Acknowledging the Non-humans

Last week, CCC announced the revival of CCCOnline, a digital partner for the flagship journal of our discipline. The announcement and the resulting discussion kept returning to the same place: the collaborative scholarship featured in the issue. Of the 8 texts, 5 of them were collaboratively created, 3 of them with 4 or more authors. (You can access the webtexts here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8552537/ccconline/issue1-1/public-toc/index.html). There is a certain amount of controversy surrounding the newest incarnation, however: the “disappearing” of articles from earlier incarnations of the journal. That is, the digital space created to house CCCOnline required physical space that may have displaced earlier work. The journal, and the controversy it created, is a perfect example of the sometimes problematic interactions between the digital, the physical, and the semiotic/discursive.

Arguably, collaborative scholarship is nothing new. Even single-authored texts rely on citations that reveal networks of thought and cast, I would argue, all scholarship as a networked endeavor. (For a recent discussion of citation practices within English studies, see Ling Shi’s "Common Knowledge, Learning, and Citation Practices in University Writing." Research in the Teaching of English. 45.3 (2011): 308-334.) What may be new, however, is the collaborative construction, the co-writing of the text itself and the connection (foregrounded by the chapters in McGrath’s collection Collaborative Approaches to the Digital in English Studies) between physical, digital, and discursive spaces.

George Siemans (2006) argues that “learning is the process of creating networks. Nodes are external entities which we can use to form a network...The act of learning (things become a bit tricky here) is one of creating an external network of nodes—where we connect and form information and knowledge sources” (29). These networks must, according to actor-network theorists like Bruno Latour (especially in Pandora’s Hope), include considerations of human and non-human nodes. In other words, strong networks connect the material and the semiotic. (See Donna Haraway’s Modest Witness for a discussion of the hybrid material-semiotic actor created through our evolving connections to technology.) For their part, McCarthy and Nahas (2011) suggest that digital technologies alter knowledge making practices precisely because they expand or at least illuminate the role of non-human actors in the production of knowledge. Further, the authors suggest that James Gee and Eric Zimmerman’s game theories help explain the new collaborative approaches to scholarship: “These multiple semiotic modalities require a restructuring of not only the texts we write but also of the entire process of research. The playful methodologies we support in the Lab correspond to the larger project of rethinking how we research and publish in the field of digital rhetoric” (154).

The changes to scholarship enabled (or perhaps mandated, depending on your point of view) by digital technologies require that we revise more than our concept of what counts as intellectual work in the academy, though this is a challenging proposition all on its own. Our increasing interaction with digital spaces and knowledge making practices requires us to consider the role of non-human participants and begin to recast knowledge production as a collaboration that includes the technologies we have long seen as mere tools.