Regeneration: Multimedia Genres and Emerging Scholarship

This white paper presents an initial taxonomy of generic strategies and conventions that have emerged from the past eight years of practice-based research in multimedia pedagogy at USC’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy. These genres emerged organically across a wide variety of courses and disciplines at the IML and have subsequently been incorporated into the curricula of the Honors in Multimedia Scholarship and Multimedia in the Core programs. The taxonomy begins with a more detailed description of the five genres that have been deployed most frequently in these programs, followed by brief outlines of additional genres. The concept of genres has long been used to categorize and describe literary, cinematic and other creative endeavors. When thinking about the hybrid (creative, scholarly, technological) activities that define the emerging practices of multimedia scholarship, generic conventions offer a useful way of understanding both the processes of creation and the significance of this work within higher education. Both students and instructors may benefit from thinking in terms of genres in order to create self-awareness about the strengths and weaknesses of particular media and technological affordances. More importantly, genres offer the beginnings of a critical vocabulary which may help facilitate the assessment and legitimation of mediaand technology-enhanced forms of scholarship. This investigation is thus both an observational taxonomy, drawing on nearly a decade of classroom experience with multimedia and education at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy, and also a discussion of strategies for using genres in the design of multimedia curricula, classes and projects. My goal is to address a broad range of multimedia genres as they function within specific contexts of scholarly research, publication and teaching. Although many of the genres discussed below exhibit familiar resonances with the conventions of other cultural forms (including those of commercial entertainment industries), I regard these genres as having been customized and transformed – or “regenerated” – to reflect the priorities of scholarly multimedia. In practice, few scholarly multimedia projects are constrained to a single generic mode. Hence, the effective selection and combination of generic strategies is an important aspect of scholarly multimedia authoring. Although this taxonomy remains far from exhaustive and includes numerous overlaps, idiosyncrasies and arbitrary divisions, it offers a point of departure for thinking about the usefulness of genres for designing multimedia-based scholarship.