Thank you/Grazie mille to all the people involved in the organization of the event.

Présentation dans le cadre de la conférence Electronic Literature Organization 2022 (Cômo) - 31 Mai 2022

Titre : Understanding Digital Writing through Distance Learning
Sous-titre : Retrospective of a distance learning class in literature on digital creation

Slides #

Texte #

In this paper, I would like to present a series of ongoing considerations about teaching digital publishing and literature (theories and practices with a research and creation approach) in a distance education situation, methods to either bridge the distance or to use it as a key-element for the study.

Despite what one might have though, the measures of distanciation as well as the conditions of distance learning turned out to be challenges for teaching digital studies and digital literature especially when the teaching itself includes a component of praxis or creation.

I have to specify first of all that what follows is not yet the result of a long teaching career: I am just a lecturer and I consider that I am still learning to teach by teaching. This experience of distance teaching raised from a new perspective questions related to the issues of digital writing, its different textualities and the way for students to capture digital writings as to shape their own. Teaching online places us in the situation of asking ourselves what it means to teach, what it is important to digitalize in the teaching and learning experience, what presence should be or become in these process and how important is presence effect in this activity of science transmission. Distance learning involves other arrangements and modalities that are part of my experience of digital writing.

How the class was organised #

In the fall 2020 semester, I was teaching creative writing in the Department of French Literature at the University of Montreal, a class entitled “Écriture et nouveaux médias” (Writing and New media). The class was organized in several times and environments according to two online teaching modes:

• an not-in-real-time format for the theory: the videos of the lesson including the support for the presentation were recorded and made available to students before the online meeting. This part included the documentation with tutorials on how to use digital several tools and environments.

• a in-real-time format for the practice, i.e. workshops, but also for the discussion and feedback periods.

The content of the class was of course available on the institutional platform of the University of Montreal, but in order to facilitate access and to be able to organise content in a different way, it was also made available on an open github repository. This github, which allowed to create versions of the documents, was exposed as a case study during the presentation of the versioning principle of digital files.

The class gathered a small group of students from different programs (French literature, video games, screenwriting and, digital publishing). This diversity of backgrounds and expectations contributes to the first challenge of the class, which is to consider the technical profiles of students, even more important when they have a digital presence.

Technical Profiles #

In distance learning, we have to plan the mediation of our presence (anticipate the transmission of our image, our voice, possibly screen sharing) just as we have to consider the mediation of the students’ presence. Such presence reminded me of the concept of profile, especially as described by Monjour, i.e. the association between a true identity and the machine’s involvement in a fictive product (Monjour 2015).

In order to design an environment suitable for the student’s investment, it seems to me vital to include the student’s technical device, and especially the students’ different reception contexts. Distance learning faces the challenge of a class that is split into several spaces, and some of them less convenient than others. The learning device does not only depend on the actual context, the location, but also on the technological interface which became the medium of a presence. In this idea, it was important to be aware of the technical reality of each student, and to consider each technical reality as a profile in order to have a understanding of my class, as a gathering of different technical individuals : I had to be aware of their technical profiles, which implied:

• the type of machine and and Operating System
• the digital device available
• the Default Browser
• their digital practice: writing practice (for example, if they use editor or word processor)

Based on this information, I was able to establish a broad profile of my class, to adapt the documentation at their disposal, and to truly account for the technical diversity that was present: I had Mac, Windows and Linux students, desktops, laptops, tablets, students, some familiar with programming, some unaware of the HTML behind their web page, etc.

As Karen Barad stated, “Matter matters” (Barad 2007), and these different technological and medial dispositions determine conditions of learning (in this regard, we can refer to McLuhan’s Medium is the message (McLuhan 1994) or to Kittler’s German media studies where “Media determine our situation” (Kittler 1999), determine in the ontological sense).

This may seem like name dropping here, and it certainly is, but the idea I wish to underline is that if there is indeed determination, constitution of meaning by the medium, in the case of distance teaching, the learners of the lessons are then defined by this medium.

These theories concurs on the importance of media, i.e. to consider the different conditions of transmission as “mediating conjunctures” (Larrue & Vitali-Rosati 2019).

Perhaps more than any other field, digital humanities face this diversity of practices and technical profiles, and are therefore engaged with issues of literacy and cross-disciplinarity, especially when these literacies define or contribute to conditions of knowledge reception in the context of distance learning.

The reality of these literacies requires the adaptation of presentations, the diversity of documentation and, above all, the proactive exploration of the environments available for experimentation. As McPherson points out in his book Feminism in a digital Lab, inclusion and difference awareness must be designed into the model, not just into the application and data (McPherson 2018).

Open-source & Cost-free condition #

In order to be inclusive of all the technical profiles in my class, it became clear that the model of open source and cost-free tools and platforms was not only a personal statement: the open and the gratuity of the digital spaces is a sine qua non condition for distance learning because it allows to rely on a rich documentation and community, but, above all, it allows all students, whatever their situation or their OS machines, to participate.

As we were each enclosed in our personal spaces, it seemed even more important to consider the digital space as a gathering space (to create a class unity) as well as a space for individual expression: each session, the students were able to take notes on a collaborative pad, which – besides allowing them to explore the principle of collaborative digital writing and the principles of semantic writing in Markdown – also enabled them to create a class architecture.

Despite the large number of services available on the Web, the balance between technicality and accessibility was sometimes difficult to find when the condition of openness and gratuity was added: this lead me to reappropriate certain digital environments, to use it not as officially planned.

Appropriation and reappropriation #

In the context of a creative class in digital literature, I have set up 9 creative workshops, and the writing constraints were designed to explore a writing practice in a deeper way, sometimes even suggesting the subversion of a digital environment into a concrete, poetic, literary and technical appropriation. here some examples :

The first workshop, for example, involved using the online annotation tool Hypothesis to create hypertextual narrations and aimed to: 1. overcome linearity by considering continuity; 2. take ownership of a marginal area; 3. explore ad explode the sense/direction of writing. The annotation tool thus became a tool for appropriation of the marginal zone, to incorporate the visited pages into a game of paths and tracks.

The workshop focusing on the perfomativity aspect of digital writing aimed to create a story in bash code to explore the perspective of writing with and according to the machine. In the Online Bash Shell environment, students designed short interactive stories.

The workshop on profile writing (Monjour 2015) was also an opportunity for students to create individual profiles in the Wikipedia “pastiche” page and thus deal with the mechanisms of online profile. The idea was to test how a profile and a piece of identity could be introduced into a space managed by a community of knowledge and into an online encyclopedia. The main part of the pastiches have been deleted by the wikipedian admins but some very relevant ones have been kept.

The workshop focusing on collaborative writing was a real discovery for the students who were able to: test collaborative writing, examine the implications for a story, explore the visibility of the writing process in progress, and create a collective piece of writing. The class was divided into two groups, each group had to create a common narrative, using only their pad as a writing space and not using other communication media. The Framapads, an onligne collaborative editor for pad, that were used for the workshop unfortunately have an expiration date and could not be restored, but I would like to share here some feedback on how this experience went. These pad give students a feeling of “being together” and some students started to navigate between the groups and the pads, trolling the other story. The students had chosen to bridge the distance and distinction of the groups to tell the story as a full class, as a collective.

Conclusion #

This experience of distance teaching made me consider my own practices of writing, of using digital technology and of academic transmission, and these reflections have convinced me of how important it is for a researcher in the digital humanities to be aware of the digital environment that structures his or her thoughts, to be aware of it precisely in order to be able to renegotiate with its constraints, to be able to divert it, to think of it not as the designers of the tools had planned (plus those who design writing environments for the humanities most of the time are not themselves humanities researchers), but as a space for experimentation and appropriation. Or to engage these environments as spaces for research-action, for intervention of a collective knowledge.

In the class I led the following year, even though it was in a face-to-face mode, I kept thinking about the importance of designing digital structure in a more independent and inclusive way, not to stand against or reject the institutions platforms, but rather to consider an alternative way to conceived a public space. Contents were avaible on a website built with a CMS and a github repository.

First of all, as a conclusion, I would like to thank the students: Haitam Alam, Chloé Dassylva, Félix-Arthur Grenier, Olivier Jobin, Farid Laouari, Antoine Sweeney et Sébastien Vaillancourt, but also the team of the Canada Research Chair on Digital Textualities, which has provided a place for discussion and exchange among its members (especially Marcello Vitali-Rosati and Antoine Fauchié for all the listening, the advice given and the ideas discussed).

In order to be completely honest, not only on a theoretical level but also on a technical level, I would like to mention and thank the digital environments that allowed me to write this presentation: the translator DeepL who wrote with me and allows me to be at least understandable, and the editor Stylo who gave a semantic structure to the writing under my hands (and reveal.js for the presentation).

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version) and rengociat with Margot Mellet