Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
Computers and Composition 28 (2011) 160–174
Community Mediation: Writing in Communities and Enabling
Connections through New Media
Guiseppe Getto ∗ , Ellen Cushman, Shreelina Ghosh
Michigan State University
Abstract
The question of how best to facilitate the creation of sustainable new media compositions within communities is vital if these
compositions are to become a permanent part of community knowledge-making practices and to reach audiences in a meaningful
way. We explore a model of community mediation that is cognizant of the practices and structures of communication within a
given community. This model also acknowledges the boundary between the definition of community identity and the possibility of
connection to both internal and external audiences. We illustrate this model of community mediation using three cases in which it
was practiced: the creation of an informational video that profiles a local neighborhood center, the building of a digital installation on
the history of the Cherokee Nation, and the preservation and practice of Indian classical dance amid its remediation via new media
technologies. These examples reveal where and how stabilized meaning-making practices can emerge when researchers and other
facilitators of new media composition are cognizant of existing mediums that community members use to represent themselves and
the complex lifeways embodied by those mediums. Because all cultural practices resist mediation to some degree, we ultimately
find that the only way to insure sustainable community mediation is to use existing practices and structures as infrastructures for
building new compositions.
© 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Keywords: composition and rhetoric; community literacy; community media; digital; media; identity; culture; mediation; preservation; new media
writing
1. Introduction
Drawn from three digital compositions produced in the communities in which we respectively research, the three
screenshots below (Figs. 1–3) mark places where specific communities become represented in new media compositions
for the purposes of both delineating community identity and connecting with other communities. The first screenshot
(Fig. 1) represents a digital media composition created to represent the stakeholders in the Allen Neighborhood
Center on the Eastside community of Lansing, Michigan. In this case, the storytelling practices of the center’s staff,
volunteers, and founders were recorded in digital video in order to represent the center to specific audiences selected by
the project’s stakeholders. The next screenshot (Fig. 2) is from the entry portal of an educational resource, “The Laws
and Treaties of the Cherokee Nation 1684-1907,” made for and with the Cherokee Nation in order to present a counter
narrative to the history of the settlement of Oklahoma <http://www.cherokee.org/Culture/treaties/toc.htm>. Competing
∗
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: [email protected] (G. Getto).
8755-4615/$ – see front matter © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.compcom.2011.04.006
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161
Figs. 1–3. Three digital compositions from the communities in which we research.
notions of national identity important to the Cherokee are revealed in both this new media composition specifically
and this educational resource in general. The third screenshot (Fig. 3) is a digital media composition depicting various
remediations of classical Indian dance, a practice considered by its practitioners to be a divine art that was revealed
to humans by God. Transmitting knowledge of this art involves a great deal of respect for the art and also a God-like
reverence for the Guru. For Indian classical dance to persevere in the cultural memory, the corporeal presence of the
Guru as teacher and student as performer has been a traditional necessity. In digitizing the dance for preservation on
DVD and through Second Life, this relationship and its effect on an audience are redefined.
We discuss these compositions as cases through which we apply our community mediation framework because
these cases illustrate how digital media can work as both a material form of meaning making and an articulation of
community identity. We hope to demonstrate the utility of this framework through analysis of these disparate cases in
order to explicate this dual nature of digital compositions in a variety of community situations. Through our community
mediation framework, we seek to address a need for scholarship that unites research on computers and composition
with scholarship on community and cultural literacies.
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Digital compositions such as these have been analyzed as discursive statements that suggest meanings through both
form and content (Wysocki, 2001, 2002) and through their remediation of a variety of modes, such as word, sound, and
image (Bolter & Grusin, 2000; Cushman, 2010a, 2010b; Cushman & Green, 2010; Handa, 2001; Hocks & Kendrick,
2003; Kress, 2003; Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001; Manovich, 2001). Such compositions have also been analyzed in terms
of composing and teaching practices (Anderson, 2003; Selfe & Selfe, 1994; Wysocki, Selfe, Johnson-Eilola, & Sirc,
2004), as well as discussed in terms of the infrastructures that sustain their creation (Ball, 2004; Devoss, Cushman, &
Grabill, 2005; DeWitt, 2001; Holdstein & Selfe, 1990; Star & Ruhleder, 1996). We attempt to extend these important
analyses of new media compositions in order to understand their broader socio-cultural implications.
Important work in community computing explores how various new media literacies are used by writers within
everyday situations, including in communities and organizations (Cushman & Green, 2010; Grabill, 2003, 2007; Haas,
1996; Hawisher & Selfe, 2004; Grabill & Simmons, 2007). At the same time, within community literacy studies, several
scholars have discussed the ways that local practices should inform praxes of community outreach, engagement, and
pedagogy (Barton & Hamilton, 1998; Cushman, 2006; Grabill, 2007; Long, 2008). To our knowledge, however, no one
has yet produced a framework for theorizing how new media can be composed in a way that honors the local efforts
of communities to represent themselves to those both outside and inside of the community. It is our intent here both
to introduce and demonstrate just such a framework. This framework begins with an understanding of mediation that
includes the creation of meaning and the creation of boundaries that are at once inclusive and exclusive of people and
practices.
Understanding how new media can work as a bridge to and from specific socio-cultural contexts is crucial at
this time when communities are developing digital identities in order to sustain their everyday struggles for selfrepresentation and learning. To begin our analysis of each of these new media pieces, we must say a bit more about the
theoretical underpinnings guiding our framework and the problems it seeks to address. We then draw upon our three
cases to illustrate the ways in which our framework expands understandings of new media compositions as knowledge
products that operate as different forms of mediation. Further applications and implications are then suggested.
2. Community Mediation
We would like to start by describing how mediation occurs, meaning both how humans create meaning and how
this meaning becomes socially formative. In this essay and elsewhere (Cushman & Ghosh, 2010; Cushman, Getto,
and Ghosh (2011)), we use mediation in two senses: first, mediation includes the selection and arrangement of sign
technologies—the tools humans use to create meaning (e.g. language, writing systems, film, photograph, digital media,
etc.). In this regard, mediation includes the processes and products involved when people create meaningful statements.
Meaning-making is always situated in larger social relations that demand a second form of mediation, however. In
this second sense, mediation represents the in-between place where negotiation between different social spheres (i.e.,
neighborhood/city/state/nation/globe) has successfully created a connection between spheres, defined a boundary
between spheres, or both. Mediation in this regard can be thought of as a negotiation between positions and values that
community stakeholders engage in to come to some compromise that always both includes and excludes some people,
practices, and resources. In other words, when communities come together to make meaning through any form of sign
technology, the choices they make always have both material and social consequences.
Ruth Finnegan’s (2002) Communicating: The Multiple Modes of Human Interconnection develops a taxonomy of
various modes for meaning making, describing how these modes work at both material and social levels. Any specific
sign technology, or mode of meaning making, always allows meaning to be made in specific ways given its audiences,
cultures, time periods, and the ways in which it has been remediated. In this way, mediation is contested, slippery,
and contingent. Finnegan’s book seeks to understand how humans “work through the resources of our bodies and of
our environment” to actively connect with those around us (p. 3). She fuses pragmatic approaches to understanding
meaning-making with a symbolic interactionist approach to show that meaning is always made through several “modes
of social action, created by interacting human agents in specific situations” (p. 7). In this respect, her definition of
mediation works at the two levels we find most important for understanding community mediation: the process of
forging and delineating social connections, and the various modes that provide the tools for this forging. Her focus is
on “active interconnectedness through a range of modes. This is to take a broad view of communication that includes
all the channels open to human interaction, whether auditory, visual, kinesic, proxemic, tactile, or olfactory. Humans
are not solely intellectual or rational creatures, and their communication through human-made artifacts and through
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their facial expressions, dress or bodily positionings form as relevant a part of their dynamic interacting as verbally
articulated sentences” (p. 8). Her definition of mediation facilitates our understanding of community mediation because
it allows us to understand how community members use artifacts like digital compositions to connect, delineate, and
mark meaning.
It also allows us to understand the limits of remediation, to remind us that some activities in a community must
not be remediated into digital form because the original mode of delivery matters so much to the culture of the
community we hope to represent. When digitizing or digitally mediating community practices and identities held
in high esteem by stakeholders, the original material form of the stakeholder’s ideas, memories, images, and so on
becomes exceedingly important. The remediation from one material form to another, from embodied practice or identity
to digital composition, for example, always runs the risk of creating a gap between the original context of the practice
or identity to the extent that it completely loses its original meaning and value for the community.
The negotiations involved in digitizing an embodied practice or identity present a central tension inherent when
using any medium for representing communities, which leads us to wonder how digital compositions, such as the ones
that open this article, work both at the material and social levels to help connect embodied practices within communities
and potential audiences. In answer to this question, we suggest a framework of community mediation, or a framework
for producing digital compositions with communities that
1) attends to local community practices already in place,
2) uses these existing practices as an infrastructure for producing media, and
3) attempts to bridge both local and external understandings and values of the medium itself so that community
practices are understandable to audiences both within and outside the community itself.
Community mediation must start with a situated understanding of the lifeways and values of the community being
represented. This should involve deep, though sometimes limited, involvement between media makers both within and
outside the community seeking to be represented.
From here, community practices of making and using media that might support sustainable production should be
identified. Rather than thinking of these community media practices as a “substrate,” or in other words a sort of material
base upon which something like a community website runs, Susan Star and Karen Ruhleder (1996) prefer to think
of an infrastructure as a “fundamentally relational concept” (p. 112). Just as a tool has meaning when put into usage
rather than being easily defined as a built structure which has “pre-given attributes frozen in time,” then, infrastructure
“is something that emerges for people in practice, connected to activities and structures” (p. 112).
In addition, Jeff Grabill (2007) has warned of the dangers of focusing purely on information rather than infrastructure
(and we could also say medium rather than infrastructure), and further argues that when we shift to an emphasis on the
latter:
our attention shifts radically to what is indeed useful for individuals and communities as they seek to generate
persuasive discourse about what is good, true, and possible... it shifts our design gaze to deep issues and problems.
Infrastructures are not just information, not just interfaces, not just the computers or the wires. Infrastructures
enact standards, they are activity systems, and they are also people themselves (and all that people entail, such as
cultural and communal practices, identities, and diverse purposes and needs). Community networks of any kind
are social, political, and technical; they get work done and allow others to work; and they embody a set of often
hidden and invisible design decisions and standards that change people and communities. It’s not information
that is powerful. Infrastructures are powerful. (p. 40)
Helping to develop an infrastructure from the roots of community media practices that is capable of maintaining processes of community mediation, in other words, means identifying places where structures like networks of technology,
resources, and skill sets can be connected to the daily activities of the people who are or will be using and consuming
the media produced. Such an infrastructure is not just the ability to create a website, for example; it is not just the wires
and servers to hook the website up to the Internet and the people who have the knowledge to do so; it is the ways that
community members log on to the site, what the site is meant to portray and to whom, and who within the community
will continue to build and maintain the site. An infrastructure is not just the structure upon which a given medium runs,
but the maintenance of the connection between community members and that structure.
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Finally, and perhaps the hardest to predict, account for, and even understand, are the ways in which people both within
a community and outside of it understand and interact with media-based representations of that community. As Lisa
Gitelman (2006) attests, echoing Star and Ruhleder, media are more than just platforms for disseminating information:
they are “socially realized structures of communication, where structures include both technological forms and their
associated protocols, and where communication is a cultural practice, a ritualized collocation of different people on the
same mental map, sharing or engaged with popular ontologies of representation” (p. 7, emphasis ours). By protocol,
Gitelman means “the shared sense people have of what” a given medium is and how it functions (p. 8). Creating a piece
of media, in other words, especially given the new flexibility across media platforms that thinkers like Henry Jenkins
(2006) have described, is an act of invention involving the negotiation of complicated understandings of that medium,
how it functions, and what it allows one to share with the rest of the world.
To continue with our example, a community website is not simply a text but a bridge between popular and local
understandings of what the medium “community website” should represent and how it should work both within the
community and outside it. How does one use a website? What for? What is the function of a website in a given
community and how does this connect to audience expectations of websites that are common to our culture? All these
understandings must be carefully negotiated with community members during the creation of digital media. All these
understandings bridge the manifold ways to express meaning in digital media and the ways these media both help
create and are products of social connectivity.
Our framework, as described above, is a way of looking at digital compositions and how they can function as both
materially and socially-situated objects that represent communities to themselves and to each other and how they can best
be used to represent or remediate community practices into digital ones. We have selected three new media compositions
that demonstrate both the material and social processes involved when selecting modes of communication to represent
different kinds of social groups, such as a neighborhood, tribe, and culturally-based dancing community. In the first
case of a video produced for a local neighborhood center, we discuss co-author Guiseppe Getto’s process of digital
composition and highlight the input community members can have in such a process in order to reveal an organization’s
identity and formation to an outside audience. In the second case, we reveal how co-author Ellen Cushman responded
to the Cherokee Nation’s request for particular forms and arrangement of digital modes that would highlight the central
roles Cherokees played in the history of the country and the formation of the state of Oklahoma. We highlight the
specific ways in which images were selected to ensure historically accurate representations of Cherokee contributions
as distinct from those of other tribes and white settlers. We use the final case as a cautionary tale of how the selection
of particular modes can accidentally reduce the historical and cultural importance of a practice such as classical Indian
dance performance. In this case, we argue that when such a practice as a classical dancer’s performance is remediated
digitally, even by an experienced practitioner like co-author Shreelina Ghosh, the sacred bond between Guru and
student is severed, thereby compromising the integrity of the transmission of culturally-situated knowledge essential
to this practice. These new media representations are knowledge products that serve to both facilitate the learning of
others and to mark community boundaries—they are at once syntheses and enactments that educate audiences while
marking and delineating socio-cultural connections. In addition, they represent our situated knowledge of and actions
with these communities as facilitators of community mediation.
3. Mediating Storytelling at the Allen Neighborhood Center (ANC)
In response to negative and inaccurate coverage of the work the Allen Neighborhood Center (ANC) does
as part of the Eastside neighborhood of Lansing, Michigan, Guiseppe was asked via a professor in his graduate program to compose a history of the ANC that could more accurately represent what the organization
is and what it does for outside as well as community audiences. (A shortened version of the final product can be found at <https://www.msu.edu/∼cushmane/digitalcomps.htm>, and another version can be found at
<http://www.allenneighborhoodcenter.org/about/>). At first, when the professor approached Guiseppe with the idea for
the project, Guiseppe had no idea what this might look like as a finished product. As he began to meet with the center’s
director and staff and then to conduct videotaped interviews as he might for any oral history, a certain overarching
story began to emerge: the story of the emergence and formation of the ANC as an icon of the Eastside community.
Important to this iconic status of the ANC as a symbol of the Eastside community is the notion that the ANC is simply
built from the existing practices of activism and neighbor-centered activity that have made the Eastside what it is.
In this way, then, Guiseppe would come to realize that he was mediating between two groups: 1) an organization
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whose central role was to mediate between the activities of various neighborhood groups on the Eastside and larger
institutions at the city and state level and 2) larger public audiences that would be determined by the stakeholders of the
project.
In order to do this, Guiseppe had to start with stage one of the process of community mediation we are arguing
for here: he had to attend “to local community practices already in place.” Guiseppe was not a member of this
community and at that point was connected to the community solely via other members of his graduate program
who had worked with the ANC, such as the professor who was acting as liaison and several of Guiseppe’s fellow
graduate students. For Guiseppe, then, attending to local practices meant dwelling at the Allen Neighborhood Center
for an entire semester while he was awaiting IRB approval to start what he had begun calling a “multimodal history”
of the organization. During this time he was not only providing service to the center, such as helping with their
farmer’s market or helping to create promotional materials, but he was also already thinking about how he could
use “these existing practices as an infrastructure for producing media.” He was also, during this time, proving to the
community that he was someone committed to representing them in a fair light. One of the first practices Guiseppe
identified within the organization, for example, was storytelling: staff members, volunteers, and members of the
Eastside neighborhood frequently sat around with each other and told stories, often stories about the history of the
organization. Other important practices included the activities in which the center was engaged: people associated with
the center were constantly involved with creating new community activities and sustaining existing ones. And finally,
as already mentioned, all of this work and storytelling was grounded in a deep reverence for the Eastside neighborhood
itself.
After Guiseppe received IRB approval for creating a multimodal history of the organization, he had to think about
making a video that would constitute such a history—a video that would attempt “to bridge both local and external
understandings and values of the medium itself so that community practices are understandable to audiences both
within and outside the community itself.” He decided that digital video would be the most flexible medium to work
in for, as Marie-Laure Ryan (2004) notes, digital media hold the potential for more direct engagement between story
and audience because of their potential for alternative framing of material (p. 339). As opposed to a traditional oral
history, for example, that focuses on individuals telling stories, Guiseppe wanted to create a video that embodied the
sense of interconnectedness and community that makes the ANC what it is. He attempted to do this by sticking close
to the practices and material structures most important to the ANC when he began filming and by paying attention to
the existing infrastructure the ANC used to express itself to the world.
When Guiseppe began work, the ANC already had a website, a Flickr page, a newsletter, and many eager funders,
volunteers, and neighbors who were invested in the center. These groups, however, were also sometimes confused
by what the center did due to its diversity of programs. So, when Guiseppe picked up his camera to start capturing
storytelling practices and center events through interviews with key staff members and volunteers and live footage of
as many events as he could get to, he was already thinking about not only what would become part of the final video but
also how the video would become part of the ANC’s existing practices. Through this video, in other words, Guiseppe
knew he had to not only capture key aspects of the ANC’s identity and what sets it apart from other neighborhood
centers but also had to consider how the ANC would use the video and to what ends. All these concerns influenced the
production of the video itself.
It is not our intent here to present community mediation processes such as Guiseppe’s as linear and tidy, in fact
we wish to convey quite the opposite: Guiseppe engaged in a recursive process of meeting with ANC members,
capturing footage that the ANC menbers thought was important, editing it (sometimes with ANC participants when
they were available or wanted to add their own individual spin on something), and presenting it to the organization
through a series of screenings. This process was anything but neat and tidy, but it allowed Guiseppe to keep in mind
community practices that his participants wanted emphasized, the infrastructure to support the video, and the audiences
his participants wanted to reach.
Such an attention is evidenced by the two different versions of the video referenced above. Guiseppe did his best
to capture the most important aspects of the organization as they were pointed out to him by his participants as well
as to consier the manifold ways in which the video could become a part of the infrastructure of the ANC; however
Guiseppe’s participants would eventually articulate two very specific audiences and aspects of infrastructure for the
video: potential funders and orientations of new staff and volunteers. For example, once Guiseppe finished a 54-minute
rough cut of the video that included a multitude of stories and events culled from well over 50 hours of filming, it
became clear to him that his participants wanted another version: a shorter, more pithy version that spoke more directly
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to the specific programs offered by the center. The viewers told him that the longer cut would be most useful to them as
an orientation to the center. Their biggest lament about the history of the organization was that new staff and volunteers
did not have access to many key people who had come through the center over the years and had made the ANC what
it was. This longer version of the video would live on as an active document used to tell the history of the ANC to
those most in need of understanding it: new volunteers and staff members. For this to happen, Guiseppe would finish
editing this cut into a DVD that the center could show on their digital projector (a shortened version of this “Longer
Cut” can be found at <https://www.msu.edu/∼cushmane/digitalcomps.htm>).
Creating the other cut involved another process of community mediation altogether (the finished version of this
cut, which Guiseppe would come to call “The Funder’s Cut,” can be found at <http://www.allenneighborhoodcenter.
org/about/>). This cut, his participants told him, was intended to communicate to potential and existing funders what the
organization actually did. As a model for the organization of this cut, Guiseppe was given a fifty-plus-slide Microsoft
PowerPoint presentation by the center’s director, a presentation that laid out all the activities of the center, some of
its history, and research the center had done to prove that its programs were effective. Guiseppe was, to say the least,
overwhelmed; how could he boil down 54 minutes of footage into something that any potential funder could quickly
access and yet capture all the information from a substantive presentation that included fifty-plus slides?
Guiseppe felt that he had no ethical choice but to begin the process of community mediation again. He consulted
his participants and a colleague with media expertise who worked closely with the center to provide tech support.
Through these consultations he was able to identify potential practices, infrastructures, and an understanding of the
expectations of an audience of funders that would support such a medium. Through this process, for example, he was
able to identify new informants and was able to approach others who had appeared in the Longer Cut to collaborate on
shorter, simpler versions of their stories about the organization. After many meetings; a bit more filming; some careful
remixing of photos from the center’s Flickr page and his existing footage; and a collaboratively produced voiceover
that would provide select information from the ANC’s lengthy slide presentation along with key words to signal the
different programs that were being explained, Guiseppe produced a second medium capable of becoming part of the
ANC infrastructure and reaching the intended audiences.
The above case, then, argues for our stages of community mediation as flexible and heuristic rather than hard
and fast: community mediation is a process of stops and starts, pauses and breaks that are key to the process if
community stakeholders are to get a product that will truly be useful to them, be sustainable, and have a chance
of making an impact on a broader audience. It also points to the notion that when accounting for both material
and social forms of mediation within a community, digital composers must balance a slew of competing value
systems, technical requirements, and larger discourses. This will also be illustrated in the next case discussed
below.
4. Digitizing Cherokees in Indian Territory
In collaboration with Webmaster of the Cherokee Nation Tonia Williams, Cultural Resources Director Dr. Gloria
Sly, and Policy Analyst for the Cherokee Nation Dr. Richard Allen, MSU professional writing students and Ellen,
a Cherokee citizen, designed new media educational materials for and with the Cherokee Nation (CN). The CN
representatives hoped to build three interactive histories of the Nation that represented an alternative to the history
of Oklahoma that was being told repeatedly as part of the centennial celebration of statehood. These pieces were to
supplement a 6,000-node award-winning website that the Nation already had in place. The CN had several dedicated
staff lines and a dozen consultants who worked in Tahlequah, OK to organize, manage, and develop content for their
site. They asked for an extension of this work in part because the media was already valued in its utility and social
value as a vehicle for their rhetorical sovereignty. The CN had three goals for this work:
1. To satisfy the need for educational materials that present in-depth, accessible understanding of three periods in
Cherokee history for any learner interested
2. To distribute widely these digital products to citizens of the tribe, educators, non-citizens of the tribe, and anyone
who visits Tahlequah, Oklahoma during the CN’s National holiday
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3. To represent fairly and in detail the competing perspectives of the time of the time period being portrayed1 .
The goal was to provide a working knowledge of the ways in which Cherokees have had longstanding governmentto-government relations with the United States. When seen from the perspective of Cherokees telling their history,
the treaties and laws often reveal efforts to preserve tradition and protect villages and towns from encroaching settlers
while simultaneously developing trade, governing practices, and codifying social norms that map Cherokee ways onto
White ways. In the entire educational piece, a history of survival and success is present after every attempt to remove,
displace, and disenfranchise Cherokees.
Though a citizen of the Cherokee Nation for 28 years, Ellen was raised away from Oklahoma, and her formal
connection to the Cherokee Nation began when she was introduced to Tonia Williams in 2004 by her Cherokee language
instructors (Cushman, 2008, 2010a). She has since undertaken ethno-historical research related to Cherokee language
and identity (Cushman, 2010a, 2010b, 2011a, 2011b), was appointed by Chief Smith to be a Sequoyah Commissioner
(2008-2011), and was asked to teach in two of the Johnson O’Malley Co-Partner programs. The projects discussed
here dovetail with her research in community literacies and new media (Cushman, 2006; Cushman & Grabill, 2009).
As the students working with Ellen and the Nation were not members of the Nation and were unfamiliar with
its history, the first stage of this community mediation work involved students immersing themselves in the context
of Cherokee history through reading, and synthesizing into research reports, several hundred pages of primary and
secondary sources relevant to the time period in question. Their papers synthesized this evidence into content that would
eventually populate the online educational materials. Although students were not taken to Oklahoma to understand the
context of stakeholder needs, Ellen used video conferences at several stages of the production process to ensure that
the content being developed represented the understandings and positions most important to the representatives of the
Cherokee Nation. This process of negotiation regarding what understandings and positions would become represented
was a key infrastructure for the project.
In the first installation, for example, Ellen and her students researched and created a new media piece
titled The Allotment in Cherokee History, 1887-1914, which was launched on the Cherokee Nation’s website at the National Holiday during Labor Day weekend, 2005 (Cushman & Green, 2010; Cushman, 2006).
The next installment, discussed here, explored the Laws and Treaties of the Cherokee Nation, 1684-1907, that
preceded allotment and was launched in 2006. (Work is available at <http://www.cherokee.org/allotment> and
<http://www.cherokee.org/culture/treaties/toc.htm>). Throughout this second production process, everyone stayed in
close contact with Tonia, Gloria, Ben, and Richard of the Cherokee Nation via video-conference and e-mail to discuss
progress on interface design and content delivery as well as to secure continued blessings on this work. Gloria, Tonia,
and Richard were most influential in developing this piece, which in part relates to their positions in the Cherokee
Nation. Tonia’s capacities as webmaster helped us meet the technical specifications and design criteria for the materials while Gloria and Richard paid close attention to the content through fact checking and editing for accuracy of
language.
The State of Sequoyah node, for example (see Fig. 4 below) focuses upon the ways in which the Cherokees experienced a cultural resurgence and attempted to gain statehood with a confederacy of tribes living on land treated to them
as Indian Territory (a video from this node can be found at <https://www.msu.edu/∼cushmane/digitalcomps.htm>).
Indian Territory was devastated during the Civil War, with soldiers on both sides taking whatever they needed from
Indians. After the Civil War, Cherokees excelled in cultural, economic, and educational productivity. Many Indian
nations along with the Cherokee created a constitution for the State of Sequoyah, a State petitioning Congress to join
the federal union, a state developed and governed by Indian peoples who were removed to Indian Territory. Unfortunately, at the same time, white boomers and squatters arriving by train invaded land that had been treated to the tribes.
The tribes petitioned the federal government to remove these squatters from their lands, but the government failed to do
1 This collaboration began with a qualitative study of Cherokee language and identity that Ellen continues today. To begin this study, she attended
the Cherokee National Holiday in 2004 and learned about the kinds of digital mediations the tribe was undertaking in order to reach its citizens
who live away from the tribal cores in Oklahoma and North Carolina where the language is spoken and Cherokee traditions and religion are still
practiced.
Ellen’s family went through this process of allotment and enrolled on the Dawes roll, a kind of census for the Cherokee Nation and other tribes.
Because they went through that seven-year long process, today’s generations of Drews (Ellen’s Cherokee family’s name) are able to maintain
citizenship with the tribe.
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Fig. 4. The Laws and Treaties of the Cherokee Nation, an online webtext.
so. Setting up illegal towns, staking claims to oil and mineral rights, and squatting on land that did not belong to them,
these 200,000 plus emigrants petitioned Congress to allow them to develop the state of Oklahoma. This brief history
is covered at some length in this node, which was created by a professional writing student named Anne and includes
interactive images and digital movies that overview the events leading up to the creation of the State of Sequoyah
constitution and petition for statehood (see Fig. 4).
Recall that since the state of Oklahoma was celebrating its centennial at the time the Cherokee Nation asked for
this project, the CN hoped to develop an alternative history to the ones the state of Oklahoma was creating, which
focused on honoring the pioneering spirit of boomers and squatters. Anne’s digital movie also describes this history
but relocates the narrative perspective away from the mainstream boomer history to the history of the Indians who
tried to develop a state. “The events up until 1905,” Anne explains in her first movie of this node, “including the
frustrations with the railroads, squatters, and defeat of the initial Indian statehood constitution bill, lead to a meeting of
representatives of the five tribes in Muskogee to rethink what they had originally pushed for in a unified Indian state.”
As she explains this, images drawn from this time and place illustrate the claims she is making: opening with a scene
from the railroad, she moves to an image of the bill before Congress petitioning for rights of squatters on Cherokee
land, then to an image of a map panning outward from Muskogee to the area of Indian Territory treated to and occupied
by the Cherokee and other tribes.
This single fifteen-second clip moves from the national level of squatters coming to the state at the very beginning
of the Progressive Era’s movement West to the railroad as a tool of westward expansion that was resisted by Indians
to the squatters’ petition to Congress to a detail of the map of Indian Territory. The condensed narrative of time that is
possible with this digital composition evokes and draws upon local and national movements of peoples to form a history
representative specifically of and for Cherokees and Indians in Oklahoma. Importantly, then, this digital remediation
illustrates the ways in which a Cherokee identity comes to be formed through a retelling of the history of a fraction of
the events leading to its present situation as a Nation within a state.
Anne’s digital composition demonstrates the ways in which this project works at the three stages of community
mediation. First, the images, audio, and content were selected to represent the nation building efforts of the Cherokees
during the early 1900s in Oklahoma. Anne had based her content on her research paper, which focused on this specific
time period within the larger scope of historical materials students were charged with understanding. Anne understood
that her content needed to show the cultural resurgence and rhetorical struggle for statehood shown by tribes that had
been removed to Indian Territory. She determined the importance of this period in part through consultation with the
representatives of the Nation who appreciated and encouraged an entire node of materials being developed to represent
the State of Sequoyah movement.
G. Getto et al. / Computers and Composition 28 (2011) 160–174
169
Her selection of media was meant to bring to light the rhetorical purposes the CN had for this section of the
educational installation: to present an alternative read on the railroad that showed the negative impact it had for
Cherokee land owners. In this way, Anne was attending to the rhetorical practices already in place at the CN that
enabled them to continually strive to define themselves as a Nation within a State. These practices, in other words,
were used as the infrastructure that guided the selection of media that were then digitized, compiled in light of her
narrative, and compressed into a final story that could be embedded into the interface we had designed to bridge directly
into the CN’s website. Her work was seamlessly integrated into the existing CN website in ways that used both their
existing practices and hardware as stepping-stones to a final product. Her rough cuts of these videos were viewed by
representatives of the Cherokee Nation during a video conference in which she was asked to add further images that
highlighted the roles of the railroads in bringing unwanted settlers, boomers, and squatters to the territories that had
been treated to Cherokees.
Importantly, this step allowed Anne to further connect her selection of media to the social purposes of the CN in a
way that was audience aware. Boomers may be popular throughout Oklahoma given the state’s narrative of itself and the
university’s football team, but the popularity of the term for Cherokees is qualified with the historical understanding that
boomers, squatters, and settlers were unwanted and illegally allowed onto land that had been promised by treaty to the
Cherokee. This selection of media for this digital composition reflected the Nation’s desire to check the aggrandizing
narrative of the roles of railroads in developing both the state of Oklahoma and the United States.
In these ways, Anne’s selection of media was meant to highlight the definitional boundaries between the CN and
the state of Oklahoma while writing a history that is widely understandable. Because the Cherokee Nation asked that
this project be created to help shape the CN’s story, an alternative history to the one told by the state of Oklahoma that
glorified its boomers and squatters, Anne’s piece reveals another important facet of boundary marking: “organizations
[such as tribal governments] also possess an external identity as enduring, goal directed entities. As such organizations exist as part of populations of other organizations with which they interact, and in these interactions they will
exercise capacities that belong to them as social actors” (Delanda, 2006, p. 75). As a governmental organization, the
present day Cherokee Nation rests in a tense, sometimes acrimonious relationship between the federal government
and state government of Oklahoma. The Cherokee Nation requested these materials be created in part to help them
articulate an external identity as an enduring government, demonstrating its capacity to write histories contrary to
the ones being promoted by the state government. Anne’s digital composition shows mediation unfolding at both the
material and social levels at once; it demarcates a space where culturally valued representations of the CN defined a
narrative parallel to and different from the narrative space that the state of Oklahoma claimed for its history. Her digital
video reveals the complex intervention in and gambits for the power to represent a national identity just as our next
example reveals the limits of particular media in representing the necessarily embodied practices of classical Indian
dance.
5. Remediating Indian Classical Dance
The case of Indian classical dance, then, is a particularly complex example of the three stages of community
mediation. Though this dance has survived for many, many years and gone through countless remediations, it is now
in danger due to the pervasiveness of digital technologies—a pervasiveness that both ensures this practice will meet
a broad audience and at the same time endangers its embodiedness as well as the mediation of the practice from
master to student. In other words, practices like Indian classical dance that depend the most on intimate, embodied
interpersonal relationships become the most endangered as researchers, practitioners, and digital composers seek to
create new infrastructures to help them reach new audiences. In order to explain this further, more of the history of
Indian classical dance will be explained and then contrasted to more contemporary forms of remediation that lend
themselves to our model of community mediation.
The video we have included (which can be found at <https://www.msu.edu/∼cushmane/digitalcomps.htm>) demonstrates some of the stages of remediation of Indian classical dance. The first section shows the Konark Sun Temple of
Orissa and the walls of the temples with their etched figures of dancing girls. This is one of the thousands of temple
walls that bear the memory of this traditional heritage. These sculptures were inspired by the temple-dancers called
Maharis or Devadasis (servants of God). The Devadasis danced for the pleasure of the temple deity and were not
allowed to perform outside the temple. As the spiritual tradition of the dance transferred to the gotipuas, or young
boys dressed as girls, the dance was re-interpreted into a more acrobatic style. The next clip shows a modern day
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gotipua performance. Though the dance was never performed by the Devadasis outside the Natamandir (dance wing
of the temple), its memory was preserved by the gotipuas for hundreds of years before the revival of the dance as
a classical form. The Gotipua Gurus originally encountered the dance by studying the postures and gestures of the
temple sculptures and thus saved classical Odissi dance from annihilation. The video traces the forms in which the
memory of the art was preserved over time and ends with glimpses of the dance being performed in Second Life by
an avatar. The location depicted in Second Life is the “Kamasutra temple,” which bears digital walls engraved with
Konark sculptures.
A practice such as Odissi, then, is a particularly interesting case for our model because it is a two-thousand-year-old
artistic practice whose memory has survived in bodies, texts, and artifacts over many centuries. This means that any
composer attempting to create community media that fosters this practice must understand this complicated history
first, as the first level of community mediation, or must understand the ongoing practices of Odissi dancers and the
complex culture these practitioners carry with them into the art. In addition, composers must understand the various
stages of remediation that this practice has already gone through, such as the ones described above.
Next, understanding this practice also means understanding that classical dances almost always prescribe a set
grammar that contains the unwritten laws governing the nuances of physical movement of each particular dance.
Odissi is no different: it evolved over hundreds of years as a dance form, and the knowledge of the grammar of the
dance was transmitted orally and through rigorous practice. Mediation of the sacred knowledge into written texts
probably came much later. The grammar that Odissi follows was written down by Nandikeswar, the third-century
Indian author of the dance text Abhinaya Darpana. Ancient Orissan temples of Lingaraj, Konark, Puri Jagannath, and
several others bear thousands of sculptures of dancing women. Etching poses of the dance served as a pedagogical
strategy that kept the performative tradition alive, sometimes without the intervention of the Guru, or master, who
holds a central position in this artistic tradition. Documentation of the physical movements of the dance and their
representation in stone sculptures is a key moment of remediation that therefore needs attention. Textualization of the
nuances of the dance in the revered Sanskrit language probably also helped Odissi be accepted as a classical dance and
so should also be taken into account. In other words, these textual representations of the dance’s grammar are instances
in which the dance has already been supplemented by artifacts and texts outside of the all-important Guru-shishya
or teacher-student relationship that is so central to it. These forms of remediation served a mnemonic purpose for
promoting the Guru-Shishya relationship and allowed for variations of the dance to be performed as the student gained
expertise with the grammars of the dance.
Third, the importance of the Guru-Shishya relationship to the dance cannot be over-stated. Indian classical dance
began as a spiritual performance in temples and was considered an offering to God. In addition, the knowledge of
the art has been handed down from generation to generation primarily by the Guru or teacher. Guru is derived from
the Sanskrit root [gr], which means, “to praise or invoke.” A Guru is considered to be the human form of abstract
divinity that helps in illuminating one’s knowledge and helping one realize God just as the Guru himself has realized
God. Learning in the Guru-Shishya method involves a complete surrender to the Guru and a willingness to absorb the
knowledge of the Guru into one’s self. The Shishya or disciple is expected to embody the knowledge offered by the
Guru.
The three most important infrastructures—or networks of resources and activity—surrounding Odissi are, thus,
these various remediations during its history, the grammars of the dance itself, and the Guru-Shishya relationship. Any
attempt to remediate this practice into contemporary, especially digital, media must take these practices and forms of
knowledge into account. These existing infrastructures are especially important to consider now that digitization of the
dance and the music it is performed to is becoming more prevalent as thousands of diasporic Indians resort to learning
the dance long-distance through newly available DVDs, software, and video sharing. Shreelina received lessons of the
ancient art of Odissi dance for twenty-five years from her Guru in east India. In her own learning of this ancient dance,
she has thus adhered to the rigorous Guru-Shishya tradition. The master would perform a movement and Shreelina
would imitate that movement. Then the same movement would be repeated and imitated several times until the nuances
of that single movement were ingrained in Shreelina’s body in a way that made the dance step spontaneous and allowed
her to flow from one movement to another without having to think. Oral feedback was also a key component of her
training as her Guru often tweaked the rendition of the piece as Shreelina practiced.
Aware of the affordances of new media, however, and as a diasporic Indian herself, Shreelina has allowed new
media to creep into her own pedagogical practice of this ancient art as she teaches interested students and performs
the dance in her current home in the United States. Shreelina frequently records a step in order to show it to students.
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The main reason for this remediation is that students in the U.S. are not able to devote as much time as Shreelina
did to learning the initial steps. Shreelina learned through five-hour practice sessions during which she repeated each
movement several times. In this way, she learned the Rasas and Bhaavas, or facial expressions used in the dance, by
imitating her Guru. However, her own young Indian Shishya, a child of the digital age who does not have five hours per
session to practice, began making charts of emoticons that she believed corresponded to the particular facial expression
she was trying to learn. Her way of memorizing the Rasas and Bhaavas did not involve any embodied imitation at
all. Physically enacting an expression and drawing emoticons to learn dance expressions can function in very similar
ways, however, if an experienced practitioner is still guiding the process. Drawing emoticons and enacting actual facial
expressions are both performative mediations used to convey a message to an audience, are they are both aesthetic
manifestations of emotion. Both are essentially mimetic. However, an emoticon produces emotional states for only
certain audiences to share, bringing up our final stage of community mediation, or the synchronizing of audience value
systems that allows for a translation from one medium to another.
Again, this process is incredibly complex and contradictory for such an ancient practice as Odissi. Though Shreelina
allowed her student to remediate the facial expressions of the dance into emoticons, she fears that such a practice
distances the expressions from the body of the dancer who is, after all, producing an emotional state for a live audience
to share with the performer. Emoticons are a technological tool that supposedly stands in for the emotion of the body
in digital spaces but only really do this for particular audiences in particular digital spaces, such as people adept
and familiar with using Instant Message platforms. Shreelina fears that when such a distancing occurs between the
remediation of Odissi and its original infrastructures, the cultural memory of the dance is compromised; the reason
for the dance, the relationships enacted by the dance, and the need for the dance become mitigated by the digital
preservation of it.
In an attempt to popularize Odissi, the dance is also being recorded onto DVDs and sold to interested people all over
the world. Digitization of Odissi has been hailed by renowned Gurus of the Odissi gotipua tradition like Maguni Das
of Raghurajpur and Gangadhar Pradhan of Konark as a wonderful means of not only preserving a cultural memory but
also giving it better visibility in the international cultural arena. However, Basanta Pradhan of Raghurajpur, another
well-known Guru whom Shreelina interviewed during her fieldwork in India, is skeptical about the absence of the
interactivity with the Guru that occurs when learning via a newer technology. As he said in the interview, “you can
watch a CD [sic] for entertainment, but if you try learning from it, it might not be a good idea” (Ghosh, 2008a).
Gangadhar Pradhan basically agreed, saying “yes, it is alright [sic] to translate the movement of [the dance] into a
digital medium and learn from it. However, only a Guru can tell you when you have attained perfection. Dancing
by looking at a CD [sic] might be too mechanical.” According to him, only advanced students should use DVDs to
learn some Odissi pieces and only if they have received full training of the basics from their Guru. Odissi, he says is a
“Guru-mukhi vidya” or Guru-centered technology; “In spite of progress of science and technology in art, the Guru is
irreplaceable” (Ghosh, 2008b).
In one final example of the supposed preservation of this dance, the 3D virtual world program Second Life has a
Kamasutra temple where movement is made possible with codes that one purchases with Linden dollars (the currency
used in Second Life). Shreelina has participated in this digital space. As a new remediatory practice, like the others
discussed, this performance is also exceedingly complex. When Shreelina enters this Second Life space, for example, a
traditional memory contained within her own body is being translated into the body of digitized dancer. The performance
of the dance in Second Life involves computer-generated codes rather than the traditional knowledge of physical
movement handed down by Shreelina’s Guru. In other words, this act involves a complex relationship between Shreelina
as artist, the Guru that instilled in her the sense of how a traditional dance should be performed, and the Second Life
avatar that embodies this knowledge. Also, any Second Life dancer can buy the codes to perform a coordinated dancelike movement of the avatar body, a movement that in real life may take many years to perfect. Ultimately, Shreelina
feels that remediating the dance into the space of Second Life creates an extra remove from the Guru and the avatar
“body” that performs the dance.
When a user engages in such a virtual practice or when a student without proper guidance imitates movements he
or she sees on a DVD, the central place of the Guru is lost. An important infrastructure that has been present through
every remediation of Odissi to date is compromised despite the potential for preservation represented by these new
technologies. Though the dance has moved from one phase of mediation to another in its long history, from folk to
classical and now to digital, Shreelina fears that this new remediation may mean the practice is moving from phases
that allowed immediacy between Guru, student, and audience to a phase that severely deviates from the ritualized
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codes that have been the bedrock of this two-thousand-year-old cultural practice. The movement to digitize a very
orthodox and ritualized dance brings it to new audiences but only through disembodied expressions made possible
through new technologies. This has led to destabilization, confusion, and wrath from the veteran practitioners of the
art who welcome changes, but ultimately feel, as Shreelina does, that the central authoritative figure of the Guru is
essential for the long-term survival of this cultural art form and for its continued performance and preservation.
6. Community Mediation: Implications
When applied to these cases, the definition of mediation from which we work reveals that any act of digital composing
within a community must take into account the ways that sign technologies relate to the communal, historical, and
cultural practices of the stakeholders involved with the project. The ways in which these practices are preserved,
digitized, mediated, and remediated matters, hence the model we have introduced here. We do not believe, for example,
that the people who make up the Allen Neighborhood Center are trying to profit in some way from the exploitation
of other community members in the name selling advertising space, and we do believe that this is exactly one of the
(implicit) motives of those in power within many established media structures that tell stories about the ANC and its
neighborhood. So although both established media structures and the neighborhood center are trying to tell stories, the
ways in which they tell stories and the ways in which these stories are preserved in structures and practices in order
to reach audiences matters a great deal to those being represented. In the case of the video Guiseppe prepared for the
ANC, the stakeholders had significantly more control over how they were represented to other community members
and outside audiences than any other form of public representation available to them.
In this way, the digital shorts created for the Cherokee Laws and Treaties site revealed a shared history distinctly
different from the one often told by the state of Oklahoma, a history now available to any who have web access. Through
a process of community mediation, students developed an understanding of the context for this history, mediated it
through a careful selection of tools that told the story from the Cherokee Nation’s perspective, and offered their product
as one that shows a distinction between the Cherokee Nation’s history and the one presented by the state of Oklahoma.
Although this educational piece was accessible and understandable to those outside of the Cherokee Nation, it marked
a boundary between the types of history being told at that centennial moment. Through community mediation, the
Cherokee Nation was able to demonstrate publicly that its existence extended beyond that of the State of Oklahoma’s
portrayal of state history.
Finally, Indian classical dance, originally intended as an immediate expression of joyful relationship with God and
audience, survived its remediation into writing and stone sculpture. This original mediation did not alter the significance
of the relationships that were still embodied in the dance and in the Guru-Shishya relationship, but digital mediations
like those in Second Life and through the translation of the emotional states embodied in the dance into emoticons and
producers of DVDs seem, in fact, to threaten the dance’s original cultural meaning. Surely a balance can be struck in
which new media technologies are used as pedagogical tools by experienced instructors rather than as replacements for
direct instruction by a Guru, but it is also possible that as the dance gains popularity through these new technologies
that the new technologies will start to replace the key original infrastructure.
These three cases of community mediation are robust in their representations of local realities different from official
or mainstream depictions of these stories, then, at the same time that they become part of the changes in meaningmaking that occur within a culture regardless of the mode of translation. This brings us to another important implication
of these cases: the use and impact of meaning-making technologies must be assessed and weighed in relation to the
original significance of cultural memories and practices. If the medium is the message, then we must understand the
medium for what it indexes about the knowledge, culture, and identity of its users and audiences. We must strive to
align this translation as much as possible with the wants and needs of both the individuals and groups being represented
and the audiences they are being represented to (McLuhan, 1994).
When respecting the rights of those representing themselves and being represented, community technology consultants, community organizers, digital writing scholars, writing teachers, software designers, and producers of new
media have a responsibility to serve multiple communities by mediating those practices that enact and embody cultural
memories and practices in the best way possible. As cultural studies theorist Ileana Rodriguez (2001) finds, “it is clear
that tradition cannot be discussed separately from the subject that bears it; from the technologies that inform the logic
of its production; from the mediations or spaces where hegemony refunctionalizes everything to actualize or modernize
it” (pp. 57-58). Rodriguez would have us understand how the very act of mediation of one group of people by another
G. Getto et al. / Computers and Composition 28 (2011) 160–174
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in itself indicates the logic of its production. When we help community, tribal, and cultural representatives digitally
translate their practices and memories in ways that honor their most important understandings and practices, then we
do much to respect their embodied lifeways.
Our dual definition of mediation as sign technology and social process has allowed us to articulate a series of heuristic
stages through which community mediation should unfold. This process begins with the meaning-making practices
already in place in the community being represented so that any communication media chosen are chosen to meet the
purposes, exigencies, and deliverables outlined by stakeholders themselves. Products and practices are developed in
deep and respectful collaboration with and in light of existing practices to ensure that the digital compositions produced
compliment the values, practices, and communication structures already in place. Finally, community mediation should
bridge local and wider understandings and values so that products are understandable, valuable, and respectful of
traditions.
This process of community mediation and the definition of mediation it rests upon can be applied to any community
seeking both representation and connectivity. This proves especially important for the local cultures whose practices,
memories, and perspectives we hope to represent as digital writing scholars. As various communities seek to make the
shift from consumers of media to producers of their own media in order to represent themselves and connect to others,
it is important for writing teachers, and all those interested in digital media, to be aware of and even help intervene in
this process (Jenkins, 2006). Armed with a robust definition of mediation as both material and social process, writing
teachers can begin to engage students and community members in the process of community mediation that ensures
local cultural values and practices become a key part of both final products and the processes involved with creating
and maintaining those products. At the same time, it’s important to remember that digital mediation and its grammars
can unintentionally distort, disembody, and decontextualize the very cultural lifeways that it strives to protect and
represent. Only when we recognize how mediation acts as both sign technology and marker of a social and cultural
logic can we develop best practices for digital composition.
Guiseppe Getto is a Zen Buddhist and Ph candidate in Rhetoric and Writing at Michigan State University. His research interests center at the
intersections of cultural rhetoric(s) and community literacy and media. He is currently working on his dissertation, which centers around an empirical
research project investigating how service-learning students used various modes of writing to make materials for local community organizations
and individuals in the Lansing, MI community.
Ellen Cushman, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, serves as a Sequoyah Commissioner for the Cherokee Nation and is an associate professor of
writing, rhetoric, and American cultures at Michigan State University. She has published her qualitative research in a number of new media essays,
scholarly journals and books in literacy studies, rhetoric, and writing.
Shreelina Ghosh is a classical Indian dance performer and doctoral candidate in Rhetoric and Writing at Michigan State University. Her research
exists at the intersection of cultural and digital rhetoric, cultural identities and resistances, subaltern studies, human computer interaction, information
design, accessible website design, and usability studies.
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