15: Reflection

I honestly wasn’t sure what to expect from this class; I’d taken other classes that discussed digital publishing to some extent, but had never really gotten an overall definition of what digital publishing was or what kinds of things it involved. I hoped this class would give me more specific ideas about what digital publishing was and how it might be useful to me going forward, and how it was different or similar to things I’d learned in other publishing courses. 

I definitely feel that I have a better grasp of what digital publishing it and a broader view of it than I did previously, and throughout this class I’ve seen the places where digital publishing and traditional print publishing overlap and share characteristics, and the ways in which they are very different entities. I wasn’t expecting the amount of attention to rhetoric and theory at the beginning of this class, but I think it was useful to understand the ways in which a digital or online context changed how we interpret certain rhetorical theories or ideas that I’d previously been exposed to. 

Other than fulfilling my last requirement for graduation (sorry!), this class has also prompted me to re-examine the ways I think about digital publishing and the ways I’ve heard it talked about during my four years as a Publishing & Editing major. I’ve found that we either discuss digital publishing as something that is either going to destroy or revolutionize the publishing industry, but that either way is radically different from traditional publishing. Taking a more in-depth look at digital publishing this semester has made me realize that there are many similarities with traditional publishing, and that while we may have to look at some things differently, the same concepts can be applied to both print and digital publishing.  

While the larger projects were interesting, I think focusing on a wider variety of smaller assignments might be more useful; students in this class come from a variety of backgrounds (English, Writing, Publishing, Communications) and will be going into a variety of different fields, and so I think gaining more experience of writing and publishing on a wider variety of platforms would give students more marketable skills.