We are currently seeking submissions for a proposed MLA 17 special session, “That’s Not How Scholarship Works: Exploring the Process of Multimodal Critical Making.” 

Most scholarly works published in digital forms reprise the written essay: they may be unconstrained by publisher’s desires for page limits, but otherwise they are often so bound to the pseudo-printed form as to be published online as PDF documents, paginated and static. Despite the promise of many disruptive technologies for collaboration, annotation, open peer review, and the integration of multimedia, relatively few literature and humanities journals operate with these mechanisms. Digital humanities discourse has embraced the collaborative project, which is often large in scale, grant-funded, and requires the dedicated labor of programmers and designers. However, these projects do not offer us an accessible alternative to the scholarly essay, bound as they are to structures of privilege, access, and knowledge. Instead, we look to multimodal journals, where works are often constructed by individuals and small teams who among them balance the demands of diverse skillsets.

This session will gather an interdisciplinary group of scholars and editors who engage with critical making as scholarship to reveal their process: the post-it notes, sketches, planning, code experiments, and non-linear piecing together that becomes an individual or co-authored multimodal work of scholarship. Through curating their own acts of critical making, the scholars involved will offer models to others that reveal some of the invisible labor behind multimodal scholarship. Participants will interact with these works through a digital roundtable, with exhibited materials and fragments gathered and free circulation and discourse around the room. The scholarly works selected for self-reflexive analysis include works built with intentional platforms such as Scalar as well as works hand-coded or built with tools not aimed at scholars.

We are particularly interested in revealing how structure and meaning are interwoven in multimodal works, as scholars move between coding, designing, and writing without a clear separation of these labors. Webtexts (such as those featured in Kairos and Itinerations) have been a scholarly form for over twenty years, but the tools and practices have changed dramatically over that time. Modern makers engaged with such forms face not only the challenges of labor (both lessened and complicated by transitioning tools) but also the expectations of an over-saturated world of digital media.

For consideration, please submit a 300 word abstract to anastasia.salter (at) gmail.com by March 15th! If you are proposing a discussion of a multimodal work that is already available, please include a link to the work.