On Multimodality: An Interview with Jody Shipka, Part 2
This is the second half of a 2014 interview with Dr. Jody Shipka. If you missed the first half, it’s available here.
Dr. Shipka was the featured presenter at the Digital Writing and Research Lab’s 2014 Speaker Series. Before her presentation, she sat down with DWRL assistant director Steven LeMieux for this interview. The first half of their conversation focused on Shipka’s 2011 book Toward a Composition Made Whole. In what follows, they turn their attention toward the possibilities and challenges of multimodal scholarship.
Many of Shipka’s recent projects have themselves unfolded across a range of modes and media. Notable among these is “Inhabiting Dorothy,” a project that began when Shipka purchased six boxes at a yard sale—boxes containing scrapbooks, photo albums, and other life materials belonging to a deceased couple named Dorothy and Fred. The project, Shipka writes, is “inspired, in part, by projects where people revisit, re-stage, or reenact images of themselves taken at an earlier point in time. Unlike those projects, however, this one asks people to recreate, respond to, or otherwise attempt to inhabit images belonging to people they have never met.” You can learn more about the by watching the video of Shipka’s DWRL presentation, which is available via the lab’s YouTube channel.