Prelude

In the late 18th century, during what was thought to be the Enlightenment’s dying gasps, William Wordsworth wrote a preface to a collection of poems that he and a close friend had published. The Preface to the Lyrical Ballads became a seminal work of literary criticism. Filled with novel ideas about the nature of poetry, Wordsworth claimed that for poetry to be lasting and universal, it must not only touch upon those ideas that affect the lives of most people, but also be intelligible to them. All good poetry should be “in a selection of the language really used by men.” The revolutionary importance of this statement might not be readily apparent. To advocate that poetry, that canonized, high-cultural artifact and one of the most complex linguistic codes humans have devised, be written in the language of the average reader was a democratic coup. Poetry had been written for a relatively small, highly educated, and exclusive audience. Wordsworth took poetic discourse, boiled it down to its central, essential parts, and based his theory of poetry on the results. In so doing, Wordsworth transformed the purpose, effect, and form of poetry so that it might reach a wider audience in a language that they might readily understand and deal with subjects that are of direct relevance to them.

The problems of a nascent, interdisciplinary field

So what does all this have to do with studying, teaching, and practicing in the nascent fields of Digital Media and Arts? Plenty. Look at the table of contents for the 2006 Conference edition of the International Digital Media and Arts Association journal. These articles represent a selection from all of the papers accepted to the 2006 iDMAa conference held in conjunction with the Interactive Media Studies conference at the University of Miami of Ohio. The theme of the 2006 conference is Code—“built around an examination of the many codes that drive the digital media and arts world” Consider the breadth of inquiry, the diverse fields, and the varied approaches—the varied academic codes—represented in these papers. Note how the papers’ methods and forms vary. This introduction to the 2006 conference edition of The International Digital Media and Arts Association Journal proposes to speculate on why these different codes exist and advocates adopting an editorial policy for the conference edition that attempts to “decode” our dialog and instead privilege “plain text” and an instructive focus that I hope will best suit the needs of our research, art, and pedagogy.

These differences between papers exist primarily due to two reasons—the newness of our field and its interdisciplinary nature. First, the media upon which our field is based is fairly new and while I’ll agree that this statement might sound overdone, let’s look at the facts. Compared to this history of the moveable type printing press, digital media, as a means of communications, has existed for a brief span of time. During this time, we have only yet begun to define the conventions of our field (such as critical methodologies and vocabularies and suitable, commonly accepted and appropriate navigation devices for digital works). Whether we call ourselves New Media, Digital Media, Digital Art, Digital Storytelling, Interactive Art, Digital Communications, Interactive Media Studies, or Digital Critique, because of the field’s relative newness, it has not yet negotiated a shared critical vocabulary or methodology or bibliographic tools useful in secondary research. While different departments and program have different goals, target markets, and realities, this fact that we work in a field so new that it doesn’t yet know what to call itself poses very specific, very real problems that the field as a whole must negotiate; and as Cornet and Hriso point out later in this edition, the interdisciplinary field represented by Digital Media and Arts has, as of yet, no real accrediting body nor accepted best practices in our field. As we’ve not yet negotiated these central issues, our field remains heterogeneous in its approaches regarding scholarly and artistic practices.

This heterogeneity leads into the second reason for the variety within these papers; the very interdisciplinary nature of this group poses some serious problems to the act of scholarship and communicating with one another via journals such as this. Lev Manovich claims that our understanding of new media relies upon the conventions of preexisting media. We view the new media (and its potential) through the lens of the familiar media and, in so doing, adopt practices that do not make the best use of the new media’s attributes. I maintain that this practice is equally true for this new discipline, cobbled together as it is from older, established “primary-disciplines.” As a community of artists, designers, scholars, and teachers, many of us hail from different disciplinary backgrounds, such as Theatre, Computer Science, Art, Engineering, Journalism, Business, and English. These primary-disciplines form our expectations and practices. We each bring the assumptions and practices of our primary-discipline to our work and discourse in digital media and arts. We see this new discipline through the lens of our primary-discipline, often relying upon a discipline specific critical vocabulary or methodology, which in turn can trouble the discourse between those varied primary-disciplines that compose iDMAa.

These differences form the basis for this association’s strength; and a journal should capitalize on this strength as well as allow for and benefit a varied, wide audience. We must, however, be frank in our examination of these differences. In an interdisciplinary field such as this, how does this interdisciplinary group learn, write, and thrive in a culture where terms have different meanings dependent upon the author’s primary-discipline? In such a heterogeneous audience, authors cannot assume that the critical vocabulary they use is free of the biases, jargon, and assumptions of their discipline.

For example, what does perspective mean? According to Mark Stephen Meadows, there are “at least two kinds of perspective: emotional (or cognitive) and dimensional (or visual).” Yet within art, architecture, and literature, the term perspective varies in meaning. Can we write a work that deals with perspective, for a diverse audience, without first defining those terms central (or even secondary) to our project’s purpose? Another example is the term multi-modal. What does it mean? Two articles in this edition use the same term, but with different meanings. Hedgecock, Wang, and Fernandez’s “Mobile Media and Digital Wayfinding: Strategies for Implementation” associate multi-modal with a location and define it as a location that integrates multiple public transportation systems (such as air, train, bus, etc.). However, in McDaniel, Fiore, Greenwood-Ericksen, Scielzo, and Cannon-Bowers’s “Video Games as Learning Tools for Project Management,” “multimodal refers to the practice of using combined modes of sound, imagery, or text.” We have two different papers from ostensibly two different primary-disciplines that define this term in two different ways. Exasperating this problem is the fact that we continue to attempt to define digital media related processes and concepts using different terms (such as using the terms interactive text, digital text, new media, ergodic literature, and cybertext to refer to the same object). Such confusion is understandable given the young age of the field and its interdisciplinary origins, but this confusion poses problems nonetheless.

The difficulties posed by iDMAa’s interdisciplinary composition manifests itself in other ways as well. For example, how would a member of our field go about a critically analyzing a digital work? A humanities paper could examine the interplay of elements in the work and how these elements fulfill the work’s rhetorical purpose (assuming it had one), or the cultural assumptions implicit in the work’s construction. These are valued analyses, yet these approaches to studying this work are only a few of the possible means of studying digital media and arts. These two studies differ from more social science oriented research (which privileges different methods and evidence), as well as the creative/production oriented side of the discipline. But what about an artistic response to this work, or an analysis of its effectiveness as a marketing tool, or a sociological study of its varied uses? In many ways, the interdisciplinary nature of this field constitutes a microcosm of the academic world—only with the adjective “digital” or “interactive” prefixed to it.

Given our heterogeneity, my attempt to establish guidelines for choosing papers from this conference replicates Wordsworth’s act of boiling down poetic expression to its constituent parts and should catalyze, I hope, a discussion concerning the nature of scholarship in our field. I have divided my assessment of what a paper should do into four basic parts. First, the paper must say something new or of interest to our audience. Second, it must situate the paper within a larger critical discussion through referencing other critical or artistic works. Third, the paper must make its claims in a clear and concise manner. Fourth, the paper must adequately support all claims it makes. Part of the debate I’d like this edition and these papers to engender concerns the meaning and practices of scholarship and practice within such a diverse, interdisciplinary field. Can we as an organization reside in one ivory tower, or should we resign ourselves to lead our separate lives in our varied, separate towers? Does such a debate, focused as it is on the scholarly side of the organization, privilege the critical over the artistic, and give creative expression short shrift? Does it overly privilege my own primary-discipline’s critical methodologies at the expense of other fields’? Should we even consider setting scholarship standards in such a field or would continuing on in our silos best serve this organization, having constructed a Tower of Babel rather than a single ivory tower, housing us all? Should our tower be ivory at all—given the practioner base of iDMAa membership?

“On the same page”

These problems facing the discipline of digital media/New media would be common among most new, interdisciplinary fields. While I’d maintain that there need not be a unified, monolithic approach to work in this field as the richness of this field stems from its varied perspectives and ideas, from an editorial standpoint, however, the paper-based medium in which this journal is published and the varied media in which we work compounds our troubles. The nature of the media in which we work poses several problems. First, most methods of citation and attribution are largely based on a paper medium, not a digital. Paper works form what is known as uni-cursal works, having only one reading path through them. An example of a uni-cursal work is a paper that follows the linear path of the line of print. This paper has a discrete beginning, middle, and end and the author intends that it be read in the same order, no matter who reads it. Digital media, however, allows for what is known as multi-cursal works, which have varied paths through them. A good example of a multi-cursal work is a video game that allows users to follow their own paths and interact with the game as they see fit (the SIMs would be a good example). Each time a game is played, slight (or major) differences in the game manifest themselves due to the choices of the audience. Uni-cursal works don’t pose the same editorial and citation problem as multi-cursal works that allow for user action in order for the work to take place. Multi-cursal works, have no set path, resulting in no set, shared text or experience to reference or cite. This isn’t necessarily bad, but it does challenge many of the assumptions governing publishing research that had existed before the advent of digital media.

The Humanities is predicated on the assumption that specific, authoritative editions of texts exist and upon which critical exchanges were based. One of the fundamental premises of scholarship in the Humanities is the citation and attribution of primary and secondary sources. To illustrate how citations demonstrate our disciplinary values, let’s look at the logic of citations. Citation and attribution practices, while seemingly trivial, reflect the deep-seated values of a culture predicated on print technology and on the values and concerns of different disciplines. The humanities documentary note (name of the author, work, publishing information, page numbers) attends to textual evidence and the need for accuracy in quotation, as well as privileging the author. Obviously, both the humanities documentary note and the science’s author/year are means to attribute material to sources and acknowledge an intellectual debt. Implicit within these two choices, however, are the values of different constituencies. In both, the author’s name is included because we as a culture attribute value to individual, original thought. Date/year is included because of the need for timely information in fields where research becomes dated and the timeliness of the information is important. Including page numbers is largely an artifact of the print-age, relying upon the navigating conventions of print to serve as a reference point. Citing page numbers also allows individuals to verify the accuracy of the citation, the humanities equivalent of repeating an experiment to attempt to get the same results. Including the publication information of a work—the place of publication, the publisher, and the date that a work was published—create a means to differentiate more readily between different texts or authors with the same names (and helps establish the credibility of a text, basing the judgment on the perceived rigor of different presses). Exact reproduction of quotes is a hallmark of print technology.

The documentary note format has problems associated with it, because when applied to digital media, this practice relies upon the conventions of print technology (such as page numbers) to works that no longer abide by these conventions. Multi-cursal works result in many of these assumptions being overturned. From an editorial and scholarly standpoint, how would we reference in a scholarly article a specific instance in a work such as a video game, where there is no “standard” edition because we “co-author” the work? There are no page numbers to cite. We could resort to requiring a procedural literacy and look at, reference, and cite the code of a digital object, but the code only supplies a fraction of the work as a whole; it overlooks the influence of the user on the text. The fact remains, however, that as long as scholarship takes to paper as a medium or continues to abide by conventions based on print technology, we will need to develop better means to cite digital, multi-cursal works.

In many digital media works, there really aren’t the navigational cues analogous to those in print. Besides the internet (where URLs might work), the different navigational cues upon which the humanities documentary note relies have yet to be firmly established and are still in flux. The print medium of this journal poses problems as well, in that we’re rendering a digital world on paper. I suppose that this is the same challenge faced by social sciences such as anthropology or those fields that face recording ephemeral acts and events. How do you reduce this grand spectrum down to the black and white of a printed page? Reducing a rule-based media such as multi-cursal, interactive works in digital media, is like forcing an ephemeral, digital peg through a book shaped hole. The process doesn’t do the digital world justice. Perhaps we as a discipline should begin to debate the merits of Jay David Bolter’s call for a hybrid merging of new media practice and academic theory into the world of scholarly prose and his questioning academic establishment regarding their willingness to change their notions of critical research to include new media forms. However, as a discipline, we need to question whether new media forms that are non-linear and multi-linear or multi-cursal can sustain logic and argument—the cornerstones of academic scholarship.

The purpose of this conference journal edition, as I see it, is to record the dialog that takes place every year between those diverse fields that comprise digital media arts. As a result, I have edited these papers so that they “educate, not obfuscate.”10 Wherever possible, I have asked that the authors avoid jargon and use footnotes to explain and define those discipline specific terms, processes, and ideas that they use. The idea is that we bring together our collective voices so that, outside of our individual silos, we can continue the conference’s critical dialog concerning our research, practices, and pedagogy.

As a result of this problem posed, I’ve proposed to establish editorial policies that follow Wordsworth’s edict. By boiling down our prose to its constituent parts, avoiding jargon, writing in clear, general language and generously explaining in footnotes the nature of the ideas, terms, and processes in our papers, this conference edition will come to be the editorial equivalent of plain text. Plaintext is text without the different, varied codes that are available to us as writers. By using plaintext, we guarantee that we will be able to communicate our message to our audience, no matter what codes in which they operate. Of course, some degree of loss will occur, but absent of those codes unique to our respective fields, the message will be readable. It is within these two notions—that of Wordsworth’s preface and that of the metaphor of plaintext—that I have based the editorial practices of The International Digital Media and Arts Association Journal conference edition. I hope that you find it as instructive and edifying as I had.

Footnotes

1. William Wordsworth, “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads,” in Abrams, M.H., ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 2, 7th ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2000): 241-250.
2. We see a similar movement take this idea to its extreme in the artistry of Piet Mondrian, whose works seem to boil painting down to its essentials—lines and colors.
3. “Call for Papers,” http://www.units.muohio.edu/codeconference/papers/pdf_cfp.htm.
4. For discussions of the history of print technology, see Ronald J. Deibert, Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia: Communication in the World Order Transformation (New York: Columbia UP, 1997); Frederick G. Kilgour, The Evolution of the Book (New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998); Jay David Bolter, Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print, 2nd edition (London, Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003).
5. See Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 71.
6. Mark Stephen Meadows, Pause and Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative (Indianapolis: New Riders Press, 2003): 12.
7. See George Landow and Paul Delany’s “Hypertext, Hypermedia and Literary Studies: The State of the Art” Hypertext and Literary Study (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991): 10-11. This essay discusses the secondary nature of text in footnotes, and how hypertext changes this power relationship.
8. Procedural literacy is the idea that those studying the field of digital media and arts demonstrate a knowledge of code—the “procedural literacy” of how multi-cursal, interactive and digital objects work—to demonstrate a knowledge of how the work operates. See Michael Mateas, “Procedural Literacy: Educating the New Media Practitioner.”
9. Jay David Bolter. “Theory and Practice in New Media Studies,” in Digital Media Revisited: Theoretical and Conceptual Innovation in Digital Domains Edited by Gunnar Liestøl, Andrew Morrison, and Terje Rasmussen (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003): 30 and 29.
10. Design Editor Randall Hoyt’s great turn of phrase.