After a week or so of emailing and chin-scratching, this appears to be the title of my forthcoming book: Rhetorics of the Digital Nonhumanities. Not sure when it will appear yet--copy editing, indexing, etc., etc. But someday I expect. So what's it about? Well, it's along the lines of what you might expect if you've... Continue Reading →
free as in beer: speech in the social media market
Harper's Magazine published a letter signed by 150 journalists, authors, artists, academics, and related folks basically in defense of free speech as we conventionally understand it and in opposition to cancel culture, broadly conceived. American Conservative followed with an op-ed in support of that letter (which, rhetorically speaking, probably doesn't do many of the people... Continue Reading →
modeling workflow in a synchronous online writing class
I know, I know... me and the sexy, clickbait-y post titles. I just can't help myself. This is a brass tacks thinking through of something I've very rarely done, which is to teach an online course with a synchronous element. Of course many of us did it in an emergency way last spring, but now... Continue Reading →
what would valuable digital deliberation look like?
One of the subjects I (and many other digital rhetoricians and scholars in adjacent fields) write about is digital deliberation--that is, how does deliberation work (if at all) online, in social media for example? One of the concepts I've discussed in the past is "distributed deliberation," which is a way of investigating how machines and... Continue Reading →
exposing assemblages: ten years on
A decade ago I published an article in Enculturation titled "Exposing Assemblages: Unlikely Communities of Digital Scholarship, Video, and Social Networks." It concluded with this. Through the mapping of the social-material assemblages of scholarly video production, one can develop tactics for investigating and activating these thresholds, these relations of exteriority. From this perspective, one would... Continue Reading →
zoom, distance, and productivity theater
I'd be curious to know if other institutions are running surveys similar to the one UB has run. Since I can link to it here, I assume there are no state secrets within. It's a survey of students (there's another for faculty) after one week or so of this online existence. 20% of students say... Continue Reading →
Righting Writing Courses
Tomorrow I'm participating in a SUNY Writing Council webinar (at 2pm Eastern) on the challenges of teaching writing online, so here I'm working through some ideas of what I might say in my little 10-minute spiel. (If you are interested and want to know how to join, email me at Alex dot Reid at gmail... Continue Reading →
designing ethical experiences
Yesterday my grad class began its discussion of Liza Potts' Social Media in Disaster Response. It is an excellent and (sadly) timely book that examines how people work across a variety of social media platforms during periods of disaster. In particular, she looks at Hurricane Katrina, the London bombings in July 2005 and the Mumbai... Continue Reading →
the principle of illectracy?
Perhaps Ulmer has a more elegant puncept for this, but basically I'm thinking here about the analog of illiteracy within electracy. I.e.: literacy -----> electracyilliteracy -----> illectracy? For the first 25 years or so that we have discussed electracy, I don't think there was a pressing need to imagine the operation of illectracy. For one... Continue Reading →
media theory and the Video Assistant Referee (VAR)
For the American sports fan, the instant replay is a familiar feature of our viewing experience. The use of replays in the NFL actually goes back to 1986 and has been steadily employed for 20 years. I think it's about the same for the NBA and even MLB has used it for a decade to... Continue Reading →
