The time is now ripe to join the insights of decades of film and media studies with the new modes of information management, visualization, and dissemination that digital technologies are enabling.  Who better to reimagine the relationship of scholarly form to content than those who have devoted their careers to studying narrative structure, representation and meaning, or the aesthetics of visuality?  Who better to address the utopian registers of much popular commentary on technology than historians of media and scholars of political economy?  In the late 1990s, fueled by the siren call and profit-driven dreams of “distance learning,” administrators at many of our universities reduced the role of the humanities scholar to “content provider” for the digitally enhanced university.  In this scenario, our lectures and research would populate their information systems.  I am here suggesting that we should reject this limited role for the humanities scholar and instead fully engage with the platforms and tools of the digital era.  This will require new forms of collaboration and engagement that may push us beyond our scholarly comfort zones.  It also means rethinking our allegiance to print as the only (or even the primary) outcome of our scholarly endeavors.

 

One potentially rich space for action for the media studies professor is in a third variant of the digital humanities, the multimodal scholar.  This third type of digital humanist in effect blends many of the desires and goals of the other “early adopters,” the computing humanist and blogging humanist.  This emergent breed, the multimodal humanist, brings together databases, scholarly tools, networks writing, and peer-to-peer commentary while also leveraging the potential of visual and aural media that so dominate contemporary life.  This multimodal scholar complements rather than replaces other types of digital humanists, expanding the scope and reach of the field.  She aims to produce work that reconfigures the relationships among author, reader, and technology while investigating the computer simultaneously as a platform, a medium, and a visualization device.  She thinks carefully about the relationship of form to content, expression to idea.

 

The multimodal scholar explores new forms of literacy that include authoring and analyzing visual, aural, dynamic, and interactive media.  She also takes her cues from popular culture, imagining what it would be like to immerse yourself in a scholarly argument as you might immerse yourself in a movie or a video game.  She investigates what happens when scholarship looks and feels differently, requiring new modes of engagement from the reader/user.  She takes seriously such questions as “How do you ‘experience’ or ‘feel’ an argument in a more immersive and sensory-rich space?”  “Can scholarship show as well as tell?”  “Will representing data differently change the ways we understand, collect, or interpret it?”  “What happens to argument in a nonlinear environment?”

 

This is more radical than simply arguing that we should publish our work online.  It is an argument that hands-on engagement with digital forms reorients the scholarly imagination, not because the tools are cool or new (even if they are) or because the audience for our work might be expanded (even if it is), but because scholars come to realize that they understand their arguments and their objects of study differently, even better, when they approach them through multiple modalities and emergent and interconnected forms of literacy.  The ability to deploy new experiential, emotional, and even tactile aspects of argument and expression can open up fresh avenues of inquiry and research.