Writing now includes images, sounds, and words in networked spaces. The scholarship here responds to this moment. The response does not try to directly translate writing from print to video. Instead, it takes up intellectual concerns through experiments in screen-based composing. The result is video scholarship that focuses on ways of knowing that are windowed, layered, emergent, and multimodal, that recasts print expectations, and that offers open-ended readings that feature performance, immersion, affect, and ambiguity.

Screen composing draws from methods linked with creative production—from visual rhetoric to cinema to music to performance to spoken word. It extends this history with affordances of the screen like software, gestures, interfaces, and networks. Through the screen, print behaviors are brought into relief, speculative approaches play out, and new methods emerge in the classroom.

The collection brings together twelve videos, each a chapter in the screen composing project. Each chapter offers Discussion text that extends the videos. Transcripts provide context and prose descriptions of the videos. Chapters also include information about Materials and Sources. (For more, see About the Project.)