#Writingdigitalspace #Hypermodalinquiry

• In Event: Working Through Methodologies Without a Proper Name

Abstract

Purpose: As refereed journals and books increasingly embed digital elements (images, video, sounds, hypertext) into print form, multimedia scholarship expands possibilities within academic publishing. To illustrate, this paper explores how digital writings may create new openings and, in so doing, write within unnamed methodological spaces. In the process, this paper responds to a call for “new strategies, media, and formats that combine academic rigor with the broader audience demands on public scholarship” Oakes, Welner, & Renée, 2015, p. 2).

Theoretical Framework: The theoretical framework draws from Deleuze’s conceptualizations of spatiality (1993). For Deleuze and Guattari, smooth space is marked by the visual, the auditory, and the tactile in an open, “infinite succession of linkages and changes in direction” (1987, p. 494). Striated space, in contrast, is tightly regulated and controlled. Smooth space disrupts striated space, just as methodologies without proper names disrupt normative approaches to qualitative research.

Modes of Inquiry: Hypermodal inquiry involves “the new interactions of word-, image-, and sound-based meanings in hypermedia” (Lemke, 2002, p. 300; see also Author, 2015). As Kaufmann and Holbrook (2013) suggest, hypermodalities foreground different methodological spaces for thinking and responding. Hypermodalities also form a methodology without methodology (Koro-Ljungberg, 2016), or a constant regeneration of methodological flows that “transform, circumvent, infiltrate, appear, and disappear while opening up new directions for qualitative research” (p. 80).

Data Sources: A minimalist soundscape forms the hypermodal surface (_ghost, 2010). Digital images then are selected from black and white minimalist photography on Flickr; following Deleuze and Guattari, the images depict movement through striated space. Lastly, text emanates from the title’s hashtags: #writingdigitalspace and #hypermodalinquiry. None have been used on Twitter to date, enabling the hypermodality to introduce new methodological discourse into the Twitter sphere and unfold over time. In this respect, the hypermodality is not a contained project, but a digital opening that spills over into other realms. Given that this writing experiment evolves alongside Twitter hashtag use, half of the film canvas remains blank, later to be filled with live Tweets. Taken together, text, images, and sound approach an “extensive unity of minimal art, in which form no longer contains a volume but embraces a limitless space in all directions” (Deleuze, 1993, p. 160).

Findings: http://youtu.be/Ef-0_zA-c0Y

Significance: Given the rapidly evolving nature of technology, it is important to reconsider what counts as scholarship, who contributes, and how research is written and disseminated. At the same time, technologies are creating new modes for both creating and regulating methods; the tensions therein may occur in the folds between smooth and striated space. Notably, however, “smooth spaces are not in themselves liberatory. But the struggle is changed or displaced in them, and life reconstitutes its stakes, confronts new obstacles, invents new paces…” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 500). As new writing modes emerge, digital writings displace and re-pace unnamed methodological space.

Author

• Jasmine Ulmer, Wayne State University