Incubating Visual Arts Research's "Born Digital" Issue

Guest Editors Ryan M. Patton and Aaron D. Knochel

Our journey to the Visual Arts Research: Born Digital special issue began in the fall 2013 when we started collaborating on a manuscript to review digital scholarship constituted in the field of Art Education. In what became "As We May Publish: Digital Scholarship and the Future(s) of Art Education" (Knochel & Patton, 2014), we surveyed activities within and outside of the field of art education and engaged in speculation about the nature of the technological ecology: how might a digital publication afford different multimedia opportunities for art education and knowledge generation? Further, if advantages were possible, what would be needed to sustain these digital texts as extended textual forms and reach a broader, more diverse global audience?

Despite early efforts to use digital spaces for research, from our perspective in 2013, digital scholarship and online publication in art education remained skeumorphic translations of traditional print publications. What we suggested then, and continue to believe, is the need for innovation in scholarly publishing through digital scholarship. While print modes of scholarly publications continue to be privileged as this special issue is published, 21st century scholarship is being shaped and morphed by digital platforms: journals distributed as electronic documents; social networks sharing academic and professional resources; and peer review processes managed on open journal web platforms. Increasingly, major publishers are developing robust digital platforms to distribute journal content by making electronics documents available, and offering a range of tools for authors to promote their research so they can more effectively market the availability of their content. It is as if scholarly publishing has entered an uncertain business model somewhere between the distributed direct-sales model of Amway and Etsy's networked labor force. Despite these developments, in surveying the current field of art education, there are few venues advancing scholarly practices living and thriving as multimodal digital manifestations. So in our call for this special issue we asked authors to engage with the question of how might scholarly activity be born digital, augmenting current practices of research in art education, by expanding opportunities in knowledge creation?

When we first proposed our idea to the editorial team of Visual Arts Research, we balanced our desire to think ambitiously about what digital platforms may offer to academic platforms and art education authors, while being wary of the hype of digital media and learning. Marc Prensky (2001) coined the term "digital native" and "digital immigrant" as metaphors to frame the generational shift demarcating the emergence of tech-savvy learners, or at least born in an era with a networked and pervasive technological ecology. The digital native and immigrant concepts receive push back for the ways they are wielded to assume technological knowledge. However we do gravitate to the idea that our era is increasingly filled with digital systems, processes, and objects. At the time of our 2014 article, our core challenge was to try to understand how digitality was affecting scholarship as practices associated with academic labor and knowledge creation. Was scholarship born digital doing something different, and if so how? We believed the most obvious place to look first was the impact that digital systems and platforms were having on academic publishing. Born digital scholarship in the form of publishing has its exemplars: Kairos (online since 1995) is a peer-reviewed Rhetoric and Composition journal, encouraging scholarship that is interactive, networked, and utilizing multimedia. Other examples including Vectors, American Institute of Graphic Art's Loop, the Institute for the Future of the Book, Scalar, recently used for an issue of The Art Bulletin (2013) and the book Flows of Reading (2013). Art education journals Voke and Visual Culture & Gender also present multimodal research using digital publishing platforms. Building on the innovative spirit showcased with VAR's graphic novel issue (2012), our call for papers asked scholars to question, investigate, and expand the conversation about the ecology of art education scholarship to specifically address work that is born digital.

However, expanding any ecology can come at a cost or reallocation of resources. In our earlier efforts to understand the possible futures of digital scholarship in art education, we utilized Selfe, Hawisher, and Berry's (2009) ideas on sustaining scholarly efforts in the face of rapidly changing digital publishing environments. Selfe et al. (2009) note four possible paths for the future to sustain the humanities in higher education. The first path, traditional print scholarship can be sustained, but will change its value and form. On the second path, scholarly production will shift and change over time, turning into digital environments to be maintained and circulated. The third path employs different modes of communication, not limited to writing, including images, audio and video. The fourth path proposes social networks and collaborative scholarship to support new forms of contributions and research. In each path, the authors recognize scholarship printed on paper will not remain the default method of academic discourse. Considering these prognostications 3+ years later, it is clear art education scholarship has developed trajectories navigating all four paths. In asking authors to consider their born digital scholarship we wanted them to think not only of the venues of publications, but the nature of scholarly data in publishing. We ask contributors to speculate on how art education publications can distribute burgeoning research in real-time rather than with lead-time, using hyperlinks rather than references, remixing rather than paraphrasing, and exploring time-based and timely scholarship. Submissions were encouraged to incorporate hypertext, video, audio, location-based, interactive, data-driven, and real-time media, instead of text and static images only.

We are also interested in how scholarly publications born digital may impact issues concerning accessibility. Digital information increases the opportunity to be transcoded into different modalities impacting how readers can access content, whether it means a screen reader reciting text for a blind user, or connecting mobile devices with remote locations. In 2013 and now, we perceive issues of access to digital scholarship and online publication as deeply related to the complex realities of global communication and readership. We hold our exuberance in check, because connecting to the internet is a global network fraught with persistent inequalities to access continuing to illustrate the economic and social realities of globalization. Persistent issues of internet access particularly impact multimodal content requiring high bandwidth. As we discussed in 2013, "competing trends in broadband and mobility may inspire a response in digital scholarship that asks surprising questions in light of globalization: for example, what would an academic journal look like if it were designed for a mobile phone?" (p. 273).

The suggestion of a mobile phone as a publishing platform is perhaps another way of perceiving the increased role of discrete scholarship on microblogging platforms such as Twitter. The question of tweeting and microblogging as scholarship ignites many issues in academia from the role it may play in tenure review processes to the exposure, both good and bad, it brings to scholars in various stages of their career (Ross, 2016). Some of academia has embraced digital writing like twitter or blogs as acceptable forms of scholarship, understanding the reach and speed of digital platforms for public scholarship (Schalet, 2016). Many academic journals are quickly moving to have a digital presence, either publishing their articles online first, or creating digital versions of print issues as part of this trend to accept digital publications in academia. Publishing digitally expands the audience for academic writing, however most academic journals publish at speeds stifling the relevance of academic writing by ignoring the pace of change. For example, the co-editor Patton had an article accepted that took three years for the publishing schedule to put it in print. Because the article dealt with technological innovations, the delayed publishing schedule required significant revisions to the final article.

When we wrote the 2014 article "As we may publish" we didn't deeply consider the rapid changes of research consumption by the general public and academia. As noted in the post from the Twitter handle @Academics Say, high impact journals are losing their influence in academia Lozano, Larivière & Gingras, 2012). So what does this mean and why should academics care about a tweet on scholarship? To begin with, @Academics Say has 225,000 followers with 24 million views per month (Hall, 2016). Simply stated, @Academics Say is widely (and regularly) read. @Academics Say tweets about academia, often humorously. @Academics Say author, Nathan Hall, an Associate Professor of Education at McGill University, has used his Twitter account to recruit research subjects and conduct research. This example shows how using born digital writing as an academic, whether it is to conduct research or as a method to publish, is an important consideration for current and future scholars. We see this form of discrete scholarship as a continuing area of expansion for research. For example, Jorge Lucero et al. (2016) traces a Facebook dialogue about the audience and authors of Art Education. Microblogging sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr hold promise as potential sites of knowledge generation and digital scholarship in the field of art education.

Discrete scholarship utilized on popular social media and microblogging platforms also highlights points of access to scholarly work. Increasingly, members of the scientific community are calling for free access to journal articles stemming from U.S. government funded research and discoveries (Mayyasi, 2013). Historically, academics and researchers gave precedence to publishing in journals behind paywalls, requiring individuals and libraries who can afford the leading research publications to pay for subscriptions. Researchers themselves have created ways to get around paywall barriers by posting their work to their own websites, or social media platforms like Academia.edu, Researchgate.net and Google Scholar. However, these sites remain specialized with targeted academic communities. For new researchers conducting internet searches and unversed in the literature of the art education field, they can easily overlook or be unaware of previous findings (Hafeli, 2009). K-12 teachers who don't have access to journal subscriptions, but are invested in research, may also be isolated and constrained by available resources. Problems with research literature found on the internet is it may not have been properly vetted or cited, since barriers for publication are removed. Uneven access to peer-reviewed literature and quality journalism impacts both the rigor of new research and the expansion of participation in research literature. This is not inconsequential, as we saw in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. "Fake news" (Silverman & Alexander, 2016; The Guardian, 2016) and imbalanced reporting (Vavreck, 2016) took hold of the public's conscious, further entrenching people in their beliefs, regardless of factual evidence.

In addition to issues of paywall access focused on publishers, authors, and readers, there is also the issue of access to a sustainable archive. As we worked with the University of Illinois Library to figure out the technical requirements to support this special born digital issue, we worked within the constraints of how the publication could live on the internet. Through our (relatively short) lifetime, publications on floppy disc, CD, DVD, and different kinds of computer file formats, have become unreadable without special equipment or software. By choosing a web-based platform as the born digital format for this issue, we hope to circumvent as many problems of archivability as we can. We realize it may be quixotic to try and make a digital publication permanently archivable, but we also know valuable research literature looks to the future as well as can be retrieved from past, making predictions of where a field can (or should) go through research. Ultimately future generations of researchers decide which efforts to continue on from prior generations, but it is our responsibility to develop strategies in archiving so that these choices may be made.

A part of our own work in born digital scholarship in art education may take as an example the struggles of grey literature and transdisciplinary research in art, science, and technology. Grey literature refers to research produced outside of traditional venues for distribution namely academic publishers and art museums. For example if research using arts-based methods or alternative forms of media texts (e.g. video, audio, interactive) do not have platforms for distribution or archiving, this research may be lost or untraceable. Executive Editor of Leonardo Roger Malina and MIT Press have begun a new initiative called ARTECA (http://arteca.mit.edu/) that intends to address the problem of ephemeral data and grey literature in art/science/technology by adapting to the needs of research, file formats, and publishing (MIT Press, 2016). It is our belief that digital scholarship will only grow in the field of art education, yet ultimately this kind of work is doomed to exist in the nether spaces of grey literature unless we continue to push for robust publishing platforms and sustainable practices.

In this issue we called for short-form submissions featuring online projects and long-form submissions focusing on born digital scholarship. In addition, we invited submissions from art education scholars demonstrating a long term commitment to this topic, or serving in roles that make significant contributions to the field's development of born digital scholarship such as the National Art Education Association (NAEA) Research Commission. We organized the issue under three concepts: places of scholarship, play, and pedagogy, bringing together themes emerging from the submissions that suggest prominent threads in the nature of the work.

Places of Scholarship (COMMISSION>MUSEUM>JOURNAL)

The question of scholarship is central to our call and throughout this process we encountered the proliferation of scholarship into an increasing number of places. A central component to the expansion of digital scholarship is expansion itself; from small, informal communications building nuanced portfolios of discrete scholarship to the increased capacity afforded by more powerful computing found in big data methodologies. These expanding spaces of scholarship are fed by private and public sources, including professional organizations invested in the health of art education as a professional field and research community. We begin with the invited submission from NAEA Research Committee (RC) Chair Mary Hafeli, Associate Chair Juan Carlos Castro, and commissioners Julia Marshall and Chris Grodoski, the committee crafts a statement focused on the activities of the RC and its digital portfolio. These representatives of the RC discuss the role of the NAEA to cultivate an ecosystem of research, particularly for this issue, those living cultures born digital through the Interactive Cafe, webinars, and an evolving web presence. What the RC's ecosystem indicated to us is the expansion of art education scholarship into the different places where art education happens. Reviewing programs in higher education and the various employment where art teachers find themselves indicates a deeper consideration for the places where art education happens. Schools, community centers, and museums are all important places for art educators' employment. Jennifer E. Henel, Curatorial Coordinator for Digital Content at National Gallery of Art, provides a case study of how the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. responded to the need to create born digital museum publications, outlining how their office created a sustainable model for future museum scholarship. Henel's contribution to the call reminds us how the spaces of digital scholarship in art education must also grapple with the ways it is expanding into a more diverse range of places of learning. A part of this expansion is in the online spaces of the internet as well: changes in hybrid coursework, increasing online communities for arts professionals, increased curricula utilizing digital platforms, and the extension of scholarship into the global audience of the internet are all important parts of our born digital ontology. We invited Art Education professors Karen Keifer-Boyd and Deborah Smith Shank to discuss the evolution of the journal they created, Visual Culture and Gender, recently marking its 10-year anniversary. In their essay, Keifer-Boyd and Smith Shank discuss how the journal's online format supports new forms of born digital research and inquiry. Keifer-Boyd and Smith Shank's review of their experiences creating and guiding the journal over the last ten years provides insight as to the opportunities and challenges of supporting born digital publications.

Play (NARRATIVE>ROLE PLAY>DIGITAL DEATH) or (BEGINNINGS>TRANSITIONS>ENDS)

Not only does born digital scholarship offer a range of new places for scholarship, it also offers new modalities to encounter the research text. In 2013, we surveyed what were the opportunities for digital scholarship to offer new forms of research texts from multimedia to real time data. What these new forms provide to the author is a range of expressive tools by which research findings can be communicated, but it also offers new ways to involve the reader in exploring and experiencing research findings. With increased participatory frameworks for research, readers playing with the findings of art education research may present new emergent ways of knowing that can drive inquiry in exciting ways. Utilizing interactive platforms and computational frameworks to re-present research findings holds great promise for the field and we capture some of those efforts in this issue. Christine Liao in her project submission makes the argument that new media can be used effectively for arts-based research by creating interactive artworks. Liao uses the program Twine to create a hypertext interactive fiction (http://avatar-making.neocities.org/). In the essay portion of her project Liao makes the argument that creating interactive games works like research processes, requiring analysis, reanalysis, and retooled methods of organization. Adetty Pérez Miles and Kevin Jenkins in their project submission also use the non-linear web tool, Twine, to promote learning about gender identities, trans issues, and creating positive environments through an interactive story. They argue interactive tools like Twine are an example of how media-rich platforms have the potential to expand how we create, consume, and produce texts. In both of these examples the research text becomes an interactive site where information is more akin to an experience than a report, leaving the reader in the position of a user that can play the text like a game. The gamification of born digital research brings into consideration the very cycle of life and death as players engage in openings and closures through digital platforms. As an inversion of our call for research on born digital scholarship, Robert W. Sweeny, a longtime leading scholar in the field of Art Education and digital media studies, contemplates digital death and what happens when one dies within networks that are ephemeral as well as tangible. Sweeny highlights the hauntology of digital technologies as their impacts to our scholarship and educational performances when they are invaded by memories, habits, and ghosts in the machine. While we ponder the newness of opportunities created by born digital publication methods, Sweeny reminds us we need to ponder how our digital lives remain when we no longer breathe life into these identities.

Pedagogy (DISRUPTION>ASSESSMENT>CRITIQUE>GENEALOGY)

In the cycle of beginnings and endings, digital life and death, we can perceive the performance of pedagogy as central to our practices becoming informed and crafted through born digital ontologies. In what Sweeny (2004) has called a digital visual culture, our focus takes a slight shift to zero in on born digital research and publishing, but pedagogy is integral to art education research. In this section authors approach pedagogy through theory, classroom activities, and historical patterns. In an effort to better represent the complex entanglements and intersections of theory and the girls' digital productions, Courtnie N. Wolfgang, Olga Ivashkevich, and OK Keyes introduce Glitch Feminism as a conceptual framework for using digital tools creatively to disrupt normative gendered identities. Their project links text, still images, and moving images in nonlinear space, prompting the reader to move back and forth between conceptual ideas and visual representations to embrace incompleteness, ambiguity, and inquiry. Student-created images are an important component of art pedagogy. How student work is assessed is integral to many forms of art education research. Pamela G. Taylor shares experiences, possibilities and implications related to visualization and assessment in art education as data and as an artistic process. In Taylor's essay she describes the process of coding undergraduates reflection journals used to critically ponder, explore, connect, and document their service-learning experiences mentoring elementary school students. Engaging students through their images, and supporting them in and outside the art classroom, art educators can help guide their students through life processes. Cindy S. Jesup utilizes the process of critique when understood as a way to systematically explore and discuss the technical, contextual, and interpretive aspects of artwork as a model that may be used to analyze hazardous digital behavior so that future teachers and students can be better prepared for their digital lives. Decisions that manifest to live on the internet can have profound effects to the trajectory of a person's life. Other life decisions, like choosing where to go to college, a person's major, and mentors also have a profound effect. Justin P. Sutters offers a prospectus of his visualization research focusing on understanding the academic and scholarly lineages that populate the pedagogical and research space of art education scholarship. Using survey and other open source data visualization software, Sutters project shows the pathways and connections to the scholars in the art education field.

Conclusions

At the conclusion of this process, with the issue full of articles and projects begin to flesh out the range of born digital scholarship currently in the field of art education, we are left asking what other forms of born digital scholarship are missing? In our original article we were intrigued with the possibility of submissions using large cultural data sets (i.e. big data) and creating projects using real-time platforms such as trending hashtags on Twitter or news feeds. Efforts like these would require carefully constructed research models and user interfaces, along with a technical knowledge that may be daunting for a scholar to undertake and still at the fringes of our field. Looking far off on the horizon, born digital research and publications using geolocation data, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, or haptic feedback might be future directions for art education. Ultimately, we believe a born digital migration does not have a final destination, rather born digital scholarship is a journey we are excited to pursue. We invite others to join us.

We'd like to extend our appreciation to the authors, reviewers, and Visual Arts Research team for extending this opportunity to us as guest editors. With all of the potential for things to run amuck, we applaud their bravery.

References

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