriation, thus
increasing the use value. Consider the case of the MA thesis that is bound and
sent to a university library--the thesis is in circulation (except in the event that it is
checked out, at which time it would be in circulation albeit in very limited scope).
That same thesis, made available on the web, is much more likely to be read,

quoted, and cited; that is, to garner increased use-value. The rhetorical object

50

itself is in essence a “ﬂow of forms.”

The production of digital objects endows them with use-value, but the
motivation for production is grounded in the subjective exchange-value that is
garnered through the distribution and publication (and ultimately circulation) of
the texts. Because digital circulation does not function in the same way as
material production, it is better to approach the question of exchange-value not
through Marxist theory, but via Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital. Particularly in
terms of scholarly work and knowledge management ecologies, digital objects
are not typically traded for material or monetary gain; instead, the exchange-
value of the work comes from the accrual of cultural or social capital.

Bourdieu's (1977) project began as an attempt “to extend economic
calculation to all the goods, material and symbolic, withoUt distinction, that
present themselves as rare and worthy of being sought after in a particular
formation—which may be 'fair words' or smiles, handshakes or shrugs,
compliments or attention, challenges or insults, honour or honours, powers or
pleasures, gossip or scientiﬁc information, distinction or distinctions, etc.” (p.
178); my own interest in developing an economics of circulation would fall in with
the latter categories of symbolic goods, as I am particularly interested in the
kinds of formation (genres) that occur in academic settings. In a sense, the
Marxist perspective can be used to consider the circulation of digital texts as
capital that requires labor, production, and distribution, while the Bourdieu-ian

perspective is concerned less with the object of circulation and more with the

51

composers and appropriators of those texts.

In “The Forms of Capital,” (1986), Bourdieu extends Marx's notion of
capital beyond material production in order to develop an economic theory that
more ably explains “immaterial” products and that can describe the tight
relationship between the social and the economic in terms of distribution of
capital. Bourdieu posits two new forms of capital: cultural capital and social
capital. Cultural capital can take the form of cultural goods (the expression of
accrued cultural capital) or it can be institutionalized, in the forms of educational
credentials. In this second form, cultural capital represents a "certiﬁcate of
cultural competence which confers on its holder a conventional, constant, legally
guaranteed value with respect to power" (p. 248). While the collection of cultural
capital is at its core an individual undertaking, Bourdieu describes “social capital”
as residing in the relationships that develop in and around social networks: social
capital is "the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to
possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of
mutual acquaintance and recognition" (p. 248). Social capital can take the form
of group membership and identity—it is possible, therefore, to delineate various
types of social capital based on their ﬁelds of production. In considering the
circulation of scholarly texts, for instance, one might describe the textual
networks embodied in citation and reference interconnections as academic
capital. This kind of capital may come from the connections between an author

and her advisor, or herinstitution.

52

For example, the work that I am currently doing is being reviewed and
inﬂuenced by my‘dissertation committee members and other mentors with whom
I share an intellectual and disciplinary history. This shared background provides
not only a common understanding of what rhetoric is and what methods and
questions rhetoricians should be engaging, but it also forms the background of a
citation network because I cite the relevant work of my mentors and advisors.

- This puts my published work into circulation as a member of those works that
draw on the same background, and searches on scholar.google.com, for
instance, will describe my work as related to the work of the people I cite and
work with. Because those people already have a great deal of academic capital
garnered from their experience, their publications, and their presence in the ﬁeld,
my work also accrues residual capital simply by being in circulation in the same
citation networks.

The exchange-value of scholariy work then is the acquisition of academic
(social) capital. James F. English (2005) calls this process of exchange the
economy of symbolic cultural production, which might also be considered the
economy of prestige (p. 75). Social and cultural capital operate at the level of
activity: although it is possible to exchange social and cultural capital for material
capital (such as faculty salaries, promotions, and raises), gaining social capital is
not as simple as purchasing material goods. Social capital — academic capital in
particular - is, like material capital, a product of labor. The difference here is that

the labor is intellectual and self-motivated, rather than manual. The circulation of

53

rhetorical objects is part of the process of production that leads to greater or
lesser degrees of social capital for the composer (as well as for others who
appropriate and use the compositions as the basis for further production).

Economies of circulation, then, must account for both the use-value and
exchange-value acquired by rhetorical objects as they circulate through digital
networks as well as the social capital these works are exchanged for by their
authors and appropriators. As with circulation ecologies, these processes are
complex and interdependent, relying on the relationships between human and
non-human actors who are connected via digital networks.

Circulation economies also take place within larger economic systems,
systems that articulate information in terms of material value (e.g. “intellectual
capital,” which is an extension of the idea of intellectual property); the texts that
circulate (and are objects of study in a methodology of circulation analysis) may
have actual value associated with them as information products. IBM researchers
Kephart, Hanson, and Greenwald (2000) provide one vision of the future as built
upon information economies:

Today, we are witnessing the ﬁrst steps in the evolution of the Internet

towards an open, free-market information economy of software agents

buying and selling a rich variety of information goods and Services. We
envision the Internet some years hence as a seething milieu in which
billions of economically-motivated software agents ﬁnd and process

information and disseminate it to humans and, increasingly, to other

54

agents. Agents will naturally evolve from facilitators into decision-makers,

and their degree of autonomy and responsibility will continue to increase

with time. Ultimately, transactions among economic software agents will
constitute an essential and perhaps even dominant portion of the world

economy. (p. 731)

James Hanson (2001) notes that it is “likely that a new type of agent—human
hybrid ﬁrm will take over the marketplace. Such a thing would combine the
strengthsof each of its parts. The human, for example, could concentrate on
setting long-term policy or strategy, while the agent carried out the day-to-day
operations of the business” (p. 149).

In many ways, the notion of the information agent is a ﬁtting synechdoche
for the interconnections of ecologies and economies of circulation: the agent
funCtions both within the boundaries of particular ecosystems (but with the
opportunity to cross into and affect other ecosystems) and serves as an
economic force in terms of the activities of circulation themselves. The work that I
take on here, in this dissertation, is aimed at seeing how particular texts are
themselves agents (or, at least agentive) within speciﬁc ecosystems and digital
economies.

In this chapter, I have presented theories of digital ecologies and digital
economies; having considered both the motivation and the location of circulatory
activity, I next turn to the methods currently available to the researcher interested

in tracing digital circulation as an object of inquiry as well as a survey of research

55

methods for digital ecologies more generally, and then articulate a speciﬁc
circulation analysis methodology that can be used to engage circulation

ecosystems and economic functions as l have addressed them in this chapter.

56

Chapter 3: Methods and Methodologies: Investigating Digital Rhetorics

Daniel J. Murphy (2002) argues that “sound research is grounded upon
theory insofar as it is part of the 'inductive/deductive cycle': individuals observe
the world around them and generalize as to its substance and order (induction)
and then, based on these observations, try to state the nature of the relationships
hypothesized to exist among the various phenomena in ways that can be tested”
(p. 94). In the previous chapter, I presented a theoretical framework for
investigating circulation as an element of digital rhetoric; in this chapter I will
consider the methods that are currently available for digital writing research,
focusing in particular on those methods that would are the best ﬁt for testing the
framework of ecologies and economies of digital circulation. Before looking at
individual methods, however, I think it is important to ﬁrst situate digital rhetoricin
terms of disciplinary location: the methods available to any given research
question are dictated by the disciplinary discourses and the shared
epistemological foundations that related ﬁelds and disciplines engage.

I see digital rhetoric as an emergent area of study whose theoretical
foundations and methodologies are synthesized at the intersections of the three
main ﬁelds of writing studies: composition/rhetoric, professional and technical
writing, and computers and writing. Additionally, however, digital rhetoric also
draws on the relatively newer ﬁeld of lntemet studies, which is itself an

interdisciplinary approach that draws (primarily) on communication studies,

57

information science, cognitive psychology and applied linguistics. Each of the
contributing ﬁelds provide an array of methods that are useful for examining the
processes and products of digital rhetoric, but no one ﬁeld has developed what
might be considered a “digital-native” methodology that is both rhetorical and that
takes advantage of the digital-nehNork-as-medium. Rhetoric itself, which is the
core of all writing studies (as I articulate that discipline) provides powerful
methods to be sure — but the current instantiations of rhetorical analyses have
not yet shifted from the long tradition of print culture that it has engaged for the
past twenty-ﬁve centuries. The reason for this is that many rhetoricians (and
teachers of rhetoric/composition, and authors of textbooks and scholarly works in
the broader ﬁeld of writing studies) have not yet fully accepted the most basic
premise of digital rhetoric: that digital texts are not print texts. That is, the
affordances and contexts of digital communication are sufﬁciently different from
the affordances and contexts of print communication that a new approach to

understanding the function of rhetoric for digital media is actually necessary.

58

 
    

' mapostttoanhetoric

Figure 1. lntersecting Fields Synthesized by Digital Rhetoric.

Stuart Moulthrop (1991) provides a compelling description of the

responsibility of the rhetorician to engage new symbolic modes and the actions

they make possible:

We might consider rhetoric as an interface between techne and logos: a
way of reconciling actual media of communication with the social practices
that shape discourse. During major cultural transitions —— from orality to
writing, from scribal to print literacy, lately from print to electronic
hypermedia — rhetoricians are called upon to make sense of changes in
media, a task which requires them both to integrate and to innovate.
Theorists of a new medium must look both ways across the interface, on
the one hand pursuing continuity with existing literary and cultural

institutions, and on the other hand exploring the differences that set new

59

technologies apart from old. Rhetoricians integrate by mapping new

possibilities for expression onto established practices, finding

correspondences between fresh and familiar forms. But in acknowledging
the implications of technological change, rhetorical theorists must also
innovate, redefining existing conventions and proposing new structures for

discourse (p. 292)

Similarly, in Lingua Fracta: Towards a Rhetoric of New Media, Collin Brooke
(2007) argues that “Any rhetoric of new media must account for both the
productive capacity of rhetoric, and its intrinsically technological dimension" (n.p.
- in press). Like Moulthrop and Brooke, I argue that rhetoric' must “integrate and
innovate” in order to address communicative activity that takes place in and
through digital networks: I do not advocate abandoning classical rhetoric in favor
of new rhetorics because it is still the foundation of the most powerful methods
available for understanding how writing works. I also believe that contemporary
deﬁnitions of rhetoric can accommodate this shift with relative ease, but that that
methods that rhetoric engages require a more signiﬁcant revisioning.

In addition to addressing the roles and activities of the speaker/writer,
communication/text, and audience/reader, deﬁnitions of rhetoric that address
digital communication need to also account for context, interactivity, and
circulation (via internetworked systems). Lloyd Bitzer‘s (1968) articulation of
rhetoric as “a mode of altering reality, not by the direct application of energy to

objects, but by the creation of discourse which changes reality through the

60

mediation of thought and action” (p. 4) provides a useful starting point for digital
rhetoric by virtue of being an abstraction that does not explicitly address or evoke
speciﬁc practices or media associated with rhetorical production while
simultaneously acknowledging to power of rhetoric as a meaning-making activity.
Hauser (1986) provides a more streamlined general deﬁnition of modern rhetoric
as “the management of symbols in order to coordinate social action” (p. 3); for
both Bitzer and Hauser, rhetoric is an activity and not just an analytic framework
(which is how it is often invoked in composition instruction). Additionally, Hauser's
deﬁnition also evokes Kenneth Burke's (1969) notion of rhetoric as “symbolic
action,” that is "symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature
respond to symbols” (p. 43); however, whereas Burke focuses explicitly on
words, stating that the function of rhetoric is “the use of words by human agents
to form attitudes or to induce actionsin other human agents” (p. 41), Hauser
asserts that “symbolic modes other than the verbal, such as music or dance” (p.
3) can also be described in terms of rhetorical activity.

In the case of the deﬁnitions I draw on above, which I see as particularly
useful foundational points, none of the theorists address the complications of
digital circulation, or the possibilities of non-human agents becoming rhetorical
actors. And while Hauser acknowledges that symbolic modes need not be
constrained to the verbal, he does not address these other modes in his work
(moreover, it is important to understand how multimedia and multimodality

function at the intersection of multiple symbolic modes, and how this might

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complicate the “management of symbols”). Digital rhetoric, then, should take into
account the complications of the affordances of digital practices, including
circulation, interaction, and the engagement of multiple symbol systems within
rhetorical objects, and its methods need to explicitly engage those complications
and affordances.

Because I situate my own professional identity at the same nexus as the
point of origin for digital rhetoric as a ﬁeld of study, I see composition/rhetoric,
computers and writing, and professional writing as the ﬁelds that best understand
how to research rhetoric and writing, and by extension, that provide the most
effective starting points for assembling digital rhetoric methods. In this chapter
then, I will ﬁrst address methods from these ﬁelds of writing studies and then go
on to examine methods from ﬁelds that do not take rhetoric as their theoretical or

methodological foundations.

Research Methods in Writing Studies

Qualitative methodologies have been at the forefront of composition
studies for the past decade, foregrounding the situated, contextual practices of
composing that take place through various genres and locations and engage
multiple means of production. Denzin and Lincoln (2003) deﬁne qualitative
research as “a situated activity that locates the observer in the. world. It consists
of a set of interpretive, material practices that make the world visible. These

practices transform the world. They turn the world into a series of

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representations, including ﬁeld notes, interviews, conversations, photographs,
recordings, and memos to the self qualitative researchers study things in their
natural settings, attempting to make sense of, or to interpret, phenomena in
terms of the meanings people bring to them” (pp. 4-5). Qualitative research is
particularly apropos for composition research because it acknowledges the
sociocultural location of writing activity and because of its concern for ethical
issues and responsibilities of researchers in terms of researcher-participant
relationships, which echo the care that compositionists take when developing
student-teacher relationships (and given the prevalence of teacher-research
methodologies, student-teacher and participant-researcher roles are often
inseparable). Qualitative research also pays close attention to the intertwined
nature of theory and research design—the lack of which was criticized in the
discipline's early reliance on scientiﬁc experimental methods. Contemporary
research methods in compositidn also have a close relationship with rhetorical
theory: as Sullivan and Porter note, “[tjhe asking of the research question itself
and the design of a way to address the question (i.e. the inquiry procedures)
constitute a rhetorical activity: a rhetorical interaction with research participants.
Methodology is not merely a means to something else, it is itself an
intervening social action and a participation in human events” (pp. 12-13).
Composition as a discipline is currently undergoing a signiﬁcant shift in its
overall focus: as composition continues to engage multiple modes and media as

acceptable forms of composition (beyond the tradition of print-based writing), the

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practices and processes of composing that composition takes as its object of
inquiry are undergoing radical changes -— changes that necessitate cOncomitant
changes in research methods. These changes amount to what is essentially an
epistemological shift from a view of the solitary writer who has available only
limited material means of production and often no recourse to distribution or
circulation of the work to a view of composition as a collaborative activity that
engages multiple means of production and that occurs within digital networks that
provide broad opportunities for publication and circulation.
As Margaret Syverson (1999) argues in The Wealth of Reality: An Ecology
of Composition,
New technologies, while they have expanded the horizons for discourse,
have also made manifest the inadequacy of our present approaches to
composition. Since our present analytical approaches are inadequate to
the task of understanding new technologies for composing and
communication and their transformational impact on cognition and culture,
our best hope of developing new analytical approaches lies in careful
observation and interpretation of the discourse as people are presently
using it in a wide range of applications, in classrooms and corporations, in
campuses and laboratories, in government agencies, and in commercial
information services. We need to discover who and what are the agents

interacting in an ecology of composition.... (p. 26)

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The research methods in professional writing and technical
communication tend to lend themselves more readily to the discovery of agents
interacting in writing ecologies; Laura Gurak and Mary Lay's Research in
Technical Communication (2002) contends that the foundational research
methods in professional writing are “ethnography, textual analysis, historical
research, survey and questionnaire research, and experimental work” (p. vii).
Professional writing methods, like composition/rhetoric and computers and
writing research, tend toward the qualitative, although the ﬁeld is much more
accepting of quantitative methods and experimentation. Historically, professional
writing research has paid more attention to context (particularly in terms of
organizations and workplaces) than other writing studies research traditions.

Two of the key research traditions from professional writing that are
particularly appropriate for digital rhetoric or genre studies and usability.

Genre studies, as elaborated in professional writing research, focus on
investigations of “an individual's repertoire of situationally appropriate responses
to recurrent situations” through examinations of the “situated actions of writers
and the communication systems in which those actors participate”
Berkencotter and Huckin, 1995, p. ix). In methodological terms, genre studies
privileges a multi-layered approach that engages both micro- and macro-level
interactions. As Berkenkotter and Huckin (1995) explain,

...what microlevel studies of actors' situated actions frequently depict as

individual processes, can also be interpreted (from the macrolevel) as

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communicative acts within a discursive network or system. Genre is the

concept that enables us to envision the interpretation of process and

system in disciplinary communication. (pp. Ix-x)

This approach to the study of writing processes and practices as theorized and
practiced in professional writing research is particularly useful when applied to
digital environments, which engage individual and collaborative practices that
take place within both digital and discursive networks. Focusing the lens on the
activity of the writer or the context (and its conditional affordances for composing) -
allows a view that collapses system-centric and user-centric activity.

A methodology that is especially well-suited to the study of digital
composition is usability. Usability is not well understood as a rhetorically-based
qualitative research methodolOgy outside of the field of professional and
technical communication; more often than not, it is equated with observing users
performing tests of pre-set activities under controlled conditions. However, if
usability is rearticulated as a method of investigating actual use in speciﬁc
contexts and cultures, it is clear that it can be a powerful method for
understanding rhetorical knowledge-making activity within a broad range of
contexts and uses. As I've written elsewhere (Eyman, in press):

In order to engage usability as a suitable methodology for studying writing

processes and pedagogies, it’s important to ﬁrst acknowledge that writing

is a technology, and, consequently, that teaching writing is part of a

technological system; a system with which our students interact as users.

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Constructing students as users allows us to see them not as subordinate
to the learning process, but as engaged participants in the technological
system that is bounded by the institutions, departments, and physical
spaces in which learning activities take place. Students, have particular
needs and goals, but we don’t always have a clear understanding of what
those needs and goals are from the perspective of the user; curricular
design is all too often enacted through a systems-design framework,
rather than a user-centered framework. We know what skills and rhetorical
tools we want students to take with them from our classes, but we often
ascribe these outcomes from our own understandings of usefulness and
appropriate function; as such, we are the designers of the pedagogical
systems that our students use.

‘ Usability, in other words, provides a methodology for studying both writing
practices and writing pedagogies - and because it takes both system and user
into consideration, it provides appropriate methods for studying digital writing

. practices and digital pedagogies. In the methodology that I am constructing for
circulation analysis, genre-studies approaches help inform the development of
research questions that investigate the degree to which circulation is affected by
how digital texts take up or work against particular genres. Usability will also play
a role in later work on the methodology, but it also helps to ensure that the focus
of the study (of circulation analysis) is not too narrowly construed (usability

comes into play in particular when considering both human and non-human

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actors as engaged in or profiting from the ways in which digital texts are rendered

more or less usable).

Digital Writing Research

While many traditional research methods in composition/rhetoric and
professional writing — particularly qualitative research practices - will continue to
function well regardless of the material conditions of production, new methods
need to be developed (or appropriated from other ﬁelds) to help us better
understand how composing practices change from traditional print production
activities to multimodal, multimedia productions that can now be delivered,
distributed, published, and circulated in and through digital networks.

The general trend of research in composition/rhetoric and professional
writing toward qualitative methodologies works well for the study of digital
compositions because it takes into account situation, context, and media. Case
studies, textual inquiry, and rhetorical analysis are particularly useful for
investigations of rhetorical activity in digital environments, although in each case
there is room for enhanced methods that can be adapted for use in digital
networks. While the methods currently available cover quite a bit of ground in
terms of researching digital writing practices, there are a few areas for which
appropriate methodologies have not yet been developed, as well as a series of
emerging methods that show a great deal of promise.

Rhetorical analysis, in particular, can take advantage of technological

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methods to better situate our understanding of the use of ethos, pathos, and
logos in digital texts. Seeing these digital compositions as functioning within
larger intertextual networks — in speciﬁc relation to the material systems of
production and circulation that make them possible adds additional
dimensionality. to the analytic framework.

Other new methods include systems of visualizing discrete elements in the
writing process as it takes place between and among multiple
composers/authors. Hart-Davidson, Carter, and Sun (2006) suggest that
producing different views (visual representations) of particular compositional and
communicative activities can support different frames of analysis. This
methodology is tied to a re-vision of the nature of composition as a rhetorical
practice:

Our view of writing, on the other hand, assumes that writing is a medium,

and that people are more often users of texts (as opposed to participants

in a conversation); writing is not the focus of the action, but a powerful

context for action. (p. 20)

Shifting the research paradigm from a study of writing-as-action to writing-
as-context allows for the development of new methods that might help us better
see how this approach to the use of writing may be investigated. Bill Hart-
Davidson's (2005) work on establishing a rhetoric of objects, relationships, and
views is an example of how context, system, and user might work well as the

. focus of inquiry for writing-as-context.

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Of course, I am not the only person to argue that we need to develop
research methods that can help us understand digital contexts - and that take
advantage of the affordances of digital texts themselves. When I began the work
that would eventually lead to this dissertation in 2003, there were very few works
that addressed digital, networked writing in terms of research methods — many
articles and book chapters explored the way that literacy changes when it takes
place in digital contexts; how teaching must change to be successful for online
courses; and examples of new media practices — but the general consensus
seemed to be that we could apply our rhetorical, genre, or discourse analysis
methods regardless of medium or context. Now, as I complete this work, there
are two edited collections that explicitly address methods for digital writing
research. The ﬁrst is Digital Writing Research: Technologies, Methodologies, and
Ethical Issues, edited by Heidi McKee and Danielle DeVoss, published in April of
2007; the second, Digital Contexts: Studies of Online Research and Citation
(Walker, Purdy, Eyman, & Reilly, eds.) is on track to be published in 2008.

McKee and DeVoss (2007) deﬁne “digital writing research” as

research that focuses: (1) on computer-generated, computer-based,

and/or computer-delivered documents; (2) on computer-based text-

production practices (and we deploy text broadly here, to include
multimedia artifacts); and/or (3) on the interactions of people who use
digital technologies to communicate (McKee & Porter, 2006). Because of

the increasing digitization of writing in educational, institutional, and social

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contexts, all composition researchers, not just computer and writing
specialists, need to consider methodological and ethical approaches to
digital writing research. Further, the term digital writing research—rather
than the more commonly used term lntemet research—acknowledges that
not all digital writing and related communicative acts and interactions
occur on the lntemet (n.p. - in press).
Digital Writing Research is an important collection for a number of reasons
(not least of which is the support it provides to my own arguments about the
development of digital methods): it represents and acknowledgment of and
engagement with the broadening scope of what counts as writing activities (that
is, what kinds of interactions can be claimed by writing studies, both in terms of
research and teaching) —- as James Porter notes in the.foreword, “the chapters in
Digital Writing Research show us, either implicitly or explicitly, that the deﬁnition
of “writing” has changed in the digital age and that, consequently, our
approaches to doing research need to change; we need a parallel and equally
dramatic change in our notions of methodology” (Porter, 2007b). But the
collection also represents a starting point for a disciplinary engagement with
digital research methods for writing studies that has the potential to bring into
sharp relief the kinds of theoretical and methodological shifts that that must
happen when writing moves from purely analog (print) to digital in nature. As
Porter argues in the foreword:

Likewise, digital writing research should not be viewed merely as research

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about writing with technology. It should be viewed, rather, as changing the

fundamental assumptions about methodology, particularly the humanist

assumption that divides the human from the technological. Digital writing
research takes a cyborgian view and a networked view of human
communications. It is not simply old methods applied to new events or
practices. It represents a new way of looking altogether—an approach that
emphasizes the role of production, delivery, and technology in human
communication, but even beyond that, acknowledges the hybrid, symbiotic
relationship between humans and machines. (n.p. - in press)

Whereas Digital Writing Research signals the beginning of a disciplinary
conversation about research methods, Digital Contexts explicitly seeks to
provide a nexus for interdisciplinary conversations about research in digital
environments: “the authors collaborating on the Digital Contexts project are
responding to the need for research that crosses boundaries the boundaries
between academic disciplines, the boundaries between nations, and the
boundaries between search and research behaviors in academic and nonEl
academic settings. Studies that focus on these issues are often framed very
differently by researchers in different ﬁelds, and people doing research in these
different disciplines are often not reading research across disciplines” (Walker,
Purdy, Eyman, & Reilly, 2007, p. 2).

I see several of the chapters in each collection as particularly useful

examples of methods that might contribute to a methodology based on the

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importance of circulation for digital rhetoric; while many of these approaches
contribute to a rhetorical reconﬁguration of the speciﬁc methods I examine below
(and will thus be addressed within the contexts of those methods), the works by
Kevin DePew and Julia Romberger in Digital Writing Research together provide a
framework within which all of the following methods may be employed.

DePew (2007) argues for the importance of triangulation—of looking not
just at texts, but at contexts and users. He suggests that, “as rhetoricians, we
should be examining more features of the communicative situation rather than
merely an artifact it produces. What else can we learn about digital rhetoric when
we also study the rhetor's intentions? The audiences’ response to the text? How
local contexts shape this interaction? In essence, I am advocating that digital
rhetoric researchers adopt strategies framed by the communicative triangle—the
rhetor, the audience, the digital text or discourse, and the contexts. By designing
such methodological strategies, researchers insert communicative participants
into the process, which gives researchers the opportunity to see both the
complex nature of the research site and apertures in the ﬁeld’s tropes” (n.p. - in
press). I would add that the communicative participants need not be solely
human audiences, but may be elements of the networked digital systems
themselves. Romberger's (2007) work similarly focuses on context, but
addresses it within an ecological metaphor, much as l have done in the previous
chapter: “An ecofeminist methodology, in short, must be aware of context and its

complexity — the ecology of the situation. It is this emphasis on the inﬂuence of

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environment upon subjects in an ecological ebb and ﬂow and how these
relationships are articulated that separates it from other feminist methodologies.
It takes into account histories of the larger social milieu and remains aware of the
context of the researcher and the system of values brought in by framing an
inquiry in a speciﬁc theory and discipline” (n.p. - in press). While DePew and
Romberger's general arguments are certainly not new to writing studies, the way
in which they articulate and further strategies for employing triangulation and
ecofeminist theory speciﬁcally to digital writing has helped me to better
understand how to engage those positions in the circulation analysis
methodology that I am proposing.

Taken together, these two positions — engaging context and expanding the
scope of research methods to include the textual, the social, and the rhetorical
situation — provide a platform for digital rhetoric research. But before such a
platform can be fully articulated and deployed, the methods that work within it
must be identiﬁed and, in some cases, developed. In the remainder of this
chapter I review research methods from a broad range of ﬁelds and disciplines
that have been, are in the process of, or could be proﬁtably appropriated for
digital rhetoric research and that would work within the theoretical framework of
ecologies, economies, and circulation as rhetorical meta-canon that I presented
in chapter 2. I’ll return to the question of triangulation and the development of an

ecofeminist research platform in chapter 6.

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Digital Rhetoric Methods Addressing Ecologies, Economies, and Circulation

While the following methods are, for the most part, already being used to
greater or lesser extents by digital writing researchers, it is often the case that
only the parts that are not overly complex or quantitative are appropriated, and it
is for this reason that I think it necessary to review the methods as they are used
in the ﬁelds in which they originated — and then determine to what extend they

may be applied to the development of a circulation analysis methodology.

C. 0. DE and Network Administration Tools

If rhetoricians are to develop methods that are “digital-native” - that is,
methods that actively and explicitly engage the digital environments and systems
of digital circulation themselves, then looking to the tools and metrics that run
these digital environments, such as. network and routing tools and the protocols
upon which the Internet was built, would be a logical ﬁrst step. Even though
digital texts are themselves immaterial, the networks in which they reside are
made of very real data conduits and routing devices. When I worked as a
webmaster and systems administrator for a community college, I learned about a
variety of tools that were designed to monitor the health and productivity of these
networks: I could keep track of how many hackers were attempting to inﬁltrate
my servers or how robust the network link between two buildings was on a
moment-by—moment basis. Although I know of several technorhetoricians whose

backgrounds include experience in systems administration or programming, the

75

ﬁrst to articulate a coherent method for using these network tools for digital
writing research is Jim Ridolfo (2006), who developed a webtext evaluation suite
that he called “C.O.D.E. — Comprehensive Online Document Evaluation.”
Ridolfo presents this suite of tools as a pedagogical application that students can
use to “not only cite online documents, but also critically research the questions
of the who, what, when, where and why of digital texts.” However, he also sees it
as a useful tool for political action:
From reﬂecting on my various jobs I can now see a connection between
digital delivery and physicality: the Internet exists through physical things -
cables that must be thrown over walls, snaked under desks and stretched
across institutional and political borders. Correspondingly as an an activist
I’ve come to see the physical geography of digital networks as politically
important. It is my hope that this system helps students, activists, and
teachers to create a more comprehensive piCture of how a digital
document ‘works’: from ﬁnding the identities of the author(s) to searching
out past revisions of the document, to situating the document in time,
place, and determining the physical and geographic locations of
documents.
I would add that these tools are certainly useful for scholars who are developing
digital writing research methods as well.
Ridolfo (2006) provides instruction on using three network analysis tools to

uncover both geographies and owners of digitally networked systems, along with

76

two additional web-based tools for examining the changes over time that a given
website experiences. The “geography and ownership” tools that Ridolfo
discusses include whois, traceroute, and ARIN. When I ﬁrst learned to use tools
like ping (that shows if a network server is running and responding to request) or
traceroute, the only way to do so was via the command line (usually on another
server, although these tools are available on all personal computers as well).
Currently, however, web-based interfaces for these tools have been developed -
making the tools themselves moreaccessible to students and researchers alike.
The ﬁrst tool that Ridolfo covers in C.O.D.E. is called “whois.” Whois
(http://www.betten~hois.com/) allows the user to retrieve inforrnation about who
has registered a domain name, including the date of registration, administrative
contacts, and billing addresses. Traceroute, the second tool in C.O.D.E., traces
the route that an lntemet request must travel in order to reach its destination. For
instance, when you use a web browser to view a page such as
http://www.msu.edu, your browser sends a request from wherever you are to the
server that hosts that site; this request travels through the various hubs and
routers that lay between your computer and the server at Michigan State
University. Traceroute reinforces the geographic nature of interconnected
networks and generally shows the overall distance between two networked
points. The output of traceroute also shows the names of the routers and
systems it encounters, so you can learn which lntemet Service Provider hosts

the server at the end of the trace. Ridolfo (2006) argues that “these two utilities

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allow us to contextualize the website based on its geographic origins,
'publisher' (ISP), time, and new authorial information.” The ﬁnal network tool in
the C.O.D.E. suite is ARIN - The American Registry for Internet Numbers
(http://www.arin.net), which allows users to look up the registration information of
lntemet addresses. So, for instance, ARIN reports that the IP address 35.8.1026
belongs to Michigan State University (in fact, MSU may use any IP address that
falls between 35.8.0.0 and 35.10.255.255), and that MSU's ISP is Merit Network
_ Inc. (which handles all of the IP addresses that begin with 35).

The other techniques covered in C.O.D.E help the user to ﬁnd out more
about the web-based (as opposed to the physical network-based) context of a
given site. Using the Web Archive (at http://archive.org) allows the researcher to
access previous versions and edits of many websites. The original website for
the online journal Kairos: A Journal for Teachers of Writing in Webbed
Environments, is available by searching for the original web address
(http:/lenglish.ttu.edu/kairosl) in the Web Archive (the web archive’s eariiest
version is from December of 1996); the archive also provides links to all of the
versions and updates that have taken places since then. The ﬁnal activity in
C.O.D.E. is a Google search of the URL for the site. under consideration.
Searching for the URL (as opposed to the site name or content) provides a quick
view of the role this site has in the larger discourse of online communities
(however, it is not as powerful a tool as cataloging the links to that site from other

sources, a technique that is discussed in the section on bibliometrics and

78

cybermetrics, below).

Because digital communication can be deceptively ethereal, these tools
help to recover the underlying material structures of the digital networks we
study; additionally, these methods also reveal the activities of the non-human
actors in the system, such as the routers that carry and promote the network's
communication signals and the servers that respond to the queries initiated by
people or other servers. The three network analysis tools are particularly useful
for circulation analysis for instances where the links to the digital-native text

being studied are generated by autonomous software agents rather than people:

Studying Web Usage via Server Log Analysis

A great deal of information about users of digital genres (such as blogs,
wikis, or websites) can be found in the log ﬁles automatically generated by the
servers upon which digital texts are stored. The most obviously useful in terms of
circulation include records of how a user's search strategy leads to a particular
text, and the records of how many individuals (and, to a certain extent, who those
individuals are and where they reside) have accessed a given text. Server log
analysis can show which pages are entry points for users and which are exit
points, how many times a given page is viewed, how many “unique users” have
visited a site, and some basic information about where those users come from. It
is possible to combine server log analysis with the use of cookies or content-

management system supported sites to track how long users spend on a given

79

page and what paths a user takes when moving through a site (server logs can
also record what link or search engine result lead a user to a site's entry point,
although it typically does not have access to the search query).
Server log analysis yields very basic quantitative data that can show how
a speciﬁc site's trafﬁc has changed over time as well as some characteristics of a
site's audience. Examining the server logs from the online journal Kairos, for
instance, provides a picture of a steadily growing number of accesses over the
past decade, as well as an increase in international audiences:
In addition to the steady increase in overall readership, we've seen a shift
from a primarily US audience to a much more international audience. A
little over 80% of our readers come from the US, which means that about
20% come from elsewhere — the logs have recorded visitors who hail
from 190 different country codes, from Belize, Belarus, Botswana and
Brazil; from Vietnam, Venezuela, and the Ukraine. And that 20% is now
over 9,000 readers — so I'd say it would be safe to consider Kairos an
"international" scholarly publication venue. (Eyman, 2006)
Although server log analysis is very limited, it can serve as a starting point for
understanding the relationship between a given site/digital text and its audiences.
Additionally, server log analysis provides data that can be used to help
triangulate ﬁndings from other quantitative (and qualitative) methods. Server log
analysis is tied to circulation analysis because it can provide a general picture of

the number of individuals accessing a digital-native text and also provide some

80

information about where those individuals are from. However, this kind of
overview should be considered secondary information because it does not
directly connect the digital texts to its users and uses, much like searches of
social bookmarking sites that can show how many people acknowledge having
copies of or bookmarks linking to speciﬁc digital texts provide an indirect
measure of circulation and use. One signiﬁcant drawback of server log analysis,
however, is that the researcher needs to have access to the server logs

themselves—and this kind of information resource is rarely made public.

Social Network Analysis (SNA)

Because of its focus on networked relationships and their support of the
circulation of social capital, Social Network Analysis (SNA), a research approach
from sociology and communication science, provides a powerful set of tools for
digital writing research. Social network analysis focuses on patterns of relations
among people, organizations, states; in other words, human relationships - but
rarely human/non-human interactions or relationships (Wellman & Berkowitz,
1988; Knoke, 1990; Scott, 1991; Burt, 1992; Wasserman & Faust, 1992;
Castells, 1996; Lin, 2001) . Social network analysis takes a mixed-method
approach: SNA makes use of qualitative data gathered via interviews, surveys,
observation, and artifacts (Rogers, 1987; Garton et al., 1997), but it uses
quantitative analyses to interpret that data. As Lin Freeman notes,

From the outset, the network approach to the study of behavior has

81

involved two commitments: (1) it is guided by formal theory organized in

mathematical terms, and (2) it is grounded in the systematic analysis of

empirical data. It was not until the 19703, therefore — when modern
discrete combinatorics (particularly graph theory) experienced rapid
development and relatively powerful computers became readily available —
that the study of social networks really began to take off as an
interdisciplinary specialty.

The basic premise of social network analysis is that relationships cannot
be discretely quantiﬁed as units of measurement; that is, the relationship
between two individuals must always be seen within the context of all the other
relationships those individuals engage in (either shared or separately). This-
approach presents a high level of complexity that is handled by statistical
analysis, and the mathematical formulas that describe networks in terms of
nodes and ties; as J. Barnes (1972), credited with being the ﬁrst researcher to
study social networks (cf. Barnes, 1954) explains, “to discover how A, who is in
touch with B and C, is affected by the relation between B and C . . . demands the
use of the network concept" (p. 3).

In social network analysis, nodes represent the individual actors within
networks; ties represent the relationships shared by those actors — these
relationships (also called “strands”) can be described in terms of content (the
resource that is exchanged), direction and strength. Some network analysts have

applied social network methods to electronic texts, using SNA tools to surface

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patterns of relations between words and phrases; however, unlike the kind of
mapping that similar work in applied linguistics produces, SNA textual analysis is
used to “reveal cognitive maps and identiﬁes people who hold similar conceptual
orientations” (Garton et al., 1997).

The complex relationships examined through social network analyses can
be displayed via the construction of sociograms, which are network diagrams that
display nodes (individual actors or groups) as points and ties as lines. As Garton,
Haythomewaite, and Wellman (1997) describe them,

sociograms provide snapshots of organizational interaction structures

which can indicate how static or dynamic these structures are over time.

From these types of diagrams we can visually identify emergent positrons

and clusters of interaction. Visual depictions of whole networks can

highlight both linkages and non-linkages, revealing ’structural holes' (Burt,

1992). By examining these patterns of mediated and unmediated

interaction we gain an added perspective on communication structures

that underpin explicit work processes as well as those that support

affective, less instrumental behaviors.

83

 

 

Total .
(ﬁkabik'ty)

 

m
DOES NOT LIKE LIKE
-t .. - Rarely work togemer - - - +1
-2 ~«——- Occasionally work together +2
-3 -—— Work together daily ——- +3

Figure 2. Example Sociogram showing strength of relationships between

co-workers (Magis, 2005).

Social networking analysis methods have been used to trace the
circulation of social capital (Ooka & Wellman, 2006; Huysman & Wulf, 2004;
Quan-Haase & Wellman, 2004), and thus are particularly well-suited to questions

of digital economies and circulation: as Barry Wellman (2003) notes, "Networks

84

are a major source of social capital mobilizable in themselves and from their
contents” (n.p.). The work that social analysts do focuses ‘on tracking and tracing
the movement of resources between people; they “seek to describe networks of
relations as fully as possible, tease out the prominent patterns in such networks,
trace the ﬂow of information (and other resources) through them, and discover
what effects these relations and networks have on people and organizations”
(Garton et al., 1997). Social networking analysis also ﬁts well into an ecological
model, as the networks they diagram can be seen as ecosytems themselves—
and they can also have interactions with other ecosystems as well: the concept
of networks is scalable on a whole network level to a " network of networks"
(Craven & Wellman, 1973), networks can be connected to other networks by
actors who are members of more than one network.

Indeed, some researchers in rhetoric and writing have begun adapting
social network analysis methods for studies of online interaction that are based
on writing practices; these methods, however, are event based rather than
relationship based (Hart-Davidson, 2007). In the circulation analysis methodology
I describe in the next chapter, I also appropriate elements of social network
analysis for digital writing research, but my use is more closely aligned with the
way that SNA research approaches questions of tracing the circulation of social
capital. The coding of data into matrices and subsequent rendering as
sociograms are an important component of circulation analysis methods,

particularly for the evaluation of the data collected using other methods described

85

in this chapter. But because the main objects of inquiry are texts and the
rhetorical relationships between them, it is important to also examine a slightly
more appropriate articulation of this kind of analysis called Hypertexts Network

Analysis.

Hypertext Network Analysis (HNA)

Hypertext Network Analysis (HNA) is, in a sense, a form of social network
analysis, but it moves the question of relationships away from people and
organizations and instead looks at the nodes and ties of digital texts as
instantiated in websites and web links. The key distinction between social
network analysis and hypertext network analysis is that the websites themselves
are considered actors within the the networks being investigated: “In particular,
through a hyperlink, an individual website plays the role of an actor who could
inﬂuence other website’s trust, prestige, authority, or credibility" (Park, 2003, p.
53).

Park and Thelwall (2003) argue that “compared to other Web methods
such as a content-based analysis, the relative advantage of hyperlink analysis is
that it is able to examine the way in which Web sites form a certain kind of
relations with others via hyperlinks” (n.p.) — so for hyperlink analysis, it is the
hypertext link qua link that is of the most importance and that serves as the focal
point of the investigation. Hypertext link analysis also tends to be applied to very

large-scale data sets. Broder et al. (2000), for instance, examined 200 million

86

pages and 1.5 billion hyperlinks in a study that showed that the probability of a
hyperlink path between two randomly chosen Web pages was about 24 percent.
When a path was present, there were an average of approximately 16 hyperiinks
in the path between pages. These kind of topological investigations take
advantage of network analyses in ways that are similar to those of Ridolfo's
C.O.D.E. suite of networking tools, but they use only the explicit links among and
between websites to uncover the connections between them.

Hyperlink analysis has also been applied as part of the methods available
to cybermetrics, drawing on Rousseau's (1997) analogy between citations and
hyperlinks (coining the term “sitation” to foreground the similarities). As Park and
Thelwall (2003) note, “the analogy between hyperlinks and citations has
continued to generate interest within information science, including speculations
about the kind of information that they could reveal in different contexts” (n.p.).
This connection of citation and hyperlink also evokes the circulation of social
capital, as both hyperlinks and citations can be indicators of (and can be mapped

as) social/academic capital forms of resource exchange.

Bibliometrics and Cybermetrics

The most obvious (and traditional) method of tracing the use and value of
texts is through citation analysis, although its use is limited when considering the
overall circulation of a text. Still, as Kaplan and Nelson (2000) point out, “in the

absence of a more compelling metric, citation analysis remains the best

87

commonly available indicator of usage” (p. 324).

Citation analysis as a process and a ﬁeld of study provides numerous
means and methodologies for use in quantifying a record and history of citation
for authors, articles, and journals. The simplest method of citation analysis is to
select a time frame and a body of citation data and determine how many times
an author, article, orjournal has been cited by the publications indexed in the
dataset within that time frame. In most cases, citation data for this sort of
bibliometric analysis is drawn from citation databases, such as Social Sciences
Citation Index (SSCI), Science Citation Index (SCI), and Arts and Humanities
Citation Index (AHCI), which are all accessible online from Thomson’s Institute
for Scientiﬁc Information (lSl) database, also known as the Web of Science.

Scholars also employ citation analysis methods called co-citation and
author co-citation in order to map disciplines (Small, 1999; White & McCain, I
1998), determine sub-ﬁelds within majdr areas of study (Bayer, Smart, &
McLaughlin, 1990), and locate cross-disciplinary inﬂuences (Small, 1999.). The
raw data included in co-citation analyses of articles, journals, and authors
includes the number of times that pairs of articles, journals, and/or authors are
co-present in the works cited or footnotes of articles located through citation
databases. As Bayer, Smart, and McLaughlin (1990) explain, co-citation assumes
“that the more frequently two scientists are cited together, and the more similar
their patterns of cocitations with others, the closer the relationship between them”

(p. 444). This kind of relationship can be viewed as an instance of circulation

88

activity that can be directly tracked. The problem for utilizing bibliometric methods
for examining circulation, however, is that the databases are not complete — they
are selectively populated both in terms of the work and citations they track and
by a calculation of value (in terms of academic capital) that is applied to those
works based on the citations it receives from other work that already has an
established value. Thus the scope is very limited in terms of an overall picture of
knowledge production and circulation.

Of course, qualitative methods of citation analysis are also employed in
order to determine how authors incorporate citations and the ideas of the texts
they cite within their scholarship. Such analyses require examining the use of
citations within scholarly texts to determine the rhetorical functions of those
citations (Budd, 1999; Hyland, 1999). Budd’s (1999) study of internal citations in
70 sociology articles from 1990-1995 reveals that authors use of most of their
citations quantitatively, also called procedurally in Budd’s terminology, in order to
prove to readers that they thoroughly researched their respective topics and are
aware of disciplinary contexts (p. 271 ). As Budd (1999) notes, procedural
citations, those not integral to knowledge claims made by the authors, outnumber
epistemic citations by a ration of more than 3 to 1 (p. 271). Authors” use of
citation in largely procedural ways supports our assertion above that the citation
of particular materials reﬂects and reinforces the signiﬁcance of those items as
important texts in the ﬁeld that must be taken into account and acknowledged by

authors as a condition for the perceived credibility of their new assertions and

89

arguments, even if the references cited are not integral to their arguments. On
the other hand, items that are not cited can be viewed as having less credibility
and may be judged as largely irrelevant.

A more promising method for circulation research can be located In new
informetric methodologies — based in part upon the principles and statistical
formulas developed for bibliometric analyses — that are being developed by
researchers in the ﬁeld of information science. Several terms for these new
methodologies have been suggested, but the ﬁeld currently appears to favor
“cybermetrics” as the designation for the study of online scholarship.
Cybermetrics studies the network of links between electronic scholarly works,
revealing how widely a speciﬁc electronic source is linked to other online texts,
what types of texts link to speciﬁc sources, and how the source is used. Aguillo
(2003) locates cybermetrics at the intersections of “cybergeograpy” and
“cyberdemography” aoross lntemet genres (such as email, the World Wide Web,
and online databases). Methods include adaptations of bibliometrics, user
studies, calculations of “cyberindicators” (website hits, search engine rankings),
assessment of web data architecture and hyperlink topologies, and comparative
search engine analyses.

Initial research on web linking began with bibliometric approaches, but it
soon became apparent that new methodologies would need to be developed in
order to study the web from an inforrnetrics perspective: Larson (1996) used

linking as an analogous method of citation analysis to devise a map of the

90

intellectual structure of cyberspace; Kleinberg (1999) demonstrated that useful
information about individual web pages and websites can be extracted directly
from link structures; and Broder et al. (2000) asserted that hyperlinks themselves
can be studied as objects of interest in their own right.

Clearly, the range of available texts and evaluative mechanisms of is much
greater than citation analysis alone can provide; cybermetrics, then, is one
starting point for the development of a more comprehensive methodology for
circulation studies. These methods, however, provide only a mechanism for
tracing a limited portion of a given circulation ecology and need to be combined

with other methods in order to fully investigate digital circulation.

Content Analysis

Content analysis is the systematic, quantitative analysis of communication
content (including verbal, visual, print, and electronic communication.) According
to C. W. Roberts in the International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral
Sciences (2001 ), "content analysis is a class of techniques for mapping symbolic
data into a data matrix suitable for statistical analysis." (p. 2697); in this regard,
content analysis is similar to social network analysis, except that it focuses on the
representations in and across individual texts rather than the relationships
between them. List (2005) makes clear that content analysis, “thOUQh it often
analyses written words, is a quantitative method. The results of content analysis

are numbers and percentages. After doing a content analysis, you might make a

91

statement such as "27% of programs on Radio Lukole in April 2003 mentioned at
least one aspect of peacebuilding, compared with only 3% of the programs in
2001 " (kya16a.html).

Content analysis is typically applied in one of two general modes:
conceptual analysis or relational analysis. Conceptual analysis establishes the
existence and frequency of concepts - most often represented by words of
phrases — in a text; in contrast, relational analysis examines the relationships
among concepts in a text (Busch et al., 2005).

Busch et al.'s (2005) description of relational analysis echoes the call for
understanding relation complexities that occur in social network analysis, where
the individual ties have no meaningful relationship except within the context of
the larger network:

Relational analysis, like conceptual analysis, begins with the act of

identifying concepts present in a given text or set of texts. However,

relational analysis seeks to go beyond presence by exploring the
relationships between the concepts identiﬁed. In other words, the focus
of relational analysis is to look for semantic, or meaningful, relationships.

Individual concepts, in and of themselves, are viewed as having no

inherent meaning. Rather, meaning is a product of the relationships

among concepts in a text.

There are two forms of relational analysis that hold promise for digital

writing research: proximity analysis and cognitive mapping. Proximity analysis,

92

like co-citation analyses in bibliometrics, looks for the co-occurrence of concepts
in the texts being studied. In text-based proximity analysis, the concept takes the
form of a string of words that can be searched for. Cognitive mapping uses the
results of a proximity analysis and displays them as a visual map that represents
the relationships between concepts (this is, indeed, very similar to the
sociograms of social network analysis, which provide maps of relationships
between people or groups). Busch et al. (2005) enumerate the theoretical
assumptions that support this kind of mapping: “mental models are
representations of interrelated concepts that reﬂect conscious or subconscious
perceptions of reality; language is the key to understanding these models; and
these models can be represented as networks.” These kinds of maps are difﬁcult
to create by hand; like the mathematical approaches employed in social network
analysis, the development of concept mapping for content analysis has been
greatly aided by advances in computing — in other words, the digital environment
itself is necessary to support these methods. Early proponents of concept
mapping describe it as “a computerized multidimensional scaling technique that
generates maps of content themes based on the frequency and co-occurrence of
key words” (Miller & Riechert, 1994); which seems like a ﬁne description of
another visualization technique rapidly becoming common for digital texts known
as tag clouds (which will be discussed in greater detail in the following section).
One example of content analysis applied to digital writing research is

Herring, Kouper, Scheidt, & Wright's (2004) “Women and Children Last: The

93

Discursive Construction of Weblogs," in which they examine an apparent
paradox - “quantitative studies report as many (or more, depending on what
one counts as a blog) female as male blog authors, and as many (or more)
young people as adults (Henning, 2003; Orlowski, 2003), suggesting a diverse
population of bloggers as regards gender and age representation. At the same
time, as will be shown, contemporary discourses about weblogs, such as those
propagated through the mainstream media, in scholarly communication, and in
weblogs themselves, tend to disproportionately feature adult, male bloggers.”
Herring et al. (2004) use content analysis techniques to assess the age
and gender of weblog authors:
Gender of blog authors was determined by names, graphical
representations (if present), and the content of the blog entries (e.g.,
reference to “my husband” resulted in a “female” gender classiﬁcation,
assuming other indicators were consistent). Age of blog authors was
determined by information explicitly provided by the authors (e.g., in
proﬁles) or inferred from the content of the blog entries (e.g., reference to
attending high school resulted in a “teen” age classiﬁcation).
They also used a content analysis rubric to develop type categories for the
weblbgs themselves, dividing them into “ﬁlters,” which primarily feature links to
world events, online happenings, and other non-author-centered issues,
“personal journals” which primarily contain the blogger’s thoughts and internal

workings, and “k(nowledge)-logs,” which are “repositories of information and

94

observations with a typically technological focus.” This second move is a
rhetorically-informed variation on traditional content analysis techniques, which
often do not take into account the the context of the texts under consideration.
In our chapter in Digital Writing Research, Colleen Reilly and l utilized a
similar form of content analysis to develop a heuristic for evaluating digital texts
in terms of their structure, the digital environments in which they reside, and the
degree to which they violate traditional print-based genre norms. Drawing on
Bolter and Grusin's (1999) theories of remediation, we examined the content of
electronic scholarly publications to determine their degree of departure from the
conventions of print texts and the extent to which they exploit and even highlight
the affordances, structure, and multimedia nature of texts native to digital
environments. We established a continuum that includes four designations for
electronic texts: highly transparent, moderately transparent, moderately
hypennediated, and highly hyperrnediated (Reilly & Eyman, 2007). In order to
code the websites that we examined as falling into these categories, it was
necessary for us to consider not only textual content, but also paratextual content
(links, document structures) and the kinds of visual and interactive content that
can be published on the web. Thus, our work is also an example of how content
analysis techniques can be applied to both textual and visual elements in digital

texts.

95

Data Visualization

Composition/rhetoric as a ﬁeld is experiencing a renewed interest in the
role of the visual, particularly as itvis used in multimedia and multimodal
compositions; professional and technical writing has long understood the
importance of visual rhetoric for effective communication. The “turn to the visual”
also plays a prominent role in digital research methods, particularly in the form of
data visualization.

Visualization is not simply a tool for displaying the results of analytic
methods; it is itself a method that can be used to structure data in ways that
reveal patterns—in other words, it is an analytic technique in its own right.
Lengler and Eppler (2007) deﬁne visualization methods as “systematic, rule-
based, external, permanent, and graphic representations that depict information
in a way that is conducive to acquiring insights, developing an elaborate
understanding, or communicating experienCes. In their “Periodic Table of
Visualization Methods for Management,” Lengler and Eppler divide visualization
methods into six distinct groups: data visualizations (visual representations of
quantitative data in schematic form); information visualization (interactive visual
representations of data designed to amplify cognition by transforming the into an
image that is mapped to screen space); concept visualization (2-D graphical
displays where concepts are connected by directed arcs encoding brief
relationships between pairs of concepts; metaphor visualization (which ﬁrst

positions information graphically to organize and structure it and second convey

96

an insight about the represented information through the key characteristics of
the metaphor that is employed); strategy visualization (which uses
complementary visual representations to improve the analysis, development,
formulation, communication, and implementation of strategies in organizations;
and compound visualization (a mix of any of the foregoing visualization types).

An example of data visualization used methodologically is Kichiyoshi et
al.'s (1999) “Data visualization for supporting query-based data mining,” which
describes how visualization can help users test hypotheses about the structures
and contents of databases with which they are interacting. In their method, “an
instance in a database which has several attributes with numerical or nominal
values is visualized as a color bar with several color parts which correspond to
attribute values. Values of a function which evaluates the utility of a hypothesis
are also visualized by using colors. This visualization technique helps users ﬁnd
an initial hypothesis and modify the hypothesis in order to increase the
usefulness of it interactively” (p. 888). Like this and other examples, most
applications of data visualization as research method come from quantitatively-
oriented disciplines, such as the use of sociograms in social network analysis
and hypertext network maps in hypertext network analysis.

Data visualization is very useful for making accessible large-scale systems
that might not othenrvise be comprehensible. As Roger Brown (1965) explains,

Social structure becomes actually visible in an anthill; the movements and

contacts one sees are not random but patterned. We should also be able

97

to see structure in the life of an American Community if we had a
sufficiently remote vantage point, a point from which persons would
appear to be small moving dots. We should see that these dots do not
randomly approach one another, that some are usually together, some
meet often, some never. If one could get far enough away from It human
life would become pure pattern (p. 47)
This notion of perspective also maps onto Franco Moretti's (2000) notion of
“distant reading where distance... is a condition of knowledge: it allows you to
focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices,
themes, tropes—or genres and systems” (p. 57, emphasis in original).
Applying the functionality of a concept map coupled with a frequency
analysis of terms that appear in the journal College Composition and
Communication, Derek Mueller (2007) has implemented a system that visually

represents the main themes of each issue in the form of a “tag cloud.”

CCC Vol. 54

 

Sep2002-Jun2003

arlrrzcvwicdqe airman metric-5 ante-iv: an appropriate articulated assertion aasrgrmients bat-hart boundaries
'T‘ttatton cztc classroom coilabcratwe COHCQO carribirung corrlrmtment C’Dl'l'af‘l'JJnttél’ibrtf composing
computer confrontational canneﬂzcrss commutes canventrons CI'FXIIIIUL-l' cemwlum -:I:-;.vzt.‘al
discourse dw'wtwr‘az-m e-coruzlrmc: education emerge engage anglish essay eviriore fact
family feminist loomed gender grammar Incr-zrc'rw hybndrty l:ypc:-t4;.~:t Idealcrgy Igrc-re tiitlst":!'3
institutional metro-{tars intellectual Ir‘lteractwe tr‘iterrrret janis journals Iatm liberation lmqwstm lzralter
links literacy Wlél";2i‘r‘3II2C‘1 mettle n*;e;-ttu;rv‘JoIogﬁs mom-rents magmatic-r. ﬂoristzmtlard chime
Participants pedestrian! {’ECIEI'SIL"3’r" lierf.».';r‘:r;.5tr~.ra phrases plagiarism VIII-BEEN Dri'cr'vrttuve

punctuation quotes radical recipmcity repr'rscnttzti-‘zm rhetorical attest... space St":-‘.I.--g:s(-$

St u d e '1 ts study tarbalttm sustainabia teacher teaching

tax-mat theology {Oprct- university vatues vocabulary' web western 'youthi

Figure 3. Tag cloud from College Composition and Communication.
http://tagline.earthwidemoth.com/cccexp/volumes.html

98

Tag clouds can be generated automatically by extracting the most
common phrases from a given corpus (as with the example above), or they can
represent the tags that individuals apply to content in folksonomic systems. In
either case, this form of data visualization has clear potential as a digital rhetoric

method.

Complicating Factors for Digital Research Methods

Although each of the preceding methods can, I believe, be adapted,
appropriated, and synthesized for use in digital rhetoric research (after infusing
them with a rhetorical foundation and vision), there are several complicating
factors that will effect any method used for digital writing research. The main
factor (and the one from which the others derive) is access. Accessibility can be
impeded by intellectual-property gatekeeping (restricted access to networks and
texts that circulate in and through those restricted systems, as well as cost-
prohibitive access fees on certain content), but it is also an issue when
considering the format of the rhetorical objects themselves. Digital texts can be
made up of, in part, proprietary formats; they may also engage media or genres
for which we currently have few (or no) tools that would allow us to fully
understand how they work or their relationship to their digital environments.
Finally, the problem of ephemerality is also endemic to digital texts: websites are

not stable entities that are ﬁxed (they are un-ﬁxed by their very nature), and

99

many become inaccessible by ceasing to exist. As noted above, some sites are
still recoverable via the Web Archive, but this is not always the case. Thus, any
digital-native methodology must be aware of how these issues of access
constrain the methods that are used.

In the methodology that I am proposing in this dissertation, I draw upon
and synthesize elements from the methods discussed in this chapter. In the
following chapter, I describe the methodology and the methods it employs, as
well as continuing the discussion of the complicating factors I brieﬂy outlined

above.

100

Chapter 4: A Digital-Native Methodology: Circulation Analysis

In the first chapter, I noted that one of the primary goals of this dissertation
is the articulation of a methodology supported by a theoretical foundation based
upon circulation as a rhetorical activity that takes place within and across multiple
ecologies and that is driven by economic functions particular to digital production.
The theories elaborated in the second chapter serve two functions — they provide
both the foundation for the methodology and the parameters that guide
deployment of the digital methods I am using to investigate the role of circulation
for digital rhetoric. In the third chapter, I presented a review of the methods from
which I will draw and synthesize a digital-native method for digital rhetoric
research: circulation analysis.

Circulation analysis is intended as a method for investigating digital texts
using digital methods; that is, the focus is on the creation and dissemination of
digital-native work. While there are some ecosystem interactions that cross the
print-digital boundary, the main goal of this methodology is not to examine or
mediate that boundary, but to engage digital-native texts on their own terms and
within the ecologies in which they circulate.

Because I am arguing for the development of digital methodologies, it is
important to make clear the distinction between methodology and method.
Spinuzzi (2003), drawing on the work of Sullivan and Porter (1997), provides a

brief summary of the distinctions: “A method is a way of investigating

101

phenomena; a methodology is the theory, philosophy, heuristics, aims, and
values that underlie, motivate, and guide the method” (p. 7). In constructing the
theoretical foundations for a methodology of circulation analysis, I also ﬁnd it
useful to begin with the distinctions articulated by Sullivan and Porter’s Opening
Spaces: Writing Technologies and Critical Research Practices (1997). Sullivan
and Porter's “revision of methodology is intended to call particular attention to its
rhetorical nature: all methodology is rhetorical, an explicit or implicit theory of
human relations which guides the operation of methods” (p. 11); they see
methodology as invention, as the construction of a rhetorical design that
contributes to an understanding to that also effects some kind of positive action
through a rhetorical practice“ (pp. 12-13). Quoting Stanley and Wise (1993),
Sullivan and Porter argue that “method” should be identiﬁed as “techniques or
speciﬁc sets of‘research practices” whereas “methodology” describes how
particular methods are engaged through “broad, theoretically-informed
frameworks” (Stanley & Wise, p. 26). Articulating a rhetoric of methodology,
Sullivan and Porter construct a three-part framework that can serve as a heuristic
when applied to any given methodological model: they argue that any
methodology can be articulated and assessed via its ideology (assumptions
about how people should relate to one another via symbol systems), its practices
(symbolic actions that serve as rules for discourse), and its methods

(procedures, heuristics or tools for investigations) (p. 11 ).

While Sullivan and Porter's work is explicitly aimed at foregrounding

102

ethical research practices as they are instantiated in particular methodologies, ,
speciﬁcally focusing on human interactions in the activities of situated practice (p.
12), my work here seeks to extend the application of their heuristic to the
methodology I am developing by engaging both human and non-human actors at

each of the levels of their rhetorical framework: ideology, practice, and method.

The methodology I am designing is heavily indebted to Actor Network .
Theory (ANT), in particular for the way that it allows the researcher to see non-
human agents as rhetorical actors within the activity systems under study
(Latour, 1987, 2005; Callon, 1987; Law, 1992; Bowker & Star, 1996). At the
ideological level of the rhetoric of methodology—the “assumptions about what
human relations should be and about how people should use symbol systems”
(Sullivan 8 Porter, p. 10)—Actor Network Theory adds assumptions about what
both human-human and human-nonhuman agent relations should be. Thus, ANT
provides a mechanism for examining what I will call post-rhetor agency; that is,
the factors (both human and nonhuman) that motivate circulation once a digital
text has been completed and made available to the networks on which it resides
(and circulates); these networks include human and non-human agents, and can
be seen as the “heterogeneous networks” described in actor-network theory
(Law, 1992). Latour (2004)clariﬁes the use of “network” in terms that resonate
with my use of ANT as a signiﬁcant foundational theory for a digital circulation-
based methodology, arguing that “being connected, being interconnected, being

heterogeneous, is not enough. It all depends on the sort of action that is ﬂowing

103

from one to the other, hence the words ‘net’ and ‘work’. Really, we should say
‘worknet’ instead of ‘network’. It’s the work, and the movement, and the ﬂow, and
the changes that should be stressed” (p. 64). Actor-Network Theory at the
ideological level also works well in terms of viewing networks as ecological

entities; as Jay Lemke (2000) notes, ANT invokes

a relational epistemology which rejects the naive positivist view of objects
or actors as existing in themselves prior to any participation inecosocial
and semiotic networks of interactions (including the interactions by which
they are observed, named, etc.). ANT has much in common with
Ecosocial Dynamics, but adds one crucial observation: that the usual view
of dynamical systems assumes that they have a local topology, and so
events nearby in space and time are more relevant than those at a
distance, leading to neat separation of scales of processes. ANT notes
that the topology of networks is in general non-local, and further that
semiotic artifacts are often the 'boundary objects' that mediate non—local,

scale-breaking interconnections. (theories.htm#AT)

At the level of practice, what Sullivan and Porter (1997) describe as the
“symbolic actions that constitute the conventions that govern or guide discursive
relations...and the construction of knowledge” (p. 10), relationships described via
circulation are formed through the development, movement, and uptake of
“inscriptions”: the texts ”central to knowledge work....that make action at a

distance possible by stabilizing work in such a way that it can'travel across space

104

and time and be combined with other work. Texts are also central to the process
of gaining credibility. They carry work to other people and institutions. They
attempt to present work in such a way that its meaning and signiﬁcance are

irrefutable” (Van House, 2001, n.p.).

These inscriptions include images, animation, video, databases, and new
media work, not just alphabetically encoded documents. Inscriptions (in the case
of circulation methods, the digital texts that are in a state of circulation), interact
within both speciﬁc and multiple ecologies; these ecologies constitute both
boundaries that delineate the scope of circulation-investigation methods (which
may address micro- or macro-ecologies, depending on the scale of the
investigation) and contextual frameworks that become themselves actors that co-
constitute networks of circulation (in the terminology of ANT, the ecologies
themselves are enrolled and translated as constituent members of the actor-

network).

At the level of method, the procedures and tools available to a given
methodology for its investigative activity, circulation analysis requires digital
methods for the study of digital environments, texts, and networks; I argue that
traditional methods that were developed for the analysis of print texts that
Icirculate in analog forms can only provide a limited view of circulation activities
and thus have much less explanatory power than methods that are designed
from the start as an engagement of digital ecologies. As Jenny Edbauer (2005)

suggests

105

Indeed, circulation is always speciﬁc: the ecologies of production,
distribution, consumption, and linkages are thoroughly embedded (and
embodied) in historical, temporal, spatialized, and affective channels.
Although rhetorical analysis methodologies might indeed draw out unique

elements of texts and situations,

the analytic vocabularies ﬂatten out the context of rhetoric as an ongoing

process (p. 117).

Because others (notably Edbauer [2005] and Syverson [1999]) have used
ecological frameworks to examine the interplay of rhetorical activity and cultural
production, I should make clear that while my focus on digital ecologies cannot
be separated from the larger cultural contexts in which they are embedded, the
methods that I am devising at this stage of methodological development focus
primarily on the contexts and activities revealed by investigations of the digital
networks themselves, and not, at this time, on the larger (non-digital)

sociocultural systems that interact with and engage these digital networks.

Circulation Analysis Methods

The basic process of circulation analysis is to ﬁrst determine what scale of
ecosystem is to be addressed and set the boundaries of the study accordingly.
Second, the researcher must choose which text(s) will serve as the starting

point(s) and collect information (metadata) about those texts, including what

106

genre or form the texts take, where they link to, the works they cite or use, and
where they reside or have been published. Once the texts have been selected,
digital tools are used to discover three main facets of circulation: references to
the text (formal and informal citation); links that point to the text; and quotation or
appropriation of any part of the text. The data retrieved by these three methods
are then subject to a series of analyses: content and genre analyses of the works
that cite, link to, or quote from the original text and a network analysis that
produces a map of relationships similar to the sociograms produced by social

network analysis.

Circulation analysis is designed to reveal patterns that arise from the use,
appropriation, and circulation of speciﬁc texts; the selection of those initial texts
depends upon the kinds of questions the researcher is interested in and also
upon the boundaries set by the ecosystems and networks in which this
circulation takes place. As the editor of a peer-reviewed online scholarly journal,
I am most interested in seeing where and how the work we publish circulates
(and what effects derive from whether these texts are more like print texts or
more like new media work). For these questions, I would select works from the
journal and set the boundaries as wide as the scholarly ﬁelds engaged by the
work we publish. This kind of approach (at the macro-ecological level) would also
work well for journalistic works published in online newspapers, or for blogs
(although blogs have some built-in mechanisms that make them easier to work a

with than other kinds of online texts, a point I will return to at the end of this

107

chapter). If the ecosystem to be studied is a microecology, such as all of the
works produced by one individual or produced by a particular collaboration,
questions about how these works related to each other rhetorically can be
addressed with this analysis technique; similarly, digital circulation can be

addressed with in speciﬁc institutional or organizational contexts.

‘ rele/iscpllne
lntitution

   
  

     

Department

 

Figure 4. Ecosystem boundaries for digital circulation analysis.

Once the primary research question (and the concomitant ecosystem
boundaries) have been established and the text or texts whose circulation is to
be investigated have been chosen, the ﬁrst task is to collect data about those
texts and their immediate contexts. The metadata collected about each initial text

includes standard bibliographic elements (author, publication venue, year of

108

publication, date of last modiﬁcation) as well as some information about its status
(distributed, published, peer-reviewed), and some more detailed information
about the format and content, including the number of words (for text-based
documents), the numbers of internal and external links (and a catalog of what the
external links are), how many formal references appear in the text (divided into

print or electronic), and the document type deﬁnition (DTD) if available.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Author Eyman, Douglas

Year 1996

Status Published - Online Peer-Reviewed Journal
Venue Kairos: Rhetoric, Technology, Pedagogy 1.2
URL httpzllenglish.ttu.edu/kairos/1 .2/features/eyman
Format Webtext; moderately transparent

DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional

Modiﬁed February 05, 1999

Pages 19

Words 9110 (excluding references and navigation)
OutLinks 3

References 26 print

 

 

 

 

Table 1. Example Metadata Collection.

A more qualitative assessment of the content is then undertaken, using
two primary methods: an analysis of the genre, if identiﬁable (e.g. a government
website, an online journal, or an online archive of a print newspaper) and an

evaluation of the degree of transparency or hypermediacy exhibited by the text.

109

The ﬁrst method draws on a catalog of digital genres generated by an earlier
citation study conducted by Eyman and Reilly (in-press); the second uses an

evaluative rubric based on Bolter and Grusin’s (1999) categories of remediation:

We deﬁned four degrees of hypermediacy for electronic texts: “highly

transparent, moderately transparent, moderately hypermediated,” or
“highly hypermediated.” The key elements for determining where on the
continuum a given online source would be located are its relationship to
print genres, document design and layout, use of links, color, and images;
and use of interactive programming, animation, digital video, and

hypertext. (Eyman & Reilly, in-press).

The evaluative rubric and catalog of digital genres are provided in Appendix A

and B, respectively.

Once the research question has been established and data collection
completed for the texts that will serve as starting points in the circulation analysis,
the researcher engages three procedures that are both time and labor intensive,
but relatively straightforward in their application. The three procedures examine
formal and informal citations of the initial texts, links from external sources to the
initial texts, and full-text quotation or appropriation of all or part of each of the
initial texts. Prior to analysis, the data returned from each of the following search
techniques is placed in a database that associates the results with the initial texts
(this is necessary because the following techniqUes generate a large amount of

data).

110

For each of the three approaches, it is important to engage more than one
tool—each tool that is available has one or more ﬂaws, so triangulation (via using
multiple tools) is necessary in order to collect the most complete set of data

about how the initial texts are used and circulated.

Formal and Informal Citation

The ﬁrst method I use is a series of standard and specialized searches
that aim to uncover formal citations (in other electronic documents) as well as
written references to the initial texts that are not links (links are covered in the
next method). A basic web search (repeated in Google, AlltheWeb, and AltaVista)
on the author and title of the initial work provides the ﬁrst data set. Any explicit
reference to the work is determined to be a formal citation (following a speciﬁc
citation format, such as MLA or APA) or an informal citation (where the author
and/or title are referenced, but no further bibliographic details are provided).
Speciﬁc genres may beneﬁt from a follow-up basic search utilizing a search
application or research service speciﬁcally designed for that genre: for instance,
High Beam (http://www.highbeam.com) is a search engine designed for tracking
news reports in periodicals (newspapers and magazines); an analysis of the
circulation of legal texts would certainly beneﬁt from a search on WestLaw

(http://www.westlaw.com).

Following the basic web search, citation-speciﬁc searches are carried out

using Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com) and the Thomson/ISI Web of

111

Science (which is a citation tracking database); these search tools are designed
specifically for seeking out formal citation, but they may not provide many results
if the initial texts are outside the scope of the databases these tools draw from.
The data used for most citation analyses are drawn from standard citation
databases that index a core group of journals that are selected subjectively
(Corby, 2001; Funkhouser, 1996). According to the website for Thomson’s
Institute for Scientiﬁc I nformation (ISI), the database indexes a select group of
8,700 international journals (Testa, 2004), under 200 of which are open access
electronic journals (Testa & McVeigh, 2004). For instance, Corby (2001) notes
that Educational Researcher is a prestigious journal in education that is not
indexed by ISI (p. 286); according to Corby, sociology and psychology both
receive better coverage by ISI than education: ISI includes 35 percent of the
1,580 journals indexed by SociologicaIAbstracts and 45 percent of the 1,500
journals covered by PsyclNFO (p. 283). Funkhouser (1996) ﬁnds a similar
problem of underrepresentation of journals in communication studies, concluding
that of the top 27 journals in communications, 14 of them are not indexed by ISI
and, as a result, 25 percent of relevant articles are not cited. Clearly, formal
citation itself is not a sufﬁcient metric for circulation analysis, although it can

contribute to the overall picture.

The same kinds of metadata and genre/content evaluation that were
recorded for the initial text are recorded for each of the citing texts, along with a

copy of. the relevant portion of the citing text and a brief rhetorical analysis of why

112

that reference appears where it does and an indication of the level of formality

and citation format used, if that can be determined.

Sitations: Links to Source Texts

“Sitation” (Rousseau, 1997) describes the relationship between sites on the
lntemet (Aguillo, 1996; McKiernan, 1996) as well as the activity of constructing
the links that represent and enact those relationships. The simplest way to
measure sitation is by examining the links that point from external sources back
to the initial texts whose circulation is of interest; this process is referred to as a
“backlink search.” Currently, only three major search engines support backlink
searches: AltaVista, AlltheWeb, and Google. AltaVista and AlltheWeb are

, consistent in their report of backlinks and are recommended for performing this
type of analysis; Google only displayssresults that pass a certain threshold using
its PageRank TM algorithm (Brin & Page, 1998; see Reilly & Eyman, 2007 for an
explanation of how this algorithm works). Additionally, both AltaVista and
AlltheWeb allow the option of excluding the originating site so that links that
come from within that site are not counted as backlinks (these internal links are
referred to as “self-links”), whereas Google does not allow the exclusion of self-
links. A quick‘comparison can highlight the need to triangulate with multiple
search engines (and the fact that Google is not the only or best search engine for
all tasks), a backlink search performed on the main page of the online journal

Kairos: Rhetoric, Technology, Pedagogy produced 10,100 backlinks in the

113

AlltheWeb search engine, 10,200 backlinks in the AltaVista search engine, and

574 backlinks in the Google search engine (of which about 10% are self-links).

The question of accessibility also plays a role in terms of back linking—no
search engine indexes the entire Web: Lawrence and Giles (1999) used
statistical analyses to argue that search engines were indexing fewer than 50%
of the extant pages on the Web. Search engines also cannot currently index “the
invisible Web”—sites that are password-protected, online databases and
database-driven Web sites, and sites that specifically instruct search engines not
to index them through use of search-engine exclusion metadata. So while
circulation analysis can provide a richly detailed picture of digital circulation

across and through multiple ecologies, it is unlikely to be comprehensive.

The backlinks are recorded, along with the data about their origin (similar
to the citation method above). There is a situation where an identical link is
propagated across several different online domains: in this case, it is best to
simply record one example of the instance and note the number of identical links
(rather than including each one in the data set). These “propagated” links are
typically the result of data mining systems designed to increase trafﬁc to websites
(regardless of the relevance of the link to the site), to trace the origination of
these links, it is useful to use the network analysis tools whois and traceroute (as

discussed in chapter 3).
Quotation or Appropriation

The ﬁnal step in circulation analysis data collection is designed to discover

114

quotations or appropriations of work that is in the initial text. While it is certainly
possible to use Google for this purpose (running searches on every ten words in
a written text, for instance), the word limitation means that the labor costs of
doing the search this way are significant. A better method is to use a plagiarism
detection tool such as mydropbox.com or copyscape (http://copyscape.com).
Mydropbox.com returns results relatively quickly and provides a color coded
representation of the quotations or appropriations it ﬁnds (of course, it can't tell
the difference between properly quoted material and blatant plagiarism; like all of
the methods I discuss here, there could well be a technological mechanism that
would help speed the process, but a careful examination of the data by a person
is still certainly necessary.) Copyscape is an online service that compares
distributed or published websites with other websites, so it is more limited than a
fully-featured plagiarism detection tool, but it does help to provide triangulation.
When using these tools, it is important to directly review the sources that are
quoting or appropriating the initial text: plagiarism detection tools can only show

matches, not evaluate them.

115

 

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Additions to Bibliography of Electronically-Availablc Sources: MOOs. MUDs, MUCKS,
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Issues of accessibility for this method are primarily limited to the distinction
between open and proprietary formats (the latter being inaccessible without the
software needed to read it) and to non-text formats ( such as PDF ﬁles that are

simply images of the printed page, rather than searchable/usable PDFs).

Ownership as a Measure of Circulation

There is one additional measure that is useful for citation analysis:
searching social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/) and social
bibliographic sites such as CiteULike (httpzllciteulikecom). In each case, the
information revealed doesn't directly address rhetorical circulation, but it does
provide a picture of who has a copy of the work in question (regardless of

whether it has been cited, linked to, or quoted).

117

Deﬁnitions and Data Coding

Because it is important to distinguish the various forms of citation and

sitation, the deﬁnitions of the terms I've used in the description of the methods

above (which will in turn be used when coding the data) follow:

Formal citation: A reference (including a quotation or paraphrase) that
includes bibliographic information following a citation format; the
bibliographic information typically appears in a separate references

section that is keyed to in-text parentheticals or footnotes.

Informal citation: A reference that includes only limited bibliographic

information (e.g. author/title; title/joumal but no author).

Simple link: A link that occurs in a list of links or is otherwise separate from

other contextualizing content.

Embedded link: A link that whose text is part of the content of the page
(i.e. not explicitly displaying the URL). This may be within a paragraph
(deeply embedded) or within a link list (shallowly embedded). For
example, a linking document might include the text “I was searching for a
good example of visual rhetoric” and the underlined portion of that text
would link to, for instance, a bibliography of visual rhetoric. In this case,
the actual URL is not displayed, nor is any information about the work

being referenced.

118

Bibliographic link: A link that is formatted as a formal reference, following a
citation format. In many cases, where a formal link is present, a
bibliographic link will also be present, but there are many cases (such as
bibliographies that are not part of an article or essay) where only a
bibliographic link is present (hence the distinction between formal citation

and bibliographic link).

Annotated link: A link that include a brief or extended annotation of the

target source or a copy of the target's abstract.

Propagated link: A software-agent generated link that recurs in the dataset

(see the following chapter for a discussion of this type of link).

Quotation: Attributed, quoted text that may or may not be accompanied by

citation information.

Appropriation: Unattributed quotation (plagiarism) or full copy of the
original text, with or without identifying information about the authorship of

the original.

Invisible: The HTML code for a link to the source is included without any
link text (thus, the link does not appear in the referring document. In this
case, the author of the referring document has considered using the

source but ultimately not done so.

lnaccessible: The use of the target is indeterminable because the link is

inaccessible (e.g. requiring a password or fee).

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After identifying what kind of link or reference is pointing back to the
source document, the next step is to determine the degree of interaction with the
source as expressed in how those references are formed. The references are

coded in the dataset with one of the following:

o P — The reference is in parenthetical notation but not connected to a quote
or paraphrase. This is typical of scientiﬁc styles; an example from the
paragraph below is my use of (Connors, 1999; Hyland, 1999; Robillard,
2006; Thelwall, 2003) to point to works that use a particular approach
without drawing on any one of them speciﬁcally. A variant on this

. construction is coded as [P], indicating that the actual reference appears
in a note rather than in a direct parenthetical (so, for the above example,
instead of the parenthetical with names and dates, I might have put [1]
and then in the notes section following each chapter I would list the same
information that would have been in the parenthetical. I don't make a
distinction between these two forms because the use is essentially the
same, the actual reference information is simply deferred to a later portion
of the text in order to minimize breaking the ﬂow of the narrative it is

supporting.

o S — Marks a single quote or paraphrase. When examining both the
connections (circulation) and the motivations (rhetorical analysis of the
actions of the citers) this can be delineated as SQ for single quote and SP

for single paraphrase.

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o M — Indicates multiple quotes or paraphrases and is followed by the
number (i.e. M3). As with S, M can be divided into MQn and MPn (where n

is the number of quotes or paraphrases).

o D — I use this to code cases where the referring text is “in dialogue” with
the content of the source article: the referring text is arguing against the
source or is using the source to further an argument based on interactions

with the source itself (as is common in debates or online discussions).

0 U — Unknown (because the referring text is inaccessible due to password
protection, imposition of a fee for access, or it is in a language I am unable
to translate. Given enough resources, this last category can be converted
through translation. For this kind of assessment, though, language is really

only a barrier when it is presented in non-alphabetic script.

0 N — None. No interaction per se is engaged beyond the link itself. This is
most often the case for informal, simple, embedded, bibliographic,

annotated, and invisible links.

Both kind and degree of link or reference can provide an implicit account
of the rhetorical use of these references; circulation analysis can be used in
conjunction with a rhetorical analysis of the use of these links (see Connors,
1999; Hyland, 1999; Robillard, 2006; Thelwall, 2003) in order to better
understand the motivations of the citers, but this aspect changes the kinds of
research questions addressed by circulation analysis by shifting the emphasis

from the post-rhetorical agency of the digital text itself to the actions of those

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interacting with the text; thus, I see this as a useful research method, but one that
is not required for the carrying out the kinds of circulation analysis described in

chapters 5 and 6.

Analysis

Once the data has been collected, the information is placed into matrices
that code the relationships of the initial text to those found during the research in
terms of content, genre, and use (that is, formal and informal citation, linking,
quotation or appropriation). These matrices are used to produced rhetorical
relationship maps using visualization tools such as GraphVis
(http://www.graphviz.org) or Pajek (http://vlado.fmf.uni-lj.si/pub/networks/pajekl).
Because the level of detail collected is exceptionally rich, any interesting patterns
that are revealed through the data visualization can easily be further investigated
and theorized. In addition to the network analysis maps, descriptive statistics,
such as number of cites over time, geographic regions and languages
represented in the data set are compiled and output as tables and graphs; an

example of a “cites over time” graph appears below as Table 2.

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.s
.0

.1
0

Number of Links

 

O-INUAU'IONOID

1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006
. Year

Figure 8. Sitations over time for Eyman, 1996.

Blogs and “Digital Fingerprints”

Before presenting the case studies that show the application of this
method, I want to consider how this methodology may be developed using new
digital research tools by looking at the case of blogs. Blogs represent an
excellent example of how circulation tracking mechanisms are being built into
evolving digital genres. Current blogging systems typically include options for
enabling syndication of content, tracking of readers, and tracking of comments
(which may progress across several disparate blogs). Feeds (syndication),
pingbacks (tracking of readers), and trackbacks (tracking of comments) are
active systems that must be initiated by the blog's composer(s). Additional data
about circulation can be gleaned from circulation analysis (described above) or

through server log analysis (both of which are passive methods, in the sense that

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no action must be taken by the composer to generate the data).

Dave Shea's (2004) description of syndication is one of the most
accessible currently available. He explains that “RSS/XML/Atom are
technologies, but syndication is a process. RSS [Really Simple Syndication] and
Atom are two ﬂavors of what is more or less the same thing: a ‘feed’ which is a
wrapper for pieces of regularfy and sequentially-updated content, be they news
articles, weblog posts, a series of photographs, and more” (online). The activity
of syndication then, is process of using RSS/Atom for automated updates from
either the perspective of the supplier (the composer of the digital text) or the
subscriber (the reader). It's important to note the use of the term subscriber here
— it is no accident that syndication is explicitly aligned with practices of
publication—and this is one way to track circulation (as the supplier can view the

subscriber list and see where the texts are being sent).

Pingback, as explained in the WordPress Codex (2005), is a system that
“lets you notify the author of an article if you link to his article (article on a blog, of
course). If the links you include in an article you write on a blog lead to a blog
which is pingback-enabled, then the author of that blog gets a notiﬁcation in the
form of a pingback that you linked to his article” (online). Pingback, then is a form
of automated link tracking, although it relies on a system that understands the
protocol (that is, not every link to a particular digital text is guaranteed to register,

even on pingback-enabled systems).

Similar to pingback, the trackback function “helps you to notify another

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author that you wrote something related to what he had written on his blog, even
if you don't have an explicit link to his article. This improves the chances of the
other author sitting up and noticing that you gave him credit for something”
(WordPress, 2005). Both pingbacks and trackbacks are analogous to citation and
are similar in function to cyberrnetric analytics (although they are limited by
proximity — that is, pingbacks and trackbacks work between two digital texts and
cannot trace or track appropriation or use of the text once it moves beyond the

systems that use these tools).

Since these digital ﬁngerprint mechanisms are primarily only available to
blogs and not to all digital texts, I have decided to not use blogs as case studies,
although a separate application of circulation analysis tailored to the exigencies

and generic structure of blogs will be part of my future research.

In the next two chapters, I apply the circulation analysis methods I have
outlined above to two different ecologies — an individual electronic portfolio (a
tightly bounded microecology) and a series of works published in peer-reviewed

online journals in the ﬁelds of computers and writing and communication studies.

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Chapter 5: Circulation Analysis and the Electronic Portfolio Ecosystem

In this chapter and in the chapter that follows, I apply circulation analysis
as a digital-native method for exploring and investigating digital-native genres
and for mapping the ecosystems in which those genres circulate. For this
demonstration of the methodology, I will be looking at the works in an individual
electronic portfolio, ﬁrst examining the ecological interrelationships and
interdependencies that occur within the tightly bounded ecosystem of one
individual's work and then working outward to the larger ecologies engaged by
the works in the individual e-portfolio. In the next chapter I'll be looking at
circulation on a much larger scale, examining trends in the publication of online
scholarship in the humanities. In each case, the goal of the chapter is not to
produce a fully-ﬂeshed out research project; rather, my aim is to demonstrate
why we need digital methods for digital texts and show how such methods might
be deployed. Because I am not concerned with a deﬁnitive outcome as a result of
these cases, I can instead focus on methodological implications and applications
tangential to the cases themselves.

An ecological framework for understanding interaction does not require a
large ecosystem to work, although most ecosystems are relatively large (such as
ponds and forests). However, in the Amazonian rainforests, giant epiphytic plants
called bromeliads grow upon the trees; within the bromeliad exists a micro-

ecosystem that can be studied in much the same way as the entire rainforest.

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The point here is that complex interactions and inter-relationships don't happen
only within larger social and cultural economies—in a knowledge ecology, an
given text (particular multimedia works like those described in chapter 2) can be
an instantiation of an ecosystem; similarly, the corpus of one individual's output
can be viewed and analyzed as both an ecosystem in its own right and as
connected to larger ecosystems as well as an ecological superstructure (e.g. a
discipline or institution), much as the bromeliad both houses an ecosystem and
plays a role in the larger ecosystem of the rainforest, which in turn is part of a
biome (a large geographical area of distinctive plant and animal groups adapted
to a particular environment).

Analysis of the smaller or micro-ecosystem (particulany at the individual
level) will not show the same kinds of interactions as those in larger ecosystems,
but it is nonetheless useful to consider the rhetorical and network relationships
embedded in these more focused and tightly bounded ecosystems. Once the
individual portfolio has been analyzed, a second step (although not one carried
out in this dissertation) would be to analyze the individual's work as it relates to
the immediate local environment, to the larger departmental and institutional
ecosystems, and to the disciplinary ecology (a form of this last approach is taken
up in the following chapter). Thus I begin with a circulation analysis of an

individual electronic portfolio as an example of a micro-ecosystem.

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Genre Ecologies and Electronic Portfolios

Portfolios have long been used in some disciplines—particularly in the arts
and humanities—to organize and present work; to provide'a context for
discussion, review and feedback from instructors, mentors, colleagues and
friends; and to demonstrate progress and accomplishments over time
(Greenberg & Jafari, 2003). Because the production of texts has become
increasingly digital, (even texts designed for print circulation are crafted with
digital tools), it has consequently become easier to develop personal,
pedagogical, and institutionally-driven electronic portfolios —- and the area of
electronic portfolio development and research has seen enormous growth over
the last ﬁve years (Batson, 2002; Cohn & Hibbits, 2004; Lorenzo & lttleson,
2005)

My own interest in electronic portfolio research stems from two
observations: there is (or could be) a relationship between electronic portfolios
and personal digital archives, and the electronic portfolio infrastructures currently
available are either monolithic-institutionally situated systems (what Helen Barrett
[qtd. In Barrett & Wilkerson, 2004] calls “assessment management systems” —
not really electronic portfolios at all), or simple template-driven static websites
.(Batson [2002] differentiates between these static systems and dynamic,
database-driven systems, where the former are “webfolios” and the latter
“ePortfolios“). There are currently very few systems that are available for the

individual user; and none of the current systems provide adequate mechanisms

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for making explicit the relationships between the elements selected for
representation in any given electronic portfolio. While institutional systems can be
relatively adept at showing progress toward goals and providing mechanisms for
assessment, and some proposed systems are linking in to social networking
systems to expand the electronic portfolio from a primarily personal/institutional
undertaking to a socially-connected identity kit (see, for instance, the innovative
work of Werdmuller and Tosh's ELGG project at http://elgg'.org, also reported on
in Tosh & Werdmuller [2004]), there is still a gap between the personally useful
and portable electronic portfolio and the institutional assessment-driven platforms
that are dominating the higher-education market.

But‘ if the electronic portfolio is viewed through an ecological lens, the
function of the portfolio shifts from a mechanism to an environment. In the
portfolio environment, it is possible to show the energy inputs (where the digital
texts within the portfolio originated and how they were developed through the
rhetorical production of the author, articulated through reﬂection statements or
blog entries), the various forms of material cycling (via drafts and explicit
acknowledgment of re-use and adaptation of earlier works), and both internal and
external relationships (the latter would include both integration with social
networks and interaction within communities of scholarly practice ranging from
classes to institutions to fields or disciplines). The processes of reﬂection,
assessment, or shaping a coherent research agenda take place within the

portfolio ecosystem, but these become instances of rhetorical action within the

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ecological structure rather than the sole motivator and delineator of the portfolio's
boundaries. Circulation analysis provides methods for uncovering each of these
ecological processes; the application of circulation analysis also helps to frame
the portfolio itself as an ecological system rather than simply a collection of
documents produced for a single rhetorical purpose.

It was during the process of developing an electronic portfolio system that
included tools for visually representing the connections between the selections in
a given portfolio (Eyman & Bernhardt, 2006) that I began to seriously consider
the need to develop methods that could help identify those relationships (in other
words, the methods that l have incorporated into my circulation analysis
methodology in this dissertation). And while the system for automatically
generating and visualizing those relationships within the electronic portfolio is not
yet complete, the methods outlined in chapter four can nonetheless be applied to
an individual electronic portfolio (by hand, as it were) in order to tease out some
of the relationships that would not otherwise be explicitly represented in the
construction of the portfolio.

An example of an implicit or even hidden relationship that can be
uncovered via circulation analysis is the relationship between texts that are the
product of distinct exegeses (such as course assignments) that have an
underlying connection to each other based on the interests, position, or
composing processes of the texts' producer. For the portfolio of an advanced

academic, this may be (for the most part) obvious, but an undergraduate portfolio

130

that could make the connections between texts explicit and represent them
visually, if developed over the course of the student's curriculum, could begin to
show the coherence of the curriculum and also encourage students to view the
relationships not only between the texts they produce but the courses in which
they participate (and this scenario is also one of the motivations for developing
the visual portfolio system).

While it is unavailable for adoption and use in electronic portfolios
and has some significant limitations in terms of how relationships are visualized,
there is a new network visualization tool available from TouchGraph.com. I've
included a screen capture of TouchGraph's representation of the network formed
by examining texts related to “digital rhetoric” available on Amazon.com in order

to show the kind of visual mapping that could be included in a visual portfolio.

131

 

Figure 9. TouchGraph map of texts on “digital rhetoric" available at

Amazon.com.

A key assumption that drives this approach to revealing connections within
an individual corpus of work is that most portfolios are instantiations of what
Spinuzzi and Zachary (2000) call genre ecologies: “ an interrelated group of
genres (artifact types and the interpretive habits that have developed around
them) used to jointly mediate the activities that allow people to accomplish
complex objectives" (p. 172). An individual electronic portfolio can focus on one
knowledge ecosystem (Which is the case when students turn in a portfolio of

drafts of one essay or research project) or it may be made up of a series of

132

intersecting genre ecologies (exempliﬁed by academic research and teaching
portfolios). In my academic online portfolio, for instance, I provide access to
copies of journal articles and book chapters I've published (or links to those that
are available online), seminar papers written for courses that I've taken, my MA
thesis, institutional documentation of my progress as a doctoral student, syllabi
and teaching materials, and written reﬂections on the portfolio itself.

A good example of a genre ecology occurs in the teaching portfolio. The
genres that typically show up in a teaching portfolio include the syllabus, the
course assignment, the teaching philosophy statement, and often documentation
of teaching effectiveness as well (e.g. peer-review reports or letters, student
evaluations of teaching, etc.). These genres work together to provide a picture of
both the theoretical approaches and pedagogical practices engaged in by a given
teacher, and this portfolio may serve the needs of multiple audiences: the teacher
herself can draw on the portfolio when developing new courses, the institution in
which the teacher works can use the portfolio as a means of assessment, and
external institutions can use the portfolio when evaluating the teacher's work
during job search or award nomination procedures. In teaching portfolios, the
connections between genres is often explicit — the syllabi reference the course
materials; the teaching philosophy and reﬂections reference the syllabi and
course materials; and the evaluations may reference statements of teaching
philosophy, syllabi, and course materials. Because of this explicit marking of the

interconnectedness of the texts that make up the portfolio, it would seem that

133

applying circulation analysis methods to uncover these relationships would be
unnecessary; thus, while the teaching portfolio is a good example of a genre

ecology, it is not the focus of my investigation for this chapter.

Mapping Relationships Between Documents and Tracing Re-Assembly

To test the usefulness of circulation analysis methods for uncovering
complex (and possibly unobserved) relationships within the electronic portfolio, I
have applied two main methods to my own professional/academic portfolio:
content analysis via keyword distribution and full-text searches using plagiarism
detection software. I have chosen to use my own portfolio for this exercise
because my familiarity with the work in the portfolio provides a triangulation
mechanism bywhich I can judge the utility of the methods I am deploying. I can
also evaluate the degree to which these methods show me a picture of my own
work that I might not otherwise have seen.

Before applying the search tools, I ﬁrst identiﬁed and mapped the genres
in the portfolio so that I could see relationships that worked both within and

between the genre ecologies present in my work.

 

 

Basic Genre Number
Coursework
Short Assignments/Modules 19
Reading Responses 18
Seminar Papers 11
Project proposals 6
Annotated Bibliography 3
Conference Proposals 9

Table 2. Genres present in a PhD student electronic portfolio.

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Book Chapters

VVebsﬂes

Syllabi

Book Reviews

Teaching: Assignments & Rubrics
Journal Articles

Nous-010100

Table 2 (con't). Genres present in a PhD student electronic portfolio.

The kinds of genres in my portfolio are, I think, typical of those found in
PhD portfolios of rhetoric and writing students, although a survey of such
portfolios shows a range of production which includes more multimedia work in
some portfolios and a focus on print products in others (this is usually indicative
of whether the PhD program sees digital rhetoric as a central or ancillary part of
the curriculum). It's clear from Table 2 that the majority of work in this portfolio
comes from course assignments; many of the other genres are also derived from
or extensions of those course assignments as well.

For examples of applying digital methods to the digital texts in my portfolio,
I am going to focus ﬁrst on three particular genres: seminar papers, conference
proposals, and book chapters. The exigency for each of these genres arises from
the ecologies they engage — seminar papers are part of the program of
coursework (and are individually part of each course ecosystem); conference
proposals are one of the key mechanisms through students engage their ﬁelds
and become professionalized as members of the discipline (and each conference
has its own fOCUS and thus serves as a kind of speciﬁc ecosystem as well); book

chapters (and journal articles, which I will address below) are part of the archival

135

speciﬁc elements within each book's thematic ecosystem). Each genre engages
successively larger disciplinary ecologies while simultaneously remaining

grounded within the speciﬁc ecosystems for which they were created.

Seminar Papers

The seminar papers in my electronic portfolio come from a range of
courses, including the history of rhetoric, contemporary rhetorical theory,
advanced technical communication, theories of professional writing, methods in
rhetoric and writing, composition studies, and a research colloquium. In order to
see how the seminar papers from these various courses constituted a speciﬁc
genre ecology, I ﬁrst extracted the keywords from each paper and then compiled
an aggregate keyword list; this list was then transformed into a “text cloud” as a
means to visually represent the major themes and ideas circulating within this
specific corpus“. Examining word frequency does have some drawbacks, for
instance, infrequently appearing words aren't necessarily unimportant; and some
concepts might not appear explicitly (like “education” or “writing”); thus it is
important to pair word-frequency counts and visualizations with full-text searches
as well“.

The ﬁrst 25 words with the highest frequency appearing in all of the

 

3 I used http://www.tagcrowd.com/ to generate the text clouds; although I have php code to do it

myself, it was far simpler for this iteration of this project to use the freely available web-based
tool instead.

Because I am using my own portfolio, I can also see when these cases occur — for example, in
many of the word frequency lists the word rhetoric (or a variant of it) appeared lower in the list
than I had expected, most likely because the works address the idea of rhetoric implicitly
rather than explicitly. This is an instance where familiarity can provide a mechanism for
triangulation and help me to gauge the effectiveness of the methods I am using.

136

seminar papers (excluding articles, conjunctions, and prepositions) are:

information, documentation, design, research, digital
rhetoric, system, usability, online, architecture
media, practices, project, users, communication
students, composition, writing, context, scholarship
technical, narrative, rhetorical, print, cultural

and the text cloud visualization (using 75 keywords) looks like this:

.. architecture . 5 .. --
communtcatlon coniposulon .;-:-:..~.:..~..c cultural. current

deSign . .5. 5 digital (itscitfgllr'te
documentatton n...
however important .. r5 1. media . . .. .

narrative needs. online participants
past‘it utar practices prmt process production project

.5 3: researCh-I rhetoric scholarship

,specific .. students system . technical
tecl'mol(taggzies texts . .. ...... usabl lity
userusers «writing

Figure 10. Seminar Paper Text Cloud.

Despite the relatively disparate courses, there appears to be a general
cohesion to the seminar papers — the visualization shows a strong emphasis on
documentation, research, rhetoric, and design. This generally matches my
expectations, although I was surprised to see “composition” and “students" less
visible than I thought they might be, given that much of my work focuses on

teaching with technology.

137

Conference Proposals

I currently have 9 conference proposals (eight of which were accepted) in
my electronic portfolio. The proposals cover 7 different conferences: two
proposals for the annual Computers and Writing Conference (C&W), two for the
Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), and one each
for the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the Association of
lntemet Researchers conference (AoIR), the National Council of Teachers of
English conference (NCTE), the Georgia Information Literacy Conference (GIL),
and the Sweetland Writing Center conference on Originality, Imitation, and
Plagiarism.

The ﬁrst 25 words with the highest frequency appearing in all of the
conference proposals (excluding articles, conjunctions, and prepositions) are:

digital, students, sources, electronic, practices

literacy, analysis, research, citation, online

writing, presentation, study, course, methods

teaching, technologies, rhetoric, teachers, communities
information, pedagogical, print, traditional, address

and here is the text cloud visualization (also using 75 keywords):

address . 5 anatys1s .... .- case Citation
5i mic: . .. c..:>rr11111.1r1itie::s <_ :131n;-.>ntels s...
course-(ritu- .1 d1g1tal electron1c
. , .-- . u-...1 ...- Jet)»: examine .....-..5.,~.:.. 1 ...r 5.

.5. 111011111111; instruction jourmls .5 we... media
methods networks online uu. .t partic .ipants
. pedaswogmat practices presentation
Infill: ..,.. remediating research
resources rhetoric sources Speaker 5
students . teachers teaching
technologies texts thenry l‘r as.:lit.i«f:.ne1l .. 5. 5. usability -
ways writing

Figure 11. Conference Paper Text Cloud.

138

It is immediately apparent that there is a sharp distinction between my
coursework and the work that I planned to present at conferences. The
conference proposals certainly were more pedagogically oriented, with students,
practices, electronic, sources and digital much more visible than they were in the
seminar paper text cloud. The next data set, book chapters, takes yet another
step away from the classroom and into the more formal arena of disciplinary

communication.

Book Chapters

The eight chapters in my portfolio (seven are published; one is in-press)
appear to cover a much broader range of subjects and themes than the
conference proposals or seminar papers examined above. The chapters deal
with how one engages in the ﬁeld of computers and writing; the importance of
developing research networks for work in digital rhetoric; how usability might be
reconﬁgured as a research method in rhetoric and writing; teaching writing with
technology; the role of technology in the practices of revision; a case study on
the digital literacies of advanced undergraduates; researching the virtual
workplace; and developing new methods for assessing the value and authority of
digital texts. Each one addresses a facet of digital rhetoric, but the speciﬁc
arenas engaged are fairly wide ranging.

The ﬁrst 25 words with the highest frequency appearing in all of the book

139

chapters (excluding articles, conjunctions, and prepositions) are:

students, writing, research, digital, computer
texts, technology, electronic,literacy, community
course, practices, journal, print, process

online, social, citation, hypertext, revision

5 clue-«IUD class C IaSSICZfruIn Ctﬂi c1 LI'VH (cl-

COI I II I lumty 5: UII‘DJKIIIUII C5-i;-"1‘21_Lg:-ut;er C(iIIII'SIFB . .. .. ..- (1.5.5.21311

.- digital elc ctronic
I"‘1‘:."j3€i“t5—f:)-\'I; important Journal
rizt—iti‘imis no; twork unlit 1153 p.‘5i"‘:‘l.‘lcij).lttts ...;...~....::..a.». ..
praCticeS print. process trud :1 firm projects
Mame-.. ., research..m.m . $0: 1.1
5 StUdentS <niport teat-1 Ill‘5§_J teChnOIogy
teXtS..1...2*-. .suusabil'ityLﬁ-EQJusers5 wcbwriting

Figure 12. Book chapter text cloud.

The connections between the book chapters show yet another series of
main topics, although inthis case, like the conference proposals, “students” is
again a central term, as are research and practices, with community and writing
adding further dimensions that are not as apparent in the previous two genre
ecologies.

Of course, considering each of these genres separately yields an
incomplete picture of the connections that can be drawn — many of the seminar
papers were the ﬁrst drafts of book chapters or served as topics that were
developed into conference proposals (and in some cases, the work presented in
the proposals was designed to report on and promote the book chapters as well).

In order to see cross-genre connections, I created a text cloud that was derived

14o

from the combined text of all of the works used for the preceding three examples:

address analysis case citation
C;i\.5‘-.'i5i: communities ---. (amputers .:... ..5...

course .-.» 5. dIgItal electronic
», 5 5 . .examine a»... 5, «». 5...”...

- 5. in i: :( Ti: {3. in? {.51er {If-"H jﬂtttil 5! ‘ _ 2; . Int-“(I51
mEthOdS -.5 . 5. networks online : pnrtc‘wuit

» p..dagomcal practices presentation

55'555 .. ,. remediating research
re;ources rhetonc 5 sources speaker p... .

StUdentS teachers tea CIIInO

technologies texts theory traditional. . ~ l-lS-1IC}'II_Iif-y 5..

5.5.5.153 W H ti n g

Figure 13. Text cloud of seminar papers, proposals, and book

chapters.

In this case, the different areas combine to provide a more complete (and
arguably more coherent) view of my research and scholarship to date.
Interestingly, this view most closely reﬂects the text cloud of the conference
proposals (despite the fact that the proposals are considerably shorter and carry
fewer keywords than do the other genres). Again, students and pedagogy are
foregrounded, as is an interest in the digital, focusing on practices, research
methods, electronic sources and their analysis, and citation. It is clear from this
view, however, that although l consider myself a rhetorician, I am not explicitly
engaging rhetoric to the degree that perhaps I should (it ﬁgures less prominently

than “technologies” even though most of my work is not interested in

141

technologies as instrumental, but rather as tools for engaging and applying
rhetoric).

While this application of keyword analysis can help make explicit the
thematic connections evident within the overall collection of work, the full-text
search tools appear to be the most useful for looking at connections across
genres in ways that highlight re-use, re-mix, and re-assembly. As an example, if I
select my master's thesis as a starting point and compare not just keywords but
the full texts of the works in the portfolio, I can see the ways in which the earlier
work that l have done has filtered through and inﬂuenced my later work

(sometimes through self-citation and other times through self-appropriation):

 

 

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Figure 14. Circulation over time through re-use and self-appropriation.

Using full-text analysis tools, I can see that the theory I built upon in my
MA thesis (1995) found its way into my ﬁrst peer-reviewed journal article (1996)

and that both that articulation of theory (as reconﬁgured in the article) and the

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pedagogical applications I discussed in my thesis recombined as the core of my
ﬁrst contribution to an edited collection (2000). Both the journal article and book
chapter informed an online course assignment I developed in a “Teaching with
Technology” course that I took my ﬁrst semester as a graduate student (Fall,
2004). These three examples of works derived from my thesis all cover the same
general theoretical and pedagogical ground; however, I found that I had also
appropriated a few key theoretical elements from the 1996 journal article to
sUpport arguments I made about student authorship and plagiarism at the
Sweetland Writing Center conference on Originality, Imitation, and Plagiarism in
2005 (but this appropriation did not ﬁlter into the conference proposal, which is

one of the proposals in my electronic portfolio.)

Moving from Local to Global Connections

In the previous section, I outlined the methods that could be used to help
uncover and map the relationships between digital texts within an electronic
portfolio. However, the portfolio is also itself part of a larger ecosystem, and it is
as a smaller part of a larger system that the methods of circulation analysis can
help to show not only the internal relationships but also the connections that may
be made to external sources as well. Again. taking up the example of my
professional/academic portfolio, I apply the general search and backlinking
methods to see what connections have been made to the work in my electronic

portfolio (as opposed to the internal connections within it).

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Not surprisingly, there are very few links to the work in my portfolio: there
are several self-promotional links (i.e. I placed the links in various proﬁles and
directories), several links from blogs (mostly related to interactions with the blog
authors at conferences), and links to three speciﬁc works within the portfolio from
the EServer TC Library (“a cooperative library for tech communicators,”
http://tc.eserver.org/). So while the portfolio itself does have connections to a
larger network, those connections are tenuous at best. However, one of the
works that is part of my electronic portfolio is also the ﬁrst peer-reviewed article I
published; and because it was published online (in Kairos:A Journal of Teachers
of Webbed Environments 1.2 — before I joined the editorial staff the following
year) instead of including a copy in the portfolio, I simply link to it. In this case (as
with other works that are available on the web and are included in my portfolio
via linking), I am explicitly crossing the boundary between the individual
electronic portfolio and the larger disciplinary ecologies of publication.

Using the search, backlink, and fulltext methods described in chapter 4, I
discovered 33 links back to this 1996 article. Some of the connections I
uncovered were somewhat surprising (I describe those in the methodological
reﬂections below), but there are two results that are illustrative of the kinds of
detail that these methods can provide: digital work is global, and digital work is
always in circulation; that is, it is always current each time it is found by another
reader/user.

Looking at the links and references to the article I published in Kairos in

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1996, l was encouraged to see that it had been linked to as often as it had (I did
not expect a high degree of citation for my initial foray into academic publication).
But it also immediately struck me that many of those links originated in other
countries (based on the country code or server location as determined through
traceroute and whois) and several were in languages other than English: 27 of
the pages with links back to my work are in English, 2 are in Spanish, and 1 each
are in Gennan, French, Bulgarian, and Icelandic. The English language pages,
moreover, were housed not only in the US and Canada, but also in Brazil, Spain,
and Belgium. While language does not correlate to locale, taken together, the
multiple languages and network infrastructure locations point to a decidedly
global reach for digital texts.

I also plotted the number of links over time, and found that there was not,
as I had expected, an initial (relatively) high number of links that tapered off over
time as the work lost its sense of immediacy. In fact, there was not a clear pattern
of links or references over time, but there was certainly a steady number of links,

with dips and surges apparently at random:

145

Number of Links

_L—.L
0-:

ANOdbUO‘ICD‘D

 

O

1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006
Year

Figure 15. Links over time for Eyman, 1996.

This general lack of a pattern over time has been consistent for all of the

online texts I've evaluated using circulation analysis methods, leading me to
suggest that digital texts are essentially timeless for the duration of their
existence within digital networks—these texts are, until they are lost or deleted,
effectively always in circulation. And even after a digital text is removed from the
network, traces and links often remain (and there may well be an archived copy
at http://archive.o’rg as well). The implications of this always-in-circulation
characteristic of digital texts, when considered with regard to the construction of
electronic portfolios, would seem to require portfolio publishers to make careful

considerations of whether they want their work available indeﬁnitely or only as, in

146

effect, a time-bound snapshot.

Methodological Reﬂections

In the ﬁnal sections of this chapter, I address the outcomes of the
experiment in terms of how the methods of circulation analysis might prove
valuable in other contexts, based on my observations while deploying them as a

way to study and situate my own electronic portfolio.

Rhetorical Value and Economic Value

One of the reference forms identiﬁed in the previous chapter as the
“propagated link” first appeared when I began looking at backlinks to the Kairos
article I linked to from within my electronic portfolio. I was at ﬁrst unsure what
these links were or where they were coming from — there were 174 identical links
pointing back to my work, but they were coming from pages that simply listed
links to many seemingly unrelated websites, along with a series of
advertisements. As it turns out, this is not a particularly new phenomenon: these
pages are called “scraper sites” (because they useautomated bots to “scrape”
the content of websites and use that content to build their own link pages) —
“scraper sites” are an offshoot of link farms, which were originally part of a
system of search engine optimization designed to improve a website's placement
in search engine rankings. Zoltan Gyongyi and Hector Garcia-Molina (2005)

provide an overview of the different ways that website producers can “game” the

147

search engine ranking system; they use the term spamming or spamdexing “to
refer to any deliberate human action that is meant to trigger an unjustiﬁably
favorable relevance or importance for some web page, considering the page's
true value” (p. 2). Spammers typically attempt to manipulate the page rank
algorithms by creating links that that search systems believe have value,
regardless of whether there is any actual use for the humans who use those
search engines.
Gybngyi and Garcia-Molina note that
the most wide-spread method for creating a massive number of outgoing
links is directory cloning: One can ﬁnd on the World Wide Web a number
of directory sites, some larger and better known (e.g., the DMOZ Open
Directory, dmoz.org, or the Yahoo! Directory, dir.yahoo.com), some others
smaller and less famous (e.g., the Librarian's Index to the lntemet, lii.org).
These directories organize web content around topics and subtopics, and
list relevant sites for each. Spammers then often simply replicate some or
all of the pages of a directory, and thus create massive outgoinglink .
structures quickly. (p. 5)
And this is precisely the case in the “propagated” links I found — the references to
my work were coming from a replication of a page from the DMOZ Open
directory. The activities of Spammers who attempt to game the search engine
algorithms has the unfortunate side effect of complicating the search and

backlink methods employed for circulation analysis: in order to achieve the most

148

complete picture of circulation value, it's important to ﬁlter the spamdexing
results.

But it also leads to an important distinction — some links and references
have clear rhetorical value: they are used in particular ways to support
arguments or to connect the author to a particular discourse community (for
discussions of the rhetorical applications of citation, see Cozzens, 1989,
Connors, 1999, and Rose, 1999; for a taxonomy of rhetorical uses of citation and
reference, see Robillard, 2006). Other links, however, such as those that are
created in order to drive trafﬁc to particular websites, have an economic value
that is not tied to a particular rhetorical act. The links that have economic (as
opposed to rhetorical) value tend to be produced by nonhuman actors, and they
are designed to ultimately provide material proﬁt for those who deploy them
(thus, there is no accrual of social value here, only an attempt to gain material

capital).

Circulation Analysis as Research Tool

The other outcome of this initial application of circulation analysis is the
development of an ancillary use: not only can circulation analysis help trace the
movement and use of digital texts, but it can also serve as a research tool as
well. Examining the connections being made to my work helped me to see how
others are approaching similar theoretical questions or developing similar

pedagogical applications, and following the other works that they cited or linked

149

to, l was able to tap into citation networks that could help me with my own
research agenda. Moreover, when using the full-text search tools, I found both an
instance of outright plagiarism of my work (but recontextualized as part of what
appears to be a seminar paper on “Hypertext and Theological Reﬂection”) and an
instance of a scholar who drew on the work of the same theorists that I used and
came to nearly identical conclusions, but who had not likely been aware of my
work in the area (there was no identical text used, unlike the plagiarized case
above, and the context was sufﬁciently different enough that I don't believe this to
be a case of non-attribution); in the latter case, the reference list included many
sources that I was using myself, but it also included several sources with which I
was not familiar, prompting me to expand the bibliographic network associated
with that facet of my scholarship.

Applying circulation analysis methods to my electronic portfolio yielded
some interesting results:

- l was able to see (through the text cloud visualizations) an internal
consistency to my overall corpus of work; this is particularly useful as, on
the surface, my research proﬁle does not appear to be as focused as it
actually is. Using this technique helps to show the coherence of my
professional work (which will certainly be useful for tenure and promotion
as well).

. When organizing the relationships based on coursework, I could also see

the coherence of the graduate curriculum (taken together, a circulation

150

analysis of all student portfolios in a given program could show the
strengths and gaps that arise from the application of the program's
curriculum.

I could see the ways in which I re-used and revised texts between and
among different genres, and I could also see “orphaned” works that I had
not re-used as I could have. I have marked these works as areas of

interest that I should return to in order to not abandon promising lines of

research and scholarship.

 

Figure 16. Explicit relationships between digital texts in an electronic
portfolio. The gaps between projects are clearly visible, as are the
“orphaned” works in the lower right-hand corner. This represents a
different view from the generally more coherent text cloud visualization.
Both forms of analysis are required in order to avoid seeing the portfolio
ecosystem as either overly coherent or overly disaggregated.

151

. Examining the links into the portfolio, and those provided by incorporating
my online publications into the portfolio ecosystem has lead me to
discover both resources (texts and software tools) and people who are
interested in the same areas of interest.

. Taking an ecological view helps me to see the connectedness of my'work
both internally and externally; ifl had seen signiﬁcant disconnectedness
(which I might not have otherwise noticed) I could then have taken steps

to correct the problem.

Using circulation analysis helps to show the ecology of work that arises
from a speciﬁc curriculum, but it also helps to situate that work both institutionally
and in the wider ecosystems of ﬁeld and diScipline by showing both internal and

external relationships.

Shifting from Micro-Ecologies to Macro Ecologies

In the next chapter, I apply circulation analysis methods to examine the
circulation of digital academic texts that have been published in peer-reviewed
electronic journals. While the primary view of circulation examined in this chapter
was one of a bounded, homogeneous ecology of textual ecosystems, the next
chapter will widen the scope and scale of the works under investigation; the
following chapter also provides a more detailed description of how the search

and link analysis tools are used.

152

Chapter 6: Circulation Analysis and Online Scholarship

As in the previous chapter, the case study presented here is designed to
show the kinds of information that can be uncovered through the use of
circulation analysis. In short, circulation analysis provides a richer view of how
texts interact than rhetorical analysis alone can provide—but it is best used in
conjunction with other methods of rhetorical analysis, othenNise it risks being
interpreted as a purely quantitative approach. However, if circulation is
understood as important to a theory of digital rhetoric (as I argue in chapter two),
then this form of analysis, while seemingly concerned with hard data (as opposed
to qualitative analysis) is in fact a form of rhetorical study. Unlike traditional
rhetorical analyses, which can use textual analysis to provide an assessment of a
text's argument, studies of texts-in-action (such as Spinuzzi's genre tracing
method) to see how texts perform in particular contexts, or studies of the impact
of texts on a particular rhetorical situation, circulation analysis seeks to identify
the larger contexts in which digital texts circulate and situate them within an
ecological framework in order to better understand both intended and unintended
effects of speciﬁc rhetorical objects' interrelationships with other texts.

The study in this chapter is not intended to be a complete research project
in its own right; rather it is an example of a prototyping process that shows how
circulation analysis can be used as an inductive method to help develop

hypotheses about why certain kinds of texts circulate the way they do, what their

153

ecological positions are, how they interact with other genres and ecosystems,
and what that might mean about the economics of digital circulation in these
particular cases. Once effective tools have been developed to help ease the
labor-intensiveness of the process, I will undertake a follow-up study that looks at
a much larger sample of digital texts that can help to provide support for the
hypotheses established here—and if a sufﬁciently large data set is analyzed, it
may be possible to generalize trends and correlations from the outcome. But for
this initial approach to the study, which investigates the circulation of online
scholarship with a particular focus on the relationship between genre and degree
of remediation to the overall circulation patterns of electronically-published
scholarly texts, the circulation analysis methods described in chapter four are
deployed as part of a heuristic process that aims to develop hypotheses rather

than test them.

Electronic Publication and Online Scholarship

My interest in digital circulation was initiated by what I originally thought
would be a fairly straightforward approach to answering a research question
about the impact of online journals in the ﬁeld of rhetoric/composition—or, to be
more precise, the impact of the journal of which I was co-editor (Kairos: Rhetoric,
Technology, Pedagogy, http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/). I had some anecdotal
evidence that work in the journal was being cited in print journals and in

conference presentations and dissertations; however, I did not have any

154

empirical data that I could use to assess to what degree the journal was being
cited and how we might be able to situate it in ways to encourage further use.
The ﬁrst study that I conducted (with co-researcher Colleen Reilly) examined how
often works published in online jOumals were being cited in the major print
journals in the ﬁeld (Eyman & Reilly, in-press). The results of this study were
disappointing: despite the enthusiasm and interest people claimed to have for the
journal, it was rarely cited — at least in terms of formal citations in print journals.
Our study was expanded to look at the citation of any kind of online text, and we
found that there were very few overall citations of online work of any kind
(moreover, the most common use of online texts was as examples illustrating a
point, rather than a citation of the arguments made by those texts).

Following our investigation of citation in print journals, we decided to
examine whether the works in Kairos were more likely to be cited or linked to
from other online texts. Unsurprisingly, we found a great deal more connection to
the journal and its articles online than we saw in print. But we also noticed that -
works that operated farthest from established genre conventions for scholarship
— new media texts — were the least cited; and when they were cited, they were
more often presented as examples of new media scholarship per se rather than
directly referencing any of the arguments made in them. We devised a rubric for
delineating webtexts as falling along a continuum of genre accessibility: using
Bolter and Grusin's (1999) theory of remediation, we determined to what degree

texts were transparent (trying to appear like a traditional print-based genre) or

155

hyperrnediated (engaging the affordances of digital media as fully as possible,
even if that meant a break from any immediately recognizable genre); this rubric
is provided in Appendix A. We applied this rubric to the online works that were
cited in the print journals and found that the farther from a known genre a work
was, the less likely it was to be cited. We did not, however, continue our study to
examine if the same outcome would be evident in online linking patterns -
primarily because we did not have appropriate methods for such an investigation.

Applying circulation analysis provides a method for examining the linking
patterns and use relationships (quotation, citation, and appropriation) of these
online publications; additionally, circulation analysis is not limited to formal
citations (as is the bibliometric approach to questions of value and use for
publications) — these tools ﬁnd all the connections, regardless of how formal or
informal they are, thus providing a much fuller picture of how these texts are
engaged (a secondary effect is that it is possible to see how previously dismissed
genres, like academic blogs, are providing more rhetorically sophisticated
avenues of circulation for these texts than they enjoy in more traditional genres, a
point I'll return to below).

In the following examples, I apply circulation methods to four works that
have been published in established, well regarded peer-reviewed online journals.
Each work represents one of the main points on the remediation continuum:
highly transparent, moderately transparent, moderately hyperrnediated, or highly

hypermediated. I was originally going to select works only from journals that are

156

in the discipline of rhetoric/composition (speciﬁcally the subﬁeld of computers
and writing), but none of the established online journals in this ﬁeld publish highly
transparent digital texts (the print journals do make digital versions available, but
I am speciﬁcally examining how digital-native texts work, not the mechanisms or
outcomes of print-to-digital transformation). Thus the highly transparent example
comes from an established, long-standing peer-reviewed online journal in
communication studies; the particular article l have chosen also addresses
issues that are disciplinarily close to those taken up by the ﬁeld of computers and
writing.

The journals from which I chose the texts for analysis are Kairos: Rhetoric,
Technology, and Pedagogy, Computers and Composition Online (C00), and the
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (JCMC). These are all
established, well-regarded journals in their ﬁelds: JCMC was started in 1995, and
Kairos and Computers and Composition Online were launched in 1996 (although
the Computers and Composition Online archive currently only goes back to
2000). Unlike JCMC and Kairos, Computers and Composition Online is a
companion site to a print journal (which may be why the texts published in CCO
tend to be less radically hyperrnediated than those published in Kairos).

When selecting the initial texts for the circulation analyses, “I chose works
that were published close to or after the mid-point of each journal's career, which
landed in 2002 for two of the journals and 2004 for the third. If a selection was

published too long ago, it seemed likely that there would be fewer overall

157

citations because the web itself is relatively new, and the weight of tradition
would work against pioneering scholarship; conversely, a very-recently published
work may be more accepted as multimedia and multimodal texts become more
mainstream, but less time of exposure would similarly lead to fewer links and
citations.

I also wanted to begin with a sense of the quality of the works
(presumably, works that had been judged as high-quality or exceptional above
and beyond the peer-review process would be more likely to be cited and used);
thus, with the exception of the ﬁrst example (highly transparent), each of the
three remaining digital texts were winners of the Kairos Best Academic Webtext
Award: Joyce Walker's “Textural Textuality” was the 2001—2002 winner, Anne
Wysocki's “A Bookling Monument” was the 2002-2003 winner, and Michael“ J.
Cripps's “Hypertext Theory and WebDev in the Composition Classroom” was the
2004-2005 winner. Although Lapadat‘s article in JCMC has not been the
recipient of an award, it ﬁts with the overall disciplinary discourses presented in
the range of examples (and the number of citations and links to it is certainly high
enough to indicate that the work is of sufﬁcient quality for inclusion in this study).

For each of the following examples, I provide a brief overview of the work,
followed by a discussion of how that work ﬁts into its place on the remediation
continuum. The results of the data collection are presented as a formalized table
listing the features of the digital text (these features are important to the

subsequent discussion, so I provide them in full rather than relegating this

158

information to an appendix), followed by a report on the three main areas of
investigation: formal and informal citations retrieved through web searches and
use of scholar.google.com; sitations (back-links); and quotation or appropriation
that has neither reference nor link. After the report of the data findings I present a
network analysis map that provides a visual representation of the links to each
example text. Finally a discussion of the ﬁndings and possible explanatory

hypotheses concludes each example application.

Example 1: Highly Transparent

Judith Lapadat's ‘Written Interaction: A Key Component in Online
Learning” was published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication in
2002. Lapadat's article was clearly rendered into HTML by exporting from a
Microsoft Word document (although the code was subsequently cleaned up to
remove most of the proprietary tags generated by Microsoft's non-standards-
compliant markup). Other than the links provided for navigating the journal itself,
this text features no external links and no images, audio, video, or interactive
elements. The text is black on a white background, and it can be printed out and
easily approached as a traditional print article (the journal in which it is published

is online-only, so user-initiated printing is the only way to get a print version).

159

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Figure 17. Screen Capture of Lapadat, 2002.

In her article, Lapadat argues that “ the interactive textual environment of
asynchronous online conferences is particularly facilitative of both social and
cognitive construction of meaning” because “the nature of online interactive
writing itself, in an appropriately designed conference, supports meaning-making"
(2002). The article provides a literature review followed by a discussion of the
differences between synchronous and asynchronous communication for writing
in online courses, using a few brief examples contrasting a graduate students'
discussion in F2F and online situations. Lapadat concludes that “online written
contributions have some of the characteristics of spoken language, in that they
are interactive, relatively informal, personalized, and audience-aware, with
synchronous messages being more speech-like and asynchronous messages
being more formal and conventional.” The article is a rhetorical argument (as
opposed to an empirical study), and in that respect it also ﬁts well within the

disciplinary discourses typically invoked in rhetoric/composition and computers

160

and writing publications.

The following table reports on the formal features of the digital text; of

interest is the fact that this article includes keyword meta-data (although no other

formal meta-data is provided), and that this digital text is composed of only one

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

web page.

Title Written Interaction: A Key Component in Online
Learning

Author Lapadat, Judith C.

Year 2002

Status Published - Online Peer-Reviewed Journal

Venue Joumal of Computer-Mediated Communication 7.4

URL http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol7/issue4/lapadat.html

Format Webtext; highly transparent (exported to HTML from
a Microsoft Word ﬁle)

DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional

Modiﬁed Wednesday, December 22, 2004

Pages 1

Words 6666 (excluding references and navigation)

Internal Links 2 (to footnotes; same page)

External Links 17 (all in references; none in—text)

References 57 total: 40 print, 17 electronic

Metadata — Keywords political communication, email, legislative email,
lntemet career sites, job sites, Egypt, early adopters,
innovation, distance education, e-learning, mass
customization, fashion, apparel, clothing

 

 

 

Table 3. Formal Qualities of Lapadat, 2002.

161

For each essay in this chapter, I use four distinct search applications to
record all of the citations, sitations, and references to each article. However, I
don't simply record the number of “hits” because that is not a very useful metric
for two reasons: it cannot show the relationships represented by the links, and it
includes false positives—such as propagated links—that need to be identified
and removed. Instead, I examine each reference, and evaluate it for form of
reference, degree of engagement, and genre. (See chapter four for a discussion
of the methods employed in these assessments). In the process of evaluation, I
can eliminate false-positives and duplicates. For this work (Lapadat, 2002), I
recorded 84 distinct search results, and 43 citations from scholar.google.com, of
which 11 were not already recorded via the web search. There were also 2
backlinks to the article that were not found by other search methods. The full-
text search (using mydropbox.com and copyscape.com's premium search
feature) yielded no results; thus indicating that while there are many sources that
quote or cite ‘Written Interaction,” there are no publicly-available instances of
appropriation or plagiarism of the work.

Originally published in 2002, Lapadat's article has enjoyed a relatively high
number of links from 2003-2006 (for an academic essay published in an online
journal in the humanities — see Eyman and Reilly [in-press] for more on this
metric). The data for the ﬁrst six months of 2007 indicate a similar number of

links and references will be made this year as well.

162

 

2002 2003 2004 2005 2006

Figure 18. Links per year for Lapadat, 2002.

Lapadat's work is the only one of the four examples in this chapter that is
referenced in languages other than English: 3 references are in Italian and 3 in
German, 2 in Finnish, 2 in Spanish, 1 in Portuguese, and 1 in Japanese".

Six types of links or references occurred in the data set for this article. By
far the largest number were formal citations, where the work was referenced in
the text (used as an example, paraphrased, or quoted) with a separate full
bibliographic entry appearing at the same source. The next most common were
bibliographic links (providing full bibliographic reference but not used within the
source), informal citations (providing name and title, but no other reference
information), annotated links (providing a link to Lapadat's article and either a
user-supplied annotation or a copy of the abstract), and a few “simple” links —

simply the title or URL listed in among many others:

5 When assessing the form of reference and degree of engagement, the Japanese reference is

the only one that remained inaccessible to me because of a language barrier.

163

Forms of link or reference
formal citation 53
bibliographic link 15
informal citation 1O
annotated 6
simple 5
Of the formal citations, 24 instances were parenthetical citations’without
quotation or paraphrase, using either in-text parentheses or notation format. An
example of in-text parenthetical references of this type can be found in Sorensen
and Murchu (2006):
Furthermore, both email web-based conferencing interactions, which are
essential to web-based learning, are not direct forms of interaction but are
considered mediated transactions (Harasim, 1993; Lapadat, 2002).
And an example of the notation format appears in Stahl (2004), where note 21
points to the bibliographic record for Lapadat (2002),
While asynchronous is considered a more thoughtful, reﬂective mode for
knowledge building [21], synchronous communication can be much more
time-efﬁcient for intense interaction, such as brainstorming or working out
details of a drawing--assuming that the participants can get together online
at the same time.
Thirteen of the formal citations were single paraphrases or quotations and
9 utilized two or more paraphrases or direct quotations, while 5 of the formal

references exhibited both single quotations and parenthetical references similar

to those described above. Only 2 sources that formally cited “Written Interaction”

164

engaged in direct responses or arguments speciﬁcally with Lapadat's arguments
(l code these as “dialogic” references), one is a response paper posted to the
“reader's forum" attached to an online journal and the other is a blog posting.
The works citing or linking to Lapadat comprise 26 different genres,
ranging from peer-reviewed print journal articles to blogs, social bookmarking
sites, archived listserv email and even one conference presentation proposal.
The top four genres using Lapadat's work are peer-reviewed print journals (16),
bibliographies (14), conference proceedings (10), and peer-reviewed online
journals (9). Other genres included PhD dissertations, blogs, whitepapers, and

course syllabi.

 

Figure 19. Genres, link types, and engagement levels for Lapadat, 2002.

165

As we can see from the organization of the nodes in Figure 19 (above),
Lapadat's work is primarily taken up in formalized genres and attributed in very
formalized ways. But in those formal genres, her work is ovenlvhelmingly used as
a background reference (often one of many) to support general arguments about
the benefits of asynchronous communication rather than being drawn on directly
either in support of arguments or as a counter-argument and rarely is it the focus
of the work citing it. This may be attributed to the disciplinary conventions of the
works that cite Lapadat, which come from education and communications (more
social-science oriented ﬁelds that rely less on direct quotation or paraphrase than
is common in the humanities; this would also account for the high number of
formal citations within conference proceedings, which is also an uncommon
genre for humanities-based ﬁelds).

While researching this text, I found some odd circulation mechanisms as
' well. For instance, one bibliographic site worked as an aggregator of information;
thus the reference to Lapadat's work was the result of an automated search

engine that collected the information from another bibliographic site (the
‘ aggregator site helpfully lists where its information comes from). A similar
software-agent driven system presented an annotation of the work as part of an
automatically generated proﬁle site. According to the site (www.zoominfo.com), .
This proﬁle was automatically generated using 5 references found on the

lntemet. This information has not been veriﬁed. Zoomlnfo continually

166

scans millions of corporate websites, press releases, electronic news
services, SEC ﬁlings and other public online sources. From these websites
Zoomlnfo automatically compiles a person's profile, which focuses on their
professional achievements and background. All of the information you see
in a Zoomlnfo proﬁle was originally found on a public web document.
There were also two instances of appropriation6 that were not discovered
by the full-text search because the mechanisms were not visible to those search
tools. In one case, an enterprising individual had placed a copy of the entire
article into a database from which it can be selected — but the article that is
returned is a text-based copy with minimal bibliographic information and no
indication that the original is freely available on the web (that is, no URL is
attached to the document)’. The other instance is one of appearance rather than
possession - there is an annotated bibliography in which Lapadat's article is
listed, but the link attached to that annotated entry requires a password to follow
(even though it is the link to the published version in JCMC)8; this gives the
impression that the work is not freely-available and that it is in possession of the
institution where the bibliography resides. In each case, the ease with which
online texts can be copied and appropriated may have a detrimental effect on the
economics of this work's circulation, either by making it difﬁcult to acknowledge

the original publication's source or by making the information about authorship

 

5 Appropriation takes place when the original text is removed from its original context and used
for purposes that speciﬁcally serve the needs of the appropriator; in most cases, appropriation
also elides attribution as a secondary effect.

7 See http://168.144.129.112/ — use “interaction” as the search term; Lapadat's work is the last
one in the search results list.

8 See httpzlledtech.boisestate.edu/eresearch/stash/default.asp

167

and publication appear to be unavailable (that is, individuals who ﬁnd the
appropriated version may not realize that it exists in a more authoritative form
elsewhere).

. By formal bibliometric standards, Lapadat's article is not cited as often as
print journal articles published in peer-reviewed journals in the same ﬁeld.
However, in terms of both formal and informal citation, Lapadat's work enjoys a
much higher degree of circulatiOn than many other online publications in the
humanities (indeed, there are far more references and links than any other article
examined in this chapter). When compared to the other texts in this chapter,
there are three distinct differences that may account for the higher circulation rate
for this article (particularly in formal genres). The ﬁrst and most obvious
difference is that this work is part of a different disciplinary ecology than are the
the other three examples — JCMC is a journal in the ﬁeld of communication
studies rather than rhetoric/composition. Communication studies has a longer
history of accepting online publication: witness JCMC's inclusion in the ISI
citation databases — only about 25% of any given ﬁelds print journals are
cataloged and included there, so there must have been strong arguments for
inclusion put forth by the ﬁeld itself. Webometrics researcher Han Woo Park
(2004) also notes that JCMC “is widely referenced” and “has managed to remain
exclusively online without compromising its scholarly nature” (online). The
second reason that it is more often cited is likely that it follows traditional genre

expectations for scholarly work — in other words, the fact that it is highly

168

transparent equates to a higher degree of acceptance and use (I'll return to this
point when we look at all four of the examples together). The ﬁnal reason is not
immediately apparent until one looks “under the hood” so to speak: this is the
only online scholarly publication of the four examples in this chapter that provides
metadata (keywords and bibliographic information) in the html coded header of
the document itself. Metadata is important because it makes online resources
easier to ﬁnd: search engines use this information to provide more relevant
search results, and, I suspect, a higher degree of “ﬁndability” translates into a

higher instance of citation and use.

Example 2: Moderately Transparent

Michael J. Cripps's webtext, “#FFFFFF, #000000, & #808080: Hypertext
Theory and WebDev in the Composition Classroom” won the 2004-2005 Kairos
Best Webtext Award. The webtext is aesthetically engaging, employing color-
based markers to indicate where in the relatively complex hypertext the reader is.
Despite this use of color and extensive internal linking, this article follows genre
conventions of scholarly articles in the humanities and presents a series of pages
that are primarily textual (and while the hypertext structure includes many lexia, it
is generally hierarchical—although not linear--and thus easy to navigate). The
use of color/design and the hypertext structure move this work from highly
transparent to moderately transparent. The user can't print out the whole article

at once, but each lexia could be printed and collated with no loss of meaning.

169

"I" 3' 1.9., g": .‘."'. : z. - - ' —'
a

V -r.

. i

I 5', «but»! bnp- nu Ina-cc n-n «red-h Iron-1“
”L __ w I“ V ‘ P

Figure 20. Screen Capture of Cripps, 2004.

This article reports on a a “Hypertext Theory and Practice” course taught
at Rutgers University from 2001-2003. Students in the course “read hypertext
theory, learned about web development, and attempted to build elements of
theory into their academic essays” (Cripps, 2004). The main sections of the
article present the background information about the development of the course,
a section on hypertext and visual rhetoric theory, a discussion of the successful
and unsuccessful pedagogical practices enacted in the course, a series of
student models that illustrate the theory and praxis discussions, and a collection
of the course materials. I would classify this work as teacher-research, which is a
very common genre for work published in rhetoric/composition and computers
and writing journals.

The following table details the formal features of the digital text; of note is

the extensive internal linking, with 78 links across 34 pages, while there are very

170

few external links. Similarly, the references used in this webtext are primarily print

references. No meta-data is provided with this article.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Title #FFFFFF, #000000, & #808080: Hypertext Theory
and WebDev in the Composition Classroom

Author Cripps, Michael J.

Year 2004

Status Published - Online Peer-Reviewed Journal

Venue Computers and Composition Online Spring

URL http://www.bgsu.edu/cconline/cripps/

Format Webtext; moderately transparent

DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional

Modiﬁed Thursday, May 06, 2004

Pages 34

Words ' 9571 (excluding references and navigation)

Internal Links 78

External Links 4 (3 in references; 1 in-text)

References 18 total: 14 print, 4 electronic

Metadata No metadata available

 

 

 

 

Table 4. Formal Qualities of Cripps, 2004.

Using standard web searches, I recorded 15 distinct references to this
article. There were 2 citations from scholar.google.com, 1 of which was not
already recorded via the web search. There were also 2 backlinks to the article

that were not found by other search methods. The full-text search (using

171

mydropbox.com and copyscape.com's premium search feature) found one link
that was not discovered using any other method, and it also uncovered one use
of an identical quotation (from Jay David Bolter) and one individual whose
research interests appear similar to those expressed by Cripps in this essay.
Originally published in 2004, Cripps's article has garnered few links,
despite being an award-winning article; however, the number of links over time is
consistent with all of the example cases in this chapter with the exception of the

highly transparent article by Lapadat.

27
24
21
18
15
12

 

060030

2002 2003 2004 2005 2006

Figure 21. Links per year for Cripps, 2004.

Only four types of link or reference occurred in the data set for Cripps's
essay; the largest number were informal citations, providing name and article title
with the link. Four references were embedded links - that is, the actual URL is
hidden behind a textual link that is either part of a sentence (deeply embedded)

or in a list of links (shallowly embedded). For example, Deanya Lattimore (2004)

172

notes in her blog that she is “reading the new Michael J. Cripps essay at
Computers and Composition Online this moming....” In this case, the URL to the
actual article is hidden behind the phrase “Michael J. Cripps essay.” There was
also one annotated link and one formal citation for this work:

Forms of link or reference

informm citation 10

embedded link 4

formal citation 1

annotated 1

Of these references, the one formal citation was a parenthetical citation
without quotation or paraphrase, but two of the references represented in the
embedded links were dialogic interactions with the arguments and functions of
the text (both were in blogs).

The works citing or linking to “Hypertext Theory" are made up of 7 different
genres, with the most prominent being the course syllabus (8 instances). The
other genres were blogs (3), and one each of the following: unpublished essay,
newsletter, bibliography, PhD dissertation proposal, and the awards list from

Kairos.

173

Cripps, 2004
® @ ®

Figure 22. Genres, link types, and engagement levels for Cripps, 2004.

So why is this text, an award-winning example of hypertext scholarship, so
rarely cited and referenced? First, Cripps's work, unlike Lapadat's, is not
circulating in a disciplinary ecology of formalized genres; instead, most of the
uses of his work are informal citations that direct students, instructors, and web
designers to his article as a useful instmctional document (despite the fact that it
situates itself as an academic argument rather than a pedagogical text). Some of
the syllabi that cite this text are actually produced by the same instructor using it
over the course of several years (which suggests that despite its focus on
teaching with a particular technology, the article has not become obsolete).

And also in contrast to the previous example, Cripps's work is for the most
part not quoted or paraphrased—except in the cases where his work is the

central text in a dialogic response from the citer (which invoke the article via

174

embedded links in the blog and essay genres near the center of Figure 22
above)

I believe there are two main reasons why this work may not be a cited or
used as the other examples in this chapter.9 First, the main theme of this work is
pedagogical — and while articles that deal with pedagogical issues are often used
more directly (via implementation in courses) and are often widely read (based
on server log analyses at Kairos, I've found that the most practically-oriented
pedagogy articles are the most visited) they are not cited as often (particularly in
formal genres) because they are seen as lacking in theoretical depth (Stephen
North's [1987] attack on “lore” in composition is emblematic of the way pedagogy
is generally devalued in composition studies).

The second reason is that, even though it is in a relatively transparent
form as assessed by the remediation rubric, it still has a complex hypertext
'st‘ructure that doesn't lend itself to printing or linear reading strategies; thus,
because the genre has departed from traditional print approaches to scholarship
(even at the “moderately transparent” level), it is more difﬁcult to use because it
requires different reading strategies (and possibly even different literacies) in
order for the reader to effectively engage it‘°.

A ﬁnal consideration for why this text is not as widely cited is that the

 

9 I'm somewhat surprised that there aren't more formalized citations of this work (although there
may certainly be references to it in edited volumes or journals whose indexes and
bibliographies are not yet accessible online); as a follow-up study, it would be interesting to
see whether similar work that is published in the print literature is taken up in to greater or
lesser degrees than the same topics published in online venues.

1° Indeed, in the embedded link example above, the author who linked to the work complained
about the difficulty of reading hypertext scholarship.

175

author has not promoted the work beyond its publication — unlike the other texts
(below), there are very few self-citations (both from the author's online proﬁle and
CV). The highly-hypermediated article by Anne Wysocki (below), for instance,
engages in what Jim Ridolfo (2007) calls “rhetorical valuation” — the work of the
author to promote and extend the act of delivery beyond the technical delivery

itself (in this case, the publication of the article).

Example 3: Moderately Hypermediated

Joyce Walker's webtext, “Textural Textuality: A Personal Exploration of
Critical Race Theory” was the winner of the 2001-2002 Kairos Best Webtext
Award. This work is classed as “moderately hypermediated” because it integrates
animation, graphic design elements, and a complex and recursive hypertext
structure that is not easily transformed to a printed version. The article is also
multi-genre, utilizing personal narrative and contributed stories, poetry, and
traditional academic argumentation and theorization. Although the work features
approximately the same number of pages and internal links as the article by

Cripps, the actual structure of the hypertexts is far less hierarchical or linear.

176

 

 

a-ziwruitI-t -
"" min ﬂing; . ‘- . if: '— J- rv . -- ﬁlm
\flllLl‘, I ’\‘ V“ I l I
.
. 1::1! ‘ .
um 11.-aw dm-NH'IF, mm:

H -

3’13 .

11d -‘ ' " - "4 uncut-us

Figure 23. Examples of navigational structure in Walker, 2002.

Walker explains that ‘T he ﬁrst time I ever tried to ride the bus in a major
metropolitan area, l was hopelessly lost. I didn't understand how to read the
schedules, and the maps offered a frustrating lack of detail. Those of you
attempting to navigate this text may ﬁnd its mapping system to be similarly
frustrating, at least at ﬁrst” — but she provides multiple navigational aids such as
the maps in Figure 23 above.

“Textural Textuality" considers self-representation, identity, and racism
through a series of narratives, responses to events and texts, and rhetorical
arguments that engage contemporary work in critical race theory, framed in
metaphors of transportation and movement. The webtext also explicitly
addresses the function and use of hypertext as a supporting medium for the kind
of dialogic/reﬂective work that Walker is attempting (and by all accounts

successfully so). For example, in one node, labeled “conversations,” the author

177

provides a series of slides that places texts excerpted from other sections of the
essay “in an effort to consider how it is we speak to one another. What does it
mean to have our words placed in reference to one another? What does it mean
to have a conversation?” and then points the reader to other nodes where those
questions are taken up.

The following table reports on the formal features of the digital text; like the
Cripps text (above), there is extensive internal linking and minimal external
linking and the references used in this webtext are also primarily print references.

No meta-data is provided with this article.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Title Textural Textuality: A Personal Exploration of Critical
Race Theory

Author Walker, Joyce R.

Year 2002

Status Published - Online Peer-Reviewed Journal

Venue Kairos: Rhetoric, Technology, Pedagogy 7.1

URL http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/7.1/binder.html?featu
res/walker/text/indéxhtml

Format Webtext; moderately hyperrnediated (incorporates
images, animation, and complex structure)

DTD Not Available

Modiﬁed Friday, April 12, 2002

Pages 39

 

 

 

 

Table 5. Formal Qualities of Walker, 2002.

178

 

Words 16,470 (excluding references and navigation)

 

 

 

Internal Links 6
External Links 4 (in-text and references)
References 23 total: 19 print, 4 electronic

 

Metadata — Keywords Not available

 

 

 

Table 5 (con't). Formal Qualities of Walker, 2002.

For Walker's text, I recorded 12 distinct search results, and 4 backlinks;
scholar.google.com reported no citations. The full-text search (using.
mydropbox.com and copyscape.com's premium search feature) found no
instances of appropriation or plagiarism.

Originally published in 2002, Walker's article appears to have received the
most attention when it was ﬁrst released, although 2006 (and the data for 2007)
are showing steady use as well.

27
24
21
18
15
12

 

01.0030

2002 2003 2004 2005 2006
Figure 24. Links per year for Walker, 2002.

179

 

Six types of links or references occurred in the data set for this article. The
largest number were informal citations (6), followed by formal citations and
simple links (3 each). The remaining types (1 of each) were bibliographic,
embedded, and annotated links. Two of the references did not have hypertext
links and were strictly textual bibliographic entries.

Forms of link or reference
informal citation 6
formal citation 3
simple 3
bibliographic 1
embedded 1
1
2

annotated
no link

Of the formal citations, 1 instance was parenthetical, 1 was a single
quotation, and 1 was a dialogic interaction.

The works citing or linking to Walker were made up of a wide range of
genres, including course syllabi (the most prevalent at 6 references), two
bibliographies, and one each of the following: social bookmarking site, seminar
paper, blog, conference program, archived listserv email, conference program,
peer-reviewed online journal, peer-reviewed print journal, and the awards list

from Kairos.

180

bibliography ® @
mple am.otated gr.phicbiblio -®

Figure 25. Genres, link types, and engagement levels for Walker, 2002.

The references to Walker's text do not appear to be situated in either
formalized or informal genres; rather, there is a balance of genres of works that
make reference to “T extural Textuality.” From Figure 25, above, we can see that
the most common use of the work as a reading on a course syllabus (and the
instructors who write those syllabi ﬁnd it sufﬁcient to provide a link rather than a
full bibliographic citation — possibly because the syllabi are online and thus
facilitate access to the reading). When this work is cited in formalized genres, it is
most often used as an example of how a hypertext argument might be structured,
as opposed to engaging the narratives and arguments of critical race theory that
are at the core of the text.

The lack of citation and reference in this case is most likely due to the

multimodal and multigenre nature of the work: it certainly violates genre norms

181

for scholarship both in the way that it is constructed (engaging a very complex
link structure) and the way that it mixes theory, critique, visual representation,
and narrative. In a later essay (2006), Walker acknowledges that “it can seem as
if the process of experimentation in new media compositions actually opposes
the development of more traditional scholarly goals — goals of coherence, logic,
and objectivity” — and this appearance of opposing those traditional goals likely
contributes to the difficulty that current scholars have in both reading and using
these kinds of hypermediated texts (for the next generation of scholars, however,
this might not'be as signiﬁcant an issue, as they are enculturated to engage and
use interactive multimedia texts, from YouTube to massively multiplayer online
roleplaying games — and the ﬁnal example comes closer that form of interactivity

than any of the previous examples in this chapter).

8 Example 4: Highly Hypermediated

Anne Wysocki's webtext, “A Bookling Monument,” originally presented at
the 2001 Computers and Writing Conference at Ball State University, was the
winner of the 2002-2003 Kairos Best Webtext Award. “A Bookling Monument”
requires the Macromedia Shockwave plugin in order to be used; instead of using
HTML markup to arrange text and other media elements into a webtext, Wysocki
has built a richly interactive experience using Macromedia Director software. This
work is highly hypermediated because it requires interaction for meaning to be

drawn from the text and because it incorporates'and integrates rich visual

i182

imagery (both photographic and artistic), animation, and text. This work cannot
be transferred to a print genre, although it does evoke other digital genres,
notably interactive computer games (such as Myst, which is referenced within the
text).

When “A Bookling Monument” ﬁrst loads, the reader is presented with the
image of body lying in a ﬁeld (Figure 26); on the landscape of the body (only the
back is shown in the initial screen) are several pieces of folded paper and a ﬂy.
Clicking on the ﬂy shows a time-lapse video of the person whose body we are
viewing getting up and walking away. Clicking the papers leads to texts, different
views of the body, different animations, or other illustrations -— but in order to ﬁnd
these other components of the essay, the user must explore and play there are
no navigational explanations or cues (such as those provided in Walker's text).
Wysocki's work takes up several themes: books and bodies as common carriers
of culture, remediation, memory and discomfort (as evidenced in part from some
of the grotesque imagery deployed [Figure 27]), and the relationship between
new media and books. She notes that “new media pieces show — in their
modiﬁcations of the book — is how much the 'content' of the book (including our
senses of 'book self') are shaped by and dependent upon and hence inseparable
from the material, visible structures of the book” and this work, indeed, enacts

this same dynamic.

183

 

 

Figure 27. An internal screen of “A Bookling Monument" (Wysocki, 2002).

The following table reports on the formal features of the digital text. There

are fewer data points in this table because there are no “pages" in the main text

184

nor are the words accessible enough to be easily countable (there are words
however; this is not a purely visual text). There is a separately-linked bibliography
page that provides very traditional access to the references used in the piece.

Again, like Cripps and Walker, no meta-data is provided with this article.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Title A Bookling Monument

Author Wysocki, Ann Frances

Year 2002

Status Published - Online Peer-Reviewed Journal

Venue Kairos: Rheton'c, Technology, Pedagogy 7.3

URL http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/7.3/binder2.html?cov

enNeb/wysocki/index.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

Format Flash/Director; highly hypermediated
DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional

Modiﬁed Wednesday, December 22, 2004
External Links 1 (in references)

References 21 total: 20 print, 1 electronic
Metadata Not available

 

 

 

 

Table 6. Formal Qualities of Wysocki, 2002.

I found 21 distinct search results that referenced “A Bookling Monument”,
as well as 2 citations from scholar.google.com (1 of which was not already

recorded), and 6 backlinks to the article that had not been found by other search

185

methods. The full-text search (using mydropbox.com and copyscape.com's

premium search feature) yielded no results because, with the exception of the

references list, the text that is in the work is embedded and not extractable.
Originally published in 2002, Wysocki's article has had few links overall

(although there are already more links in 2007 than in 2006).

27
24
21
18
15
12

 

OUJONKD

2002 2003 .2004 2005 2006

Figure 28. Links per year for Wysocki, 2002.

Seven types of links or references occurred in the data set for this work.
The most numerous were embedded links, followed by formal, informal, and
bibliographic citations. The remaining types were two annotated links, a single
simple link, and one “invisible link” — that is, a link to the work is included in the
referent, but there is no link text — only the html code (it's likely that it was
originally included in the referring work but removed at some point through the

process of revision).

186

Forms of link or reference
embedded 10
formal citation 5
informal citation 4
bibliographic link 4
annotated 2
simple 1
“invisible” 1

. Of the formal citations, two were parenthetical citations without quotation
or paraphrase, one was a single paraphrase, and one was a dialogic discussion
of the main themes of Wysocki's text (two of the embedded links could also be
classiﬁed as dialogic).

The works citing or linking to “A Bookling Monument” include 13 genres.

The number of examples of each genre are fairly evenly represented, but the
genre with the most examples is the cOurse syllabus. Other genres included
social bookmarking sites, seminar papers, blogs, conference programs, a
conference presentation, peer-reviewed online journals, peer-reviewed print

journals, bibliographies, a linklist, speaker announcements, and even one edited

collection book prospectus.

187

 

Figure 29. Genres, link types, and engagement levels for Wysocki, 2002.

Wysocki's text presents the most complex genre ecology diagram of all of
the examples in this chapter. Because it is the farthest from a known or
understood genre, it appears that different readers have applied it to many
different situations (thus citing it in many different genres). As with Cripps's and
Walker's texts, the strongest links are to course syllabi; and echoing the use of
Walker's moderately—hypermediated work, the formal citations of “A Bookling
Monument” primarily point to it as an example of new media scholarship, rather
than engaging the arguments it presents.

The single instance of direct quotation actually comes from a citation
made by the author of the preceding work: she reports that she had to ‘Watch the

text scroll across the screen" and quickly transcribe it (Walker, 2007). In fact, over

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ten percent of the references recorded for this work are self-citations, which may
well be one strategy that scholars producing new media need to engage in order
to promote the acceptance of their work. (This self-promotion is an instance of
Ridolfo's [2007] “rhetorical valuation” — in this case, the author has not only
produced the text, but also actively works to explain its beneﬁts and present
ways that it may be used).

Wysocki's work is a very early attempt to create a new media scholarly
argument, so while I have often heard it referred to at conferences and in
workshops, it is likely that it's very cutting-edge-ness works against it in terms of
formal citation. While scholars of new media continue to reinvent the scholarly
argument as multimodal, it seems likely that the weight of tradition will continue
to work against its recognition—at least until the time when the students who
have been studying and emulating these works become the primary consumers

of such scholarly work.

Conclusions

Although there are too few example texts in the sample from which to
safely generalize about the effects of degree of remediation on circulation, it is
possible to look across all four examples and make some observations that
should be helpful for refining the research approach or directing attention to
speciﬁc issues that may be valuable avenues of inquiry. The following table

provides a brief review of the main data points for all four examples:

189-

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Author Lapadat Cripps Walker Wysocki
Journal JCMC CCO Kairos Kairos
Discipline Communication Comp/Rhet Comp/Rhet Comp/Rhet
Field CMC C&W C&W C&W
Genre Scholarly jounal Scholarly Mixed- Unknown
article Hypertext Genre
Remediation HT MT MH HH
Total links 89 16 17 27
Formal 53 2 3 5
Informal 36 15 14 22

 

 

 

 

 

Table 7. Comparison of 4 Articles.

These examples provide two ways of articulating ecologies of circulation —
one based on disciplinary activities and norms and the other based on
predominant uses of these texts. In the first case, the highly transparent
example text was clearly situated in a different disciplinary context than were the
other texts". Because Lapadat's text resided in a different disciplinary ecology
than were the other texts, the kinds of genres that engaged the work and the
ways in which it was taken up were constrained by the expectations of the
environment. Lapadat's text had the most formal citations both because it was in
a form that was more immediately recognizable as worthy of scholarly attribution

1‘ This could be seen as a ﬂaw of my selection criteria, but since the aim of this chapter is to

evaluate the use of the methodology rather than coming to any speciﬁc conclusions about
degrees of remediation, I think it is appropriate to see how the method works or breaks down
for different kinds of text.

190

 

and because there are more formalized genres in the ﬁeld of communication
studies (e.g. conference proceedings, which are uncommon in
rhetoric/composition). Cripps's text pushed beyond the traditional academic
journal article, but not enough to brand it as experimental or “new media”;
additionally, the work's focus on pedagogy helps to mark it as an appropriate text
for use in pedagogical genres (thus, the use-driven uptake). Walker's text is
certainly experimental (although not, strictlyspeaking, new media), but it
experiments both with media and with mixing genre conventions (incorporating
narrative, research, and scholarly argumentation in ways that are not typical of
most scholarly work in rhetoric/composition). On the far end of the spectrum, the
new media scholarship of “A Bookling Monument” (and to some degree the other
three examples as well) illustrate a kind of use-driven ecology: references to
these texts showed up primarily in course reading lists, syllabi, and student-
produced seminar papers and essays. These works are thus becoming part of a
pedagogical movement whose actions may well show up in future iterations of
this research approach. But for now, disciplines work to reinforce their ecological
niches, accepting those elements that “ﬁt” in a given ecosystem and rejecting
those that are seen as, essentially, invasive species.

A ﬁnal comment on the four examples: although the instances of formal
citation appear quite low for all but the ﬁrst example, even the least-cited work
has an above-average rate of citation when compared to print scholarship in the

humanities. Many studies have shown that scholarship that is published in open

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access online journals that engage in peer-review enjoys higher rates of formal
citation than print scholarship (Hajjem et. al, 2005; Hajjem, Harnad, & Gingras,
2005; Eysenbach, 2006), so despite the relatively few citations of these online

works, they are still at an advantage relative to their print counterparts.

Methodological Reﬂections

After examining all of the examples and the data collected about their
circulatory activity, (along with a fourth highly transparent text that was used to
develop the methods—examples from this text appear in chapter 4) l have
discerned the work of three distinct forms of appropriation: traditional plagiarism,
which is not limited to just digital texts, although it is easier to perform with more
transparent texts; copying the whole work for redistribution elsewhere, which is a
form of ecological appropriation — poaching — that removes the work from its
proper ecosystem for the gain of the poacher; and a form of economic .
appropriation called propagated linking (see chapter 5 for a detailed discussion of
this phenomenon). I see this as a form of appropriation because the intellectual
work of that author is being used to support monetary gain for someone else
without the benefit of even recognition (i.e. academic capital); there is no return
value for the author.

During the course of this application, I did run into some methodological
issues: in many cases, there were multiple references to the original source as

well as to digital copies of that same source (the same problem arose with the

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citing documents as well). In many cases, the same text might reside in multiple
locations (one of the affordances of digital copies, which require no additional
capital in order to be reproduced). Sometimes there were simply multiple URLs
that could be used to access a given text, other times I discovered author-owned
copies of works published in various other venues (e.g. print and online journals).
I decided to focus on genre and use rather than replication per se, as that ﬁts
with my theoretical use of circulation ecologies (how do these texts function in
particular ecosystems?); thus in most cases I collapsed the multiple examples
into single instances (the exception is for propagated links, which I counted but
did not include in my evaluations of the example texts above.

The preceding examples show how circulation analysis can be employed
to answer research questions about how genre (or new genres) affect the ways
inwhich digital texts are used (surfacing both formal and informal uses); I see
this method as deployable and useful for this research question, although
excessively labor-intensive (thus, a future project for circulation analysis as
methodology is to build tools that can support these methods).

In the ﬁnal chapter of this dissertation, I provide a list of other kinds of
research questions that can be addressed using circulation analysis methods in
conjunction with other rhetorical analysis methods, as well as a map of future
work on both the development of digital-native methods and the tools that will
need to be built to make these methods available to the academic marketplace of

researchers and scholars in a variety of disciplines.

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Chapter 7: Digital-Native Methods, Future Research and Development

The aim of this dissertation has been to argue for the development of
digital-native methods that take advantage of the nature of digital media in order
to further our understanding of how and why connections are built between digital
texts; these methods are designed to help develop an ecological view of digital
circulation. This ecological view situates the digital relationships uncovered via
circulation analysis within the disciplinary context of digital rhetoric by extending
the purview of rhetorical activity beyond initial production and into the distribution
and circulation of digital texts.

The methods I have proposed can be used to trace and map connections
between digital texts, and although these methods are related to and sometimes
derived from methods used in inforrnetrics (including bibliometrics and
webometrics), circulation analysis is not a “citation study,” nor is it a bibliometric
analysis. The formal study of citations and citation networks uses mathematical
algorithms to produce quantiﬁable data about citations (in bibliometrics) or links
(in webometrics); circulation analysis instead uses qualitative, rhetorical
evaluation techniques not to map formalized bibliographic networks, but to
discover and outline emergent ecosystems whose contours and boundaries are
revealed through the structures made by textual relationships (additionally,
circulation analysis looks at all references and links, not just those represented

through formal citation).

194

I see this dissertation as a offering a proof-of-concept for the development
of one particular kind of digital-native analysis: there is much work yet to do to
reﬁne this method (and this work is outlined in the ﬁnal section of this chapter);
but other forms of digital-native methods should also be identiﬁed and developed.
I began with theories of ecologies and economies of circulation, presented the
methods of circulation analysis, and provided two case examples to show both
possible uses and limitations of the methodology. In this chapter, I offer what I
believe to be two important outcomes of applying circulation analysis as a
method in digital rhetoric: mapping digital/rhetorical ecosystems and utilizing the
research capacity of circulation analysis as an aid to discovery. I also provide an
account of how this method can be used to complement other rhetorical analysis
methods (both well-established and new); this chapter concludes with a
description of continuing work on the development of circulation analysis

methodology.

Mapping Digital/Rhetorical Ecosystems

One of the primary outcomes of circulation analysis is that this method
traces post-production rhetorical activity within digital ecologies. Because
circulation analysis is not concerned only With formal measures of rhetorical
relationships (e.g. citation), the connections it reveals show both distinct
references that engage the source texts as well as links that simply serve as

pointers. By taking into account the full range of connections, it is possible to

195

begin building a picture of both circulation and the ecosystem(s) in which the
source texts are circulating. Consider the case of the all of the links and
references to the Michael J. Cripps article presented in chapter 6 — using this
data, it is clear that there is a kind of pedagogical ecology that is made up of
teaching-and-leaming based ecosystems — the course syllabi, assignments, and
in some cases blog responses, which were themselves assigned to students as
coursework — in which this particular text circulates. Similarly, the circulation
patterns of the Lapadat article situates it within speciﬁc disciplinary ecologies
(notably computer-mediated communication, which is a subﬁeld of
communication studies, and distance education). The ecosystems in which this
article is found tend to be more formalized (scholarly publications and
presentations that have been formally rendered in conference proceedings) than
the Cripps article, and its presence within these ecosystems provides a picture of
a different kind of ecological circulation.

Examining the ecosystems in which these different works circulate, it
becomes apparent that they are each part of different digital and rhetorical
ecologies. In terms of scholarly evaluation, this kind of analysis can show both
formal and informal uses and the authors of these texts can make use-value
arguments based on their ecological circumstances — high citation may indicate
an important role within scholarly or research ecosystems, but a high degree of
linkage and use in pedagogical contexts may indicate an equally important role in

shaping how future researchers and scholars approach their work.

196

Because different disciplinary ecologies engage different kinds of value
systems, knowing the ecosystems that are more likely to reference a particular
work can help the writer to better understand how to maximize its value within
particular ecosystems, whether by explicitly positioning it as such, by engaging
speciﬁc genres that are taken up more readily within different ecosystems or
disciplinary ecologies, by using speciﬁc delivery practices to encourage and
facilitate circulation (such as including appropriate metadata prior to distribution)
or by engaging in practices of rhetorical valuation that are designed to promote
the work within ecosystems where it might otherwise be seen as an outside or
invasive inﬂuence (such as self-citation or using the work as an example of new
media, as was the case with the Wysocki text in chapter 6).

While circulation analysis cannot articulate the speciﬁc practices that will
' result in successful placement within target ecosystems, simply knowing how and
where one's work is taken up provides the initial step toward discovering what
such effective promotional or positioning moves might be.

In other words, although circulation analysis draws on the tradition of using
ecology as a metaphor for explaining how particular rhetorical practices of
production work, it takes the further step of extending ecology from metaphor to
analytic framework and the actual context of rhetorical circulation.

Circulation analysis can also be applied to within different kinds of
ecosystems and ecolOgies in order to answer a range of research questions

beyond those presented in chapters 5 and 6:

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In an institutional ecosystem (such as a university, government agency, or
corporation), circulation analysis can trace the appropriation and use of
specific texts that are generated at an individual or departmental level and
then used across the institution. For example, suppose a committee writes
a report about, say, the use of technology in writing courses. Circulation
analysis can help to show whether (or how) the recommendations or the
actual text of the report is used at the departmental level or at different
administrative levels within the institution. Seeing which language or
arguments are taken up and re-used at higher levels can help the
committee to shape future work that uses suCcessful circulation strategies
and drops unsuccessful strategies.

Circulation analysis similar to that used in the electronic portfolio in
chapter 5 can also be used to map the relationships of texts created within
speciﬁc departments or units. For example, a research group or an
academic department can trace the intersections and divergences of the
scholarship produced by its members; once that map has been created, it
is then possible to see where there may be areas of deﬁciency that could
be addressed through hiring new members (in the case of the department)
or taking on additional collaborators (in the case of a research group).
Circulation analysis can also examine larger ecological structures, such as
media ecologies (like blogging or video-sharing and rating sites). However,

in order to engage these larger structures, better circulation analysis tools

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will have to be developed (see below for more on this point).

Circulation Analysis and Discovery

Circulation analysis methods can also be used as tools for discovery — of
scholarly resources, including people who are working in similar areas (but who
may be in different disciplines), inter/cross/trans disciplinary research pathways,
and new and emergent genre systems. These methods can also uncover cases
of plagiarism and software-agent driven information collecting and aggregating
mechanisms, although these issues are not the purpose of circulation analysis.

The most obvious form of discovery supported by circulation analysis is
that of resources. When I examined how people who linked to my work used it for
their own purposes, I found a rich source of relevant materials from other
disciplines and other cultures that either related directly to the work that I had
done or was used to frame similar questions from different approaches or
traditions. (For example, Paul Aitken cited my 1996 Kairos article in his 2006
presentation on “Dialogic and Discursive Elements in Online Music Promotion”;
scholars in drama, philosophy, and theology have also linked to that article, as
have scholars writing in French, German, Icelandic, Bulgarian, and Spanish. This
article also appeared in the bibliography for “Los Libros de Arena: Antecedentes
literarios latinoamericanos de la narrativa hipertextual,” which included a great
deal of scholarship on hypertext from Europe and Latin America that I had not

previously been aware of, despite doing a good deal of my early research on the

199

writing of hypertext). In some cases, these resources were the result of self-
citation on the part of those linking to or quoting my work, thus, there is also a
social-networking form of discovery that can help scholars connect to other
people doing similar work in other ﬁelds or in other countries.

In the same way that resources and people are discovered through
circulation analysis, it is possible to trace interdisciplinary research paths through
the connections of those works in other ﬁelds that site the original digital text (if it
is in a separate ﬁeld). This seems particularly true for the kinds of work that are
addressed in the articles presented in chapter 6 because there are several
relatively new interdisciplinary ﬁelds (such as webometrics, computer-mediated
communication, and intemet research) that are present in the ecosystems where
these works circulate.

Examining the different sources that link to or reference the digital text
being studied can also lead to the discovery of new and emerging genres. Some
of the links to the articles in chapter 6, for instance, included references from
blogs, wikis, and social-bookmarking sites (e.g. del.icio.us). While'blogs have
certainly been around for a long while (in Internet years), it has only recently 1
been argued that blogs might have the ethos to compete with print analogs such
as newspapers and magazines; aside from journalism, though, there is also the
rapid rise of the academic blogger as public intellectual (see, for example, Collin
Brooke's blog on rhetoric and new media work, Rhetorvvorks

[http:l/collinvsblog.net/rhetwork/l, and David Kellog's “Paralepsis,”

200

[http:l/paralepsis.blogspot.com/] which has been crossposted to the high-visibility
political blog, DailyKos
[http:l/www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/4/27/22955/4969]) . The analyses
presented in chapter 6 show bloggers to be more consistently engaged with the
source texts at a deeper rhetorical level than any other genre. And examining
that ﬁnding alongside calls to see academic blogging as a form of publication and
the rise in awards for such blogging12 shows academic blogging as an emerging
scholarly genre. Wikis are also becoming more prevalent as they ﬁnd a place in
digital economies: wikis are often used by technical writers to develop
documentation; they are also used to provide spaces of textual interaction
between information providers and consumers. There is not yet a push to view
Wiki-based work as valued academic enterprise, but the uses of wikis for
academic texts‘3 is relatively rare“.

A ﬁnal example of an emergent genre is the social bookmarking site,
which combines bibliographic references with a mechanism for annotating the
references and also sharing them with other users (examples include furl, simpy,
spurl, del.icio.us, and citeulike). More often than not, links in the social
bookmarking sites do not have annotations, nor do they engage the source texts

in a scholarly way. However, they do offer a measure of how many other

 

‘2 Such as the Kairos sponsored John Lovas Memorial Academic Blog Award.

‘3 I am using “academic text” in a very limited sense here, meaning peer-review scholarship.
However, wikis are being used for pedagogical academic texts, including syllabi, assignments,
and online courses.

‘4 I am aware of only two such Wiki-based scholarly publications, both published in Kairos: Garza
and Hern's (2005) “Collaborative Writing Tools: Something Wiki This Way Comes-Or Not!"
and Brooks and Mara's (2007) “The Classical Trivium: A Heuristic and Heuretic for New Media
and Digital Communication Studies.”

201

individuals found the source text valuable (although there are at least two
drawbacks to using social bookmarking sites for circulation analysis: the same
text may appear one than once in any given application because different names
and naming conventions are applied by the users of these services, the same
problem occurs on a different scale as well because there are a great many
different social bookmarking sites, which adds to the labor overhead of the
method). And like the methods described above for ﬁnding people with similar
interests, it is possible to ﬁnd individuals who have similar interests by reviewing
the list of individuals who have marked the same entry in any given social
bookmarking site. Links to social bookmarking sites are also beginning to appear
alongside the articles of many online journals and newspapers (see Figure 30 for
an example); a move that I would characterize as a push for what Ridolfo
(2007b) calls “rhetorical valuation,” or the mechanisms that can be employed to

continue delivery after the initial distribution Of a text.

Be Social:

I'Bﬁvaft')‘-'§*20IOBC¢§®8°“J§J@TBO

Figure 30. Links to social bookmarking sites are increasingly appended to

online texts.

Finally, circulation analysis methods can also ﬁnd instances of plagiarism
(indeed, in the case of my article in Kairos, which I use in chapter 5, I did ﬁnd an

example of the wholesale appropriation and reuse of my work—uses that did not

202

included any attribution or indication that the text in questioniwas not original).
These analysis methods can also help uncover cases where software agents are
making decisions about and re-circulating the information found in the source
text. The discovery of this kind of agent-driven circulation has implications for the
economics of digital circulation as it is fueled by both human and nonhuman

actors.

Rhetorical/Analysis and Digital-Native Methods

While circulation analysis can be useful for answering the kinds of
research questions presented in chapters 5 and 6 and in the examples above, it
can also serve as a complementary method that can be used in conjunction with
other forms of rhetorical analysis to develop a more comprehensive picture of
rhetorical activities and practices that take place in digital environments.

What circulation analysis does not do is allow the researcher access to the
intentions or purposes that drive the establishment of links and references or that
motivate appropriation: in order to provide information about the initial rhetorical
production as well as post-production circulation, more direct methods (such as
interviewing and real-time observation) would need to be deployed. However,
one of the purposes of circulation analysis is to promote the notion that rhetorical
production does not end with delivery, rather, after distribution, there are still
rhetorical forces at work both on ecological and economic scales.

Combining circulation analysis with a deeper rhetorical analysis of how

203

and why the references and links are being used is one obvious way to expand
upon the results thus far presented; this might incorporate either an analysis
based on how the formal citations play speciﬁc roles in the citing document
(although this approach becomes problematic with the less-formal references
because they may be completely decontextualized), or it might take the form of
interViews with the citers to ﬁnd out why the citations or references were used in
these particular cases (see Thelwall, 2003, for an example of researching
motivations for linking; for discussions of the rhetorical applicationsof citation,
see Cozzens, 1989, Connors, 1999 & Rose, 1999; for a taxonomy of rhetorical
uses of citation and reference, see Robillard, 2006).

Circulation analysis also complements recent work on rhetorical delivery
by my colleague Jim Ridolfo. Ridolfo is developing a theoretical framework of
delivery that takes into account both network-based circulation and the rhetorical
actions that drive and support speciﬁc forms of circulation. Whereas my work is
aimed at articulating an ecological approach to digital circulation, Ridolfo is
framing delivery in terms of speciﬁc actions and has developed terminology for
describing these actions: he describes activities designed to promote the
distribution of a specific message as “rhetorical velocity,” the obfuscation of
authority for purposes of circulation as “rhetorical mystiﬁcation,” working from
only textual evidence to determine the strategic rhetorical considerations of
delivery in a speciﬁc case is “rhetorical reconstruction,” and (as mentioned

earlier), the process of managing the continued strategic worth and function of a

204

document, after the basic technical act of rhetorical delivery is “rhetorical
valuation” (Ridolfo 2005, 2006, 2007a, 2007b). Ridolfo‘s work focuses on actions
in the world: he shows how his framework can help activists get their message
out to mainstream media through the construction of press releases that take
advantage of the principles of rhetorical velocity (such as understanding and
leveraging the labor economics of mainstream media producers), and his
examples of rhetorical mystiﬁcation and valuation come from humans acting in
speciﬁc social milieu (such as the production and circulation of a political ad that
appropriates Apple's 1984 advertisement [Ridolfo. 2007b]). Examining rhetorical
activity that takes place as a component of delivery can be placed within
ecological contexts: combining Ridolfo's approach with circulation analysis as l
”have articulated it here provides a more complete picture of both textual
circulation and the human actions that motivate, promote, or complicate such
circulation as it takes place both within digital networks and in larger social
networks. Aligning circulation analysis with Ridolfo's theoretical approach and
methods remains an important aspect of continuing and future work on this

project.

Developing Digital Rhetoric Methods and Tools
One of the most serious drawbacks of this form of analysis is that it is
signiﬁcantly labor-intensive to collect and analyze the data: working with just the

ﬁrst example in chapter 6 (the Lapadat article) required well over 40 hours of

205

work to collect, evaluate and analyze all of the links and references to the source.
If circulation analysis is to become a useful method for investigating research
questions in digital rhetoric, there will need to be a serious effort undertaken to
develop data collection and analysis tools.

As I began to work on the case study presented in chapter 6, I also began ‘
developing speciﬁcations for a system that would support circulation analysis.
This system would take the source document as its primary input; it would read in
this document, convert it to xml and perform a text analysis that produces the
keyword list and text cloud described in chapter 5. The user would enter the
basic metadata about the source, but the system would then perform the three
main search functions (multiple search engine basic search; backlink search; full-
text search and” comparison). There will need to be a mechanism that would
allow the system to ﬂag potential propagated links and disinclude them from the
net results. During the search process, the system should harvest metadatafrom
each linking or referencing text. The user will still need to view and evaluate each
link or reference and record the information about genre, link type, and degree of
engagement.

. In addition to a data collection tool, data visualization tools that can show
the maps of the ecosystems engaged by the source texts will need to be created.
I used GraphViz to create the network maps (based on the social network
analysis concept of sociograms), but this is not an ideal representation of the

complexity of relationships uncovered through circulation analysis. The data

206

visualization tool I plan to develop will be able to trace out the ecological
boundaries and ecosystems the source text is interacting with, but it will also
show different views based on the kinds ofquestions to be answered (e.g. some
views would focus on genre, others on degree of engagement, and still other
views would focus on link type). An interactive data visualization tool that allows
for manipulation of the environment by the user would be ideal because the user
could reﬁne the ecological map based on the discoveries made when analyzing
the initial text and its relationships (one model for how such a system would work
is TouchGraph, http://www.touchgraph.com).

Once the analysis and visualization tools have been built, it will be
beneﬁcial to run formal usability tests; these tests will evaluate not only the
usefulness and usability of the tools themselves, but will also serve as a text of
the usability of the method as well.

Building the data collection and analysis tools will also support further
work that extends the case presented in chapter 6: applying the same methods
to a much larger sample of digital texts from each level of remediation can lead
from hypothesis-building to hypothesis-testing and the possibilities of
generalization. If time and labor resource issues can be mitigated, circulation
analysis can move from heuristic/discovery method to a method that can be used
to test hypotheses about digital rhetoric — at least for digital texts (and, perhaps,

in the future, for multimedia/new media work as well).

207

A Caveat: Methods for Working with New Media
One of the pressing needs for digital rhetoric research is the development .
of tools and systems capable of dealing with new media works: the main reason
that most of the examples of circulation analysis in this dissertation deal with text
qua text is that there are currently no tools that can do the equivalent kinds of
searches with images, audio, video, or a combination of modes and media. In the
case of Anne Wysocki's “A Bookling Monument,” l fOCused on links and
references to the work, but I could not see if any part of the whole (or the entirety
of the work) had been appropriated, reused, remixed, or repurposed. Many audio
and visual search engines are available, but these engines only return results
based on titles, tags, or annotations of the media rather than based on the
content of the media itself. There is a push to create tools that will allow users to
search within multimedia works, but the tools are still fairly limited. Podzinger ‘
(http://podzinger.com/) offers a search engine that will ﬁnd spoken words within
(a limited set of) online videos, including YouTube videos; blinkx
(http://blinkx.com/) also offers similar functionality, but does not provide as
detailed search results as does Podzinger. Although these tools are in a relatively
eany stage of development, it is this kind of tool that most needs development for

the use of digital rhetoric researchers.

Conclusion

In a knowledge economy, understanding the interactions of texts and

208

contexts can yield a more comprehensive picture of interaction than the
traditional approach of rhetorical invention, composition, and delivery; it can also
provide a map of the relationships that co-construct digital ecosystems because
we have not yet developed appropriate methods for doing so. It is my hope that
by developing a digital-native method in circulation analysis I will have provided a
model that others may use to consider developing other digital-native methods
and that these methods can be proﬁtably employed to further the research

agenda of scholarship in digital rhetoric.

209

Appendix A: Evaluating Degree of Remediation

The following rubric can be used to evaluate digital texts in terms of their
degree of remediation: the remediation continuum developed by Eyman and
Reilly (in-press) includes four designations for electronic texts: highly transparent,
moderately transparent, moderately hypermediated, and highly hypermediated.

The theoretical foundation for assessment in terms of remediation comes
from Bolter and Grusin’s (1999) Remediation: Understanding New Media. Bolter
and Grusin posit that new media genres are either transparent or hypermediated:
transparency describes electronic texts that allow us to forget or see through
their electronic mediation and view the text as we expect it to be: linear,
straightforward, hierarchical, and accessible, like a page from a printed book or
journal but delivered online. Readers are not challenged by the structural aspects
of transparent electronic texts; years of reading printed books and journals
prepare them for reading these texts. The same holds true for examples from
other media, such as video (the videos available on YouTube, for instance, are
transparent with regard to mediation — they look like the videos available on
television, albeit in a somewhat wider range of genres and content).

In contrast, hypermediated electronic texts draw attention to their own
mediation, ﬂaunting their differences from print and defamiliarizing and
challenging readers to make their own meanings, or in Yancey’s (2004) terms,

achieving a measure of coherence, through navigating the hyperlinks, exploring

210

inten~oven graphics and text, and experiencing the multiple media, including
audio and video, that comprise them. As Bolter and Grusin (1999) explain,
“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...ln every manifestation, hypermediacy makes us aware of the medium or
media” (p. 34) - often because of this media enactment is required for the use of
the digital text.

The key elements evaluated when determining degree of remediation
include clear relationships to extant non-networked genres (such as print
journals, encyclopedias, television sit-coms, etc); use of design elements such as
color, typography, iconography, moving and still images; hypertext linking
structure; number of genres or media interacting within the digital text; and
requirement of explicit interactivity (beyond reading and navigating).

For evaluating the hypertext linking structure, the rubric uses the
taxonomy of structures from the Yale C/AIM Web Style Guide (Lynch & Horton,

1997»

211

 

 

 

"‘ Complexity

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

-1? “£3; gee
Educated 3% x. é" Air-“3'1
audiences m I em
new we: a; Era a-.. ﬁxi-f" :3.
iii ié‘EEETET":e§ FE/\~=E=E
”r" ""7 “I“ 3’ “T f' , ﬁ‘e-
e3 z:_e_;e_ge_ee
£3732 2:3- g: 335-“ E?!
Grid .— —. T .
5:3 BE 55E
:1: T :1" T}: 1
Simplicity 25+: 22; E a .=='_—__.—-'—
Basic content, Hierarchy
training '
EEHWJIS‘E ea £23!
Sequence
L
. 1'
Linear narrative Non-linear, hyperlinked
Predictable structure Flexible. may be confusing

Figure 31. Yale CIAIM Link Structures.

Degree of Remediation Rubric
Genre

Is this genre clearly identiﬁable? '
If Yes, go to the next question in this section; if no, continue on to Design.

Is this genre clearly replicating an extant genre without adding any additional

functionality or incorporation of other media?
If Yes then this work is “Highly Transparent.” If No then continue below.

212

Interactivity

Does this work require interactivity (beyond typical reading/navigating activities)
in order for it to be meaningful? (Tip: Aﬂash-based text that requires the user to
navigate through buttons labeled 'next' and 'previous' would constituted typical
navigation, not interactivity).

If Yes then this text is “Highly Hypermediated.” If No, then continue below.

Design
assign a point value of 0 to 3:
0 = none or N/A, 1 = single instance, 2 = several instances, 3 = many instances

Typography
Rhetorical use of multiple fonts
Use of “artistic” fonts

lconography
Use of icons for symbolic representation of concepts or ideas
Use of icons to demark structural divisions
Use of icons as aesthetic design element

Color
Use of color to convey meaning
Use of color to structure navigation
Aesthetic use of color (e.g. background design)

Still images
Inclusion of black 8 white drawings
Inclusion of color drawings
Inclusion of black & white photographs
Inclusion of color photographs
Inclusion of black 8 white digital images
Inclusion of color digital images
Inclusion of clearly manipulated images

Moving Images
Inclusion of animated images
Inclusion of digital video

Audio
Inclusion of speech recording
Inclusion of music
Inclusion of incidental/background audio

213

Structure

Sequence = 1

Hierarchy = 2

Grid = 3

Web = 4
Multiple Modes or Media

Add 1 point for each additional mode or media beyond 1.

Score:

0 — 5 Highly Transparent

6 - 10 Moderately Transparent

11 — 15 Moderately Hypermediated
15 or higher Highly Hypermediated

214

Appendix B: A Taxonomy of Digital and Digitized Genres (Cited in
Rhetoric/Composition Print Scholarship)

Although the following list is not by any means comprehensive, l have
found it helpful in establishing the genre of the digital texts that are circulation in
various network ecosystems. The list itself is based on a qualitative evaluation of
digital documents encountered during an earlier research project that examined
how print journals in rhetoric/composition cited or referenced digital sources”.
The development of this list is related to the assessment of the degree of
remediation exhibited by digital documents (see Appendix A); in many cases, the
genre of a digital text is related to a precursor genre (or genres), so the challenge
has been to establish to what degree the digital work has sufﬁciently changed
purpose or form to be considered a new genre.

It's important to note that identiﬁcation of genre is not based solely on
visual or structural attributes. When developing the taxonomy below, I examined
both form and function, structure and rhetorical purpose. The deﬁnition of “genre”
that l have used to guide my assessment is that of Swales (1990), “A genre
comprises a class of communicative events, the members of which share some
set of communicative purposes. These purposes are recognized by the expert
members of the parent discourse community and thereby constitute the rationale

for the genre. This rationale shapes the schematic structure of the discourse and

 

‘5 The answer thus far, after examining the major print journals in rhet/comp from 1996-2003, is
“not very much” and “not very well.” This research is still ongoing however, and I am hoping to
see greater use over time as the database is updated to 2007.

215

inﬂuences and constrains choice of content and style” (p. 58).

There has been quite a bit of work done on developing an understanding
of digital genres and attempts to classify those genres into taxonomies similar to
the one below (Yates 8r Orlikowski,‘1992 Yates, Orlikowski, 8r Okamura, 1999;
Roussinov et al., 2001; Crowston & Williams, 1997; Ryan et al., 2003; Furuta &
Marshall, 1996; Kwasnik, 8r Crowston, 2004; Askehave & Nielson, 2005; Kwasnik
et al., 2005), and most of the researchers working the genre classiﬁcation admit
that there are many challenges that are encountered when attempting to create
such a taxonomy. One challenge is understanding the interplay of medium and
genre: Askehave & Nielson, 2005) argue that “media properties inﬂuence both
the purpose and form of web-mediated genres and should therefore be included
in the genre identiﬁcation” (p.4); they further theorize that the difﬁculties of
understanding and accounting for this interplay are the “uncertainty and
confusion” that has accompanied the “shift in genre research from traditional
printed genres to genres published in electronic media such as the WWW “ (pp.
6-7).

In 1997, Crowston and Williams examined 100 web pages and determined
that they were composed of 48 distinct genres and that 80% of the pages in their
sample replicated a print genre to a high degree. In 2001, Roussinov et al. used

Crowston and Williams's (1997) coding scheme16 to analyze 1234 web pages,

 

‘6 Crowston and Williams (1997) did not have a coding scheme per se, the method they
identiﬁed genres “based on the authors' experience with the Web and with other forms of
communication. The determination of the genre of each Web page was done by each author
separately. The authors then discussed the classiﬁcation of each page and either agreed on a
genre or that the page was unclassiﬁable” (n.p.)

216

coming up with a total of 116 genres; they then asked users to classify these
pages as belonging to one of the 116 genres. The agreement between the
researchers and the respondents about appropriate genre classiﬁcation for a
given page was 49.63% — as Shepherd, Watters, and Kennedy (2004) note, this
study shows two things: “ﬁrstly, the number of Web genres seems to be growing,
secondly, it is often difﬁcult to determine the genre of a Web page” (p. 3).

Shepherd, Watters, and Kennedy (2004) developed their own
classiﬁcation scheme based not on speciﬁc genres of individual pages but on a
distinction between “extant” and “novel” genres: extant genres are those based
on existing genres whereas novel genres are “not like any existing genre in any
other medium” (p. 1). These categories are further subdivided into replicated or
variant forms of extant genres (which map onto Reilly and Eyman's (2007) .
remediation continuum as “highly transparent” and “moderately transparent”) and
emergent or spontaneous forms of novel genres (which do not map as neatly
onto the remediation). While Shepherd, Watters, and Kennedy's schema is
similar to Reilly and Eyman's remediation continuum (based on Bolter and
Grusin's [1999] theories of “remediation”), it's approach to “spontaneous” novel
genres does not ﬁt with the rhetorically-based deﬁnition and use of genre (that is,
all genres are to varying degrees emergent because they have speciﬁc
communicative requirements and social exegeses).

Although this is very preliminary work, the next step will be to determine

whether particular genres are more likely to function within speciﬁc ecosystems,

217

or if they are equally distributed across ecosystems and within and between
larger ecological structures (e.g. institutions and disciplines).

This taxonomy is based on data collected from journals in
rhetoric/composition from 1996-2003; there are certainly more digital genres than

represented here—however, only these genres are cited in the data set.

Home Page
Home Page: Government
Home Page: Corporate
Home Page: Organization
Home Page: Community
Home Page: Personal

Link Pages
Link List
Bookmark List
Webliography
Bibliography

Position Statement
Mission Statement
Strategic Plan

FAQ

Press Release

Advertisement

Whitepaper
Whitepaper: Product
Whitepaper: System
Whitepaper: Concept

Journal Article
Journal Article: Editorial
Journal Article: Non-Peer-Reviewed
Journal Article: Peer-Reviewed

218

Editorial

Review
Review: Text
Review: Software
Review: Event
Review: Performance

Response Letter

Conference Presentation
Conference Proceeding

Course Materials
Course Materials: Syllabus
Course Materials: Assignment
Course Materials: Lecture
Online Course

Library Handout

Student Work
Course Assignment
Assigned Blog
Undergraduate Honors Thesis
MA Thesis
PhD Dissertation

Email
Email: Personal
Email: Listserv
Email Archive

Threaded Discussion

Book
Book Chapter

Editor's Introduction
Introduction
Table of Contents

Legal Document

219

Report
Survey Results

Poem
Short Story

Transcript
Transcript: Television interview
Transcript: Radio interview

220

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