It’s that time of year again: CRDMers have been filling up the Pubs

In keeping with what has become tradition on the CRDM blog, it’s time to take a moment to recognize the CRDM students who have been published all across the academic landscape in the past year.

Pubs. Publications. Get it?

Brock, Kevin. “Establishing Ethos on Proprietary and Open Source Software Websites.” Online Credibility and Digital Ethos: Evaluating Computer-Mediated Communication. Eds. Shawn Apostel and Moe Folk. Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 2013. 56-76.

Davis, Matthew, Kevin Brock, and Stephen McElroy. “Expanding the Available Means of Composing: Three Sites of Inquiry.” Enculturation. Web. 10 Oct. 2012. Available online: http://www.enculturation.net/files/availablemeans/index.html

Brock, Kevin. “One Hundred Thousand Billion Processes: Oulipian Computation and the Composition of Digital Cybertexts.” Technoculture 2 (2012). Web. 6 Oct. 2012. Available online: http://tcjournal.org/drupal/vol2/brock

Dickerson, J. A. (2012) “Metonymy and Indexicality: People and Place in the Five Points.” Rhetoric Review, 31(4), pp. 405-421.

Gierdowski, D. (2012). “Studying learning spaces: A review of selected empirical studies.” In R. Carpenter (Ed.) Cases on Higher Education Spaces. Hershey, PA: IGI Global.

Gruber, D. & Dickerson, J. A. (2012) Persuasive images in popular science: Testing judgments of scientific reasoning and credibility. Public Understanding of Science, 21(8), pp. 938-948.

Kinsella, William J., Kelly, Ashley R., and Meagan Kittle Autry. “Risk, Regulation, and Rhetorical Boundaries: Claims and Challenges Surrounding a Purported Nuclear Renaissance.” Communication Monographs 80.3 (2013) doi: 10.1080/03637751.2013.788253. Available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03637751.2013.788253

Kittle Autry, Meagan, & Kelly, Ashley R. (2012). “Merging Duke Energy and Progress Energy: Online Public Discourse, Post-Fukushima Reactions, and the Absence of Environmental Communication.” Environmental Communication 6(2), 278-284. doi:10.1080 /17524032.2012.672444.

Kittle Autry, Meagan & Ashley R. Kelly. (2012). “Computers and Writing 2012 Special Issue: ArchiTEXTure.” Guest Eds. Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture 14. Available online:
http://enculturation.net/architexture-introduction

Miller-Cochran, S. and Gierdowski, D. (2013), “Making peace with the rising costs of writing technologies: Flexible classroom design as a sustainable solution.” Computers and Composition Special Issue: Deploying 21st Century Writing on the Economic Frontlines. 

Reeves, Joshua. ”If You See Something, Say Something: Lateral Surveillance and the Uses of Responsibility.” Surveillance and Society 10.3/4 (2012): 235-48.

Swift, Jeff. Review of The Filter Bubble by Eli Pariser. Technoculture 2 (2012). Web. Available online: http://tcjournal.org/drupal/vol2/swift

Jeff Swift, ABD!

It’s time to party in the public sphere. This Wednesday, April 24th, Jeff Swift passed his comprehensive exams. Congratulations, Jeff!

Jeff’s committee consists of Carolyn Miller (chair), Matt May, Vicki Gallagher, and David Rieder. According to Dr. Miller, he’ll be writing his dissertation about “flash publics and a recuperated public sphere.” Digital rhetoric, meet Locke, Burke, and Habermas…

Christopher Cummings, PhD!

Big Ups to the newly-endoctored Christopher Cummings, who successfully defended his dissertation titled Impacts of Communicating Secondary Risks on Risk Reduction Responses: The Case of Nanoparticle-Formulated Sunscreens this week! Christopher’s committee was chaired by David Berube, joined by Jason Swarts, Deanna Dannels, and Andrew Binder. Soon-To-Be-Doctor Cummings will officially receive his degree in the upcoming May commencement ceremony, after which we can only assume he will indulge in some well-deserved (and well-protected) fun in the sun!

Another Look at Seminar Papers

I was looking at the infographics on “moving from seminar paper to publication“ and was reminded of another visualization technique that helped me during my time in NCSU’s CRDM program.

In Chris Anson’s infographic he mentions creating a flowchart as a way to visually map your ideas. When I was in my second year in the CRDM program I found it really useful to create Wordles of my seminar papers. While they don’t show the progression of the paper from seminar to article, the visual representation of my ideas helped me to discover my own interests as a scholar and see larger connections that I wasn’t initially aware of within my own work. It’s a great way to use existing word cloud software to gain new insights about your own scholarly interests and ideas (which, as it turns out, is one of my broad interests – how people use technologies in new and different ways).

Carolyn Miller offers excellent advice on positioning your papers within the “national disciplinary context” in order to join (and expand) the conversation. I challenge you to ask yourself, how might your all of your seminar papers broadly position you as a scholar in the academic market? Are there additional conversations you might want to join? Maybe you have underlying connections within your seminar papers that can help answer that vexing question. To get at those underlying pieces however, we might need another way to process the information. For me, the answer is visualization of the text-based information.

Creating word clouds of your seminar (and final) papers is a great way to visualize possible answers to my questions. Even classes that you feel on the surface have no connection to one another might provide you with some surprising insight when you look at your ideas and words through a visual lens. Before we look at a few word clouds of my seminar papers, I need to mention that my prior background is in broadcast journalism, documentary work, and multimedia advertising. For me, all of these are different forms of visual storytelling, my primary interest. In the wordles however, we see different themes, interests, and connections that I hadn’t noticed prior to my time at NCSU.

Below you’ll find four wordless I created from seminar papers written for the CRDM capstone courses that we all take during the first two years of the program:

Rhetoric and Digital Media capstone course. “The blueprint posting: form and style in an online discourse community.”

Technology and Pedagogy. “Teachers’ critical evaluations of dynamic geometry software implementation in 1:1 classrooms”

History of Communication and Technologies capstone. “Video Games in Hospitals: A Historical Overview and future research agenda”

Interdisciplinary Issues in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media seminar paper entitled “Tracing Similarities in form and process: Repko, Ceccarelli, and Dobzhansky”

To create a word cloud, I simply paste the text of my paper (not including the works cited) into a field at wordle.net and the software processes the information. While I can pick the color scheme and shape, the word sizes are determined by their frequency within my papers.

Within each word cloud right away we see the biggest is word “technology” or forms of technology (book, video, game). This makes sense. As a CRDM student my work most likely would have some broad focus on technology. But what I didn’t realize until stepping back and looking at the visual representations of my papers was that I have a broad interest in how people integrate new technologies into existing networks or how existing technologies are used in new or novel ways (like video games used as a distraction during chemotherapy treatments instead of simply for pleasure, or teachers using visualization software to teach math students how geometric shapes move). I also discovered that I like to trace conversations between users of technologies, to explore types of discourse and how communities talk to one another (my paper on online discourse communities and language use in cancer communities, another paper on revisions in book editions based upon community responses in articles and journals). Finally, while we see broadly the focus on users of technologies, I also have several connections to health related issues and community discussions of illness.

At the time, while trying to figure out how to expand my papers into potential articles, I was too close to my papers and focused on the individual classes as separate and distinct from one another to see the larger thread of connections between my writing for classes that had different foci on rhetoric, communication, pedagogy, grant writing and interdisciplinary issues. Making the wordles during my second year helped me explore my own writing in greater depth. Now I recognize these commonalities immediately as I use technologies in new ways for workshop events (see my recent Enculturation article on using light painting to explore our own text-based writing and revision processes) and, very broadly, the focus of my dissertation on how broadcast journalists use online platforms to repurpose existing television based materials.

As you move from seminar paper to article submission stage, consider making word clouds of your papers. It can help you see new connections between your larger body of work, and might also broaden your publishing opportunities. Once I noticed some of the larger themes in my writing, I made it a point to search for CFPs and journals that published works on those topics. I also frequently use those themes in keyword searches within journals in order to discover ongoing scholarly conversations. It’s almost like data mining and a reflective essay coexisting within a visual. As a visual storyteller, I find that very intriguing.

- Dr. Jennifer Ware is a CRDM graduate and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

http://jennifer-ware.com

Week 3 with IGERT in Peru- Iquitos, Peru

Editor’s note: Over the past few weeks we’ve followed first year CRDM student Molly Storment’s experiences in Peru. Please also see her original post here: http://molly.celevorne.net/node/29

This final post is coming a bit late due to my high level of frustration with Iquitos’ Internet (or lack thereof). We continued in our last week finalizing our mosquito larvae experiment (results are still being processed), enjoying two free days for the Peruvian independance celebration, and planning and executing individual student projects.

On our free day on Sunday, we went as a large group to a nearby butterfly farm and animal orphanage. This farm was owned and managed by a very interesting and eccentric woman originally from Austria. While looking at the butterflies and animals in her care, this woman told us that she often gets “rescue” animals from people whom she described as “stupid people” who buy monkeys or other animals in the market, then bring them to her, saying they “rescued” them. She said, with a heightened inflection in her voice, that her response to them is, “No you didn’t [rescue them], you encouraged [the sellers] to kill the mother for the babies.” She continued, in a mocking tone, that these people’s responses are “Why did you say that? My heart told me to do it.” Then she said “I say, think with your brain.” She spent some time during our tour talking about the political nature of her work. She said she can be fined 50 soles (about 20 US dollars) for each animal she releases without permission from the government. She said she once applied to release two boas, never heard back from Lima, so she “took no answer as a positive” and released the snakes. Later, she says, government officials came to see the snakes and fined her for their release.

This experience at the butterfly farm was the first direct experience with human-animal and human-nature relationships in Peru. What was most interesting to me was hearing about the politics and economics of animal releases on this island, and seeing the reactions of others to her presentation about the animals. For example, when she showed us to a cage of small monkeys that she said are known to climb into hummingbird nests and bite the heads off the young, Fred exlaimed, “They’re too cute to do that!” (Personally, I thought they looked completely guilty of such things, since they looked like rats.) I think the emotional connections we have with these animals strongly affects the way we think about these animals and what we consider ethical or unethical to do to them (e.g. Is it appropriate or ethical to genetically modify a mosquito? A rat? Any other animals? Is genetic modification any different from controlled breeding practices?). I was also surprised and interested to hear that she has trouble getting Peruvians interested in butterflies. She said that US Americans have all read The Very Hungry Caterpillar and are more familiar with butterfly ecology than Peruvians. The Peruvian understanding of insect ecology could strongly affect the reception of transgenic mosquitoes!

Getting back to work during the rest of the week, we continued to count larvae and finalize our experiment, and we were also given one day to focus on a project of our own initiative. After visiting the health clinics in week 2, I was interested in looking further into the health system in Iquitos. Gaby (one of the Peruvian students working with us, who also works with Amy Morrison and NAMRU) helped me coordinate my project. We decided to shadow a NAMRU physician, Dr. Isabel, as she visited patient homes who were suspected to have (or were positive for) dengue. These patients were being watched by a NAMRU physician because they were part of Amy Morrison’s current cohort study, where she monitored movement of people and dengue outbreaks in the cohort. We visited three different homes, all within close range of each other, and Gaby graciously served as my translator. In the first home, the dengue patient was not home, but the mother asked Dr. Isabel to look at her son, who she also suspected to have dengue. The mother seemed concerned because so many surrounding homes had dengue. In the second home, a young woman had tested positive for dengue. She explained that her symptoms had gotten so bad a few days earlier that she went to the hospital, where they treated her for a urinary tract infection. I was surprised to hear this error on part of the hospital, because this woman had already tested positive for dengue. Dr. Isabel also seemed surprised at this, and told her patient to not continue treatment for the UT infection, and that this is a common mis-diagnosis with people who have dengue. Dr. Isabel also talked to this young woman’s sister breifly, as her mother was concerned she also had dengue; Dr. Isabel decided this was not likely a case since she had not had a fever. Just before leaving, the mother of these two women asked Dr. Isabel if she had a way of performing a procedure to improve her vision. After this last interaction, I wondered if some of these patients participated in Dr. Morrison’s project in order to receive healthcare. (And understandably so, after visiting the clinics in week 2.)

Later in the evening, Dr. Morrison gave a lecture on issues of consent in minimal risk studies (she considers her movement project to be minimal risk). There was much discussion about giving incentives in these research projects – do people participate just for the incentive? In a place where healthcare can be hard to come by, is the guaruntee of healthcare too much of an incentive? What is the ethical responsibility of scientists in these situations? The issue of the UT infection misdiagnosis brought me back to another issue – is dengue “legitimate” in the Iquitos health system? What happens rhetorically to give malaria a seemingly higher status over dengue?

Week 2 with IGERT in Peru – Iquitos, Peru

Editor’s note: We’ve been following first year CRDM student Molly Storment’s experiences in Peru. Please also see her original post here: http://molly.celevorne.net/node/28

This has been an interesting first week in Iquitos. We have begun working in collaboration with Dr. Amy Morrison (UC Davis) who has been in Iquitos studying dengue and Aedes aegypti for 14 years. We were joined in Iquitos by four Peruvian students, three from Lima or surrounding areas, one from Iquitos. There has been some very interesting bilingual communication happening in our activities. I’m very glad their English is much better than my Spanish! I learned some very important differences between “muerta de hambre” and “muerta de hombre,” as well as “café pasado” and “café pescado.” Use Google translate for some nice humor.

Friday, Fred honored me with the “award” (an IOU for a pisco sour) of most improved mosquito larvae counter! But there’s lots of room for improvement when the starting point is pitiful; little do my colleagues know that was my strategy all along. We have begun an experiment involving breeding mosquitos in six different local homes. Amy’s team placed buckets in these homes 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1 week before we arrived, and we placed differing amounts of aegypti larvae in each of these buckets on Wednesday (7/25). Very simply put, our question is how much detritus is needed to maximize aegypti larvae growth, and what amount of larvae is needed to maximize growth? (The idea is that they will not reach adulthood before the experiments ends, so there is no risk of infecting these homes with aegypti. We have kept netting over the buckets to keep the level of detritus under control, and to keep any potential adults from getting out.) The participant homes have been very generous in letting us in their homes every other day for about 1 hour at a time to count larvae. In our evening discussions, Amy has told us that many people in Iquitos are more than generous in allowing her team in their homes in an effort to control dengue (but not all, as I witnessed myself!).

Between larvae counts, we made visits to two health clinics, one urban clinic in Iquitos, the other on a nearby island in the small community of Padre Coche. I was surprised to see that the bigger concerns in both of these clinics seem to be pregnancies, and in the case of the urban clinic, deliveries. In Padre Coche, the doctors we spoke with said that they do not have a problem with dengue fever, but rather malaria. It was a humbling experience to see that each of these clinics only owned one microsope, and the rural clinic had been out of electricity since December. The doctors in the rural clinic also described to us their intense efforts to keep malaria under control in their community, sometimes involving up to three hours of walking in an outbreak.

In Iquitos, our evenings have been spent listening to lectures on topics like mosqito ecology and dengue epidemiology, but often these lectures spin out into interesting conversations on the social factors related to the disease transmission and the nature of research in Iquitos. Dr. Amy Morrison along with Dr. Tom Scott (UC Davis) is doing some very interesting research on the movement of people in Iquitos and its influence on the transmission of the dengue virus. This work raises questions of how occupation, lifestyle, and possibly gender roles affect dengue transmission. Some of Amy’s work has also shown that most aegypti are born and die in the same home. (Disclaimer: I am not certain how conclusive she is on this research.) This, however, also raises questions of what is a “home.” Based on my very un-empirical observations, residents of Iquitos have a more communal lifestyle than US Americans, where one families’ “home” could extend past the confines of one structure (and even “structure” is loosely defined here). We have also had intense discussion on how to characterize diseases like dengue and malaria – are they diseases of the “poor,” a “rural” (in the case of malaria) or “urban” disease? I have observed in some of my colleagues some frustration in the difficulty in choosing words to characterize disease and the populations they affect; this was an interesting cross-disciplinary learning experience for me, as I was never shaken by these conversations, but rather felt they were very productive. But the problem that bothered the others still remains – do we settle for language that is “good enough,” or is it possible to find a truely productive and effective means of communicating about this disease to each other and to the affected publics? I think we could certainly improve the situation in Iquitos and with the World Health Organization – Amy hopes to use her research to improve health policy decisions in organizations like the WHO, where, as she told me, they promote strategies to control mosquitoes that they know don’t work (for example, some forms of insecticide spraying), but “it keeps the media off the WHO’s back.”

Week 1 with IGERT in Lima, Peru – The Role of Rhetoric in Transgenetics

Editor’s note: Over the next few weeks we’ll be following incoming CRDM student Molly Storment’s experiences in Peru. Please also see her original post here: http://molly.celevorne.net/node/27

—

Hola a todos! I have been in Peru since July 14 with NC State’s Genetic Engineering and Society program, to study pest issues in developing nations. Today we arrived in Iquitos, Peru, officially ending week 1 in Lima.

This was a busy, full week of conferences, farm tours, and museum visits. Conferences were spread over Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday at three universities in Lima: San Marcos, Catolíca, and La Molina. The schedule included a diverse mix of presenters representing different universities, different areas of transgenic research (including Peru, Brazil, Panama, and the Key West), and the Peruvian government. These conferences have provided a unique opportunity for not just our group of NC State students, but for all these interested groups. We were able to spend some one-on-one time with Amy Morrison, who is working with the Aedes mosquito in Iquitos, Peru; Nestor Sosa, who is researching dengue and working with Oxitec in Panama; Margareth Capurro, who is researching transgenic mosquitoes in Brazil; and Mike Doyle, who is also researching transgenic mosquitoes in Key West. These conferences provided an opportunity for these scientists, working in the same feild, to meet one another and discuss their own technical, social, and regulatory difficulties in each of their areas. Hosting this meet-up in Peru has been significant for a number of reasons, the most significant being the fact that Peru passed a 10 year moratorium on transgenic crops just this past December. These researchers, while working in different areas, have had several overlapping concerns, the biggest being public perception and opinion of their work, governmental regulation, and ethical issues.

A common thread I have noticed in many of these discussions is the difficulty in navigating boundaries: institutional boundaries, governmental boundaries, economic boundaries, and personal boundaries. We were able to see first hand the differences in economic interests even just within the Cañete valley in Peru, when we visited a corporately owned farm (which produces artichokes for Kirkland), a privately owned farm, and a university research farm. Some researchers presenting at the conferences stressed that no one product would be suitable for all areas. These same researchers (Peruvians themselves) also exhibited much pride in Peru’s biodiversity and diverse lanscape. This sense of nationalism extended, from my experience so far, from the scientists who were looking into tools to help preserve this biodiversity, to the citizens who wanted to protect their environment from these transgenic products. What is most interesting to me is discovering how skeptics and proponents (and those who are unsure or have no opinion) share this great sense of pride in their agriculture and environment, but come to seemingly opposing conclusions on how to make “progress.” This, I think, is the role of rhetoric in transgenics.

Chris Cummings, ABD!

Our hearty congratulations to Christopher L. Cummings — he survived the exam process and emerged with the enviable title ABD.

Chris’s dissertation committee consists of David Berube (chair), Andrew Binder, Kelly Albada, and Jason Swarts. Chris is now beginning work on his dissertation, tentatively titled “Experimental assessment of potential inhibitory impacts of recommended risk message responses on threat and efficacy appraisal.”

CRC 2012, CRDM, and You

This weekend, February 17th and 18th, marks the 2012 Carolina Rhetoric Conference. CRC rotates between Clemson, NC State, and University of South Carolina (NCSU will be hosting in 2013, so mark your calendars). You can find the 2012 schedule here–NCSU and CRDM will be well represented.

• The Rhetoric of the Future: Enthymemes and Occupy Wall Street (Jeff Swift, CRDM)
•  #OCCUPY: Has the women’s liberation movement been occupied or is a distinct rhetorical genre rising from the ashes of social movement’s past? (William Sink, NCSU)
• The Ethos of Crap: Woot.com’s Approach to Credibility on the Web (Samara Mouvery, CRDM)
•  Rhetorics of Scale: Style and Interface in The Climate Reality Project (Brent Simoneaux, CRDM)
• Merging Duke Energy and Progress Energy: Examining Rhetorical Boundary Work in Nuclear Energy Discourses in the Carolinas (Meagan Kittle-Autry and Ashley R. Kelly, CRDM)

Keep your eyes out this weekend for some blogging recaps (you can check out our liveblog of the 2010 CRC here).

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.