Dr. David Rieder

Over the course of the next few months the CRDM blog will periodically feature a Q + A with one of our outstanding faculty members. We take classes with them and work with them on scholarly projects, but now we’d like to learn more about what else they’re doing. We recently caught up with David Rieder, Associate Professor of English and CRDM faculty member:

What are you reading?

Most anything I read is for work/research, and I’m usually working through several books. Currently, I’m reading Carrie Noland’s Agency and Embodiment, and I just finished David Berry’s The Philosophy of Software. I’m also rereading Tom Ingold’s book, Lines. Besides that, I’m reading through a couple of books on C# programming for a current grant project. Any additional reading is devoted to kids’ books for 2-4 year-olds. Lately, I’m reading a lot about witches and various kinds of farm animals.

What classes are you teaching?

Currently, I’m teaching a couple of undergrad courses, ENG 323 and ENG 426, which are “Writing in the Rhetorical Tradition” and “Analyzing Style.” Last semester, I taught undergraduate and graduate courses on humanities physical computing with Arduino and Processing. I’m happy to say I’ll be teaching “Digital Media Theory” again as a CRD 791 in the fall 2012, and Tim Stinson and I hope to team teach “Introduction to Digital Humanties” in the spring.

What are you writing about?

Right now, I’m working on my book manuscript titled Suasive Iterations: Experimental Approaches to Digital Rhetoric and Writing in Computational Media. Each chapter includes an original software program written in Processing. The chapter I’m working on right now is on the revitalized role of the gesture related to (grammatological) writing. The programming in that chapter is based on my recent work with the Kinect. In another two weeks, I’ll begin writing/participating in the “Critical Code Studies Working Group,” a three-week, online meeting for scholars/artists interested in developing critical approaches to writing about code in the humanities.

What are you listening to?

Not as much as I used to! I used to go out to shows regularly. Lately, with two young kids, I play the same stuff over and over again on my Shuffle when I’m at the gym: Fu Manchu, Sasquatch, Junkie XL, Quarashi, Chevelle, Beastie Boys, etc. Other than that, ‘lots of children’s music including some in French and Spanish. But if/when the Melvins come back to town, I’ll drop everything to see them.

What are you watching?

What about asking what I’m playing?! I’m playing Dead Island right now (it was on sale on Steam), and I always go back to Fallout3 for a nostalgic romp through the post-apocalyptic DC area. In answer to your question, when I’m not chasing zombies and mutants, my wife and I watch whatever is streaming on Netflix or Amazon for free. We just watched a movie called PontyPool, which I highly recommend. It’s all about speech, writing, and knowing. Brilliant. Other than that, Portlandia, Walking Dead, American Pickers, Flying Wild, and lots of action movies.

Journey into the land of… high schoolers!

This year, CRDM’s Rhetoric Society of America (RSA) Student Chapter is undertaking a variety of outreach projects to increase awareness of rhetoric in our community. As a part of this project, this week, Ashley R. Kelly and I (Meagan Kittle Autry) volunteered at a local high school, Broughton, to speak to International Baccalaureate (IB) program twelfth grade students in a Theory of Knowledge class. The class was just finishing up their semester, so now was the perfect time for us to come in to introduce another way of looking at knowledge (and perhaps to encourage them to think about studying rhetoric as they set off for college in the fall!). We taught two separate classes, one each day, and let me tell you – teaching high school is exhausting! Each class had 40 students, and we were outside in a portable, a fairly small space for that number of students. For both of us, this was our first experience in a U.S. high school, though overall, it wasn’t that much different from our experience in Canada.

We covered basic concepts of rhetoric (what is it? where does it come from? how do we talk about it?) before moving on to a topic that they had covered in the semester: science. They had covered concepts of knowledge in science, so by bringing in the perspective of rhetoric of science, we connected to some ideas they had covered but also challenged them to think about science in new ways. We talked about expert and inexpert audiences, adapting arguments based on the different audiences, and the importance of science for the general public and for themselves as individuals. We based a lot of the discussion on our research into nuclear energy in both a local setting (with the Duke-Progress merger) and on a global scale (with the accident at Fukushima last March and Germany’s reaction to the disaster). The students were bright, talkative, and engaged – and sure knew way more about nuclear energy than I did in high school!

All in all, filling a 100 minute class to engage 40 adolescents the whole time was a challenging experience. But we left encouraged that the students were so engaged, and their teacher indicated that afterword, they expressed interest in the work we are doing and the CRDM program – they thought it was all pretty cool. Taking on this outreach opportunity was a really great experience, and we can’t wait to hear what other CRDMers are doing for it, too!

Originally posted on my blog, Meg’s Road to PhD.

Jen Ware, ABD!

Congratulations to Jennifer Ware, who today passed her preliminary exam unconditionally. She is now forging ahead as ABD, with her dissertation tentatively titled ”Still ‘live at the scene’: An exploration of timely television news broadcasts repurposed as online content.”

Her advisory committee Melissa Johnson, Susan Miller-Cochran, Ken Zagacki, and Jason Swarts.

Dana Gierdowski, ABD

Congratulations to CRDMer Dana Gierdowski on earning ABD and doctoral candidate status!

Her committee members are Chris Anson, Deanna Dannels, Vicki Gallagher, and Susan Miller-Cochran (chair). The working title of her dissertation is ”The Geographies of a Writing Space: An Ethnographic Study of a Flexible Composition Classroom.”

2012 Election Results are in!

As is the custom (written into the CRDM Student Association Constitution, in fact), elections for CRDM Student Association positions were held on first Tuesday after the first Monday in November–otherwise known as “election day.” Our redoubtable candidates campaigned hard, the votes have been recorded and tallied, and the results are in.

Please join us in congratulating the. . .

2012 CRDMSA President
Lauren Clark

2012 CRDMSA Vice President
Kate Maddalena

2012 CRDMSA Secretary
Elizabeth Johnson-Young

2012 CRDMSA Treasurer
Brent Simoneaux

Thank you again to all those who voted. And a special thank you to all of you who ran for office. We have no doubt that our new officers will guide and inspire us in the coming year. We look forward to a peaceful transition of power at our next meeting.

Meet the 2011 CRDM Cohort!

With a good portion (ahem) of the semester already behind us, we proudly introduce the stellar group of students beginning the CRDM program this year:

Kristina Bell, Greensboro, NC

• B.F.A. in Film Editing and Sound, University of North Carolina School of the Arts

• M.A. in Communication Studies, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC
• Interests: Media studies, Film

Burcu Baykan, Ankara, Turkey

• B.A. in Graphic Design, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey
• M.A. in Communication & Media Studies, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey
• Interests: Visual Communication, Cultural & Critical Theory, Visual Media Arts

Jameson Hogan, DeKalb, IL

• B.S. in Political Science and Government, Bradley University, Peoria, IL
• M.A. in English Composition, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL
• Interests: Literary Theory and Digital Humanities

Website: www.jamesonhogan.com

Elizabeth Johnson-Young, Alexandria, VA and Greensboro, NC

• B.A. in Media Studies; minor in Political Science, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC
• M.A. in Communication, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), Blacksburg, VA
• MA Thesis: “Sent to you by someone who thinks you’re beautiful: The effects of regulatory focus, personal involvement and collective efficacy in a social media campaign”.
• Interests: media campaign research (particularly online health and political campaigns), persuasion, and audience processing and effects; media literacy and education

Academia.edu: http://ncsu.academia.edu/ElizabethJohnsonYoung

Christopher Kampe, Los Angeles, CA

• B.A. in English Language and Literature, Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY
• M.A. in English Language and Literature, California State University, Northridge
• Interests: Games, Narrative, Storytelling

Johanne I. Laboy, Humacao, Puerto Rico

• B.A. in Mass Communication (Public Relations and Advertising) Univ. of South Florida, Tampa, FL
• M.B.A. in International Business and Marketing, Univ. of South Florida, Tampa, FL
• Interests: Communication Technology, Health Communication, Health Promotion, Underserved Populations

Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/johanneilaboy 

Samara Mouvery, Huntsville, AL

• B.A. in Communication Arts; minor in Computer-mediated communication, Univ. of Alabama in Huntsville, Huntsville, AL
• M.A. in Communication Studies, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL
• Interests: Computer-mediated communication, online interaction, disinhibition, anonymity

Rouli Manalu, Semarang, Indonesia

• B.A. in Communication Studies, Diponegoro University, Semarang, Indonesia
• M.A. in Communication Studies, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia
• Interests: the study of digital media political economy, communication technology and digital media studies.

Brent Simoneaux

• B.A. in English; minor in Government, Berry College, Rome, GA
• M.A. in Composition and Rhetoric, Miami University, Oxford, OH
• MA Thesis: Title: “Rearticulating the Zoomable User Interface.” In this thesis, I argue that a rooted understanding of rhetorical memory and its interwoven relations to arrangement and invention is vital to composing within multiscale zoomable environments. Based on these memory practices, I suggest ways that we might redesign currently-available ZUIs to better support rhetorically effective composing.
• Interests: Human-Computer Interaction, Interface Design, Embodied Computing, Writing Pedagogy

Twitter: @brentsimoneaux

Daniel “Danny” Synk, Adelphi, MD (danny.synk@gmail.com)

• B.A., in English (concentration in Language, Writing, and Rhetoric), Univ. of Maryland, College Park
• M.A. in English (concentration in Rhetoric & Composition), University of Maryland, College Park
• Interests: Rhetorical Theory, Rhetorical Analysis, Digital Rhetorics

Live Blog: Online Identity Workshop

Meagan Kittle Autry here: I’m live-blogging the second professional development workshop of the fall semester for CRDM, “Maintaining Your Online Identity.” Special thanks to CRDM faculty member David Rieder and CRDM-affiliated faculty member Brad Mehlenbacher for sharing their insights and websites with us today.

David starts by indicating he has a static website for a reason: that maintaining a dynamic site requiring constant updating can be quite time consuming. Message: use your time wisely.

Brad features a new page he created his website about online identity management for academics. He offers that the website has come to serve as his vita and/or portfolio. It’s a fairly comprehensive record of his work as an academic.

Dave shows his website and offers several ideas: 1) He maintains a simple, static site to keep it manageable; 2) He used an open-source template; 3) He codes by hand (hey, another old schooler like me!). He emphasizes that for those in the humanities, “flashy” isn’t a standard, and that sites should be usable on a variety of platforms and possibly printable. He also recommends using a hit tracker to identify your audience (he has used Reinvigorate; Brad, ClustrMap) and to better tailor your materials based on where your hits are and the heat map information that is generated.

Brad emphasizes not having a personal section on a website when you’re on the job market – and Dave heartily agrees – to avoid inviting unwanted biases about you as a candidate. Post-job market, Dave offers that the amount of personal information you include on a website depends on how comfortable you are with doing so, but that it’s certainly not necessary.

Brad also uses his site as a resource for teaching, giving talks, etc. He aggregates information as he comes across it and can easily use for his own preparation or to give to students.

Dave remarks that our websites should be a key marketing tool for us on the job market, and we should see it as an opportunity to self-market and become more visible. Search committee members may not all be on Twitter or Academia.edu, but they will certainly Google you – so control the material that appears when they find your site.

Wendi asks a question: “To what extent should your website replicate your CV?” Dave warns: the more information you put out there, the more you offer yourself to be critiqued on, so select the information you put online carefully. Put out enough to support the ethos you present for yourself in your job applications.

Dave and Brad both recommend including brief descriptions of the teaching experience you’ve had: titles of courses, semester taught, and a brief blurb (potentially the catalog description, if it’s not too clunky).

We end with a discussion of really putting yourself out there vs. displaying limited information about yourself, such as only your most recent work. Some academics have earned great recognition based on their open web presence (Cheryl Ball, for instance) and that this is something that each of us will have to negotiate individually as we decide what kinds of jobs we’ll be applying for.

Of course, the workshop was further reaching and with more of the nitty-gritty details than I’ve offered here. We had a great time with lively discussion – come to the next workshops in the spring to be a part of the conversation!

~ Meagan

Zach Rash, ABD

Zach Rash is studying online sports fan forums

Congratulations to Zach Rash–the world’s newest minted expert on online sports fan boards–for earning the coveted ABD designation after successfully passing his oral exams.

Zach’s committee is made up of Dr. Carolyn Miller (chair), Dr. Nancy Penrose, Dr. Steve Wiley, and Dr. Ken Zagacki, and his dissertation topic is “Identity and Hegemony in Online Sports Discourse.”

Computers and Writing 2012

Computers and Writing 2012 will be hosted at North Carolina State University, and CRDM is involved! We’ll post more about how CRDMers are involved with the conference in our next update, but for now please read our call for conference papers and a related call for a special issue of Enculturation. Please visit the official site as well.

The Call

We welcome proposal submissions for Computers and Writing 2012, “ArchiTEXTure: Composing and Constructing in Digital Spaces.” Under this theme, we encourage submitters to consider issues, challenges, and benefits specifically related to the production of digital texts. Additionally, submissions are encouraged to consider questions that both address “archiTEXTure” in the classroom and as part of a scholarly agenda.

The goal of this conference is to move beyond traditional, print-based examinations of new media objects as texts. Thus, we are interested in how digital spaces and new media objects interact with and influence the ways that we compose ourselves, our classrooms and our scholarly work. The archiTEXTure of new media can be the media object itself, but can also be the the contexts, spaces, bodies, materials, ideas, and histories of media. The TEXTure of the media could be the screen, but it could also be the differing surfaces and materials of media. In the space between the competing materialities of classroom and text, we can ask questions about construction, process, movement, and change.
At Computers and Writing 2012 we will turn our focus to those issues related specifically to composing and constructing as writing flows from the page and the screen to new contexts and formats. The concerns listed below are not exhaustive, but a beginning point for participants to consider:

• What are the material and/or immaterial barriers and considerations involved in creating new media/digital texts?
• What changes in the creative process take place when students and instructors utilize new or unfamiliar technologies?
• How do the institutions in which we teach and work constrain or enable different forms of production?
• How do new media objects and digital spaces help us to build identities as scholars, instructors, and/or students?
• How do new media objects and digital spaces enhance the way we construct our courses?
• What practical concerns do we and our students face when developing new media/digital texts?
• What do new media objects tell us about how technology influences the relationship to space, body, and self?

Presentation Formats
Computers and Writing 2012 invites proposals in a variety of formats: conference presentations and panels, installations, performances, half and full day workshops. We also introduce a new spin on the mini-workshop: a type of session we call CREATE! In all presentation formats, we strongly encourage presenters to move beyond a traditional read-aloud paper and consider other delivery methods. Please note that presenters can only have one speaking role.  A speaking role includes: Panels/roundtables, CREATE! sessions and ConstrucTEXT.  A speaking role does not include installations and workshops.

Individual Presentations (20 minutes; 250-word proposal)
Panels and Roundtables (90 minutes; 3 or more presenters; 500-word proposals)
Interactive Installations (250-word proposals)
Replacing the traditional poster session, we instead encourage scholars to share research projects, game play, software, videos, or other media that they are researching in or teaching with. Interactive Installation proposals should describe space and technology requirements

Half-Day (3 hour) or Full-Day (6 hour) Pre-Conference Workshops (1 or more presenters; 500-word proposals plus schedule of activities)
Pre-conference workshops are intended to involve participants in a technology or issue set that rewards intensive work, giving them opportunities to learn new applications, assessment, and integration of emergent technologies for writing, learning, and collaboration. Workshops should be participatory, and proposals should articulate how attendees will interact with each other, the presenters, and/or technologies involved. If you submit a workshop proposal, please submit a word document that outlines the proposed workshop timeline of activities.

CREATE!  (90 minutes; 1 or more presenters; 500-word proposals)
CREATE! sessions are similar to mini-workshop sessions at prior C&W conferences. For these sessions facilitators should focus on presenting a specific application or skill to attendees, and all participants should leave the CREATE! sessions with an artifact that they produced. This artifact can be something quite traditional—the basic outline for a lesson plan or a specific activity to use in a classroom—or it could be a new media object.

ConstrucTEXT (90 minutes; 1 or more artists/performers; 500-word proposals, including samples of work if applicable)
ConstrucTEXT sessions are designed specifically to invite artists, performers, and creators to present their work at the conference. We are interested in highlighting artists who are interacting with technologies in some way, shape or form. Sessions can be performance-based, and artists should indicate length of performance, and space and technology needs. In addition, artists are encouraged to take some time to talk about their work which could be during a round table with other artists or an individual session.

North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC
Onsite Conference: Thursday, May 17, 2012 – Sunday, May 20, 2012
Proposal Submission Opens: September 17, 2011
Proposal Due Date: October 22, 2011 (before midnight EST)
Notifications of Acceptance: December 15, 2011
Registration Opens: January 15, 2012
Online Conference: Dates to be announced

CFP: Enculturation 2012 Special Issue

Computers & Writing 2012: ArchiTEXTure: Composing and Constructing in Digital Spaces
Guest Editors
Meagan Kittle Autry, North Carolina State University
Ashley R. Kelly, North Carolina State University

We welcome manuscript submissions for a special issue of Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture. For this issue, we invite papers originating from presentations given at Computers and Writing 2012, “ArchiTEXTure: Composing and Constructing in Digital Spaces.”  Under this theme, conference organizers encourage submitters to consider issues, challenges, and benefits specifically related to the production of digital texts. Additionally, submissions are encouraged to consider questions that both address “archiTEXTure” in the classroom and as part of a scholarly agenda.

Notifications of acceptance for C&W 2012 will be sent to the presenters on December 15, 2011. Should your presentation be accepted to the 2012 conference, we encourage you to consider crafting and creating your presentation now for consideration in this online special issue.

Media and Genres
We welcome a mix of media and genres to reflect the various presentation types featured at Computers and Writing 2012 individual presentations, interactive installations, CREATE! sessions, or ConstrucTEXT presentations. Traditional essays, hypertexts, videos, and multimedia projects are all suitable for publication in Enculturation.

Schedule
Inquiries from authors to guest editors begin: September 25, 2011 (Not all submissions must be queried first, but authors are welcome to correspond about their ideas)
Submissions due: Final day of C&W conference, May 20, 2012
Notifications to authors sent: July 15, 2012
Revised manuscripts due by: September 1, 2012
Publication date: October 1, 2012

Submission Guidelines
Please send queries and submissions to guest editors at cwspecialissue[at]gmail[dot]com.
Email should include author name(s), email address(es), and title of submission within the body. Please ensure no identifying information is contained within your file submission. Submissions should be attached as .doc or .rtf formats. If you are submitting a non-print text, please email the guest editors to inquire regarding appropriate formats for your submission.

Tunnel Visionary

We asked CRDMer David Gruber to explain his recent art/project/publication. His response below explains “Tunnel Vision” and its inspirations:

“Tunnel Vision” is an interactive digital project that uses motion-tracking software to respond in real-time to users’ body movements.

You might call it a “cybertext” since users’ movements alter the appearance of a poem and users tend to move in response to the reaction of the poem. It will be featured life-sized on a wall at the Contemporary Art Museum of Raleigh this winter.

The project started in Katherine Hayles and Bill Seaman’s digital art and literature class at Duke two years ago. (Interesting CRDM fact: the course was also offered at UCLA in 2002, and Dr. Silva was a student in that course!) I decided to interpret Mark Strand’s poem The Tunnel as an analogy for the human-computer relationship. At the time, I was reading Dorsality by David Wills, a book where Wills dismantles fears of new technology by suggesting that any “technological thing” is always developing out of us and along with us. Wills imagines the backbone as an early human technology to say that once we desire to turn around to see what’s behind us enabling the turn, the backbone is already there. Even if the turn is a paranoid one where we turn back to see who or what is behind us or if we turn back to try to understand where we came from and how we came to Be whatever we are, there’s comfort in knowing that what precedes the turn is what motivates it and what enables it—what is already us.

I saw a connection to the poem, The Tunnel, where a paranoid man hides in his home and digs a tunnel to try to escape a “stranger” standing outside on the front lawn. (I always think of the movie PI when reading this poem, probably for good reason.)
In the end, the paranoid man emerges on a lawn and finds himself standing outside a home for days, waiting for help, desperate, as someone inside hides from him. So the character is trapped in a loop of experience, a dilemma where he fears the Other even while he is the Other and doesn’t even realize he fears himself or becomes what he fears. I wanted to build some kind of digital work that would express this idea and extend it to the human perspective on the computer-as-Other. I asked for Dr. Rieder’s help. He liked the idea of visualizing the poem in terms of the human-computer loop and taught me a lot about the processes involved in programming a digital work. Together, we shaped Tunnel Vision.

A couple of people have asked me whether I would count this as a publication. The question seems motivated by anxiety about the legitimacy of hands-on digital media work and/or digital media art in English and Communication Departments. Floating in the background are concerns about what tenure will mean for CRDM students doing this kind of work. But my answer is “yes, I’ll count this as a publication.”
My answer doesn’t indicate a belief that digital media projects like this one will carry the same weight as peer-reviewed journal articles available in print (although they should—and getting into an online academic journal or into a museum almost certainly requires peer-review). Rather, my response follows from my belief that scholarly digital projects (whether deemed “art” or not) are conceptual, that they require as much work or more to complete as any traditional publication, and that they will soon be viewed as the outcome of a valid intellectual process, instead of a novelty or a side-project for less serious scholars.
Building things with digital media is another way to do intellectual work. I learned this from Dr. Rieder. Right now, for instance, I’m trying to visualize the multiple interpretations of the functioning of mirror neurons, and I’m thinking about how the code can reflect (pun intended) the concept of a “mirror” and still compel users to see their own body movements through the movements of others. To do this, I have to think about the mirror as a metaphor and the different types of “mirroring” going on and what a computational mirror might look like. What’s a mirror expressed in numbers or in the structure of an English sentence? I’m thinking of chiasmus and parallel strings and loops and repetitions. So I’ve learned that hands-on digital media work is a way to explore, a way to develop new ideas, and a way to see connections to rhetoric and writing studies.