As others often point out, the authors write that “digital works allows for communicating complex ideas through the use of hypertextual connections, multiple modes, non-linear associations and author-reader interactions.” They also maintain that digital work also “challenges the divides between research, teaching and service.”
They suggest five rhetorical moves that may be made in scholarship (digital or not): explicit argument, speculation, implicit association, dialogic exchange and formal enactment.
- “Explicit argumentation includes those practices overtly taught in instructional materials (i.e., what we teach in our composition classes) and modeled in published scholarship (i.e., what authors do to get their texts published in respected academic journals and university presses)…That is, it is a work that communicates primarily with words, includes an explicit thesis statement and linear organization, directly connects evidence and claims, and reviews relevant literature within a particular scholarly conversation, including conventional bibliographic citation.”
- “Speculation [is a] more tentative, less forceful consideration of ideas.” It allows multiple theses instead of only one.
- “Implicit association follows from the work of hypertext theorists, who argue that digital texts allow for knowledge produced by association and depend on reader intervention and interaction.”
- Dialogic exchange: “we considered how digital texts encourage and enact direct or indirect dialogue”
- Formal enactment: “authors take advantage of the design possibilities of a particular digital space to make meaning.” In essence, authors practice what they preach.
In analyzing webtext, the authors argue that “texts do not automatically lose their scholarliness because they change medium. Digital scholarship does not inherently eliminate what we expect of other forms of scholarship. Yet while webtexts exhibit many of the same rhetorical moves as print scholarship, they add to and transform these conventional practices.In addition to exhibiting recognizable argumentative moves, all of the webtexts we studied share another characteristic, though this one departs from traditional scholarly articles: length. The webtexts are rather long—much longer, in fact, than a standard journal article. This absence of spatial limitation in digital venues affords extensive elaboration of ideas.”
In analyzing Twitter, they write that “the value of Twitter lies in the ways it can create an ongoing sense of participation—of being inside of a text under construction—not only as a sole author striving for coherence and impact on his or her audience, but as a member of a collective authorship, creating knowledge through ongoing exchange. In this sense, Twitter is perhaps less like an individual entering the Burkean Parlor than it is an embodiment of a ‘Happening’ or other experimental performance. It is the collective performance that makes knowledge and shapes thinking. Individuals act within this performance, sometimes even without being fully aware of the significance of their actions as part of the performance's ability to create meaning. And yet, participation in such a space can have a profound, ongoing effect on an individual's thinking, scholarship, and scholarly identity.” Put differently, “our analysis illustrates how spaces like Twitter, Techrhet, and blogs can serve as a direct outlet to most formal scholarly productions. That is, ideas explored and developed in these spaces frequently find their way into other scholarship and play a role in the development of ideas and productive knowledge.”