https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mz2aw927CHc Having asked students in my classes to experiment with video, I took on the task myself to make a video where I think about this question and the course I'm teaching in the fall. At this point I could offer various caveats regarding first attempts and such but to be honest I had quite... Continue Reading →
what makes professional digital communication interesting?
First, a tangent. Over the last week I've been part of a listserv conversation that reprises the now familiar question about how English Studies majors should change (or not). As I noted there, this has become a familiar genre of academic clickbait, like this recent buffoonery from the Chronicle of Higher Ed. Among other things I pointed... Continue Reading →
The empty space of the academic presentation
So there's a fairly good chance you know more about Casey Neistat that I do. He's something of a YouTube sensation with over 9 million subscribers. He also had an HBO series (I guess you'd call it). In my "copious spare time," I've been hunting around, trying to catch up on the world of digital... Continue Reading →
On the importance of deep mixture density networks and speech synthesis for composition studies
Eh? What's that? I'm talking about AI approaches to the synthesis of speech on your smartphone and related devices. I.e., how does Siri figure out how to pronounce the words its saying? OK. But what does that have to do with us? Another necessary detour around the aporias of disciplinary thought... This is really about... Continue Reading →
distributed deliberation and Cambridge Analytica
One of the major stories of the weekend has surrounded the interview with Christopher Wylie, former employer turned whistleblower of Cambridge Analytica. Here's that interview if you haven't seen it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXdYSQ6nu-M It's good to see this story getting attention, but it's also something we've basically know for a while, right? For example, here's a NY Times op-ed... Continue Reading →
4C’s and the rhet/comp slasher
This is not the working title for my academic murder mystery, so feel free to take it if you like. No. It's about a growing conversation over the role of rhetoric in composition studies, and the emergence--at least as perceived by some--of 4Cs as a composition studies conference and not (or at least less so) a rhetoric... Continue Reading →
Composing in and with data-driven media #4C18
[A text version of my presentation from yesterday] At the beginning of the century, Lev Manovich identified five principles of new media the last of which he termed "transcoding." Transcoding describes the interface between cultural and computational layers. In part, transcoding observes that while digital media objects appear to human eyes as versions of their... Continue Reading →
academic nostalgia for meatspace meetspace
Here we are once again, another national conference. I'm waiting out a three hour delay on my first flight with the second rescheduled, so fingers crossed. And let's not even get started about the return trip. I don't want to curse my luck that badly! Tell me again why we do this? I mean I... Continue Reading →
rhetoric of podcasts, podcasts of rhetoric
One of the very best things about no longer running the composition program is having the time and mental space to get back to digital rhetoric in a more practical and compositional way. This has got me thinking, in this post, about podcasting in terms of its various rhetorical structures but mostly about the kinds... Continue Reading →
