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 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

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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.

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

Literacy isn’t going to hell in a handbasket: The NC Symposium on Teaching Writing

On February 4th and 5th, The First-Year Writing Program hosted the North Carolina Symposium on Teaching Writing. For a weekend one month into the semester, The CRDM showing was strong, both in audience members and presenters. Dana Gierdowski and Robin Oswald presented “Altering Our Assumptions: A Study of the Digital Literacy Skills of First-Year Writing Students.” The detailed their first round of very interesting quantitative results concerning (you guessed it) digital literacy of students in the composition classroom. Lauren Clark, Meagan Kittle Autry, Kate Maddalena, and Wendi Sierra presented a panel titled “The Hybrid Composition Classroom: Teaching from Two Platforms.” After one semester of hybrid teaching (a mix of face-to-face and online teaching) under their respective belts, the four discussed challenges, the roles of teachers and students in a hybrid environment, and strategies for effective hybrid teaching.

But one of the main highlights of the symposium was the keynote address, given by Dr. Andrea A. Lunsford who teaches at Stanford. Dr. Lunsford’s talk was titled “The Role of Rhetoric and (New Media) Writing in 21^st Century Universities.” She tackled an issue that often rears its head in contemporary discussions of composition teaching; how is new media successfully incorporated into traditional studies of rhetoric and writing?

Dr. Lunsford does not subscribe to the idea that the youth of today are less intelligent and more illiterate than in the past; she was vehemently against the idea that literacy is “going to hell in a handbasket.” Rather, she argued that students are writing more (and more frequently) than ever before and, additionally, they are learning that their writing has consequences. I hastily took this to mean the consequence of writing in public fora; blogging, Facebooking, and the like. But Dr. Lunsford instead focused on how students are using writing to create, shape, and change their world. “Good writing,” she said, “makes something happen in the world.” Moreover, she argued that the new forms of literacy are collaborative, participatory, performative, and less expert-centered. She cited Knobel & Lankshear to point out that new literacies are characterized by a “cyberspatial post-industrial mindset,” and thus that young people are thinking of traditional textual ownership (and writing in general) in new ways.

One of the best parts of Lunsford’s talk was that she followed up these assertions with cogent, timely examples of how her students engage directly with their world through the use of writing. One student created what Lunsford called an Invention Engine: a database of Shakespeare poems, Tupac lyrics, and his own poetry (which he viewed as being a part of a ”larger poetic commons”) to allow students to mix, and remix, to create new works of poetry. This particular example highlighted students’ evolved notion of authorship and ownership; the Invention Engine creator makes his own poetry available through the database he created, yet also included copyrighted works without batting an eye. Clearly — and thanks in large part to the Internet — students are thinking of copyright in different ways. This means composition instructors have to approach class discussions of plagiarism from new perspectives. As Lunsford said, “New literacies are not bound by traditional notions of intellectual property.”

Along the same line, Dr. Lunsford also discussed the need for instructors to figure out what is necessary to retain in the vein of traditional rhetoric. Rhetoric is a plastic art, she argued, and will have a place in society unless we evolve into a totalitarian regime [insert joke about Sarah Palin and literacy here]. However, she noted that instructors must decide what needs to be retained within the practices of “old” literacies, and in turn what we can learn from new literacies. The evolution of copyright is just one example of this shift from old to new. There are myriad other issues to work out, but the main point is that both new media and evolved understandings of rhetoric are playing major roles in teaching composition today. Dr. Lunsford closed with what she sees as the goal of rhetoric and writing: to “help us learn to live — and to live well and ethically and productively — in the world.”

The North Carolina Symposium on Teaching Writing was a great success; big thanks are in order to all those who helped put the symposium together. And I think it is clear that, by both the marvelous keynote address and the excellent panels I saw, that current college instructors are doing important, cutting-edge work in their writing classrooms. It is obvious that with teachers like these, the handbasket that houses literacy is miles away from hell.

In fact, one could argue that being in a first-year college writing course is simply heaven.

~Lauren

RSA Chapter Kicks Off at NCSU with Sound Advice for Responding to Calls

(Not from Advice Dog, thankfully.)

As we promised earlier, NC State’s Rhetoric Society of America (RSA) chapter held its first meeting with several CRDM students in attendance. Dr. Carolyn Miller, one of our program’s co-founders and the current editor of the journal Rhetoric Society Quarterly, was there as well to offer advice on responding to calls for articles and conference presentations on rhetoric. Dr. Miller suggests you should:

1. Have something to say. What people are looking for are interesting claims. You want to position an abstract or proposal in a way that shows that you have already done enough to have something to say rather than just laying out a trajectory of exploration.
2. Position yourself. As the Burkean statement goes, you are part of a conversation. You are making a contribution in an ongoing exchange. If you are giving a response and you don’t know who you are talking to then that is not really an example of well-positioned disciplinary discourse.
3. Make sure that the conference organizer or editor is able to see a clear connection between your proposal or article and the call, if it concerns a specific topic or theme. Sometimes, repeating key words from the call (or clear synonyms) can be useful. Some calls, on the other hand, cast a very wide net. Check out Berkenkotter & Huckin’s study of submissions to 4Cs (ch. 6 in Genre Knowledge in Disciplinary Communication).
4. Know the place you are sending your proposal or paper in to. Know your audience. That goes without saying in journal submissions, but still needs to be said is to read the journal. Don’t submit a journal article to a journal you have never read.
5. Early on in your career it can be important and useful to look at fit between your work and a variety of different audiences by going to a variety of different conferences. However, when in doubt it does not hurt your research identity to continue to go to the largest of national conferences in your field. When in doubt (or restricted travel funding) sacrifice the regional conferences.
6. Balance conference attendance; do not over-commit and find yourself unable to produce. You can always withdraw a conference paper if you are unable to produce quality work, but do so ahead of time and with notice.
7. Check out listservs such as hrhetor, CRTNET, and U Penn’s website for more info on calls. If you joint RSA, you will receive timely messages about RSA conferences and other calls.

Thanks to Dr. Miller for these helpful tips and for helping us resurrect our chapter of RSA.

A Call to Rhetoric!

Quick Summary:

On Thursday, January 27th from 1:30-2:30 in Tompkins Hall 131B the NCSU chapter of the Rhetoric Society of America is holding an open kick-off event. We will provide light refreshments and we will have packets of calls for papers and for proposals for rhetoric-based conferences and special issues. The event will give folks a time to meet with other students interested in rhetoric to work through the calls, form panels, and prepare for future presentations. The event is open to any and all with interest in rhetoric.

The Event

During “A Call to Rhetoric” we will provide packets of rhetoric calls for conferences, journals, and special issues. Come and provide your ideas as you work through calls individually, together, or work on ideas for constructing panel submissions. Our goal for this activity is to help everyone in attendance prepare to submit at least one paper to an upcoming conference, and we’ll meet this goal by working together and analyzing CFPs and putting our heads together regarding panels and individual presentations.

All are welcome to attend. Interested in rhetoric but not yet an RSA member? No problem, come and learn more about membership and meet other students with shared interests. Already an RSA member? You can transfer your membership to NC State and/or find out more about our chapter’s goals for this year. Not sure if you’re interested in rhetoric but have an idea or a paper you want to submit? Come anyway to check out the calls and enjoy light refreshments and camaraderie.

To find out more about this event or to be notified of other upcoming RSA chapter meetings please contact Kati Fargo

kmfargo@ncsu.edu.

We hope to see you there!

(Check back after the 27th for notes on the event, and possibly a picture or two.)

CRDM Speed Dating

On Tuesday, December 7th from 4:45-5:45 six first years and six faculty members took part in the first ever CRDM research interest “speed dating” event. At this event students were encouraged to try out elevator pitches, find common interests for committee formation and research projects, and get job search and campus visit advice from faculty members.

It's a well-known rule of academic speed dating etiquette to cross your arms or fingers while engaging in conversation.

Faculty members brought candy, handouts, business cards, wordles, and a lot of great advice and intellectual resources.

Here are some “sound bites” from the event:

“Sound more positive even if you don’t feel it yet. When you are on a campus visit or interviewing at a conference you need to learn to sound comfortable when talking to almost strangers. Your job is to get them interested in your work. . . . What do you want to do in ten years? Why?” –Interviewing and job search advice from Dr. Hans Kellner

Bells ensure each conversation is well-timed. Hooray for the importance of sound!

“When you are preparing for your third year you have three tasks and none of them can clearly come first. They are all approached through a series of approximations. Decide on your dissertation topic, pick your exam areas, and select members for your committee.” –Advice on the exam and dissertation process from Dr. Carolyn R. Miller

 

Special thanks to Kati for pulling this all together.

Special thanks to: Dr. Kellner, Dr. Miller, Dr. Wiley, Dr. Swarts, Dr. Kinsella, Dr. Katz, and the first-year cohort for making this event a success!

Putting the “Arduino” in “CRDM”

A number of students and several faculty in the CRDM program have formed a group, led by Dr. David Rieder, to learn about and experiment with the Arduino microprocessor board (http://www.arduino.cc). The goal is to explore what electrical and physical computing can offer to expand our understanding of the humanities through various projects undertaken by group members.

1st Year Seth Mulliken makes the pretty lights go on. Hooray physical computing!

While the concept of physical computing may seem daunting to many parties who may be interested but lack programming or electrical engineering expertise, the Arduino is extremely accessible for non-programmers and newcomers to computing, and the Processing language used by the Arduino is very easy to learn. No prior expertise is required to participate!

The group will be meeting in Tompkins 112 every other Saturday, with our next meeting on March 13. For more information, email David Rieder (david_rieder@ncsu.edu).

Social Media Roundtable

Each year, NC State’s Department of Communication organizes CommWeek, a five-day blitz of communication-related events, panels, discussions, and guest speakers. CRDM was asked to participate by hosting a roundtable discussion on social media, given our program’s focus and the interesting research that many of are engaged in in which many of us are engaged (sorry; as Winston Churchill more or less quipped, ending a sentence with a preposition is the sort of nonsense up with which I shall not put).

So, on the last Friday afternoon in February we gathered in the conference room in Caldwell M8 to discuss some of the key issues we’ve been seeing in our own usage and research in social media. Ten of us from the CRDM program came to participate, and we were joined by three M.A. Comm students as well. We also opened up the roundtable to interested faculty members, and I appreciate Drs. Steve Wiley, David Berube, Richard Waters and Ken Zagacki for coming to offer their two cents.

CRDM PhD students, Communication MA students and faculty gather for the social media roundtable, held at a decidedly rectangular one.

We kicked things off with a video from CollegeHumor, “Twitter in Real Life.” I played this to get us talking about the content and quality of a lot of social media artifacts. I think we tend to get wrapped up in our obsession with the next shiny metal thing in social media–Foursquare, Buzz–and we forget that what we do and what we study is incomprehensible to large swaths of people, both on and offline.

From here we segued into how social media changes the relationship between individuals and corporate power. Dr. Waters, whose research focuses on strategic public relations and fundraising, brought up the recent snafu with director and writer Kevin Smith (of Silent Bob semi-fame) and Southwest Airlines. In brief, Smith was kicked off his flight after being told he was “too fat to fly.” He took to Twitter  to blast Southwest for its service to his more than 1.6 million followers and news of the event began appearing all around the web. Southwest immediately tried to put out the PR fire, and Dr. Waters used this as an example of how social media forces traditional PR communications to blur the line with customer service.

We agreed that social media services and platforms are empowering individuals in a more profound way than traditional methods of raising awareness typically could, like a letter to the editor or a write-your-congressman campaign. However, Dr. Berube pointed out that corporations are playing catch-up in the social media game to try and appear responsive and open to their customer experiences. This sparked an interesting conversation thread about the ways in which social media can actually serve to reinforce existing power structures. In short, the digital media provides a voice to the voiceless, but specific social networks can hit a critical cacophony  that drown out what made them unique in the first place.

Dr. Steve Wiley joined us to share his interests in social media and studies of space (the non-NASA kind).

More topics were covered in the space of an hour than I can do justice to here, but I found it refreshing to hear about a unique blend of research interests and issues within the context of face-to-face interaction. As social media researchers, our objects of focus necessitate that we be constantly tethered to screens, @-ing each other in truncated conversations. The roundtable gave us a chance to collectively mull over our work; issues like the surveillance implications of location-aware applications like Foursquare collided with the speculation that Facebook and Google seem to be emulating each other–Google added Buzz for status updates and social connections through GMaps, while Facebook moved into real-time search and targeted ads. (On this last point, I’m convinced that Facebook : Arthur Slugworth :: Google : Willy Wonka, but that’s another conversation entirely.) We didn’t come up with the solution to any issues of power, gender, or race within social media, and we didn’t find the magical solution for writing the next brilliant book. But that’s not the point, and maybe it shouldn’t be. Shayne made a quip during our conversation about social media’s limited ability to level out social inequalities that may seem to apply to our first roundtable:

It may be useless, but at least it’s a start.

I hope to see more of these informal discussions and roundtables like this. They offer a unique opportunity to get together with students from multiple cohorts, throw out a bunch of ideas and questions and see what comes out of it. Kind of like an Irish stew. Yup. CRDM roundtables are Irish stews. And they’re delicious.

~Matt Morain (@morainium)