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Annotations | A Reading of the Field with Dorothy Winsor

2012-01-24T11:34:00.001-05:00

Annotations | "A Reading of the Field with Dorothy Winsor"

[ NB: “Annotations” are occasional posts that explore selections from my research reading—articles or books—in rhetoric, technical and professional communication, and related fields. ]

Read, S. (2011). The mundane, power, and symmetry: A reading of the field with Dorothy Winsor and the tradition of ethnographic research. Technical Communication Quarterly 20(4), 353–383.

This is a rather interesting article in terms of genre—Read draws on an interview she conducted with Dorothy Winsor in 2009, using that conversation to frame her exploration of ethnographic research in technical communication. In this sense, the article is part interview, part conceptual lit review, and part discussion of ethnography as methodology for studying writing within organizations.

When I saw this article, I immediately jumped in; I’m a big fan of Winsor’s work, and I know I’m not alone there. I think, too, that Read’s article offers much to our field, as it creatively weaves Winsor’s interview into a broader discussion of an important methodology for studying writing work.[1]

Read’s article moves through three topoi: the mundane, power, and symmetry. These themes emerged from Read’s interview with Winsor, and they constitute a frame through which Read considers the maturation and future of methodological and theoretical approaches to the study of technical communication. In fact, Read contends that “Winsor’s words, career, and scholarship serve as a productive interpretive lens through which to read the development of the field” (p. 354).

Read begins by recounting Winsor’s distinguished career, focusing in particular on the latter’s skillful incorporation of theory. Read suggests that Winsor’s timely theoretical appropriations complemented (rather than disrupted) the developing identity of the field. Read then details the three topoi I noted above and argues that the sections corresponding to each theme frames “a set of assumptions or choices that have become tacit knowledge in the field” (p. 356).

In her exploration of the mundane, Read describes the influence of Latour on Winsor’s work. Latour (specifically Latour and Woolgar, 1986) helped Winsor see how workplace writing may be “understood as implicated in the functioning of the workplace,” where everyday writing work might be seen “as constitutive of both the organizational contexts and its products” (p. 357). Crucial too is the understanding of the social in workplace writing, and the complex activities and practices that mediate the socially situated nature of writing work. In this section, Read skillfully makes a broader argument about how Winsor’s work helped drive the field toward/during the social turn, and how Winsor’s field-based approach helped “powerfully chang[e] the object of and the methodology of research on writing” (p. 359). In this section, Read—through Winsor—shows how the mundane and regularized are significant to the production of documentation, and how attending to the mundane necessitates a shift in methodology, away from static texts alone and towards “the social context[s] of textual production” (p. 361).

In her second major section, Read considers issues of power in Winsor’s work and in the field. Calling on Winsor’s long history of work in engineering communication, Read describes how “Winsor’s research adopts the view that engineering knowledge is the product of power relations in hierarchical for-profit organizations, and although power has the capacity to constrain and harm, it is also productive” (p. 364). This brings to mind Foucault, but also Faber (2002). Not surprisingly, Read explores three ethnographic accounts of power relations in nonacademic settings, beginning with Faber. His study is juxtaposed against Winsor’s Writing Power: Communication in an Engineering Center (2003), and Smart’s Writing the Economy: Activity, Genre and Technology in the World of Banking (2006).

“For both Winsor and Faber,” Read argues, “power relations operate through discourse, whether the unit of study is image, identity, text, or genre” (p. 366). Where they differ “is in the implications of the functioning of power,” and in how each is positioned within their respective research sites. “If Faber is the ethnographer as activist,” Read claims, then “Winsor’s stance is more accurately understood as that of the ethical disciplinary outsider” (p. 366). With this statement, Read explores the heart of this section: the ethical issues attendant in field research and the power relationships between researcher and participant.

Personally, I found the final section on symmetry to be the most compelling; judging by my marginal notes alone, this was clearly the section with which I was most engaged. Read argues that Winsor’s research “suggests a symmetry between the human and the material” (p. 371), and so begins a wide-ranging discussion of agency and writing work. Granting agency to materiality “opened, and is still opening, new ways to understand the increasingly complex and unstable relationships among authorship, technology, information, and social and organizational contexts,” Read argues (p. 372).

This discussion leads Read into an exploration of posthumanist frameworks, particularly ANT, distributed cognition, and genre field analysis (p. 373). Read does a good job in this section of placing Winsor’s work (and interview responses) in conversation with Latourian perspectives on agency. A key moment in the follow-on discussion of epistemic rhetoric is Read’s quoting of Winsor (1990, p. 59): “‘even this field [engineering], which seems so tied to physical reality, is necessarily accomplished through language’” (p. 374). The mechanical engineer that was Winsor’s primary participant in this study “found that writing, both his own writing and the writing of others, was an essential means by which he generated knowledge about an engine” (p. 374). This perspective is perhaps taken for granted in our field, but I think it can’t be stated enough, especially when it is yoked to field research.

Read briefly discusses distributed cognition before moving on to a conclusion which considers the role of ethnographic research in the field of technical communication. Because of the work of Winsor and others in bringing field-based methods and methodologies to technical and professional communication, it is now “difficult to imagine a methodology that might aim to isolate documents from their environment or the perspective or actions of a single worker from the context that shapes them and that they also constitute” (p. 377).

That’s well said.

And Read may not remember this, but she and I were actually on a panel together at CCCC in 2007; I was impressed with her work then, and was encouraged by her perspective in this article. ↩

Dirty Secret: I Don't Hate Blackboard

2012-01-22T15:35:00.000-05:00

Dirty Secret: I Don't Hate Blackboard

It begins a few days before the start of each semester. Tweets of frustration. Tweets of anger. Tweets of stupefied ambivalence. Tweets of unfettered rage. Many of the educators that I follow on Twitter have serious problems with Blackboard or similar “learning management systems.”

I’m no fan either, and I never have been. My first peer-reviewed publication attempted to describe why learning management systems are especially stifling for instruction in writing and rhetoric. I’m also sure that I too have tweeted something to the effect of “Blackboard/WebCT is horridly horrible” in the past. But I feel as though I’ve been harboring a dirty secret, especially when I read those tweets tweets of frustration.

I don’t hate Blackboard.

Over that last couple of years I’ve really backed away from a militant anti-LMS perspective in everyday practice, in large part because it’s simply not conducive to getting things done with what we have.[1]

A rhetorician, after all, makes do with what’s available.[2]

Because of any number of limitations, many instructors simply find ways to play their hands with the cards that they’ve been dealt. For me, this means working within the constraints of the LMS in the most effective way possible, and with the least amount of time, energy, and headache. I wonder if much of the frustration that instructors feel is borne of simply trying to make the LMS do more than it is actually capable of accomplishing on a day-to-day basis.

In point of fact, Blackboard does few things well. Its constraints are massive. Once acknowledged, this perspective actually frees the instructor (and students) to make a deliberate move toward metis.

So, let me begin with some basic premises: first, a locked-down LMS is simply not designed to facilitate public or semi-public discourse; second, the usability of Blackboard and WebCT (the two learning management systems with which I have first-hand experience) is notoriously poor for all users—instructors and students alike; and third, with its profound ontological and epistemic limitations and soul-sucking user experience, it makes sense to spend as little time in the LMS as possible.

Given these premises, then, of what use is Blackboard? Well, there are a couple of areas where the university-sanctioned LMS actually excels: first, it’s great at storing stuff; and second, it’s intentionally designed to facilitate assessment.[3]

I don’t hate Blackboard because I recognize and accept that its limitations are enormous, and as such, I don’t try to make it do anything beyond its extremely limited capabilities. Blackboard, therefore, doesn’t frustrate me in the least.

Here’s a quick rundown of how I use Blackboard:

To store my syllabus (which includes lots of hyperlinks and can be viewed in-browser)
To store supplemental reading material (PDFs of articles and such)
To store assignment descriptions and rubrics
- To store student deliverables in a knowledge work model, so that everyone in the class can see what everyone else did for a given deliverable
To privately message my students with feedback and assessments

That’s it. I use Blackboard to do basically the two things (only things?) that it does reasonably well: store stuff and provide private, individual feedback.

And because this is all I do with the LMS, usability improves by simple subtraction.[4] The homepage basically has nothing (I use none of Blackboard’s faux-clever mix and match modules for “assignments,” “announcements,” or anything else; I delete them all). I have a simple left-hand menu which lists:

Home
Syllabus
Supplemental Readings
Discussions
Messages

The Discussions area contains one forum, called “Deliverables.” Within this forum there are several threads, each of which corresponds to a given assignment (e.g., “Practicum 1”). The first post in a given thread is my assignment description and any attendant documents; when students have completed a deliverable, they simply reply to a message in the thread and upload their document (or hyperlink).

I use Messages to give my students feedback; they have a running tally of exactly where they stand at any point in the semester by simply consulting their private messages.

To reiterate: my Blackboard experience begins with deleting almost everything the LMS suggests I use; then I add only the things that the LMS can handle with reasonable efficiency. I store stuff there so it can be easily retrieved by students, and I provide feedback that can likewise be easily retrieved and maintained throughout a given semester.

This scenario leverages Blackboard’s few strengths. It means students can upload huge files (like PDFs with video and audio files related to their qualitative studies), that they can safely retrieve copyrighted work (such as articles provided as part of the course readings), and that they can safely maintain a record of their achievement in the course.

For everything else, there’s our face-to-face discussions and the interwebs, where they can have meaningful public and semi-public interactions with authentic audiences.[5]

This is certainly not meant to shame anyone who tweets about the ontological frailties of Blackboard. I rather enjoy them, actually. Instead, I’ve chosen to take a more Stoic approach: some things are up to us, some things aren’t, and we would do well to focus on the things we can control, and those things alone. I don’t have the energy or influence to overturn my university’s LMS policy; I can offer my students interesting workarounds to the limitations of the LMS, however. ↩
I believe it was either Aristotle or Morrissey who argued that “Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.” ↩
I can hear you screaming at you screen: “It’s terrible at assessment!!1!” Stay with me here; I don’t use it for assessment in the ways that the designer intended… ↩
Figuring out Blackboard’s Messaging UI, however, remains a serious problem for first-time users. I’m not sure how one could design a poorer messaging workflow. Honestly. ↩
A final note. I have a colleague who grew up in Berkeley; I grew up in the East Bay as well. When I found out he was from Berkeley, I asked him if he hated Piedmont, an affluent enclave in the Berkeley hills that I resented when I was an angsty youngster. He replied, “No, I don’t hate Piedmont.” He understood why some folks did, but he didn’t see the point of hating something like an entire city. “What good could that possibly bring me?,” he wondered. Any residual disgust I harbored towards Piedmont disappeared on the spot. ↩

Annotations | "What Does the Transactions Publish?"

2012-01-20T16:15:00.000-05:00

Annotations | "What Does the Transactions Publish?"

[ NB: “Annotations” are occasional posts that explore selections from my research reading—articles or books—in rhetoric, technical and professional communication, and related fields. ]

Carliner, S., Coppola, N., Grady, H., & Hayhoe, G. (2011). What does the Transactions publish? What do readers want to read? IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication 54(4), 341–359.

As I mentioned in my previous Annotations post, I’m a big fan of meta-analyses and systematic lit reviews. This recent piece by Carliner et al. isn’t exactly a meta-analysis, but it’s in the same ballpark,[1] and their analysis of what major journals in technical and professional communication have published in the last 5 years is really interesting to me (and, I hope, to you as well).

In addition to exploring the major genres and methods comprising the sample of articles they selected, Carliner et al. report findings from a survey of Transactions on Professional Communication (TPC) readers in order to determine what kinds of congruencies and gaps exist between what the TPC publishes and what TPC readers would like to read. One of the most interesting gaps they established was a desire among readers for more case studies, lit reviews, and tutorials; this is is especially surprising, since the TPC primarily publishes experimental and survey-based studies.

The impetus for the study[2] was a change in TPC editorship, and Carliner et al. “sought empirical evidence on which to base decisions about the future direction of the journal” (p. 341–42). In order to do so, the authors placed findings from the readership survey in conversation with their analysis of 5 years’ worth of peer-reviewed scholarship from: the TPC, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Technical Communication, and Technical Communication Quarterly.

One handy subsection of this article is the lit review, which amounts to a review of previously published systematic lit reviews and meta-analyses. If I was wanting to know more about this methodology, the brief lit review provided here would get me off to a strong start.

As Carliner et al. note near the end of their lit review, the study actually contrasts “the content published by one peer-reviewed journal [the TPC] and other journals in the discipline with the preferences of readers” (p. 343, emphasis added). I think the italicized bit is key; if you’re an academic researcher in technical and professional communication, this article provides a very useful snapshot of the major journals in the field, the kinds of articles they publish, and the relationship among them.

Also useful, if you have an interest in conducting or evaluating systematic lit reviews, is the methodology section. I think the decision to adopt STC’s technical communication Body of Knowledge classification scheme is sound, and the authors provide a clear description of where and why they amended the scheme. They contend that the “full disclosure of the methodology and the dual coding[3] of each article ensures the trustworthiness of the data” (p. 345).

The authors provide findings for each journal, and then detail (in both table and narrative forms) findings across the journals—“the three topics that received the most coverage were: (1) Information Design and Development, (2) Deliverables, and (3) Academic Programs” (p. 347). “The three most common categories of research methods” across the articles in their sample were: “(1) Critical—Document Review, (2) Experience Report, and (3) Quantitative—Survey” (p. 347). The “critical document review” category, it should be noted, uses critical methods to explore texts without disclosing a sampling method or systematic methodology. My assumption is that most of the articles in this category were rhetorical analyses of one form or another.

The discussion of what readers of the TPC want was less interesting overall, but contains some very surprising tidbits. For one, though the sample was small (n=88, a 9.4% response rate), it was professionally diverse. Only 33%, for example, were academics, while 56% work in industry (p. 349). The survey used the classification scheme described above and asked respondents to rank the three topics of most interest and the three of least interest (p. 351). They did the same with research methods.[4]

As I mentioned briefly above, of most interest to readers were case studies and lit reviews, while survey-based studies and document analyses were of least interest. TPC rarely publishes case studies, and they publish a lot of survey-based work.

The authors note that the finding is somewhat problematic, as the term “case study” is broadly interpreted across journals. Personally, I follow MacNealy (1999) here, and see case studies as both systematic and rigorous, otherwise we’re not talking about a case study but a case history or experience report. I realize that I’m probably in the minority, though, and it’s a good idea if you’re conducting and writing about systematic qualitative case studies to clearly explain how your work is systematic, well-triangulated, and rigorous, so as to avoid the sometimes pejorative perception. But I digress…

Carliner et al. suggest that the survey findings indicate a “strong interest in research on communication in engineering workplaces,” and that “readers have a preference for applied research rather than the basic research that the Transactions has emphasized in recent years,” hence the preference for more in-depth (dare I say?) qualitative work (p. 352).

Overall, this was a fun read. The article provides a really nice snapshot of where we are in terms of current scholarship in technical and professional communication. And to me, it suggests a lot of opportunity for new kinds of work.

Carliner et al. include a detailed reporting of their methods, which means that their study is replicable, or better yet, extensible (by covering a decade’s worth of articles from these and related journals, for example). ↩
Really, Carliner et al. conducted two different studies and compared them in this article; for the sake of clarity, I’m referring to the article itself as a “study.” ↩
Two of the authors coded each article by first conducting a series of “norming sessions” where they jointly coded two full issues of each publication under scrutiny. Because of this approach, the authors didn’t provide any measures of inter-coder reliability. ↩
Interestingly, they did not include ethnography, usability testing, and experience reports in the survey… ↩

Idle Speculation

2012-01-14T16:07:00.002-05:00

A few months ago, I think my mom must have googled me and spent some time going through my blog and website. She was reading up on my research and such, and then she sent along a couple of lengthy emails asking all sorts of questions about the future of communication technologies—questions I’m not qualified to answer, necessarily.

I told her I’d try and answer some of her questions, even though my responses would amount to little more than idle speculation. Then I thought it might be neat to simply publish her questions and my answers on the blog, and she was thrilled by the idea. So here goes…

Subject: “What do you think?”

Hi Son,

Hope that you and your family are doing well and all back at school with all the scheduling that involves. Enjoy your web/blog site and check frequently to see all the wonderful things you are doing. You know that I am so proud of you and all the hard work you have done has certainly paid off. I have a few theoretical questions for you…

Considering the almost universal usage of cell phone technology to tweet, “like” instantly send msg, pix and ideas as we have seen in the countries that have overthrown dictators, would you say that this will be the methodology for future history making/changing events? Do you think that the centuries old idea of “war” as we know it will change?

So, my mom starts off with a huge question, one that I feel woefully unprepared to answer. This is the kind of question that Clay Shirky routinely answers, and I’d consult some of his stuff for viable insights.
But just thinking through the question, I wouldn’t say that mobile technologies necessarily will be central to future “history-making/changing events.” Certainly, it seems inevitable from our current perspective, but who could have predicted 5 years ago the role that something like Twitter would play on a global scale?
So while all signs point to SMS and our current iterations of mobile communications playing a significant role in the coordination of human activity, there’s no telling what might be available to us in 5 or 10 years.
As for the notion of “war,” well, yes. I think our understanding of this construct is always in flux. Look at the role of drones in contemporary warfare, for example…

Now we have the ability to take a blood test from a sick child in Congo and send samples to laboratories in the USA or any where else. The samples are tested, the results emailed/tweeted back, best practice treatment is administered and the child is well. What do you see as the future of medical technology to help alleviate suffering utilizing this means of communication?

Again, I’m so unqualified to address this question that I hesitate to respond. One of my graduate school colleagues, Lucia Dura, is doing interesting and important work in areas like this, and one of my Ball State colleagues, Kerry Anne McGeary, is leading our new Global Health Institute in an effort to explore similar problems.
I also know that this question is related to the previous question in that SMS is increasingly used to facilitate health care decision-making in places where computing technologies are scarce, but mobile technologies are ubiquitous.

As for the political arena, now that everyone has access to modifying, altering and sending images, how will that effect the truth of what we see and believe?

There’s nothing new under the sun as far as this goes. Just differences of scale…

What do you think is the solution to cyber bullying and those who hide behind their keyboard/ texting to decimate the life of others?

This is an area where I haven’t done much thinking, but I know that folks like danah boyd are actively researching in this area, and the work that she and her colleagues are doing is helping to shape public policy…

Subject: “One more…”

Do you think that since tweeting has created a sort of new language to fit in 140 letters/symbols we will eventually evolve to a phonetic only language?

thx 4 yr insite,luv u,ma

Here’s one I can answer! I needn’t just provide my thoughts, since we know that the constraints of SMS—and by extension, Twitter—have resulted in many neologisms that have been adopted in more traditional communication genres.
The word “tweet” itself is a prime example. It’s now a verb that basically means “to broadcast a short, public message using the microblogging service Twitter.”
As for a “phonetic only language,” well, our language is already phonetic, but I think I see where she was going with that question… I think she was asking if written forms of our language will contract in some way, in order to better meet the constraints of SMS.
I’d say the answer is probably yes and no. In the short term, neologisms for shortening written forms of language will prosper. But again, we don’t know what our communications media will look like in 5 years. Even now, for example, Apple’s iMessages is pushing back against the constraints of SMS, affording text expansion within a given mobile message.
Who know’s what we’ll see in 5 years? A renaissance of epistolary communication is not out of the realm of possibility!

Subject: “Re: One more…”

Just thinking of the possibilities with these new methods of communications – visitors from another planet describing earthlings “2 feet, 2 legs, a torso topped by a head and 1 arm and an angular appendage on the other side of the torso that connects to the ear on the head. “ (cell phone user) Or –” 2 feet, 2 legs, torso, 2 arms, 1 head and talks to the air” (blue tooth user)

Medical issues – already seeing “text thumbitis” –(Will the thumb evolve to twice its present size and the other fingers shrink?), greater number of young people with major hearing issues (ear bud use with volume too high), neck cervical issues (always bent over keyboard of cell phone checking or sending text msg), major increase in stress levels and blood pressure due to the 24/7 involvement in constant communication, major increase in eye problems due to small print on text msg and/or computer social network connections, or the really tragic one “accident involving multiple cars due to driver texting while behind the wheel.” New law in CA has already been placed into effect – “no texting while driving – fine at least $350.00.”

Psychological changes – future generations unable to form deep friendships or other personal relationships. Every individual continually on blue tooth or texting while attempting to have conversations with companion, neighbor, friend, spouse etc, greater population of patients with major insecurities/depression and feeling disconnected from life due to loss of cell phone, spending time in “dead zones” etc.

Two really interesting popular audience articles come to mind when reading about changes to personal relationships. This first is Clive Thompson’s excellent, almost magisterial piece on “ambient awareness”.
The second is more recent, and explores the “Joy of Quiet”.
Both articles make compelling arguments, and both are substantially “right.” It’s not either/or, but both/and.

Future of communication? – cell phone type implants in the brain (sort of like a cochlear implant now in use for the deaf) so no actual cell phone or accessory needed? Also no battery needed as communication device powered by neuron synapses of the brain. The possibilities for future communication methods and effects on many areas of our lives are mindboggling ! Fun to speculate.

Definitely fun to speculate! Thanks for your contribution to the blog, mom, and thanks for making me think!

Annotations | "Innovation in qualitative research methods"

2012-01-10T12:05:00.001-05:00

[ NB: "Annotations" are occasional posts that explore selections from my research reading—articles or books—in rhetoric, technical and professional communication, and related fields. ]

Wiles, R., Crow, G., & Pain, H. (2011). Innovation in qualitative research methods: A narrative review. Qualitative Research 11(5), 587–604.

There's a particular genre of academic article that I highly value, and Wiles et al. have produced a good example in this form. This article, a "narrative review," is similar to what MacNealy (1999) describes as meta analysis, a literature review "that is conducted empirically and analyzed statistically" (p. 109). While MacNealy's discussion of meta analysis largely relies on statistical measures of a group of previous experimental studies, the methodologically rigorous manner in which a meta analysis is carried out can provide researchers in a variety of fields with a very useful approach to exploring an existing body of research literature.

In short, the meta analysis or systematic literature review provides a valuable service to scholars in a given area; such articles are difficult to do well, and are fairly infrequent (Carliner, et al., 2011, have recently published a similar piece in the IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, and I'll review that soon...). At the most basic level, the feature that distinguishes a meta analysis or systematic literature review from a bibliographic essay, annotated bibliography, or conceptual literature review is the systematicity involved in sampling and analysis. In any of these genres, a purposeful sample must be identified from the broader range of available articles in a given subject area.

Exactly how a researcher moves from the total population to this purposeful sample is explicitly articulated in a meta analysis or systematic lit review; this is important because such transparency means that the analysis is replicable. A solid meta analysis clearly defines the total population and criteria for inclusion, describes how and why articles were selected or excluded, and proceeds along a clearly defined schema for analysis. Performing this kind of rigorous, systematic review of literature in a given area can be tremendously useful for other researchers; this is the primary reason I appreciate a strong meta analysis or systematic lit review.

Wiles et al. (2011) provide qualitative researchers with a narrative review—a systematic literature review—of 57 articles published between 2000 and 2009 that make claims of innovation in qualitative research methods. Overall, this article is useful for two important reasons: first, it acts as a good model of how a researcher might conduct a systematic literature review—an approach that differs from MacNealy's (1999) meta analysis in that it relies on a qualitative coding schema rather than statistical measures as the primary method of analysis; and second, the article explores how and why researchers make claims to methodological innovation and explore the implications for doing so.

"A claim to innovation," they argue, "should be rooted in genuine attempts to improve some aspect of the research process" (p. 588). But in order to explore a given researcher's claims to methodological innovation, the authors first set out to define what constitutes such innovations (p. 588). Ultimately, the authors seek evidence for "Travers' (2009) assertion that there is an increasing tendency for authors to claim innovation, that such claims are exaggerated and that they are detrimental to qualitative social science" (p. 589). Wiles et al. list five research questions that act as an analytic schema for exploring the articles included in their sample.

Wiles et al. describe how their project "used traditional methods of qualitative systematic review for summarizing data as well as qualitative analysis of text to explore the narratives of the claims being made" (p. 589). They next describe their sampling procedures, moving through a systematic search of the all the articles published in 22 relevant journals during the 2000s. Wiles et al. provide a table of the journals where relevant papers were identified (based on their sampling criteria); more importantly, they have published a full list of these papers as an annotated bibliography at the National Center for Research Methods, so that other researchers can see which papers were identified from the population but excluded from the sample.

The article also explores "sites for innovation," the actual research sites where innovation claims were carried out. This is important, as new media environments were related to innovation claims, often because a researcher was adapting or extending methods intended for traditional (that is, non-digital) sites. Of the 57 papers in the sample, "The majority of innovations claimed were at the level of methods, techniques, or tools with only a minority (10 papers) focusing on methodology" (p. 592). Wiles et al. then describe six different categories of innovation claimed in the sample: creative methods, narrative methods (including autoethnography), mixed methods, online methods, software tools, and focus group methodology (p. 592).

After establishing their procedures and sample and identifying major categories of innovation claims, Wiles et al. define three analytic categories to understand innovations that emerged from their analysis of the articles in the sample; they suggested that innovations could be categorized at the level of inception, adaptation, or adoption. They note that "None of the authors defined innovation when they used the term," and that overall, "much innovation in social science research methods involves adapting established methods rather than inventing completely new methods" (p. 593). Claims at the inception level, then, "are those in which the authors claim to be using a new method, approach, or tool" (p. 593). Claims at the level of adaptation "are when an author claims an established method has been adapted or changed in order to improve the method or to meet specific needs within the research context" (p. 593). Finally, claims at the level of adoption "are when an author claims they are taking an established method, relatively unchanged, and applying it into a new discipline or sphere of study" (p. 594). Given these categories, Wiles et al. note that "the majority of papers appeared to claim innovation at the inception level (32 papers)" (p. 594).

In their next section, Wiles et al. explore why authors make claims to innovation, identifying three key reasons: theoretical, moral/ethical, and practical. These reasons were distributed in fairly uniform ways across the sample. Finally, the authors look at the uptake of innovations—are other scholars citing and deploying the innovations claimed by the researchers in the sample? A little more than half of the papers had between 0–3 citations in Google Scholar; however, nine papers had 12 or more citations (p. 599). It is interesting to note that "there was a markedly higher citation rate of papers on online software innovations" (p. 599).

In their discussion section, Wiles et al. argue that "This study indicates the majority of innovation or novelty claims in these papers might more appropriately be called developments in that they involve adapting methods either to meet the needs of a particular project or to meet some moral, ethical or theoretical standpoint" (p. 600). Most of the papers, therefore, draw from and adapt existing methods, and "there is little evidence of paradigmatic shifts in qualitative research methods within these 'innovations'" (p. 600). Wiles et al. suggest that "many of the 'innovations' identified in these papers are little more than the day-to-day adaptation that researchers have always, rightly, undertaken in applying methods to a specific research context" (p. 600). Trends toward over-claiming innovation, therefore, can be "potentially detrimental to qualitative social science" (p. 601).

Too many claims of innovation may dilute the appreciation and understanding of the ways in which contemporary researchers adopt and adapt well-established methods and methodologies.

Annotations | Marino, "Critical Code Studies"

2012-01-04T18:45:00.000-05:00

[ NB: "Annotations" are occasional posts that explore selections from my research reading—articles or books—in rhetoric, technical and professional communication, and related fields. ]

Marino, M. (2006). Critical code studies. Electronic Book Review.

This piece is a hallmark of the critical code studies movement; I believe that I first heard of this article at the CCCC conference in 2011, and I've finally taken some time to give the piece a read. It is important to note that Marino calls this a "proposal" in the penultimate section of the article, so I think it's fair to allow two caveats: first, since this was early days for critical code studies, it's important to keep in mind that some of these ideas needed room to develop (in other words, I don't want to blithely assume that this iteration of CCS is in any way equivalent to today's iteration of CCS; at the same time, this iteration is often seen as foundational); and second, Marino is clearly writing from the disciplinary perspective of literary studies, while I am responding to this work from outside that perspective.

Marino's brief introduction raises some thoughtful questions about an ontology of code and our relationship to programming languages as something more than executable files. Indeed, he notes that to "critique code merely for its functionality or aesthetics is to approach code with only a small portion of our analytic tools" (para. 4). His final question (and final sentence) of his introduction asks: "What would happen if we began to interpret the meaning of the code?" (para. 4).

In the section that follows, "Making the Code the Text," I become disheartened by what seems to be Marino's invocation of the standard literary paradigm for textualizing and then interpreting a given artifact, in this case code. However, my mind is open to the CCS approach, and this section is largely given over to reviewing previous work by individuals who have taken an academic or critical interest in programming languages and executables—Raley (2007), Cayley (2002), Cramer (2005), et al. Marino unpacks Cramer's (2005) expansive definition of software, a definition I resist since it seems to be formulated by a literary critic as opposed to a software engineer—a definition, perhaps, that allows said literary critic the latitude to fold an array of technical artifacts under the rubric of hermeneutics. Marino rejects Cramer's definition, suggesting that it "directs the discussion away from the direct analysis of specific source code" (para. 14).

Marino then argues that scholars eschew code as metaphorical text and instead suggests that "we begin to analyze and explicate code as a text, as a sign system with its own rhetoric, as verbal communication that possesses significance in excess of its functional utility" (para. 15). The last clause in that sentence prefigures the nugget of the article: a code artifact, however it's designed and whatever it actually does in the world, has some symbolic significance beyond its function. This seems very similar to a standard move in rhetorical criticism, where an artifact such as the Bill of Rights—a legal document with functional utility—is analyzed in a manner similar to what one might do with an exemplary text, such as an epic poem. At root, the artifact is abstracted in some important way from its actual context ("its functional utility") and seen as worthy of study as a stand alone object. From here, the rhetorical critic can apply all manner of clever analytic permutations that largely serve the rhetorical critic. But I'm probably cynical.

In a follow-on sentence, Marino suggests the potential value that humanities scholars might bring to computer science, but his piece seems to rest on the following argument: "I am proposing that we can read and explicate code the way we might explicate a work of literature in a new field of inquiry that I call Critical Code Studies (CCS)" (para. 15). That's precisely what I was afraid of when I first caught wind of critical code studies. Marino goes on to argue that "code itself is a cultural text worthy of analysis and rich with possibilities for interpretation" (para 16). I certainly don't disagree, but since I haven't seen any discussion of methods or methodology, I'm very skeptical that this is simply literary studies' next foray into appropriating and textualizing things for which they can be arbiters of cultural normativity. I also wonder at this point how many computer scientists have read this piece, and what they think.

In his next major section, Marino introduces the reader to CCS and maps out its import and relevance. This section is broken into several subsections, which include headers such as "What Can Be Interpreted?," "Why Study the Paint?," and "Code (most of it) Is Not Poetry." In the first sentence of this section, my growing trepidation is all but confirmed: "Critical Code Studies (CCS) is an approach that applies critical hermeneutics to the interpretation of computer code, program architecture, and documentation within a sociohistorical context" (para. 18). As I read these lines, my mind conjures a vision of early anthropologists visiting "savage" peoples—"we're here to examine your culture and tell the world what it means!" Marino, drawing an analogy to the framework of critical legal studies, claims that CCS will help "explicate meaning in excess of the document's functionality, critiquing more than merely aesthetics and efficiency" (para. 18). Yet we're still left with no discussion of methods or methodology, other than the vaguely hermeneutic methods implied in the phrase "critical hermeneutics," which I resist the urge to simplify as "literary interpretation."

And yet a couple paragraphs later, Marino likens CCS to literary analysis, "an interpretive process rather than an instrumentally proscriptive or solely descriptive process" (para. 20). Basically, in Marino's lit review on code as metaphorical text he distances himself from previous instantiations of code that is written as literature (e.g., Perl Poetry) and instead argues that we take extant code, produced by programmers, and analyze it as text, with a careful understanding of the professional nomenclature of software development (see para. 23, for example). We should, therefore, interpret code because "it is a form of symbolic expression and interaction" (para. 23). A couple paragraphs down, Marino hits on some of the most intriguing aspects of studying programming—the complex sociohistorical infrastructures at work in the everyday production of a given program or project. But rather than prying apart these infrastructures by actually studying how they're held together and enacted (as an ethnographer might), it seems that Marino is interested only in post hoc artifactual interpretation, and that's a methodology that seems to be tightly congruent with literary criticism; same approach, different texts.

In describing what can be interpreted in a CCS framework, Marino argues that "The goal need not be code analysis for code's sake, but analyzing code to better understand programs and the networks of other programs and humans they interact with, organize, represent, manipulate, transform, and otherwise engage" (para. 27). Again, this is a promising site of potential research for scholars in rhetoric and writing studies; one could take an empirical approach to studying these very things! But I fear that instead, CCS will foment new spins on things like intertextuality. Indeed, throughout the article so far, I don't recall that Marino has referred to programming as writing in any meaningful way (he does state that it has its own grammar and rhetoric). For Marino, quite simply, "code is not merely a means or a procedure, it is a text" (para. 33). In the work I've done with software engineers (both novice and expert), I've never once heard a participant refer to his, her, or their collaborative code as a "text," though my participants frequently (and sometimes reverentially) refer to programming as a kind of writing work.

As Marino moves to the next major section of his article, "Current Practitioners of Critical Code Studies," I'm still deeply troubled by the utter lack of discussion regarding methodology and methods. The methodology, it seems, is simply critical hermeneutics. This must be well known to literary scholars, but the methods of effecting critical hermeneutics are nebulous (or simply unspoken) in this piece. We've been given a definition of CCS, and a rationale for the approach. We've been given sample objects of study, and Marino has even provided a brief but nuanced treatment of the complex sociocultural infrastructures within which code may be produced. But how will the CCS researcher actually study code? In this section, Marino notes that "notable readings of code have" already been conducted (para. 41), and it seems that in this statement I am given an answer to the methods question: the CCS researcher learns the nomenclature of the programming he or she wishes to study, performs a close reading of a code artifact, and then tells us what it means (see para. 41; this is not an exaggeration).

Finally, in paragraph 42, we get an oblique reference to programming as writing, as Marino reviews the work of Cayley and Glazier (who cite Hayles). But this is short lived. In his penultimate section, "Cautionary Comments," Marino is right to point out the futility of exploring code without closely attending to "historical, material, [and] social context[s]" (para. 54). Yet his corrective is hollow: he recommends more close readings of artifacts related to coding contexts. In other words, keep doing literary analysis of the things near the thing you want to analyze, but make sure not to get your hands dirty by actually deploying a social scientific methodology to see how people actually act with programming technologies (see Kaptelinin and Nardi, 2006). I see no mention here of an obvious approach: working collaboratively with programmers to better understand their code.

It occured to me this morning that this is a prime example of the hammer/nail paradigm. If you wield a big hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. His final sentence says as much: "Let us make the code the text" (para. 57). This is an approach that's perhaps congruent with mainstays of rhetorical criticism, but few empirical (associational or sociocultural, for example) approaches to rhetoric and writing studies. In short, I don't see what this piece has to offer to researchers in technical and professional communication and writing studies, though I suppose the piece might be attractive to folks doing traditional rhetorical criticism.

Studying the work of software development is exciting and rewarding. In the studies that I've conducted, programming is a fascinating, rich, and extraordinarily complex professional activity. As I've written previously, collaborative work is tremendously important to programming, and writing code is knowledge work. Studying programming as knowledge work is incredibly complex—there's much writing and communicative work that never becomes manifest in either code or documentation, and yet these forms of collaboration would be near impossible to trace by simply performing a "close reading" of "code as text." Take a look at Alistair Cockburn's advice for describing methodologies, for example. This is crucial writing work that supports the production of code, and it's something that will likely only be uncovered by an ethnographer who spends lots and lots of time observing and working with a team of developers. This is where common methods in technical and professional communication shine, but I have serious doubts about a critical code studies approach after reading Marino's article.

Informal Communication, Sustainability, and the Public Writing Work of Organizations

2011-11-29T09:21:00.001-05:00

My most recent paper, "Informal Communication, Sustainability, and the Public Writing Work of Organizations," was recently published on IEEE Xplore. This piece offers findings from two different qualitative studies of social software use within professional organizations.

Because the paper will not be accessible to folks without an individual or institutional subscription to IEEE, I have provided a pre-publication version below. As always, I welcome your thoughts on this work!

Twitter and RSS

2011-09-04T14:05:00.000-04:00

Over the last year or so, there's been a lot of talk about how Twitter killed its RSS feeds. What Twitter killed, in actuality, was the button that made subscribing to Twitter feeds (from users or search terms) simple.

As Dave Winer notes: "If you have a Twitter account you have a feed." Where people sometimes run into problems is simply finding those feeds—in particular, it can be difficult to find a user's ID number.

Luckily, Matt Matteson built a handy little tool that queries the Twitter API for the ID of any public user: idfromuser.com. Once you have the ID number for the feed you'd like, simply plug the ID into this URL:

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/[useridnumber].rss

Then, just grab the URL and drop it in Reader (or your preferred RSS reader). That's it.

Update: well, since I started writing this post a couple days ago, I noticed a problem with the "idfromuser" site—it doesn't seem to be returning IDs for some reason. So, I made a quick screencast showing a workaround in case the "idfromuser" site isn't working for you:

Update #2: Tommy, a former colleague at the Center for Media Design here at Ball State, created an elegant little bookmarklet that does all of the above in a fraction of the time! It quickly retrieves the user ID for any individual Twitter user, then returns the RSS feed for that user. Grab the bookmarklet here! Below is a quick screencast of the bookmarklet in action:

Follow Tommy on Twitter. He's awesome!

Now, If you'd like the feed for a specific hashtag, simply use the following URL:

http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%23[hashtag (without pound sign)]

Take the new URL and drop into Reader. Piece o' cake.

How is any of this useful?

Well, since I'm a qualitative researcher who studies writing, I often try to document—as much as possible—the places where my research participants write. That sometimes means tracking their tweets.

In previous and current studies, a particular hashtag has been important for exploring collective writing work. Since I'm not dealing with huge numbers of tweets—I'll typically collect anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand for a given study—RSS makes sense for a few different reasons...

First, I drop feeds into my database application, DEVONthink, for archiving. I then mirror those same feeds in Reader as a backup. If I happen to have a list of start codes or a pretty well-defined coding schema, I can use the tagging feature in either DEVONthink or Reader to code data as it comes in. This is tremendously useful during data analysis, but it also allows me to detect trends as I conduct a study, giving me opportunities to shape interview questions or fieldwork while it's happening.

Sociotechnical Notemaking: Short-form to Long-form Writing Practices

2011-08-11T14:36:00.004-04:00

I've just published a piece in the journal Present Tense that attempts to bring research from my discipline (Rhetoric and Writing) to a public debate about networked writing practices (especially via social software), while simultaneously bringing that public debate to the attention of scholars in my field.

In this sense, the article is less "academic" than other stuff I write because I'm explicitly trying to reach a public audience and show them that, hey, we've been researching this stuff for years, and it is meaningful ("it" being short-form writing). That said, it's still pretty academic in tone...

Sociotechnical Notemaking: Short-form to Long-form Writing Practices

On a related note, I wanted to mention how great it was to interact with Present Tense through the review process. I submitted my manuscript on May 4th and had a decision on May 26th. You read that right. The piece was reviewed by two referees (who provided excellent feedback) and returned with editor's comments in the space of 3 weeks!

If you're an academic, you know that this approaches the speed of light for peer-reviewing scholarship. Granted, part of the reason that Present Tense can turn manuscripts around so quickly is the brevity of the articles it publishes—2,000 to 2,500 words. In fact, part of the lag between the decision and today's publication was my need to trim my 3,100 word submission down to about 2,500 words.

I also really like that Present Tense publishes articles when they're ready rather than waiting to cobble together 6 or 8 articles before releasing a full issue. They still publish issues (my article is in Vol 2 Number 1), but they publish finished articles directly to the site when they're ready to go, which also decreases the overall turnaround time dramatically and gets ideas out into the public domain in a timely manner. Finally, they have fantastic Review and Advisory Boards, their editors were wonderful throughout the process, and articles are fully open access and published with a Creative Commons license.

If you have a shorter article or an idea for a more concise article (for example, I wrote my piece specifically for the journal), I'd highly recommend Present Tense.

Taking Stock: AY 2010–2011

2011-07-12T09:54:00.004-04:00

In this post, I recap some of my research activity from the 2010–2011 academic year primarily as a way of sharing some of the things I've been working on, and how they lead into things that are coming up...

The last year was a busy one, no doubt. In addition to the usual stuff—teaching, grant writing, administrative and service work, etc.—I led and managed four different empirical studies that will be the focus of this post.

My ongoing study of Eucharistic Adoration practices continued into its second year of data collection (more about the methods and scope for this study can be found in screencasts of conference presentations here and here). After a bit of a lull in this project during the latter half of 2010, I've hit upon some especially intriguing ideas and participant practices in the last six months or so. I'm not quite prepared to publicly discuss even preliminary findings, but I will note that I'm seeing things that I intentionally wasn't looking for and didn't expect to find. Very exciting things that I think will make a real contribution to rhetorics of religion and spirituality.

This is a longitudinal, multi-sited ethnographic study, one that is currently planned to continue through April of 2012. I'll decide whether to continue data collection into 2013 sometime in early 2012. Right now, it looks like I'll do so, as my vision for the amount and types of data to collect is ambitious and still wanting. This is despite collecting a strong amount of data to this point. I'm currently considering strategic opportunities for dissemination—an edited collection or special issue, perhaps—where I could detail some early findings, but I have nothing planned as yet (which is probably for the best!).

I'm currently drafting the first of two planned manuscripts from a qualitative case study of transmedia storytelling that I conducted between December, 2010 and April, 2011. The impetus for this project was the work of my colleague and friend Brad King, a professor of journalism at Ball State and a leader in teaching digital and transmedia storytelling. In close collaboration with Nina Steiger of London's Soho Theatre, Brad led a transmedia summer school in 2010 that introduced playwrights to emergent digital story forms.

Preliminary findings indicate the importance of indexing practices for both teaching and carrying out transmedia stories. For my participants, indexing is most often realized as mundane, background, infrastructural writing work that supports narrative forms by organizing and linking multimodal (digital, print, material) assets. In this sense, indexing as a verb carries two concurrent meanings: the commonly assumed act of recording and organizing, and the less frequent usage (at least in writing studies) of tracing the value of assets (as in a stock index). I'm really excited about this project, and I'm indebted to the wonderful insights provided by Brad, Nina, and five of the ten playwrights who participated in both the summer school and my case study.

During the spring semester, 2011, I led an ethnographic study of the writing work supporting the collaboration of computer science undergraduates. My colleague and friend Paul Gestwicki was the instructor for the course that I studied, and a collaborator on the project (he wasn't involved during data collection but is now involved in analysis and dissemination, following our IRB protocol). Paul and two undergraduate honors fellows, Holden Hill and Phil Parli-Horne, developed a prototype application called Uatu that worked with Google Docs to visualize collaborative writing activity.

Our study, therefore, focused primarily on how students leveraged networked writing practices in conjunction with agile methods of software development. Our key research questions explored the role of networked writing in collaboration and learning, with participant use of Uatu providing us a way into secondary research questions concerning visualization and metacognition. We're still working through the data that we collected, but we already have a short piece out for review and plans for another manuscript later this summer. This was a really fun project, and my data collection was aided by a graduate assistant, Erika Johnson, who took a lot of field notes.

Finally, between July, 2010 and March, 2011 I conducted an ethnographic study of media researchers working on a large qualitative project of their own—from the earliest stages of planning and development all the way through execution of their study and public dissemination of their findings. I had collected rich, granular data in previous and concurrent studies, but nothing in my previous experience matches the amount of data that I collected for this project. This is due in large measure to the generous accommodation of my research participants, who provided me with tremendous access to their work.

Most of July and August will be spent working through the data, and I'm grateful to have a summer graduate assistant, Jenn Stewart, who has been tearing through the formidable pile of audio transcriptions while also offering insights by way of her own analytic memos.

I'm not entirely certain what kinds of outputs I plan to generate from this study, but I have a good idea of where I want to take this research. I've already discussed preliminary findings from one aspect of the study at ATTW 2011 (the screencast of the talk is here), and I'll publish more details from those findings at IPCC 2011 (discussed briefly here). I also have a short piece coming out soon that relies on one observed practice from this study. The majority of my work from this project is ahead, and I'm really looking forward to developing this work.

From these four 2010–2011 projects, only the first remains in a state of open data collection. This means I have a lot of writing to do!

I've already got firm plans for two more studies beginning in the fall, one of which extends my exploration of transmedia work by employing ethnographic methods. I'm also working on another smaller-scale case study (2–3 months of data collection) and have yet another ethnographic study tentatively planned for the spring of 2013.

I'm lucky to have some grant support for much of the work of analysis and dissemination during the summer and fall.

So there you go. Taking stock of my empirical research activity for the last academic year just reminds me of how much exciting work I have ahead of me!

DIY U?

2011-06-22T14:30:00.003-04:00

I've just finished DIY U, by Anya Kamenetz. I won't review the book here (that's more Spinuzzi's thing), but I did want to offer a few quick thoughts.

First, if you're interested in higher education in general, you should read the book. Lots of mostly up to date statistics about trends in higher education economics, enrollment, the rise of for-profit models, etc. I was pleasantly surprised by how current these numbers are, given the rapid rate of change in so many of the areas that Kamenetz addresses.

Also, one of my former doctoral students, Sarah Smith-Robbins, is discussed and quoted extensively over a couple of pages in Chapter 4—very cool for her! Ball State gets a pretty nice mention, too.

Finally, if you know much about me, you know that my perspective on higher education is anything but traditional: I broadcast my dissertation defense live on Ustream and took a couple questions via Twitter; I put my dissertation on Scribd (don't bother reading it—I do much better work now); all of my syllabi are also on Scribd; and much of my research has explored ways to open up the classroom and make higher ed much more explicitly public and participatory (see this, this, and even this, for example).

So I say all that to say this: there's not much here in the way of plausible solutions. There's little hedging or qualifying and lots of triumphalism. And the single biggest issue—accreditation and measurable credit for would-be DIYers—is mentioned a few times, with no realistic solutions. Kamenetz is happy to offer solutions in far more complex areas such as how universities can cut costs, but there's really no plausible solution offered to the core problem of a DIY education: parchment.

I also bristled a bit at some of the language—according to Kamenetz, I'm apparently complicit in a massive "cartel" (p. 118) through my association and support of my university. I think most of us, working day to day with our students and agitating for change in our universities and disciplines (my colleague and friend Paul Gestwicki is constantly thinking deeply about such issues) would bristle at such language, too. I have thick skin, so I'm not shedding any tears, but I did take notice. There's a loose binary that's set up in the book that I simply can't support.

But the most intriguing bit of the entire book, for me, was the last two pages, where Kamenetz formulates her climactic argument by relying upon examples from the heights of the "cartel" she pillories. First, she pulls on research about fish farming that was conducted by folks at the University of Michigan (who, along with schools like Berkeley, Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, have to be kingpins of the higher ed "cartel"). Then, she draws on work from a Washington State University neuroscientist. Again, these examples support her conclusion. Without irony.

So? Research schools supported the kind of very esoteric niche research that she relies on to make her most important points, after spending 130 pages describing how this very system is harmful in myriad ways. In other words, her examples very likely wouldn't exist without the support of schools like UM and WSU.

Still, I think it's a worthwhile read, even though I have my problems with much of the book.

Twitter's API and Research

2011-06-17T17:56:00.002-04:00

A quick post to share some news from the Association of Internet Researchers listserv, where Amanda Lenhart has been keeping interested folks up to date on Twitter's interactions with researchers who use tweets as data.

You may recall that earlier this year Twitter made some changes to its whitelisting practice. This effectively forced the majority of developers to work within its API limits and also nudged many of those same developers toward an official Twitter partner, Gnip, in order to work around API limits for large streams of data. The latter costs money. Potentially a lot of money.

This decision affected not-for-profit applications like TwapperKeeper adversely, potentially disrupting the practices of lots of academic researchers who relied on such services. Long story short, Amanda has been in contact with the folks at Twitter, who, I presume, don't necessarily want to stifle research or torpedo someone's dissertation.

Twitter has established an email address specifically for academic researchers looking for help with scraping and archiving tweets: api-research@twitter.com. Here's what Amanda's contact at Twitter had to say:

We now have a dedicated email address for researchers who have questions about how to use our API to help them get Twitter data and use it in accordance with our TOS. Feel free to direct people to api-research@twitter.com now; we'll be doing so with the phrase "If you have questions on how to use the Twitter API to gather data for your research, or what you can do with this data, email api-research@twitter.com."

Topics we can help with include how to get all Tweets containing a keyword, how to get all Tweets from a date range, how to get all Tweets from a user, our guidelines around sharing datasets (namely, don't), and how to show Tweets in your final report.

Hopefully this will help!

This is a nice gesture on Twitter's part. I'd like to see a site or wiki eventually where much of this info is simply posted and updated. I imagine that'd take considerably less time than responding to emails individually.

Regardless, this is good news for worried academics who study Twitter.

Blogging: Links in Chains of Literate Action

2011-05-24T13:34:00.004-04:00

The 2011 Computers and Writing Conference has been widely lauded in recent days as one of the best iterations in the conference's history. I echo those sentiments: the venue was spectacular, the people—as always—were wonderful and supportive, and Ann Arbor is a lovely city.

I participated on a roundtable exploring the following: Is Blogging Dead? Yes, No, Other. With eight participants, we limited our talks to three minutes, leaving lots of time for audience interaction. The panel was organized by Steve Krause, and one of my fellow presenters, Bradley Dilger has done a fine job of corralling some of the discussion before, during, and after the roundtable.

The general feeling was that our session engaged the backchannel in a way that few others did at this year's conference, and part of that is attributable to: 1. the nature of our topic, and 2. the format, which explicitly took emphasis away from individual presenters and attempted to foster what Scott (1967) calls "collaborative critical inquiry."

Put another way: it was a lot of fun to deliver a 3 minute talk, and then sit back and listen to the thoughts of my fellow panelists and audience participants (those co-located and distributed). Basically, I spoke for 3 minutes, then didn't say anything until the last 10 minutes or so of the session. And I learned a lot more that way.

My talk is below. I encourage you to have a look at Bradley's post—he's updating periodically to capture some of the post-roundtable reaction, including a Storify perspective on the session.

RSS Relevance

2011-05-03T12:20:00.003-04:00

I've previously talked a bit about using Google Reader as one of the required sources in both undergraduate and graduate courses, most notably, here. One of the most important components of using a feed reader—consistent thinking and exploration of course themes and ideas outside of instructional time—is simultaneously one of the most consistent and pressing challenges.

Some students take to RSS immediately, seeing the value not only for using a reader within the context of the course, but for using it to their own ends, tracking and following the things they care about. But many more, unfortunately, see it as something of a novelty, dipping into Reader infrequently, often only when prompted to do so.

One of our doctoral program's fabulous students, Steph Hedge, has been teaching a section of Introduction to Digital Literacies this semester. She emailed me the other day with some feedback about how she's integrated RSS in her course, and how she's gotten students engaged with their feed readers. Here are her thoughts on the matter (published with permission):

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So I know you said ages ago that it was tricky to get students to keep up with the reader, and I think that I've found kind of a solution to that, if you're interested.

I had them come up with the sites/blogs that we would follow. I started with a basic bundle of ten sites as examples, and had them follow those ten for a week. Then each of them had to go out and find a site to follow and write me up a little report (20 points) on the site - 10 points for the content and why it was relevant to the class, and 10 points discussing the design. Then they gave a wee two minute presentation to the class talking about why their site was interesting, and I threw them all into a class bundle.

I wasn't sure how this was going to work, but my students really surprised me with the sites they found. Some were better than others, but they all found something unique - there were three different examples of teachers talking about using digital media in the classroom, for example, and four different social media sites, and this: The Big Picture, which I wasn't familiar with before and is just stunning. It's interesting to see how sites with similar themes have different takes on material, and the students have managed to find things that fit with their own interests.

They're all really invested in the reader because they put it together, and they managed to surprise me with some new sites. I thought it worked out rather well.

I just thought I would share - I still bring up things from the reader in class to make sure they're on top of it, but I think this worked better than random quizzes to get them paying attention.

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Many thanks to Steph for these ideas. I believe I'll implement them in the fall!

Interstitial Writing Work

2011-04-18T15:37:00.003-04:00

Yesterday, I sent off a 4,500 word paper for IPCC 2011—fingers crossed.

In that paper, I discussed findings from the pilot study I conducted in 2009 of the professional conference as information ecology (details here), and the ways in which those findings held or broke down in a longer (8 1/2 month) ethnographic study for which I've recently completed data collection. Basically, my IPCC paper extends some of the things I discussed in my recent ATTW talk.

Round about this time last year, I was also finishing up a manuscript for an edited collection on hybrid spaces—a project led by Loel Kim and Jason Swarts. In that piece, I make an argument about ambient research—about studying the kinds of organizational writing work that takes place in the interstices, in brief, often phatic bursts composed in small-footprint desktop clients and mobile phones.

In the IPCC piece, I talk a bit more about this interstitial writing work, my argument grounded in findings generated by the two studies mentioned above. If my IPCC paper is accepted, it won't be published until October; I wanted to share a small portion of the paper here, because I wonder if others are finding similar things in their own research. Also, I kind of just want to get this idea out there, to a broader public audience beyond the kind and thoughtful reviewers currently vetting my work in various forms.

So, here's a section from the IPCC piece...

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What "Counts" as Writing Work?

For participants in both studies, the organizational use of social software was clearly strategic and intentional. During observations of pre-conference planning meetings conducted by the executive board and local site coordinators for the pilot study, an organizational awareness of the need to better leverage social software was strikingly apparent, so much so that the organizational promotion of live-blogging, a YouTube channel, and Twitter were key to the conference experience. Likewise, in the ethnographic study the primary participants were keenly metacognitive and sanguine about their use of social software to promote their organizational brand and seed organizational knowledge assets (for example, by incrementally teasing findings from their consumer research on Facebook and Twitter).

Yet one of the most interesting findings to emerge from interviews with participants in both studies was the sense that professional writing via social software is overwhelmingly unacknowledged as writing work—especially in contradistinction to more traditional forms of organizational writing work like reports, documentation, proposals, and email. Though participants were aware that one focus of my research was their use of social software, when asked (on multiple occasions for most participants) about the kinds of writing they do in their work, participants never mentioned their writing in social software unless prompted. When prompted, participants would typically respond with surprise and belated acknowledgement that composing Twitter or Facebook updates does indeed constitute writing.

This finding leads to a peculiar understanding of social software within the realm of what subjects consider the traditional norms of organizational discourse. There is a clear sense in which public, organizational writing in a medium such as Twitter is transitional and interstitial for knowledge workers—such activities are significant in the main, in aggregate, but deemed less significant as writing work when considered at the level of composition. This is perhaps indicative of the emerging understanding of the role of social software within organizations—knowledge workers know such work is important, but don't yet consider such work as part of the writing they do professionally. In many ways, then, writing for social software environments is interstitial—it circulates in the in-between spaces of organizational writing work and carries meaning in non-traditional ways. For example, the phatic nature of many Twitter posts in both studies reveals an informal, socially significant tenor, interactions that may carry more personal meaning for participants than some sense of organizational significance. But despite participants' reluctance to acknowledge things like Twitter updates as organizational writing work, there can be no doubt that such updates, in aggregate and alone, “count” as writing work—often significantly so.

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As always, I welcome comments—here, on the Twitter, or by email.

ATTW and CCCC 2011

2011-04-16T13:47:00.004-04:00

I recently gave two talks—one about some ongoing research in professional communication at ATTW 2011 (by far my favorite conference) and another about research methodologies in rhetoric and writing at CCCC 2011.

I've created screencasts of both talks, and I'm happy to discuss them further or to share my scripts.

GEMs

2011-04-15T15:48:00.013-04:00

As we near the end of the Spring semester, the weather around Muncie has been steadily improving—the birds are out, singing their songs, the trees are budding, and flowers are blooming all over campus. This week, in both my grad and undergrad classes, we've spent some time outside, working on techniques for analyzing qualitative data.

In Writing Technologies, my grad class this semester, we're currently reading Spinuzzi's Tracing Genres Through Organizations along with Kaptelinin and Nardi's Acting with Technology. We're far enough along in Spinuzzi's book, with a solid enough grounding in Activity Theory, that creating Genre Ecology Models was a major goal for this week.

Spinuzzi notes that genre ecology diagrams "are drawn from data at all three levels [of research scope—macroscopic, mesoscopic, and microscopic] and portray how genres interact as they jointly mediate an activity" (p. 54). Spinuzzi also mentions that genre ecology diagrams "solely attempt to show direct mediational relationships among genres" (p. 54), where the lines between genres and implements are indicators of that mediation in dynamic systems (p. 120).

But this post is as much about the nice weather as it is genre ecologies. One of my students, Emily, indicated that she had sidewalk chalk in the event that we held even a part of class outside. I figured, why not draw genre ecology models in sidewalk chalk? The extra space alone would be worth the effort, as it would allow us to map more—and more complex—relationships...

So, I asked students, in two groups, to diagram the genre ecology of a typical FYC student tasked with completing their final, second semester research paper, from start to finish. They maybe included some things that are maybe more suited to activity diagrams than genre ecology models (like "embodied practices," for example), but check out what they came up with! These are the first GEMs I've seen that take on three-dimensional properties...

Edward Abbey, Meet Seneca the Younger

2011-02-27T16:44:00.002-05:00

Today, I was reading Seneca, and was struck by this sentence:

It is the mind that makes us rich; this goes with us into exile, and in the wildest wilderness, having found there all that the body needs for its own sustenance, it itself overflows in the enjoyment of its own goods. ("To Helvia")

I couldn't help wondering if Edward Abbey had ever studied the work of Seneca, or the Stoics in general. I certainly wouldn't be surprised. Despite the translation, Ed could have written this.

Search Science

2011-02-13T13:15:00.004-05:00

My seven year-old has lately been fascinated by science videos—especially those that feature the solar system, stars, planets, galaxies, etc.

Yesterday, she was browsing YouTube, mostly unsuccessfully, looking for interesting science videos she hadn't seen. She was a little frustrated, as many of the things she started to view were promotional or game related.

I stepped in, thinking I'd be able to navigate her to some better videos by using YouTube search. I typed in "science" and this is what we received.

While I can see Abbey actually liking the System of a Down video, the Thomas Dolby result was less than fulfilling for either of us. Moreover, the fourth result is typical of almost any YouTube search (search for X, get multiple hits with tits), and the fifth, while potentially relevant and interesting, is far too detailed for our purposes.

A recent TechCrunch piece puts our travails in perspective: "Search is a really bad overall experience."

The blame is partly mine, of course. After seeing my frustration—and giggling at the ginormous boobies that appeared when I searched "science"—Abbey said, "search for 'solar system.'" Smart kid.

"Solar system" indeed yielded better results, and we watched a fascinating video about scale and the size of stars. Additionally, the algorithm that suggested similar videos to this one proved useful too.

But it seems to me there's got to be something in between System of A Down, boobs, and relevant search for a query as benign as "science."

Maybe Abbey will figure out how to do that well. Hopefully someone gets us closer to relevance sooner, though.

"Look at the documentation"

2011-02-06T11:55:00.004-05:00

I'm going to make a very obvious point in this post.

It's so obvious, in fact, that I hesitate to make the point at all for fear of looking like an utter fool. But in several years of graduate school, in lots and lots of research reading, and in hours and hours of observations and interviews with research subjects it's a point which is tacit and almost never explicitly stated: we often know because we write; we often remember because it's written down; and we often reflect meaningfully because there are observable traces (written records) upon which to reflect.

This stunningly obvious realization was brought home to me while reading three very different pieces of writing recently. First, there's this bit of advice from Stake's (2010) Qualitative Research:

“...if I were nowadays asked to give just one piece of advice to the novice researcher, it would be as follows: look at the documentation, not merely its content but more at how it is produced, how it functions in episodes of daily interaction, and how, exactly, it circulates.” (p. 89, note)

Stake is an 80-something year-old veteran and pioneer of qualitative research in education studies. It's interesting to see his focus on documentation (written records—writing) here, as a footnote midway through his book, almost an afterthought. More important, to my way of thinking, is his contention that a novice researcher should pay attention to how documentation is produced, how it circulates within a given research context.

To study writing is to study more than texts—it is to study texts in contexts of production and circulation—writing as an activity, sure, but more importantly, writing as a benchmark of human activities where the actual writing is often merely an afterthought, some convenient residue.

I'll give you another example. In June of 2010 Errol Morris wrote a five-part essay for the New York Times called The Anosognosic's Dilemma. It's all very interesting, but what stood out to me was the discussion of Woodrow Wilson's health problems near the end of his presidency, recounted by Morris in part 3 of the series.

"Wilson’s personal physician, Admiral Cary T. Grayson, took elaborate notes and kept a day-to-day log of the president’s condition," Morris tell us. Admiral Grayson wasn't the only person close to Wilson to commit so much to writing. Detailing a series of strokes during the last 10 years of the president's life, Morris goes on to discuss the diagnosis of Wilson's neurological problems by a neuropsychiatrist named Edwin Weinstein, some 50 years after Wilson's death.

How could a neuropsychiatrist in the 1970s be called upon to make such a diagnosis? By poring over copious documentation.

Wilson's physicians, his head usher, his wife, Edith, and a series of others close to the president wrote things down, repeatedly, in great detail.

I'm certainly in no position to determine the merits of a neuropsychiatric diagnosis. Instead, I read this article in awe, dumfounded and amazed by the very attempt to determine the neurological disorder of a man who had been dead for over 50 years by simply reading through the notes that remained. Morris himself seems to see nothing interesting in this point.

To me, focused as I am on writing as a human activity, a thing like this is incredible in the sense of "difficult or impossible to believe." Further still, I marvel at how little attention is paid to the writing, or to the contexts of writing (the subjectivity of the various writers, their specific perspectives, the pressures under which they wrote, their reasons for writing, the accuracy of their observations, etc., etc., etc.). To be fair, Morris attends to some of these factors to the extent that they help him recount the story, and I understand that a focus on writing as an activity is not his purpose here.

But in such situations (this is hardly an isolated example), the writing is this inert thing, a transparent record of actuality that can simply be consulted for truth and accuracy, or plumbed to find something that someone else missed.

Perhaps I've lost you by now. I'm probably not making this point as clearly as I should, but I'll press on, offering one more example.

Michael Lewis's The Big Short is amazing—both the story it tells and the way it's told. Early in the book, Lewis brings the reader into contact with the life and professional dealings of one of the major figures in the subprime mortgage debacle, Michael Burry.

Lewis is an expert storyteller who paints a vivid picture of the events leading up to the 2008 financial collapse, weaving together character-driven narratives about the real people who saw the bubble years before anyone else. The case of Burry is particularly intriguing on a variety of levels, but part of the reason that Lewis is able to tell his story so well is embedded in the narrative itself.

In developing the reader's interest in Burry's professional life, Lewis repeatedly describes Burry as someone who is socially awkward in face-to-face scenarios, but socially and professionally astute in writing. In fact, Burry's preferred mode of interaction, Lewis tells us, was via email, professional newsletters, forum posts, and the equivalent of a blog (before blogs were blogs). Burry's great friendships, we are told, were fostered via email and supplemented with very little face-to-face interaction.

More to the point, Lewis is able to yield such intricate detail about Burry's professional history largely because such things were written down and archived by Burry himself.

In other words, Burry's professional life left traces—a time and date-stamped, infinitely copyable and archivable record of the things he saw in the subprime mortgage market, years before the rest of the world noticed or cared.

Perhaps most importantly, Burry noticed trends light years before the major banks and investment firms caught wind of them because he was willing to do something almost no one else would: he read the documentation.

Every mortgage bond came with its own mind-numbingly tedious 130-page prospectus. If you read the fine print, you saw that each was its own little corporation. Burry spent the end of 2004 and early 2005 scanning hundreds and actually reading dozens of them, certain he was the only one apart from the lawyers who drafted them to do so—even though you could get them all for $100 a year from 10KWizard.com. (Lewis, 2010, p. 27)

The focus here is on Burry, his fastidious research, and his keen understanding of the impending subprime mortgage crisis. The story is about interesting people and the things they do—novice qualitative researchers, president Woodrow Wilson, Michael Lewis and Mike Burry.

But let me make this obvious point once again: we often know because we write; we often remember because it's written down; and we often reflect meaningfully because there are observable traces (written records) upon which to reflect.

What am I Reading?

2011-01-27T10:10:00.000-05:00

[ NB: This post was written for the Ball State English Department Blog, and is mirrored here. ]

The more interesting question is "how am I reading?"

My workflow is constantly evolving, and right now, my reading is largely shaped by the combination of a few different mobile applications and devices.

I try to do 50 pages of research reading every day (more on that here). Consequently, most of the stuff I read is likely to be of little interest to all but the most intrepid grad students in Rhetoric and Writing. I'm assuming here that you don't enjoy research articles and technical reports about computer-supported cooperative work, distributed writing practices in the workplace, and the direction of ambient, networked writing activities. Like I do.

Some folks love to curl up with a good book of poems or short stories; I'd much rather read the methods section for a well-planned and executed qualitative study. So, I'll tell you what I'm reading, but I want to talk a bit about how I'm reading, since reading, writing, and publishing practices are currently in the midst of massive change.

Here's how much of my daily reading is likely to start. I open Google Reader and also browse links shared by folks I follow in Twitter. Thus begins the sifting and winnowing of information from the sources I've instructed to hail me each day. Clay Shirky says there's no such thing as information overload, just filter failure.

So my reading starts with filtering—selecting appropriate RSS feeds and Twitter accounts to deliver the things I need to do my job.

When something looks interesting, I'll click the link and navigate to the article. If it's more than two or three hundred words, and if it looks really interesting, then the magic starts. I use a bookmarklet that saves the article to Instapaper.

Instapaper is pure genius.

The application takes the article I'd like to save (let's say it's this 13,000 word gem of an interview with John McPhee in the Paris Review), strips away all of the banners, ads, and social networking detritus, and then serves up the written word in a clean, customizable interface on the device of my preference.

If something gets Instapapered by me, that means it's going to my iPad.

Reading on the iPad is amazing, but you know what Instapaper does that makes it even more useful? It downloads and stores every article I save so that I can read them no matter where I am, even if I'm offline (perish the thought!).

Because I don't want to keep hundreds of articles at all times in my Instapaper application on my iPad (I usually keep around 50 or so), and because I want to keep track of this river of reading for later reference, I made sure to link my Instapaper account with my bookmarking service, Pinboard. So, every time I save an article with Instapaper, that URL is archived for later retrieval on Pinboard.

Pinboard allows me to group items by using tags; here, for example, are all the items I've collected that might be used in ENG 213, our Intro to Digital Literacies course...

But I digress, this is about reading, yes?

So, let's get serious. Research articles, books, annotations of said items. Scholarly work. Instapaper usually isn't so good for those kinds of things (well, annotations, that is). That's where iAnnotate PDF and Dropbox come in to play.

If you don't have a Dropbox account, go get one immediately after finishing this post. Here's Dropbox in a nutshell: online backup of your files, synced among all of the computers and devices that you use. For free. Never lose a file again. Hard drive crashed? So what—files are in Dropbox. Elephant stepped on your Macbook? No worries—files are in Dropbox. Dog ate your homework? You get the picture. In fact, go sign up now. With this link, you'll get an extra 250 MB of space.

Many of the articles—and, increasingly, many of the books—that I read are available in PDF format. I upload those files to Dropbox, which means they're accessible from any internet-enabled device I might use to access them, which means I can choose from hundreds of articles or books to read pretty much anywhere.

Because I read so much on my iPad, I use iAnnotate to read the books and articles I have in PDF. Here, for example, is a book that students in my Rhetoric, Writing, and Emerging Media course will read this semester, Program or Be Programmed:

With iAnnotate, I'm able to read in ways that are similar to (but still very different from!) the practices I use when reading an article or a book the old-fashioned way, pen in hand.

I can underline, star important points, and make comments in the margins. Because I type these comments instead of scrawling them in my horrible handwriting, I can actually read my notes later. Best of all, I can save the PDF as is, so that all of my edits and annotations are viewable (and shareable) elsewhere—in my DEVONthink database, for example (but that's fodder for another post...).

So, what am I reading?

Denise Schmandt-Besserat's How Writing Came About. A recent article by Clay Spinuzzi in Written Communication. Bill Moggridge's Designing Interactions. Howard Rheingold's Tools for Thought. A recent article about multimodal storytelling. Dave Winer's blog, Scripting News. The tweets of Jan Chipchase and Kevin Marks. Malcolm McCullough's Digital Ground. Mitchell Duneier's Sidewalk. And a whole host of other interesting articles in the "Read Later" archive of my Instapaper account...

Means and Memes

2011-01-05T18:54:00.006-05:00

I have a thing for memes.

Not all memes, of course. Like any broad genre, the appeal of a given meme is situational and contextual. Because I don't use Facebook, for example, I never participated—either passively, by reading, or actively, by writing—in the 25 Things meme. On the other hand, I have a healthy respect for the staying power of cats with funny diction. Kthx.

To me, memes are important. They are often silly and irreverent, yes, but they engender active participation with emerging media from a lot of people—participation that very often involves the kinds of things I think about, write about, and teach. Shirky's Cognitive Surplus details some of the particulars around memetastic phenomena in clear and thoughtful prose.

I say all of that to say this—check out my band's album cover:

Looks like the hipster incarnation of some indie Brooklyn band all the rage with the kids on Tumblr, no?

This faux album cover is the result of ten minutes lost/found this morning exploring my cognitive surplus. A post on The Next Web claims that this is a meme that's currently circulating on FB.

I post it here because the results, for me, during those lost/productive ten minutes, were intriguing. I hadn't expected to get much out of following the directions, but the results, I must admit, are pretty hipsteriffic if I do say so myself.

The name of my band was taken from the random Wikipedia article I'd been dealt; Cahit Arf was a fascinating Turkish mathematician.

My random quote was a Voltaire gem: "Every man is guilty of all the good he didn't do."

The Flickr photo is rich with the fey ephemerality characteristic of the hipster teen Tumblr, replete with wistful longing and requisite bokeh.

5 or 6 minutes with Picnik and some serendipitous aggregation and I had the means to foster a meme.

What's your album cover look like?

HTML in the Classroom: Not Dead

2010-12-01T11:20:00.005-05:00

A few weeks ago, Ryan Hoover wrote an interesting post called The Death of HTML in the Classroom. He described his evolving approach to teaching HTML and CSS to undergraduate students in his Information Design class for English Writing Majors. If you didn't see the post, check it out—it's a thought-provoking read.

Ryan's post resonates with my experience in a lot of ways. I teach a course called Introduction to Digital Literacies, and while a "web-based research project" constitutes the final deliverable, information and web design (and even content management) are not necessarily goals for the course. In fact, the course was originally designed primarily with English Education majors in mind; one of the goals of the course, then, was to create a web-based research project that could act as part of a professional teaching portfolio.

Long story short: the course was designed for English majors (though it's now a university core course, meaning we'll get more and more students from across the curriculum—yay!), it's not a web design course by any stretch of the imagination, it's not even part of a broader curriculum supporting work in information architecture or document design (unless students in the course take on the new Minor in Professional Writing), and the students are overwhelmingly English Majors studying Education, Literature, or Creative Writing (that is, not technical or professional communication).

I've said a few words on what it means (to me) to be digitally literate previously. Short version: in order to be digitally literate, students need to not only understand how the tools work, they need to know how the tools (like wysiwyg editors or templates) were made in the first place.

The first time I taught the course (Fall, 2009) I used a template-based approach to making things for the web, an approach that Ryan considers in his post. Interestingly, students requested more work with what we call the "rhetorical infrastructures" of the web in our class. They wanted more hands on work with HTML and CSS in particular.

Many were frustrated by the templates they used. Many were also puzzled by the fact that we spent a lot of time considering rhetorical infrastructures without actually getting our hands dirty poking around in them. It was my first time teaching the course, and my first class at a new university, so I waded in.

The next time I taught the course (Spring, 2010), I included a 5 week unit on exploring and using HTML and CSS in a text editor ("hand-coding," as they say). This did not go over well.

Why?

Mainly because I taught HTML and CSS as a 5 week unit.

It was my fault. We tried to cram too much into too short a time-frame. Further, what we were studying during that time was all new to the students. I seriously overestimated their ability to simply jump in and start working with divs, empty tags, external stylesheets, etc.

This semester, I'm teaching two more sections of Intro to Digital Literacies. I'm teaching the same HTML and CSS book, but this time I've integrated it into the entire semester, a little bit at a time.

Almost every week, students have taken on projects hand-coding HTML and CSS in little bits—one file at a time. One week, it might be simply learning how to position text blocks. The next week, working with images. Then in-line CSS. Then internal CSS. Then an external stylesheet. And on and on.

Most of this work culminates in a project called the Code Folder.

The first component of the Code Folder is simple: there are 20 required files that must be submitted, corresponding to work they've been doing in little bits all semester from our HTML/CSS book. These are easy.

The second component is a little more complicated and a lot more interesting, and this is where my approach might be seen as a counterpoint or middle way in relation to Ryan's discussion. Students choose a website and redesign it. The website they redesign? They choose from a couple of simple open source website templates.

So students do work from a template—in this case, an index file with lots of lorum ipsum, an external style sheet, and some dummy images comprising the website template—but they work with the template in a text editor (TextWrangler or Notepad ++ are our preferred options).

This way, they're not burdened with trying to create the world's slickest stylesheet from scratch. They don't start from nothing, but they must display the technical knowhow to significantly redesign what they start with.

Code Folders for both sections of the course were due yesterday, and I've had a look at every student's site. I'm not only blown away by their creativity and ability, I'm really proud of the fact that they did this work by hand—no dream/rapidweaver, and no web-based wysiwyg editor.

Now, I'm certainly not suggesting that this is the best-case scenario, but I think it fits for our situation here at BSU. By going this route, we do miss important work on things like maintaining databases or a robust CMS.

Long term, my goal is to support vertical curricula that fosters student learning of these kinds of things up the line, with an understanding that students taking more advanced courses come in with basic knowledge about rels, linking, file and directory structures, and working with the basic markup of the web.

And hopefully, without a fear of lifting the hood and pulling things apart.

Karl Stolley's excellent recent post discusses why it's a good thing to get your hands dirty.

Tenure-Track Opening in Rhetoric and Composition at BSU

2010-12-01T11:06:00.002-05:00

I'm pleased to announce a tenure-track position—beginning 19 August, 2011—in the Rhetoric and Composition area of Ball State University's English Department. Applicants will be considered at the Assistant and Associate levels.

Details about the position can be found in the official posting on the University Human Resource Services site.

Ball State University provides a wonderful environment for faculty productivity and well-being. I'm happy to answer questions about the position, and about Ball State in general!

Exploring a Sustainable and Public Information Ecology

2010-11-10T17:48:00.005-05:00

In September, I published a paper in the Proceedings of the ACM Special Interest Group for Design of Communication (SIGDOC); it has recently been published at the ACM site.

My paper details findings from a qualitative study of a professional conference, drawing from Nardi and O'Day's (1999) Information Ecologies and Activity Theory to explore the public writing activities that I observed and catalogued. I collected a few different kinds of data for the study—observations of planning meetings, observations of activities at the three-day conference, written public artifacts on the organization's blog and in the Twitter streams of conference participants, and interviews with several of the participants (and planners) themselves.

As I was coding data from the study, one of the key activities that I encountered again and again was something called tummeling. Tummeling can be seen as the intentional facilitation of conversation and engagement within online communities—often by someone who curates ideas and content while connecting previously unaffiliated individuals from overlapping social groups.

I am indebted to Kevin Marks for sharing this concept on Twitter and in Google Reader (he is, in fact, an active tummler). I think I would have struggled to characterize some of the key activities that emerged from the data had I not been made aware of this concept and its role in fostering online engagement.

Based upon the data, I argued that tummeling was a key factor in bolstering the sustainability of the online and physical community that I studied. Since I was privy to pre-conference planning meetings, I learned that the digital sustainability and visibility of the organization was a key goal heading into the conference.

Interestingly, I don't think most involved in those planning meetings envisioned phatic communication through an application like Twitter as being a large factor in fostering that sustainability.

The data says otherwise.

Tummeling activity and online phatic interaction clearly extended the organization's reach and visibility while promoting connections that were sustainable beyond the three-day conference. These activities were largely extraorganizational; in other words, they were driven from below—by attendees—rather than from above—by the organization itself.

The organizers, to their credit, realized that blogging and microblogging activities needed to be leveraged in some way. They were intent on trying new ways of extending the organization's reach.

Findings from this small-scale study indicate how organizations might better foster tummeling activities in support of visibility and sustainability efforts. Part of the challenge is met by simply promoting tools like Twitter—embracing and encouraging the tummlers who are in some way connected to (though not necessarily a part of) the organization.

You can get a pre-publication version of the full paper below, or the official version at the ACM Portal.

"Connected Knowing"

2010-11-08T17:56:00.001-05:00

I'm currently reading Stake (2010), Qualitative Research: Studying How Things Work, and have so far found it to be eminently readable and insightful (I've read 4 chapters, not in order).

Part of what attracted me to the book was the simplicity of the subtitle, actually. It's kind of how I view my job: I study how people work.

Stake cites Candib (1995), Medicine and the Family: A Feminist Perspective, and I think the concept he invokes—Candib's "connected knowing"—is noteworthy. He says that

connected knowing is the embodiment of empathy, using personal experiences and relationships to inquire how others see how things work. It relies on a studied perception of situations in context, thus working toward credibility and esteem (p. 47).

I don't think this is the same as saying one is a participant researcher, in the sense of Malinowski, for example. Since it is empathic, connected knowing is a construct that relies on keen observation and perception—on embodied observation and perception, I might argue.

Part of the reason that this construct resonates with me has to do with one of my ongoing studies, an investigation of embodied interaction in religious practice. That inquiry is guided by the desire to better understand how people know the ineffable, how their embodied practices enable their knowing.

As a researcher, a kind of connected knowing—an embodied observation and perception—is a method I deploy for understanding participant practice.

I just didn't know what it was called.

Recursion

2010-11-02T09:04:00.003-04:00

"Before a tree is here, it was somewhere else. It was a seed, and before that it was part of another tree."

So it is with the human subject.

Eulogy

2010-10-19T16:43:00.005-04:00

[ NB: Though this is my research blog, I sometimes write posts that are more personal in nature. This is one of those times. ]

In early 2008, my Dad died.

He was a tough, tough man; a smart man, and a man of few words that were often heavy with meaning.

I watched him die. Held him as he breathed his last breath. This was a hard thing. Seeing a man tough as nails reduced to bones by cancer.

My Dad and I weren't close, but we weren't distant.

I think about the last 10 days of his life a lot. I think about seeing him die. You can't forget something like that.

I don't want to.

My brother and I eulogized my Dad at his memorial service. I'm reproducing my part of the eulogy here because when I think of my Dad, I think of what ran through my head during the final days and hours of his life, and immediately afterward.

Small things.

Small things make a life, and small things comprise love and interpersonal relationships and family.

Small things matter.

I’ve had time to think, these last few days of my father’s life, about my most meaningful memories of our relationship. The first thing that comes to mind is that I wish I had the opportunity to hear how he would approach the same question, his perspective on the most meaningful memories of our relationship as father and son. So, before I talk a little about what repeatedly occurred to me as we spent our final hours together, I think it’s worth speculating that we might find some important solace in approaching those we love, while we still have ample opportunity, and pose the same question of each other.

As I sat next to my dad the last few days, it was profoundly interesting to consider the memories that were most vivid. It seems that the most important events for me, as I thought about him while he prepared to face death, were not such important events in the grand scheme of things. At least not on the surface, anyway.

Right now, the most vivid and recurrent memory, where just my dad and I were spending time together, won’t seem like much of an event at all. When I was around ten or so, I had some kind of day trip, maybe with school or some other group, at Mt. Diablo, forty minutes or so from our home in Dublin, CA. I can’t even remember why I was there, or in what context. I don’t even remember who took me up the mountain that day, just that my dad picked me up in his red, two-tone Ford F-150 around dusk.

Darkness fell as we drove the winding road down the mountain, my dad and I not saying much to each other, but happy in each other’s company. More important than whatever I had done that day—climbing rocks, hiking, etc.—was my hunger for dinner, and my dad’s suggestion that we find a Foster’s Freeze instead of waiting until we got home. I won’t say that Foster’s was my favorite restaurant, but I loved the prospect of having a chocolate dipped soft-serve cone after dinner. As we neared the bottom of the mountain in the increasing darkness, my hunger and anticipation built as my dad took a few unfamiliar streets in search of a Foster’s Freeze.

I recall some frustration, some detours, but eventual, ultimate success: a booth with my dad, a hamburger and fries in an unfamiliar city after dark, and a cone of soft-serve vanilla ice-cream, dipped in crunchy chocolate.

We drove home together, full and happy, listening to whatever was on the radio, a Giants game perhaps, on KNBR 680.

Why should such a thing be so vivid a memory for me, at this stage, just before and after my dad’s death? It’s difficult to make clear meaning out of the complex and convoluted memories and nuances of consciousness that we all wade through in times of stress and struggle. Who can say, for example, what my dad was thinking about as he neared death…

For me, the trip to Foster’s Freeze stands out, I believe, because it’s such a pleasant and simple reflection of a time when it was just dad and me. It didn’t involve much money, or an extravagant trip, or a significant milestone, though those things are surely important. Instead, it was a simple moment in a complex and lifelong relationship, one of literally hundreds of thousands of similar moments that make up the incredible fabric of meaningful human relationships, relationships between parents and kids, husbands and wives, and lifelong friends.

My dad did lots of nice things for me, things that had much larger implications in the scheme of things; he bought me a car, for example, and drove a couch and other household items 600 miles in a U-haul to Oregon to help me settle in for college. But far more important to me: he did little things really well. Like teaching me to fish, helping me to break in my baseball glove, improving my vocabulary, and taking me for a burger and an ice-cream cone.

I know that my dad loved my brother and I, and I know that he was happy we were with him these last few days. More importantly, I know my dad loved Les. Sure, they took some fantastic trips together, and did some significant things as a couple in the last 20 years. But I will be perpetually thankful that my dad had Les to do those things, those hundreds of thousands of little, simple things for him and with him as my brother and I moved away and began to take our own kids out for ice-cream…

[ Undergraduate Research as a Curricular Outcome ]

2010-10-18T14:30:00.007-04:00

Last week I gave a talk at the 2010 Thomas R. Watson Conference on the campus of the University of Louisville.

I was thrilled to present on a panel that dealt with undergraduate research, with Joyce Kinkead of Utah State University and Doug Downs of Montana State University. We organized our panel as a way to showcase ideas from a recent NCTE-published collection to which we all contributed, Undergraduate Research in English Studies.

A screencast of my talk is embedded below. I focused on positioning students as knowledge workers from within the earliest stages of the vertical curriculum that comprises Ball State's new Minor in Professional Writing and Emerging Media. In the process, I discussed curricular instantiations of undergraduate inquiry, where students perform IRB-approved qualitative research and make meaningful contributions to the field. As always, I welcome questions or comments!

Digital Publics and Participatory Education

2010-10-13T16:03:00.005-04:00

Last week, an article that I worked on earlier this year saw publication with the open access journal Digital Culture and Education.

Back in January or thereabouts, Christa Teston and I were talking about different collaboration opportunities, and I suggested that we prepare a manuscript for a special issue of the journal. We put together a plan to explore the complex of blogging, backchannel communication, and Google Reader as a way to open up classrooms to broader public participation, drawing primarily from experiences in my Fall 2009 senior seminar at BSU.

Following Schön (1983), we took a reflective practice approach, inviting three participants as coauthors. Garrett Cox was an undergraduate in the model course, and he contributed a participatory perspective from inside the curriculum. Bolutife Olorunda was a student participant from the edges of the curriculum, and his perspective details his experience as a self-directed participant motivated by interests in the core subject matter. Finally, Noah Dunker, an Information Security professional from Kansas City, MO, contributed a participatory perspective from well outside the curriculum, as a public participant in the course, unaffiliated with BSU.

While the manuscript wasn't a good fit for the special issue, it was reviewed positively, and invited for inclusion in the next issue. In the article, we make an argument about operationalizing collaborative knowledge work within a specific curriculum and pedagogical approach—enacting a form of participatory education in digital publics.

In the process, we also detail a fairly novel approach to guided discovery (Clark & Mayer, 2003) and student blogging as a literate practice. Finally, we suggest practical methods of incorporating feeds—via Google Reader's "Bundle" feature—as a primary source within a given curriculum.

The abstract for the article is below, and the full piece can be found at Digital Culture and Education.

This article—a collaborative exploration between instructors, students, and members of the broader, digital classroom community—explores how the strategic incorporation of sociotechnical networks and digital technologies facilitates literate practices that extend the classroom in productive ways. The article builds toward coauthors’ reflective practices (Schön, 1983), or “participatory perspectives”, had during an undergraduate English Studies course at a mid-sized, public, American university. Specifically, participants argue that these literate practices afforded not just information sharing, but the opening up of a traditional classroom to include broader digital publics and collaborative knowledge work (Spinuzzi, 2006). Toward this end, we ground literate practice in scholarship that attends to public writing in online spaces, and theoretically frame our argument using Jenkins et al.’s (2006) principles of participatory education. We then detail the specific curricular approach deliberately designed to create digitally connected publics and end with generalizable significance of coauthors’ participatory perspectives.

Spring 2011 Courses

2010-10-12T18:06:00.006-04:00

A quick post—mainly for potential students (but possibly of interest to others)—with the brief course descriptions for my two Spring 2011 courses.

At the undergraduate level, I'll be teaching ENG 431 :: Rhetoric, Writing, and Emerging Media. This is a brand new course that I designed in conjunction with Ball State's new Minor in Professional Writing, and it is, in fact, the capstone experience for that program.

This course has as prerequisites our Introduction to Digital Literacies (ENG 213) and Professional Writing courses (ENG 231). It builds on the ideas introduced in those courses, including writing for the web and qualitative research practices introduced in 213 and 231, respectively. Since this is the first time running 431, however, it may be possible to take the course without having already taken 213 + 231—talk to your advisor (or me!).

At the graduate level, I'll be teaching ENG 692 :: Writing Technologies. I'm particularly excited for this course, since we'll be starting with Haas (1996) and moving through germinal work in Activity Theory and Professional/Technical Communication, leading toward small-scale qualitative studies of writing technologies.

If you have questions about either course, please feel free to ask away!

Jumping Into Epistemic Rhetoric

2010-09-20T13:50:00.003-04:00

I've now taught Barry Brummett's 1979 conference talk "Three Meanings of Epistemic Rhetoric" to 10 sections of undergraduate students—either in professional writing or my introduction to digital literacies course.

I teach the piece for several reasons: it's fairly brief (at about 7 pages); it's incredibly complex; it offers breadth in perspective; it suggests important implications for the study of rhetoric; and it deals with fundamental human problems concerning the relationships among truth, reality, and language.

I realize the piece is difficult for students who are overwhelmingly unfamiliar with the insider discourse that permeates Brummett's argument.

But what continually amazes me is how much students actually get out of the article. Literally every time I've taught it, regardless of the institution or course, I've been shocked by how many students "get it."

My dissertation director, Helen Foster, once suggested to me that undergraduate students were often able to deal with the really big problems in rhetoric better than graduate students—that they might perhaps be more willing to weigh contradictory ideas simultaneously. Though it's anecdotal, I've found that, despite the difficulties of the article, my undergraduate students consistently display a willingness to explore what it means to be, how we come to know, and how language plays a significant role in both.

One of the key components of Brummett's article is his discussion of the implications for rhetoric associated with each of the three meanings he details. So, for example, if we subscribe the methodological perspective that he lays out, our notions of a posteriori knowledge are seriously limited, and rhetoric's role in the shaping of truth and knowledge is virtually nil. In this view, rhetoric is simply a means of communicating an a priori reality and has no significant role in shaping that reality. It's a conduit, a dumb pipe.

But the implications of studying rhetoric and literacy change drastically when we consider the other two meanings he details. And once students begin to thoughtfully consider how human knowledge gets made and communicated, and what rhetoric's role is in doing so, the importance of studying rhetoric—regardless of one's discipline or professional domain—becomes not just significant, but crucial.

I typically provide a little bit of background before they jump in to the article, letting students know that he's not arguing for all three perspectives, that he's doing some lit review in each instance, and that he's using a very specific disciplinary discourse. By the time they encounter it, they've also had a basic primer on terms like epistemology, ontology, rhetoric, and discourse.

But other than that, I don't provide much detail. I encourage them to simply dive in and work hard to make sense of the ideas.

It's continually amazing to see what they generate.

A Few Thoughts on the Demise of Google Wave

2010-09-01T13:51:00.004-04:00

As you may know, my Ball State colleague Paul Gestwicki and I have been hard at work the last 7–8 months experimenting with Google Wave as a way to explore and visualize student knowledge work. And as you also may know, Google recently decided to end the Wave experiment as we've known it, moving some of its key ideas and features to other Google products.

Given that Paul and I recently published a short proceedings paper discussing our work with Wave, have a forthcoming book chapter that also considers Wave as a potential platform for visualizing collaboration, and have secured $25,000 in funding from two different grant opportunities (an internal $10,000 Emerging Media Innovation Grant, and an external $15,000 Indiana Space Grant Consortium award), you might assume that we were especially troubled by Google's decision.

On the contrary, it really doesn't matter much.

A day after learning of Google's plans for Wave, Paul and I met and realized that the death of Wave meant little to the conceptual and theoretical direction of our work.

Like Zachry, Hart-Davidson, and Spinuzzi (multiple citations—see the ACM SIGDOC Proceedings from 2006–2009), we're simply interested in visualizing knowledge work, whatever form that may take, across whatever applications might be used to produce that work.

From an application development perspective, it's true that we (and when I say "we," I mean "Paul") have lost some time. Working with the Wave API, the Google Data API, and creating a robot that interoperated with Wave took time and energy. But thankfully, we weren't all that far along in terms of investment with the Wave platform and the robustness of our prototype.

Instead, we're much further along in conceptualizing the development of whatever it is we create—in other words, we know much better how we'll visualize knowledge work by focusing on what to trace, how to trace it, and how to create visualizations that are useful to collaborators.

And even more good news? We made the decision, just a day or so after the announced death of Wave, to work with Google Docs in order to continue what we've started. That decision, not even a month on, is already seeming like a good move.

So, am I a little disappointed by the decision? Absolutely. But I feel much much worse for the folks who had invested so much more in Wave than we have to this point. We liked Wave because it afforded robust opportunities for multimedia student interaction. But really, we were always focused on visualizing the writing work that surrounded and enabled Wave's rich affordances. That perspective will only be reinforced as we move toward developing a visualization application that works with Google Docs, a platform we're quite confident isn't going anywhere any time soon...

Did I get caught up in the hype surrounding Wave's launch? I sure did. And I was dead wrong about the long-term viability of Wave-as-platform (not necessarily as an assemblage of technologies, however; an important distinction). But, I'm wrong about a lot of things.

I'm on to something with this, however: our contemporary production technologies allow us to surface and trace complex collaborative writing work in new and interesting ways.

Paul and I continue to work hard at visualizing that writing, and generating grounded, useful, and testable insights into what such visualizations can do for student knowledge workers, collaboration, and formative assessment.

App Quality Control

2010-07-29T14:43:00.005-04:00

Flipboard for iPad certainly looks interesting. Unfortunately, it doesn't work. Flipboard buckled spectacularly after its App Store launch under the strains of tech media hype. A quick update to the app changed the protocol for signup to help deal with the strain—would-be users now must wait in line to enable Twitter and Facebook connections. I dutifully "reserved" my place in the queue.

Honestly, I'm not all that crazy about Flipboard in the first place. It essentially remediates the paradigm of the page (like oh so many digital reading applications), taking something fairly novel (like a Twitter timeline) and turning it into something not-novel—a magazine-like interface.

But all of this is really beside the point. I have no axe to grind with Flipboard. I just want to know that when I download an app from the App Store or the Android Market that said app will, um, work. That it doesn't work just yet is frustrating. So I was happy to have received some hope in my inbox this afternoon:

But alas, it seems that Flipboard's new queue system doesn't even work:

The good news? At least it was a free app...

Tracing "Blip Depth" in Google Wave

2010-06-24T14:17:00.009-04:00

As Paul and I continue to work on prototypes and ideas for using Google Wave to trace collaborative knowledge work in the classroom (more on that here), we've intensified discussions of typical user practices within Wave. As part of these discussions, we've run into some interesting issues surrounding how we simply describe—even amongst each other—certain kinds of user interactions and how they're reflected in Wave.

At a very basic level, we're running into issues of terminology that are still amorphous, since the community of users and developers interested in Wave is likewise nascent and developing. This is an issue of representation, really.

For example, Paul and Ian (one of our tremendous student researchers) have been working on a robot participant that collects data about collaborative work in a given wave. But one of Wave's affordances is the ability for multiple participants to edit a single blip, or to create a series of nested replies within a higher, "top level" blip. This makes data collection a little more difficult.

These kinds of contributions are harder to collect, creating challenges for the software architecture of the robot participant and it's data representations. But they also create challenges for terminology; what do we call these kinds of user contributions?

Yesterday, Paul started a new blip within one of our existing waves for this project:

Paul goes on to offer two likely solutions to the problem of "blip depth"—one of which involves creating a tree structure of the entire wave and storing that information in AppEngine.

But as Paul and Ian continue to delight me with ingenious solutions to development challenges, I'm even more interested in Paul's brilliant term for representing the kinds of data we expect and dearly need to surface and trace. "Blip depth" says it all...

Sinews and Connective Tissue

2010-06-16T17:54:00.004-04:00

"The bundle of concepts tied to the word media is unraveling. We need a new conception for the word, one that dispenses with the connotations of 'something produced by professionals for consumption by amateurs.'

Here's mine: media is the connective tissue of society."

Shirky (2010)

"We view the internet as a set of environmental conditions that span traditional geographic or social boundaries. The internet can serve as connective tissue between and within local information ecologies."

Nardi and O'Day (1999)

Media on the internet (and this is the media with which Shirky is most concerned), whether manifested as video, audio, images, or some combination thereof, needs writing to do its work. This is writing in a different light than we have traditionally assumed—writing as markup, for example. Often, indeed, the media we experience is wholly constituted and represented as writing work (this post, for example), with writing work likewise dictating the visual elements we see and unsee (#000000, #FFFFFF, padding, divs, et al.).

If media, or the internet writ large (as in Nardi and O'Day's formulation), constitutes the connective tissue of contemporary societal interaction, then writing must be the sinew of our contemporary social graphs—the very thing that holds us together, mediates, and articulates sociotechnical existence.

Contexts, Technologies, and World Cups

2010-06-14T11:43:00.004-04:00

[ NB :: this post is a bit more personal than the usual fare; feel free to take it or leave it... ]

In a certain sense, I neurotically measure phases of my life through the cycles of the World Cup. I vividly remember watching Maradona in 1986, at 12 years old. And I'll never forget watching Roberto Baggio, after a stellar tournament, sky the ball over the crossbar in the penalty shootout of the 1994 final, gifting the cup to Brazil.

The shifts in contexts and technologies between the 2006 tournament and the current 2010 edition are particularly striking for me, mainly because I research such things and am passionate about world football. If I say that the technologies are strikingly different, the statement will resonate with most, and I'll discuss that in more detail below. But reflecting on shifting contexts is a much more personal and situated matter, simply because, as I said above, I tend to measure important phases of my life by the cycles of World Cup qualifying and the tournament itself...

-----

I want to start, then, by exploring the contexts a bit. In the summer of 2006, I was living in El Paso, Texas, running a regional office of a Fortune 100 financial services firm. I was also about to make the transition from working in finance, an industry where I had spent the previous 8 years, to full time doctoral studies in Rhetoric and Writing. It was an exciting and anxiety-filled time simultaneously.

In June of 2006, my financial advisor colleagues and I moved the lone, ancient TV/VCR combo we had used very sparingly for training purposes into the conference room of our downtown office in order to watch nearly every moment of the group stage matches that took place during business hours. With no cable or satellite connection, we used the TV's built-in rabbit ears to fine tune reception of spanish language broadcasts of every match available.

There were several occasions when everything stopped. 6 or 7 of us, wearing expensive suits and silk ties, huddled around a 13" screen watching Sweden play Paraguay or France v. Switzerland.

During the knockout stage, my context shifted again, as my family and I made a trip to Las Vegas for the 4th of July holiday. In the MGM sportsbook, among hundreds of others (some passionate, some merely interested, some merely gawking at the spectacle), I watched France beat Brazil, and Portugal move past England. I was passionately pulling for France in 2006, mainly because of my love for Zidane, one of the most brilliant players the world has seen.

On July 5th, I stood in the sportsbook—for it was standing room only—and watched France defeat Portugal for a spot in the final. I ultimately watched Italy v. France from the comfort of home on July 9th.

This is just as well. When Zidane was sent off, I was crestfallen. By the time France lost on penalties, I was too numb for the defeat to register.

A few days after the end of the 2006 World Cup—a few days after Italy uglied their way to the world championship—I tendered my resignation (though I retained my advisor's contract for a few more months). The two events are in no manner related, of course, but the timing of the two events helps to sharpen my memory of both.

And here we are in 2010, and my contexts are staggeringly different, though my passion for the World Cup is as fiery as it was in 1986, or 1994, or 2006.

I left finance for good in February of 2007. I went on the academic job market in the fall of 2008—one of the worst years to do so in the last 20. I applied to 42 schools, and saw no less than 7 of them retract positions due to financial unrest.

In 2009 I defended my dissertation, and accepted a wonderful position at Ball State University.

During this 2010 World Cup, my contexts are dramatically different, as I attempt to measure my life via the blurry interstices and intersections of the everyday events that take place between World Cups.

-----

In addition to the stunning differences in my own contexts between 2006 and 2010, I can't help but marvel at the sociotechnical differences as well. During the 2006 World Cup, Facebook still wasn't open to the general public, there were no "apps" for anything (iPhone apps, that is), and Twitter was a sketch on a yellow pad.

In 2006, I watched most of the matches on either a grainy 13" TV with coworkers or multiple outsized Vegas screens with perfect strangers. In neither scenario did I obsessively check my phone (as I do today), and the iPad I now carry, with my 2010 FIFA World Cup app, was something I had not even imagined was possible.

The technical infrastructure of my viewing and monitoring practices are tremendously different (what an understatement). Where 2006 involved repeated, intentional forays in search of matches and in search of communal interest, my 2010 experience is ambient and ubiquitous. ESPN has gone all in with its coverage, attempting to capitalize on growing interest in soccer in the United States.

But the biggest difference technologically (for me, but for a great many others like me) is the mobile device, and the mobility of social ties: as I said above, it's the socio + technical differences between 2006 and 2010 that are particularly striking.

Google Wave and Student Knowledge Work

2010-06-11T14:29:00.006-04:00

My friend and colleague Paul Gestwicki and I are headed to Pittsburgh early next week to participate in a workshop on Computer Supported Peer Review in Education (CSPRED). This workshop is held in conjunction with the 10th annual Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS). We're particularly excited about the full day event, because it represents the first material fruits of our labor with exploring Google Wave as an enabling technology for student knowledge work.

We've been hard at work since winter break—sharing ideas, reviewing different bodies of literature, writing grant proposals, publication proposals, and even attending Google I/O in order to meet with and learn from members of the Wave team and third-party Wave developers. Our work is beginning to pay off, as we've recently received a $10,000 Emerging Media Innovation Grant from Ball State University's Emerging Media Initiative. Paul and a student assistant have been working very hard of late on the the technical architecture of the ideas we've been discussing, creating robots and gadgets that interoperate with Wave and Google App Engine.

One of the things we're interested in doing is producing visualizations of student knowledge work as a step toward enabling greater metacognition and modeling activities. We also see Wave as affording robust opportunities for formative assessment and community involvement, easing the collaborative sharing of knowledge as well as opportunities for productive member checks with research subjects.

At this early stage, our work is very much in progress and developing. I've included below the pre-publication version of our concept paper, "Using realtime writing technology to enable continuous formative evaluation of collaborative knowledge work," to be published in the CSPRED proceedings. I've also included the poster we produced in conjunction with the paper (and, to be fair, I should say the poster that Paul produced—I simply wrote the copy and threw out a couple of ideas); the poster is significant in that it provides some of the visualizations we couldn't fit in the short paper, and includes a use case scenario. Special thanks in particular to Christa Teston, whose white paper assignment is one that I've stolen for this fall's Professional Writing course; that assignment serves as the basis for the use case described in the poster.

Thankfully, this is just the beginning. Paul and I have a chapter in the works for a forthcoming edited collection, and we're most excited about developing this summer, implementing in the fall, and embarking on a qualitative study in the spring.

[ A Brief History of the Monstrance: Embodied Rhetorics and Eucharistic Benediction ]

2010-06-10T12:44:00.009-04:00

Below is a screencast of my recent talk at the 2010 Conference of the Rhetoric Society of America, held in Minneapolis May 28-31. I presented on a panel with Christa Teston, Davida Charney, and Grant Boswell.

Words, Shading Off Into One Another

2010-06-03T18:17:00.003-04:00

"In the infancy of logic, men sought only to obtain a definition of an unknown or uncertain term; the after reflection scarcely occured to them that the word might have several senses, which shaded off into one another, and were not capable of being comprehended in a single notion. There is no trace of this reflection in Plato."

From Benjamin Jowett's introduction to Plato's Sophist...

[ Mentorship and Professionalization in Networked Publics ]

2010-05-24T17:53:00.003-04:00

Here's the screencast for my recent talk at the 2010 Computers and Writing Conference held at Purdue University. It was a pleasure to present on a panel about virtual mentorship with Derek Mueller, Trauman, and Steve Krause.

Professional Writing @ BSU

2010-05-13T13:25:00.003-04:00

Think. Make. Interact.

Deep Space, Deep Time

2010-04-09T13:41:00.003-04:00

One of the things "that separates us from other centuries and societies is we live with deep space (both outward and inward) and deep time (both past and future) all around our tiny island of the now. Great amounts of time are becoming less and less strange. The otherness of deep time is fast dissolving."

Mudede, The Stranger.

[ Finding Grooves ] Conversations + Spreadable Media

2010-03-31T09:49:00.004-04:00

I gave a talk last week (3.26.10) at the Center for Media Design, responding to previous presentations about two of Ball State's most successful immersive learning programs, iMedia and SportsLink. This year, the CMD has sponsored research talks from Emerging Media Faculty Fellows, and more recently, presentations about our innovative immersive learning opportunities for undergraduates.

Brad King and I have been engaged in learning about both iMedia and SportsLink, and our backchannel conversations about opportunities for using social media platforms to extend SportsLink's brand resulted in an invitation for each of us to share those ideas with the university community last week.

I had a lot of fun with this talk, and worked from a looser script than I'm used to. Both talks fostered some great discussions, and I think we're all really invested in seeing these programs develop and prosper. Below is a screencast of my talk; as always, I welcome questions and feedback!

Epistemological Movement and [ Web-Scale ] Ambient Research

2010-03-27T14:16:00.006-04:00

I've recently been invited to an NSF-funded workshop at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute on Examining Web-Scale Research Collaboration. Not only am I very much looking forward to working with and learning from an interdisciplinary group of prominent scholars, I'm excited by the recent convergence of events and opportunities around my development of the notion of ambient research.

In addition to the workshop, my thinking through the particulars of ambient research and the movement of knowledge is reflected in my recent presentation at the Conference on College Composition and Communication and a manuscript that's being considered for what I think will be an important edited collection in technical and professional communication. These events are buttressed by my ongoing collaborations with Christa Teston in Rhetoric and Writing Studies research methodologies and practices and Paul Gestwicki in computer supported collaborative work and information visualization. Interestingly, this work also coincides with my forthcoming Computers and Writing panel, where I'll present on digital collaboration and mentorship with Derek Mueller, Steve Krause, and Ryan Trauman.

In short, I'm moving toward exciting in situ and empirical research and practice of the kinds of things I've been discussing for the last 18 months or so.

Participants at the NSF workshop were asked to circulate abstracts detailing their work ahead of the event, and I've provided mine here. This abstract reflects some of the ideas I discuss in the manuscript I mentioned above, so if some constructs seem to receive short shrift it's because I didn't have the space to expound on them the way I would have liked in a one-page abstract.

As always, I welcome feedback and conversation!

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Much of my work is motivated by the desire to better understand distributed, collaborative knowledge work in hybrid spaces. Swarts and Kim (2007) define hybrid spaces as the "meshed and material places" where "information is not only a commodity; it is a frame on the world around us" (p. 212). My research, then, considers the following lines of inquiry: what do hybrid spaces look like in everyday organizational practice? How are they comprised, and what holds them together? How does knowledge move within these spaces as we move within them, and as they in turn move and shift around us? What practices enable meaningful “thinking and doing” (Haas, 1996, p.19) for knowledge workers in such spaces?

I draw on theories of knowledge work developed primarily in Professional and Technical Communication. Both Johnson-Eilola (2005) and Swarts (2007) explicitly link concepts in distributed knowledge work to Reich's (1992) figurations of the symbolic-analytic, where professionals work "within information, filtering, rearranging, transforming, and making connections to address specific, specialized problems" (Johnson-Eilola, 2005, p. 19). Johnson-Eilola (2005) argues that "symbolic analysts are people we might think of as technical rhetoricians working in the datacloud" (p. 19). Spinuzzi (2006) suggests that knowledge work “tends to be organized in distributed, heterogeneous networks rather than in modular hierarchies” (p. 1). A key component of knowledge work then is its distributed quality; Spinuzzi (2007) argues that "distributed work is the coordinative work that enables sociotechnical networks to hold together and form dense interconnections among and across work activities" (p. 268). He notes that this kind of work is "deeply interpenetrated, with multiple, multidirectional information flows" (2007, p. 268).

Following Grabill and Hart-Davidson (2010), my research is interested in "what writing does, not in what it means" (p. 1) in knowledge work environments. In other words, surfacing and tracing the literate activity of knowledge work can help us determine writing's formidable role in enabling "sociotechnical networks to hold together" (Spinuzzi, 2007, p. 268). For Grabill and Hart-Davidson, writing practices and activities are "epistemologically productive" (2010, p. 1), an assertion that foregrounds writing as heuristic, actionable, and explicitly social in the organizational and networked ecologies (Nardi and O'Day, 1999; Spinuzzi, 2003) of knowledge work. Attention to the practices of rhetoric and writing—what writing does—is paramount to our understanding of the ways knowledge moves at web-scale.

Movement, then, is a key characteristic of knowledge work in hybrid spaces. Though we have come to accept a burgeoning "ambient awareness" (Thompson, 2008; Spinuzzi, 2009) as a function of always on, always connected devices and networks in hybrid spaces, I argue for more intentional practices of situating knowledge work within heuristic frameworks of ambient informatics for the purposes of research and production. What does writing do at web-scale, how does it draw and hold people together, and how might it be leveraged?

I argue that our understanding of knowledge work in hybrid spaces is productively yoked to our ability to accept and manage continual movement, which I explore as a function of distributed and collaborative knowledge flows. Epistemological movement—manifested most often in and through writing work—not only articulates and holds together the material and ephemeral components of hybrid spaces, many of its strongest connections are often found in the interstices, and thus remain invisible for knowledge workers not attendant to the continual movement characteristic of hybrid spaces. Drawing on ambient informatics, my work suggests ways that the knowledge worker can practice ambient research, taking advantage of knowledge flows at the interstices of hybrid spaces.

6,000

2010-03-23T13:35:00.006-04:00

Whoa. 6,000 tweets. That's a lot of writing. At around 12 words a tweet, that's ~72,000 words. Hmmm...

[ Persistent Backchannels and Social Graphs ]

2010-03-18T08:22:00.005-04:00

This a screencast of my brief roundtable talk for the 2010 Conference on College Composition and Communication in Louisville, Kentucky. I was thrilled to be a part of a panel called "(Almost) Live at the Cs: Re-visioning Conference Networks."

This screencast details my opening position statement; I argue that interstitial writing work is the sinew of persistent social graphs--the stuff that holds together and articulates (in the sense of "joining and mediating," following Hall, 1980 and Johnson-Eilola, 2005) complex sociotechnical networks. As always, I welcome feedback and conversation!

An Interlude on Writing and Technology

2010-03-12T16:31:00.003-05:00

"As long as we think we do not have enough expertise to engage in substantive discussions about technology, we are effectively prevented from having an impact on the directions it may take. But there are opportunities for discussion and intervention in the process of technological growth and change, and it is important to take advantage of them. We believe that the lack of broad participation in conversations about technology seriously impoverishes the ways technologies are brought into our everyday lives. Our aim is to show how more people can be more fully engaged in important discussions and decisions about technology."

[. . .]

"We have noticed that people seem to distance themselves from critical evaluation of the technologies in their lives, as if these technologies were inevitable forces of nature rather than things we design and choose."

Nardi and O'Day, 1999, p. 13-14

Indeed, our expertise in engaging substantive discussions about technology is tied directly to rhetorical action in and through our literate practices. Our most pervasive technologies are "technolog[ies] of words" (Haas, 1996). Rhetorical action and technology are so tightly imbricated as to be nearly impossible to parse. Our literate practices, therefore, implicitly link us to our technologies.

"Technology and writing are not distinct phenomena; that is, writing has never been and cannot be separate from technology. ... To go further, writing is technology, for without the crayon or the stylus or the Powerbook, writing is simply not writing. Technology has always been implicated in writing: In a very real way, verbal behavior without technological tools is not, and cannot be, writing."

Haas, 1996, p. x-xi

Our expertise, therefore, is carried and enacted in large measure through rhetorical action, through literate practice.

:: Deliberative Ecologies :: Technologies, Practices, Actants

2010-02-22T13:08:00.004-05:00

As a follow up to last week's collaboratively written post, On the Atomization of Rhetoric, Christa Teston and I have written a companion post: Deliberative Ecologies: Technologies, Practices, Actants, which is published on Christa's professional blog.

Please have a look at our post when you have a moment; it describes in more detail the messy complexity of our collaboration, and we take initial steps toward thinking through the notion of "deliberative ecologies" by attempting to surface our formative rhetorical knowledge work.

As always, we appreciate feedback--here, there, or on Blogora.

On the Atomization of Rhetoric

2010-02-15T12:24:00.004-05:00

Faust sits translating the Bible. He is working on the beginning of the Gospel according to St. John. The troublesome word is logos, which he renders as "word," then “mind,” then “power,” then “act.” ~Scott (1967)

This post explores theoretical propositions that have potentially broad implications for researchers and practitioners in the field of Rhetoric and Writing Studies and related disciplinary and professional domains.

These propositions and speculation about their implications have developed as a result of ongoing collaboration between myself and Christa Teston as we've sought to examine how our field, writ large, understands, theorizes, enacts, and inculcates various modes of representation and rhetorical action (visual :: aural :: haptic :: spatial :: embodied :: linguistic) in both our disciplinary episteme, and when creating meaning about our discipline for broader (extra-disciplinary) audiences.

Specifically, this post is inspired by recent professional deliberations and experiences that seem to suggest that our field fails to centrally position and explicitly theorize the epistemic and ontological nature of rhetoric when investigating and articulating how various modes of representation afford knowledge-making; implications abound, then, for how the complex act of constructing knowledge with rhetoric-as-epistemic at the helm informs our discipline's theories and practices.

Following Scott's (1967) assertion that “the terms 'certainty' and 'knowledge' confront one with what has become known as epistemology,” we are interested here in what and how rhetoric means, how our disciplinary gazes should be governed, and what our philosophical and pragmatic understandings of rhetoric say about our discipline beyond academe.

Consequently, this post aims to foster theoretical discussion about the implications associated with what we're calling the atomization of rhetoric. We present here a credo of sorts, a series of propositions concerned with our desire to better understand rhetoric as object/focus/field of study, and rhetoric's role in meaningful (everyday) human activity.

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Scott (1967) posits that “rhetoric may be viewed not as a matter of giving effectiveness to truth but of creating truth.”

We argue, therefore, that rhetoric is no mere tool, the dressing or art of language. It cannot simply be just the art of persuasion.

According to Enos and Lauer (1992), "Aristotle holds not that rhetoric creates all reality but rather that it creates the meaning of that reality." And yet, Scott argues that “if truth is somehow both prior and substantial, then problems need not be worked out but only classified and disposed of.” Consequently, Scott rejects “prior and enabling truth as the epistemological basis” for rhetoric; so do we.

We argue, therefore, that rhetoric is worldview; it is underlying philosophy and tacit understanding.

We argue that rhetoric is no more teleologic than time. Rhetoric makes as it goes, and defines its ends along the way. It is not circumscribed; it circumscribes. Rhetoric deploys as it is deployed.

We argue that rhetoric ought not be treated as a conduit, a dumb pipe connecting human knowledge to an a priori Reality and Truth. Rhetoric does not discover; it invents and produces.

These propositions neither invalidate nor ignore the role of human agency in the making of meaning. In fact, we argue that rhetoric is embodied and materially instantiated, and because of this, rhetoric is grounded in human agency.

Pierre Thevenaz claims that “man acts and speaks before he knows. Or, better, it is by acting and in action that he is enabled to know” (quoted in Scott 1967).

So, because rhetoric is being and knowing, because knowing and being are rhetoric (and not merely rhetoric-al), we argue that rhetoric structures, facilitates, and makes possible human agency. Human agency and rhetoric cannot be excised from one another. They are mutually constitutive.

Further, Brummett (1979) asserts that rhetoric "is epistemic in an ontological sense," and "creates all of what there is to know." He asserts that "discourse does not merely discover truth or make it effective," but that discourse "creates realities rather than truths about realities."

We argue, therefore, that rhetoric is epistemic. It is ontological.

Rhetoric is "a dimension of all activity rather than [...] an activity in its own right" (Brummett 1979).

These are not beliefs. This is not theory hope.

These are propositions that ground our theorizing about and approaches toward understanding how meaning gets made in the overlap between modes of representation, human interaction, and everyday experiences--experiences bound by space and time. But we sense that these propositions are not shared within our field. There are profound disciplinary and pragmatic implications for accepting, rejecting, or ignoring these propositions.

Our observation is that rhetoric as an academic discipline and professional practice suffers from a kind of insidious atomization—a context-stripping particularity that reduces rhetorical practice to departments, domains, specialties, sub-disciplines, colloquialisms. And yet we simultaneously recognize that such atomization has been historically productive; atomization has fostered new approaches and understandings that, for so long, have been othered or invisible. Atomization in part yields feminisms, body studies, LGBT studies, Critical Race Studies. Atomization gives us rhetorical criticism, writing studies, technical communication. Atomization is crucial to the viability of studying and doing rhetoric.

And yet atomization separates, bifurcates, siloizes. Atomization necessitates a particularized and specious division of multivalent, polymorphous, polycontexts.

Atomization comfortably compartmentalizes—culturally, philosophically, theoretically—meaning and being. It ameliorates our need to explore through the practice of exploding contexts. It assuages our uncertainty, allows us to reduce writing to this, visual to that, performance to here, orality there. Consequently, atomization draws lines, then builds fences, then erects walls, borders, and territories.

Image becomes a province, alphabetic text an imperial kingdom, orality a third-world domain, art a margin, film a continent to be conquered, digital media a competing power.

In the atomization of rhetoric, the visual in particular is seen from across the border, with suspicion—a potential threat. When atomized, the visual is simultaneously embraced and othered. It is not granted the capacity for meaning without the contextualization of alphabetic text, a decree of its (un)worthiness.

Our argument proceeds from these principles. Image and alphabetic text are not atomized domains, but mutually constitutive actors in meaning making. Yet the very atomization of rhetoric, which generously gives and insidiously takes away, will not let image stand alone, even though the image is always already rhetoric.

Similar bifurcations materialize themselves in troubling ways. News anchors claim to "get to the bottom of" or beyond a certain politician's "rhetoric." Oral presentation skills aren't taught in Business and Professional writing courses because it's a course on "writing," not "communication."

-----

Rhetoric as a discipline suffers from failing to join the productive tensions of atomization with a kind of theoretical baseline or shared understanding among contingencies that all discourse is at once particular and holistic, situated and situating, epistemic ontologically.

Taking to be true,

(i) Scott's (1967) argument that, if there can be "truth in human affairs," it is "the result of a process of interaction at a given moment," and

(ii) Toulmin's (1958) assertion that "claim(s) to knowledge" can't always be "backed by an analytic argument," else "the future, the past, other minds, ethics, even material objects: about all of these we ought, strictly speaking, to admit that we know nothing,”

we see meaning making as always already mediated in and through rhetoric.

Instead of considering the rhetoric of images or the rhetoric of alphabetic text, therefore, we propose an approach to rhetoric, proper. We eschew the "of"--an indication that rhetoric is part rather than whole. We no longer need the "of" if we are to learn from our atomization and challenge ourselves toward holistic theorizing. We argue for is rather than of.

The visual is rhetoric. There should be no rhetoric of the visual.
Writing is rhetoric. There should be no rhetoric of writing.
Bodies are rhetoric. There should be no rhetoric of bodies.

The bricolage of visual~writing~bodies is not merely rhetoric-al, since being rhetoric-al pigeonholes rhetoric as a mere attribute, appendage, or add-on, rather than understanding rhetoric as the constitutive property of that polycontextual whole.

This is not to say that in order to know we cannot or should not first fracture and make strange previously held assumptions or understandings about our objects of study (a la Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Strauss & Corbin, 1997). What we propose is that the lines upon which those fractures take place ought not be solely dependent on mode, medium, or material form. We argue, instead, that by exploring knowledge-making holistically and in situ, rhetoric is precisely what facilitates the ontological reevaluation, reassembling, and restructuring of previously held assumptions and understandings.

We accept that our propositions are potentially troubling or problematic for a discipline that has, for years, been wedded to close textual analyses and hermeneutic approaches to understanding phenomena. We acknowledge that the arguments above are deserving of refinement; we ask you to consider this work as but a “process of interaction in a given moment.” Above all, we invite you to join us in “cooperative critical inquiry” (Scott 1967) so that we might reevaluate, reassemble, and restructure previously held assumptions and understandings about the field of Rhetoric and Writing Studies.

Our aim is to move from the above described philosophical revival of rhetoric-as-epistemic toward constructs that support more grounded investigations of rhetoric and writing practices as they occur in the world. We want to explode contexts, to make strange, and to complicate without sacrificing the holistic nature of rhetoric. Grounded, activity- and practice-based methodologies and methods, therefore, are where we turn from here. We welcome and look forward to the ongoing conversation that will develop from this and any subsequent posts.

Brian McNely
Ball State University

Christa Teston
Rowan University

Teaching in Public, Google Reader, and Self-Directed Learning

2010-02-08T13:22:00.010-05:00

[ NB: this post was originally written for :: repurposed :: and is duplicated here because of clear overlapping concerns and dissemination for a different audience... ]

This is Bolutife (Bolu) Olorunda.

Bolu was a major contributor to my senior seminar for majors in English—Rhetorics, Places, and Publics, ENG 444—at Ball State University last semester. He's also an integral contributor to :: repurposed ::.

But Bolu is a Construction Management major. He doesn't really take any courses in English anymore. And he wasn't registered for my course at all.

Bolu's involvement in ENG 444 is absolutely fascinating to me.

I'm going to spend some time explaining why that is, and how opening our classrooms to broader publics through emerging media platforms can provide tremendous opportunities for self-directed, lifelong learning...

-----

The start of fall term brought the usual documentation from the registrar's office—class lists, classroom locations, final exam schedules and the rest. As a faculty fellow with BSU's Emerging Media Initiative, I naively assumed that I'd be working in computer classrooms.

Naturally, I didn't actually check to see where my classrooms were located and what kinds of technologies were available in those rooms until a week before the semester started.

Of course, ENG 444 was not in a computer classroom. I needed it to be. So I requested a change.

Wish granted.

The new classroom location was in the Applied Technology building, in an open computer lab, in a room at least 15 degrees warmer than a room should be, regardless of changing weather conditions outside.

The new room was an unusually apt assignment for a course exploring rhetorics of space, place, and the built environment. We confronted issues of placement, location, and the malleability of the learning environment from day one. Early in the semester, when the weather was stunningly gorgeous, we often met outside, just to escape the heat of Applied Technology 208.

But perhaps the most curious affordance of the new classroom was the fact that it wasn't really a classroom at all. It's a computer lab, staffed full-time by a student employee. Every Thursday evening, when we met from 5 to 6:15, the student employee was Bolu...

-----

A junior looking to graduate in 2011, Bolu is in many respects similar to thousands of other BSU students—he's bright, conscientious, responsible, and intellectually curious. Bolu's family is originally from Ibadan, Nigeria. His mother chose to pursue graduate studies at BSU (where she earned both an MA and PhD), and he moved to Muncie with his family when he was 14.

Bolu graduated from Muncie Central High School and enrolled at BSU. His father is an architect, and Bolu originally pursued architecture as his major. Though he is now studying Construction Management, he retains an interest in both architecture and engineering. He's started to think about his graduate school options in areas that may allow him to combine these interests.

Not surprisingly, the serendipity of Bolu's placement in an on-campus job in Applied Technology 208 each week, his interests in architecture and engineering, and the nature and tenor of our ongoing course on Rhetorics, Places, and Publics proved an important combination for his eventual involvement in 444.

-----

For several class periods, our group of English majors (and contributors to :: repurposed ::) thought and talked through the politics and rhetorics of Muncie's “Village,” a shopping area just a couple of blocks away from campus. We used The Village to discuss Kevin Lynch's paths, edges, nodes, districts, and landmarks. We discussed how different groups cognitively mapped the area. We thought through what it might mean to redesign The Village, thinking about Setha Low's work on the social construction and the social production of public space.

Most of these discussions were student-led. I often provided the framework and the theoretical prompting from our readings, but the contributors to :: repurposed :: were always the contributors to our reimaginings of The Village. They did the work. And they mostly had fun with it, I think.

During a particularly lively full-group discussion one Thursday evening, while the others deliberated amongst themselves, I sat near the front of AT 208, across the desk from where Bolu patiently waited for the classroom to become a computer lab again. But this evening, about 5 or 6 weeks into the semester, Bolu asked, “is this an English class?”

“Yes,” I said. “The students are working on cognitive maps of The Village, thinking through one of our readings.”

“This isn't like any English class I've ever seen,” Bolu said.

“Oh? Why do you say that?”

“Well, the things you're talking about, the way you teach the course, the way they're discussing things. It's different,” Bolu said.

After class, I spent some more time talking to Bolu about the course. He was genuinely interested in the subject matter—in rhetoric—and in learning more about the work we were doing.

The next day, I added him to the Blackboard site for our course, so that he could access supplemental readings from Emig, Spinuzzi, Brummett, Porter et al, Diehl et al, Low, Soja, Sack, and Massey, among others. He started reading, on his own. He listened during class and took notes.

I asked Bolu to sign up for Google Reader, and had him subscribe to the Bundle that we used in conjunction with the course.

One Thursday evening after class, he told me that ENG 444 was the highlight of his day.

The week that we had this blog up and running, the week of October 19th, I formally introduced Bolu to the class, and I informed everyone that he'd be an important contributor to the blog.

And he was. And he still is.

-----

At the end of finals week, Bolu came by my office so that I could ask him a little more about his involvement in the course. It was frankly thrilling for me to meet someone so interested in what we were doing, so invested in a course he wasn't even registered for, so intellectually curious.

I simply asked Bolu what interested him in 444, what made him participate in the ways that he did.

He told me that the course seemed informal and discussion-based—that there was room for participation from all who felt inclined to do so. As I mentioned above, the mere discussion of space, place, the built environment, and the use and theory of rhetoric was likewise interesting to him.

He told me again that he didn't think it was an English class.

For Bolu, the stereotypical English class involved students writing papers and reading things. But he felt like the 444 students were more than students. That they were doing things beyond simply writing papers. And they were interacting in class, in Reader, and on :: repurposed ::.

Bolu told me that he felt like a part of the class on those Thursday nights. He knew the others by name. He paid attention and took notes. He read many of the same things as those enrolled, and he followed along especially in our sharing of links and ideas on Google Reader.

Once :: repurposed :: was up and running, Bolu read every post. He told me that he was constantly refreshing the site, looking for new contributions.

Bolu is truly a self-directed learner. He's planning on graduate school after graduation, and eventually hopes to own his own business.

He doesn't want to work 9 to 5.

Knowing what I know about Bolu, I don't think that's going to be a problem.

-----

I have more to say about how our group blog and emerging media tools like Google Reader can open up our classrooms to self-directed learners and to broader publics. The notion of making our classrooms more open, and of involving the public in our formative course work through tools like Reader has tremendous potential for immersive learning, in my opinion. But that's for another post...

"The Comedy of the Commons"

2010-02-02T11:27:00.005-05:00

Hardin's notion of the tragedy of the commons "made clear how the common ground in an English village, on which all could graze their sheep, speedily became overgrazed because each person had the use of it but none the responsibility for it. The more people grazed their sheep on the common, the more barren it became.

[. . .] The World Wide Web has created what we might call 'the comedy of the commons.' It has developed into an ever-richer community resource. The more people graze on it for their own purposes, the bigger it becomes and the greener its grass grows. It thus combines the power of a free market, where individual gain leads to collective benefit, with cooperative ownership of the cultural conversation."

~ Lanham (2006)

A Few Words About "Digital Literacies"

2010-01-31T18:54:00.004-05:00

Just what constitutes literacy?

Too big a question to tackle in a blog post, and quite frankly, I'm not the one to tackle this problem. But a few approaches...

Google runs The Literacy Project.

Wikipedia essentially suggests it's the ability to read and write.

Brian Street says that literacy is "shorthand for the social practices and conceptions of reading and writing."

Lankshear and McLaren (1993) contend that "literacy is many rather than singular." Literacy doesn't just refer to "an essential technology, a specific skill, or a universal phenomena such as print or script. Rather, reading and writing consist in myriad social and socially constructed forms."

Lankshear and McLaren (1993) also argue that literacy is "entirely a matter of how reading and writing are conceived and practiced within particular social contexts."

In other words, literate action can be seen as synonymous with rhetoric as situated, strategic discourse, the working definition of rhetoric that I use and continually explore with students.

Because literacy is defined by and pushed around into so many different and overlapping social contexts, the term gets appended to all kinds of other concepts--extended in curious ways.

Health literacy.
Financial literacy.
Digital literacy.

Let's think in terms of what digital literacy might entail, beyond simple facility with reading and writing within and for digital environments. It might include:

:: Understanding what makes the basic tools of digital environments tick: server, browser, URL, command line, etc. ::

:: Understanding and working with the basic tools of digital media production and consumption--a functional literacy ::

:: A broader, critical understanding of the tendential forces driving and shaping technology and society--how did we get to where we are with this stuff? ::

:: Basic understanding and facility with major platforms, protocols, standards, and languages ::

:: What Selfe (1999) calls critical technological literacy: a reflective awareness of all of the above ::

So, back to the forms. Digital literacy involves writing and reading in digital environments, yes. But it also involves understanding and enacting the rhetorical infrastructures that dictate what form such writing work will take in digital environments.

To that end, digital literacy isn't about using the frames in a WYSIWYG interface, or about placing content inside template-based tools. Digital literacy is understanding what made the tools in the first place. And the broader social and technological factors that impact the development and use of those tools, forms, and platforms.

On the "Death" of RSS...

2009-12-30T19:07:00.007-05:00

A screencast showing a specific use case in favor of RSS within the context of the RSS vs. Twitter debate.

Here, we see how ineffectual Twitter search can be for finding older tweets, and how important a feed-reader can be for archiving and retrieving those same tweets...

Polaroids

2009-12-28T13:19:00.003-05:00

[ Locus Communis ] Twitter as Digital Commonplace

2009-11-07T16:32:00.006-05:00

I gave a talk today at the International Digital Media and Arts Association annual conference. I almost always upload the slides for my talks, but because of the format for this conference--where presentations were limited to ten minutes--I decided to simply screencast the full talk and share it here.

I had a great time at the conference overall, and our panel fostered some excellent discussion. At just under ten minutes, the video takes some time to load; as always, I welcome feedback, questions, and discussion!

CMD, RFID, QR, and Touch at iDMAa 2009

2009-11-07T16:12:00.004-05:00

I spent some time over at the Center for Media Design during a break in the International Digital Media and Arts Association conference yesterday, and I had an opportunity to play around with the excellent integration of cross-platform media and information flow here at the conference. (If you have any interest, we've been blogging many of the conference sessions over at the iDMAa 2009 site).

Below are a couple of videos showing how iDMAa and the Center for Media Design have thoroughly integrated conference data (presenters, locations, abstracts) into the places, spaces, and ubiquitous devices that mediate our conference experience...

:: repurposed ::

2009-10-19T18:08:00.007-04:00

:: repurposed ::

:: repurposed :: is a blog exploring rhetorics, places, and publics from a group of researchers at Ball State University. It goes live tomorrow, though a preview version with a few posts are currently available. There are still some design issues to sort out, and some final preparations related to content.

While many of the contributions to the site will be from students in my senior seminar, the driving idea and impetus is the production of a sustainable and meaningful space for the ongoing discussion of the complex relationships between language, placemaking, and publics. Over the next few weeks, we expect to consistently have between 15 and 20 posts each week, and we are soliciting occasional guest posts from a variety of disciplinary and professional domains. We see this as a post-disciplinary endeavor, one which is ultimately focused on better understanding how we make meaning in and through our public places.

To that end, the site will consider wayfinding activities, architecture, mapping, ubiquitous computing and context-aware environments, the social production of place and the social construction of place, alleys and interstices, landmarks, edges, paths, and nodes, public discourse, walking, bikes, skateboards, autos, and the many ways that human beings repurpose their environments--discursively, materially, affectively--in order to make meaning.

Please consider adding :: repurposed :: to your feed reader or bookmarks. If you're interested in contributing--once or occasionally--on any aspect of rhetorics, places, and/or publics, please don't hesitate to contact me.

The Sartorialist

2009-10-16T15:38:00.004-04:00

If you've been reading this blog for any reasonable length of time, you're already no doubt aware that when it comes to certain things I can be slow on the uptake.

For example, only recently have I discovered The Sartorialist, certainly not a secret to the blogosphere. In fact, my discovery engine for such things being what it is, the find was purely serendipitous; apparently The Sartorialist is fond of shooting photos of stylish everyday cyclists, and my introduction to the blog was via Cyclelicious.

One day a couple of months ago I finally wandered over to the site, gave it a quick look, and added it to Reader. Since then, my jaw has dropped no less than 10 or 12 times. It's not as if I'm someone versed in the nuances of personal style or the vicissitudes of elegance and fashion. I'm clearly not. Nor am I even all that interested in the clothing and presentation which are integral to each post, yet I acknowledge their collective import.

What makes this blog stunning is it's (apparent) virtuoso simplicity:

On the Street....Left Bank, Paris

On the Street....Cheap & Chic, Milano

On the Street....Rue du Marche St. Honore, Paris

On the Street....One More Time, Milano

On the Street....Milan Now, Milan

Instead of fashion photography, I see expertly composed images of interesting people in interesting places. I see broader publics, architecture, city life. And I see post after post of perfect light. In my limited experience as a photographer, nothing could be more important. In nearly every post, the most important details are surfaced. As I noted above, it's only an apparent simplicity.

This is an amazing blog, one that I wish I had been following long ago.

Extending the Classroom: Conversations, Content, and Microblogging with Twitter

2009-10-15T13:07:00.007-04:00

I had the opportunity to give a fun talk today about using Twitter in educational settings. I was able to present in the brand new Schwartz Digital Complex in Bracken Library, as part of Ball State's Tech4U series. I was also able to make use of an impressive visual display that allowed me to stream tweets in Seesmic, a hashtag search on FriendFeed, and my own slides simultaneously (I actually brought a class to the "learning pod" section of this fantastic facility on Tuesday and shot some video, which I'll upload soon).

The talk essentially mashed together ideas from some other research projects and presented some new material geared toward pedagogical approaches and student engagement.

This last bit was perhaps the most interesting, as it drew from the Ball State University Fall 2008 "Making Achievement Possible" survey of first-year students. The MAP Works survey indicates that 46% of first-year BSU students spend between 30 minutes and two hours on social networking websites each day. A full 40% of students spend 2 or more hours each day on such sites. My sense is that these numbers are underreported.

In other words, 86% of our first-year students, as of 2008, are spending time every single day with communities that look like this:

Creative Commons image by luc legay on Flickr.

I asked: as an educator, where are you in that picture? Where are the influential scholars and teachers in your field? Do we see their avatars represented in the social networks where our students are spending their time? Should they even be there in the first place?

I don't have any easy answers to those questions, but I did suggest some ways that faculty at Ball State can incorporate microblogging into their curricula and pedagogies. I've embedded the slides from today's talk below, and as always, I'm happy to provide a transcript as well. Tommy and Ben from the Center for Media Design were there shooting some video, and I assume it will eventually surface at some point; when it does, I'll link to it!

Backchannel Persistence and Collaborative Meaning-Making

2009-10-14T12:30:00.004-04:00

Last week I had the pleasure of delivering a paper relatively close to home, at the 27th ACM International Conference on Design of Communication (SIGDOC), at Indiana University in Bloomington. I was especially excited to be on a panel with Shaun Slattery of DePaul University, and Jason Swarts of North Carolina State University--two scholars that I hold in high esteem.

Our panel explored the traces of literate activity that are surfaced and archived in new media writing environments, and which lead to the construction of "fact" on Wikipedia, and the development of provisional knowledge in microblogging platforms. All three papers called on Actor Network Theory and/or Cultural Historical Activity Theory as a way to frame and trace computer supported collaborative work.

I added some theoretical frameworks that are likely too much for a 6,000 word manuscript. I like what I have here, but it's meant to be the start of something much more substantial. In short, my paper amounts to a longish position piece which aims to establish a theoretical framework for tracing meaning-making in persistent backchannel platforms (such as Twitter).

The official published version, should you be able to navigate behind the paywall, is available through the ACM portal. The full proceedings--which include excellent papers from Shaun, Jason, and a number of other fantastic researchers--can also be accessed through ACM. I've uploaded a pre-publication version of the paper to Scribd, and it's available below:

Finally, I've embedded the slides for my presentation as well. If you've seen me present in the past, you'll know that I take a minimalist approach to slidedecks, favoring images over alphabetic text. So, if you'd like the script that accompanies the slides, let me know!

Considering Charles Mudede

2009-10-12T13:51:00.006-04:00

My feed reader is mostly all business. I read items in the order they arrive--not by topic, not by blog--oldest to newest, in a great big tangled mess of interestingness.

The usual suspects are there: every major tech blog you can think of (and some you probably can't), stuff on ubicomp and mobile computing, academic blogs from colleagues in my field and someday colleagues in other fields, and feeds from architecture, urban planning, design, and computer science. There are, however, a few feeds pointed in other directions, mostly toward popular culture.

Of these "other" feeds, one of my favorites is The Stranger's SLOG (and its musical accomplice, Line Out). I read The Stranger for a variety of reasons, but mainly because I find the writing entertaining and because I love Seattle.

Charles Mudede is an associate editor at The Stranger, and a faculty member at Pacific Lutheran University. He's also a key reason why I read SLOG with interest.

Mudede's posts are anomalies to a certain extent; they stand out by virtue of their juxtaposition to the mass of posts published each day on SLOG. This is not to say that the other posts aren't entertaining, informative, and even heady; they often are--perhaps just as often as they are not--and I am often inclined to celebrate both eventualities.

But Mudede's posts are something different, and they always stand out within the feed. In this sense, his posts benefit from the juxtaposition.

Take Marxism and Insects for example. In between posts on Seattle politics or sex advice from Dan Savage, Mudede surfaces with a post that cobbles together Capital, the machinations of queen bees, Iranian politics, and Althusser's notion of the Ideological State Apparatus.

His posts are often pithily thought-provoking. Ideology Today contends that the national fuss over identity theft keeps us stridently and earnestly focused "on the least of [our] worries."

And then there's one of my favorite posts in recent memory, The Difference. A brief meditation on philosophy and representation through the forgotten Foucault and the remembered Foucault.

To consider Mudede in the midst of the madness is to consider a sharp arithmetic of cogitative concision: 2 fragments + 2 photos + 2 sentences = Foucauldian heuristic.

That commenters often seem befuddled, frustrated, and pissed off cements my admiration.

Long live Mudede, and long live SLOG.

Twitter and Commonplace Books

2009-10-02T11:17:00.005-04:00

Since 2006, I have been thinking through various iterations of a digital commonplace book. First, a little background on the traditional practice of commonplacing...

As early as the 14th Century in the west, literate populations began to cobble together bits of information--quotes, measures, thoughts, arguments, summaries, responses--on paper, an increasingly ubiquitous resource. These "note books" eventually came to be known as commonplace books, and they were a predicated upon tenets of classical rhetoric. George Eliot kept a commonplace book; so did Thoreau, Thomas Jefferson, and E.M Forster, among many, many others.

The Digital Commonplace

While people continue to keep journals--both offline and on--the online sourcing and collection of information and contemporary digital reading practices have provided different affordances for the same kinds of work accomplished in the traditional commonplace book. Delicious, Digg, Reader, FriendFeed--all of these tools enable knowledge curation practices which remediate the work of commonplacing to a certain extent. And the affordances are strikingly different: greater access to massive amounts of information, far flung, and harder to filter. If these affordances can be managed effectively, new communications tools can revive commonplacing in a significant way (in fact, if you're reading this, you are very likely already engaged in the kinds of digital commonplacing I am suggesting...).

As I mention above, I have been trying to develop the idea of digital commonplacing in concert with research on recursion in writing studies (and more recently, ambient research). For example, in 2006 my first-year writing students used a modified version of the WebCT discussions area to produce a (quasi) stream of short reading responses and thought pieces that eventually built from and played off of one another. Today, platforms like FriendFeed and Twitter afford commonplacing activities in ways that are persistent, searchable, copyable, and easily shareable.

A key, of course, is positioning the platform so that it can be effective for this kind of work.

I'm still thinking through these ideas, and I'll be discussing Twitter as digital commonplace book at the upcoming International Digital Media and Arts Association annual conference (iDMAa), held this year on my home campus of Ball State University. The abstract for that talk elaborates a bit on these ideas, and is embedded below. As always, I welcome feedback!

Google Wave :: First Impressions

2009-10-02T10:13:00.008-04:00

As someone who's been eagerly anticipating the initial public rollout of Google Wave, I waited with much anxiety and baited breath as the distribution of invites were pushed later and later into the evening of 9/30. I went to bed still hopeful, and awoke early to see my invite on 10/1.

Unfortunately, I didn't have a great deal of time to work in Wave yesterday, but I started to get some interesting things done with the platform this morning. I've embedded a screencast below which details some of the basics and some first impressions of the service.

Rule #1 of Wave: find people to wave with. No contacts on Wave is probably akin to being the first person with a Compuserve email address.

:: Update ::

Things are really moving fast in Wave, now that the contact list is growing. I've added a brief screencast to provide some insights into realtime public collaboration within Wave:

"Coursesourcing" a Blog Post: Sample Tools of the Digitally Literate

2009-09-15T12:44:00.009-04:00

This post begins on Etherpad as a way for my Intro to Digital Literacies students to collaborate and share some of the tools we've recently discussed in class. These various tools and sources can be used to promote digital literacy, and are simultaneously tools used by the digitally literate. We hope that some of these tools will be helpful to you!

Notepad++ is a text editing tool. Notepad++ supports several languages and has various translating options. Notepad++ promotes an eco friendly environment by optimizing as many routines as possible without losing user friendliness.-Brian

Blogger is a sweet blog site. Make a blog and follow me. Tyler

Twiddla can be used to colaborate in group online meetings with the same function as a traditioal whiteboard. Twiddla can make conferencing, project brainstorming and homework editing easier and more accessible. -Sam

Diigo is a great tool to bookmark web pages and interact with your bookmarked sites by highlighting and making notes. Diigo is also very funtional because it is based online, therefore you can visit your bookmarked sites from any computer. ~Lindsay

Delicious is a bookmarking website that may be used as a tool to organize and store favorite webpages within a web based community from any computer that has access to the internet. It also provides the possibility of sharing these sites with others and learning about new sites from other members' lists. ~Nadine

Flickr is where you can upload, edit, and share your photos. You can also make cards and photo books. ~Katie

Evernote lets you store searched items and look them up for later use. ~Briana

Wetpaint is specifically for designing websites about things that you are interested in. Check out websites about your favorite tv shows,etc. ~Erin

Tumblr is a website that can be used to post pictures, video clips, text, and music from anywhere on the web. One can even upload and post media that is located on their harddrive. ~Eric.

wikidot now it is easier to make website and you can share with your friends!! With using wikidot, make your own world. Yookyung.

The Impossible Cool was a very nifty website of impossibly cool people. It's also a great example of a Tumblr website. ~Ashley

Good Reads is an awesome place to see who else is reading what you're reading! ~Kelly

Google Reader is how I keep track of the blogs I read and other websites that are important to me. It is easy to use and is a one-stop spot for everything I want to read online! ~Hannah

Praxeological Paradise is a unique and informative political blog for opinionated college students. Register for an account Blogger here. ~ Katie

:: Update ::

I finally got around to screencasting some of the collaborative writing which resulted in the post above. Using Etherpad's slider function, I spent a couple of minutes contextualizing our collaborative writing activity.

A Look at Yahoo! Meme

2009-09-12T14:23:00.006-04:00

Yahoo's recent struggles to remain relevant have been well documented, from upheaval in executive management to the significant search deal with Microsoft's Bing. As a long-time Flickr user, I've never been particularly happy with Yahoo. Under Yahoo! ownership, Flickr has arguably regressed as social networks have burgeoned all around them.

Earlier this year, Yahoo! rolled out a new service called Meme in a Portuguese-only version, a move described at the time as akin to a Twitter 'Clone'. I recently received an invite for the service's English-language rollout. Early impressions? It's very cool--lighter than Tumblr, more functional than Twitter. I've created a screencast with some initial thoughts, comparisons, and a brief demo...

Upland

2009-09-07T21:00:00.004-04:00

Photos taken in and on the road to Upland, Indiana, where friends treated us to the beauty of Ivanhoe milkshakes. It's good to be in the Hoosier state.

Fall Syllabi

2009-08-26T18:57:00.004-04:00

It's that time of year once again, when the heat of summer dissipates into crisp fall evenings and the trees gain shape by losing shape, molting brilliantly colored leaves which fall into the paths of so many university students on so many campuses around the world. Marching bands will march, coffee will be consumed, and my students will scratch their heads for a few weeks...

In the time-honored tradition of my field, I make available to any and all the syllabi and course calendars from which my students will teach me and teach one another. There is some overlap, yes, but the two courses, despite the apparent similarity of the deliverables, will end up in very different places in just a few weeks. Comments and suggestions are warmly appreciated.

Smith Family

2009-07-24T17:07:00.003-04:00

Smith Family Bookstore, Eugene, Oregon.

The @Reply Experiment: Phatic Communication in Digital Publics

2009-07-17T14:47:00.004-04:00

Beginning on the morning of July 5th and concluding in the afternoon of July 12th, I updated Twitter 81 times, and each update was an @reply to another Twitter user. In other words, I made no updates that were not directly in reference to--and addressed to--another user (most of whom I already followed, but some of whom I didn't).

This experiment started simply as an attempt to curtail my own usage; at times, I feel like I might be spamming those who follow my updates, and I never want folks to feel like I'm overdoing it, that I'm posting too much. But more importantly, this was an exercise in concerted listening, in using the digital publics of Twitter to read, respond, and hopefully add to the conversations of others.

Here are a few (purely anecdotal) observations:

Listening Practices

Because I often feel like I'm simply posting things that are interesting to me and my research communities--things which surely are *not* interesting to all of those who follow my updates--my initial observation is that the @reply experiment forced me to listen to others in a very concerted way.

I've mentioned previously on Twitter that I read almost every update of every person that I follow. The main way that I'm able to do this is by enabling device updates for a large majority of the folks that I follow (granted, compared to others, I follow a relatively small number of people). So, even if someone is posting from a radically different time zone--and I miss those tweets in realtime--I catch up with them eventually via my mobile. In short, I'm already a pretty good Twitter listener, I think.

But active listening and purposeful responding are something else; these are the activities that were more strongly engaged during the @reply experiment. Not only did I actively read nearly every tweet, but I was more strongly aligned in a sense of addressivity--responding and reacting, and hopefully fostering conversation. Of course, this didn't always play out in practice (read on).

The Digital Phatic

It's certainly nothing new to assert that social network sites like Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook foster phatic communication online. But I want to suggest that the digital phatic is something much more purposeful (and thus rhetorically significant) than the commonplace gloss of phatic interaction as "small-talk." At the same time (because "small-talk" is itself rhetorically significant in many contexts), I don't want to suggest that this notion of the phatic--the "small talk" understanding--isn't a very valid descriptor of much interaction on social network sites (lol, lmao, ttyl).

For me, the @reply experiment suggests that the digital phatic is both/and. In support of a more purposeful and rhetorically significant understanding of the digital phatic, I simply offer the cost associated with a thoughtful @reply. Valdis Krebs, for example, is among the most careful re-tweeters and responders I know on Twitter. He'll often publish and rewrite a short response to another's post two or three times, until he feels that it's presumably acceptable for public consumption. How do I know this? Because I receive his updates on my mobile, and each update, even those deleted, (usually) show up on mobile devices once they're posted.

My point is this: many of my own @replies during this experiment were ostensibly phatic, but they also attempted to convey amplifying information or to engage conversation in ways more meaningful than the common sense of "small talk." Yes, writing under 140 characters, many will point out, carries little cost or effort. And yes, writing under 140 characters, many will point out, requires a good deal of skill and effort. Doing so while explicitly responding to/and or engaging others can enact both senses of the phatic simultaneously, thus calling for research on the potentiality of the digital phatic.

I Cheated

For the first few days of the experiment, I had zero issues with using Twitter as a reply platform only. I was quite happy, in fact, responding to the things that others found interesting or were discussing.

However, I came across a tremendously fascinating item in my feed reader 4 days in, a lengthy interview in The Paris Review with Gay Talese. This was something that I felt absolutely compelled to share with my Twitter community for two reasons: first, it's simply a brilliant interview that I think a lot of people would find interesting. But secondly, and more importantly, it's the type of sketch that's fascinating to writing researchers like myself for what it says about the writing practices of an expert. What to do? What to do?

I tweeted it. As an @reply. I cheated. Kind of.

As I sat there with this wonderful item to share, I thought about how I could maintain fidelity to my experiment while still sharing said item. I would @reply it to someone whom I felt would appreciate it, and possibly discuss or share with others. Who to send it to?

For some reason, Collin Brooke was the first person I thought of, and I just felt he'd appreciate the interview (for the record, while I met Collin briefly at last year's Watson conference, I certainly don't know him well; most of my interaction with him is through his scholarship and on Twitter. We seem to have similar interests, and that's perhaps why I thought of him with respect to the Talese interview). This exercise revealed a potential problem with using an @reply to initiate conversation/sharing: he never said a peep.

This is certainly not Collin's fault, and here's what I'm getting at: when someone updates Twitter, and one responds within a reasonable time frame via @reply, there's an expectation that the latter message is received. When one uses an @reply to initiate a conversation or to explicitly share something with another user, the expectation becomes something different.

For all I know, Collin was simply busy and didn't have a chance to read the interview. He might not have even seen it. He might have taken a look and decided it wasn't for him. The point is, I cheated and used an @reply as a means for publicly sharing on Twitter, and it didn't really work well, it seems. So, using @replies for responsive addressivity = win, while using @replies for initiative addressivity = fail in my limited and purely anecdotal sample.

Habits

Since the end of my @reply experiment on July 12th, I've posted an additional 50 updates. Interestingly, 32 of those were @replies. I've actually grown very fond of using the @reply to track and engage the posts of others rather than using Twitter as a platform for simply broadcasting things. I did some of the latter, to be sure, but I really like the idea of actively *looking* for conversations to join in digital publics, even if my contributions are rebuffed or ignored.

I think my ratio of public updates to @replies will remain relatively similar.

What's been your experience with @replies on Twitter, or addressivity in other digital publics? What am I missing here? Is this worthy of more in-depth and rigorous study?

Go Timbers!

2009-07-01T15:00:00.006-04:00

Tonight, the Seattle Sounders of MLS will travel down I-5 to PDX for a U.S. Open Cup showdown with the Portland Timbers of USL. No idea what I'm talking about? That's okay. A primer can be found here.

Go Timbers!

Un/Commonplaces

2009-06-24T17:20:00.003-04:00

Below you will find my completed dissertation, Un/Commonplaces: Redirecting Research and Curricula in Rhetoric and Writing Studies. If you have an interest in reading the document, please follow the link to Scribd, where you can download a PDF.

I am resisting the urge to comment on the document, but it is what it is. At times controversial, at times pedantic, at times, hopefully, insightful--I welcome feedback regardless. Enjoy (or not)!

Un/Commonplaces: Redirecting Research and Curricula in Rhetoric and Writing Studies

Tweet Research: Computers and Writing 2009

2009-06-16T14:44:00.004-04:00

I'll be presenting at the 2009 Computers and Writing Conference at UC Davis this week, and I've included the slides for my presentation below. If you would like a transcript of the talk, please let me know--I'm happy to provide it.

One of the most rewarding aspects of preparing this presentation was my interaction with Peter West, a management consultant and principle of Continuous Innovation in London, Ontario. Peter is one of my most important Twitter contacts, and he was gracious enough to grant me an interview which detailed how he uses Twitter within a broader suite of knowledge management tools and ecologies. My work with Peter is so interesting that I hope to work with him on a more substantial project in the very near future, as much of the information that he provided must necessarily be truncated for a short conference presentation.

Regardless, I wanted to provide a preview of Peter's workflow now, in anticipation of a more detailed discussion on Friday:

Peter has developed what he calls an “environmental scanning system” predicated upon a complex ecology of information sources ranging from RSS feeds of peer-reviewed journals to tools such as Twitter. He also relies heavily on both Google and Windows Desktops. He says that “each day, I manually scan the new citation releases from over 10,000 journals. Experience has proven that this is the most effective way to get a general sense of the literature that is being produced and to comprehensively capture relevant material.”

To get a better sense of what this type of knowledge work entails, Peter graciously tracked his activity during the month of May, yielding some tremendous insights into how he scans and disseminates research:

He processed 23,970 total citations, and spent 89.1 total hours doing so.

The highest number of citations processed in one day was 1,630 and the longest one-day processing time was 6.42 hours. Alternatively, the lowest number of citations processed in one day was 108, and the shortest single-day processing time was 1.1 hours.

He averaged 773 citations per day for an average processing time of 2.87 hours.

The Total number of journals included in these statistics was 4,298, however, he scanned another 5,834 journals during the period whose articles were not posted in Twitter, primarily because they do not provide open access.

Peter began sharing citations publicly via a blog called “SynapShots” back in 2002. One of his objectives was to foster reciprocity and conversation, an ethos achieved more readily through Twitter.

Regardless of your perspective on Twitter, it's clear that Peter is a very unique user and participant in this evolving social space. For my own work, his diligence is invaluable. I'm very much looking forward to talking more about Twitter at #CW09!

The University of Texas at El Paso approval for this study is filed under IRB protocol ID #117301-1--"Tweet Research: Aggregating and Disseminating Organizational Knowledge Work through Twitter"

Bicycle Wayfinding in the Early 21st Century

2009-06-08T15:00:00.004-04:00

I've long been fascinated with with the interstitial spaces of cities. Back streets, alleys, shortcuts, and other little-used or liminal spaces are profoundly interesting to me. One of the reasons has to do with the arrangement of such spaces themselves. Another reason is the potential they offer for alternate wayfinding, spaces separate from the traditional grid that nonetheless allow movement through a city in ways that are often far more effective and interesting than sanctioned norms of travel.

I can pinpoint my own fascination with such spaces: I grew up in a suburban home in a suburban environment where alleys and other interstitial spaces were systematically engineered out of the landscape through rigid norms of wayfinding predicated upon the ubiquity of the automobile.

So my fascination begins in lack.

Yet while my suburban childhood was scrubbed clean of the concrete canyons, alleys, and spatial loopholes of the big city less than 30 miles away, my family's home abutted "the creek" and an industrial park across the water, and both provided some of the liminal mystery missing from suburbia.

"The creek" was in reality a series of arroyos and wastewater drainage culverts connected throughout our subdivision at right angles that paralleled our suburban streets. By age 10 or 11, my friends and I had determined who lived on "the creek" and how we might travel to each other's homes (and other places throughout the city) without ever setting foot on pavement. The flattened rock roads that bordered either side of "the creek" became our preferred mode of wayfinding--by foot or by bike--and "the creek" became our haven, a liminal and semi-private thoroughfare ignored and concsiously unseen by the good citizens of suburban car culture.

Bicycle Wayfinding

A couple weeks ago TechCrunch featured a service called Ride the City, an organization whose mission is to help cyclists navigate New York City efficiently and safely. For navigation from point A to point B, the service allows you to choose the "Direct route," the "Safer route," or the "Safe route." This is an interesting appropriation of the The OpenStreetMap, and one that is increasingly viable given the ubiquity of GPS-enabled mobile phones. Moreover, any application which serves to increase the safety of bicyclists in major urban areas is both welcome and necessary.

Today, Wyrdy published a compelling piece called The New iPhone is a Pointing Device for the Real World: The Ground Will Speak. Among the more interesting points is the discussion of augmented reality and the ability to tag and interact with real-world spaces. Both Ride The City and the News-Wyrdy piece have me thinking about the ability to increase interaction with the city, to foreground the previously unseen, and to navigate urban environments via bicycle in ways that are subversive--ways which allow non-car citizens to reclaim and repurpose the city in part by networking automotive non-places.

Yet even as I am encouraged and energized by technology-enhanced bicycle wayfinding, I have reservations that stem from rhetorics of space and map-making. I am thinking in particular about Diehl et al's fantastic article "Grassroots: Supporting the Knowledge Work of Everyday Life" and the importance of understanding and uncovering the rhetorical infrastructures of mapping and wayfinding in and through their technological manifestations.

In short, I see the tremendous potential of GPS-enabled services for increasing the ability and effectiveness of bicycle wayfinding, but I also see tremendous potential for the limiting effects of a normalized consensus about what constitutes "appropriate" or "safe" bicycle movement throughout the city. Much of cycling, in my opinion and experience, is about circumventing or subverting the norms of automobile-focused city planning. Tools such as Ride The City should allow and embrace user-generated contributions of liminal and interstitial wayfinding.

In our age, most motion is done with the assistance of technology. The farther we go the faster we go, the less our bodies have to move at all.

As technology, legs themselves are almost obsolete. As technology, they have buried themselves in cars, elevators, and the telescopic hallways at the gates of airports. They are the evolutionary experiments of our species. Though we keep the hardware, we have lost the application. The intensity of our desire for motion has made our bodies merely units of transport, personal storage containers, carry-ons. ~Travis Hugh Culley, The Immortal Class

Culley's 2001 paean to the culture of the Chicago bike messenger, though at times overwrought and over-romantic, remains one of my favorite books. Culley argues that "the problems of cycling in the American City are as real as the problems of driving in the American City. They are in fact the same problem, and the courier should be credited for overcoming the problems of transportation with such admirably simple tools."

Much of Culley's book is about the philosophy that attends urban wayfinding via means anithetical to modern urban planning. He contends that

The bicycle is a revolution, an assault on civilian territory, intent upon taking, from the ground up, responsibility for the shape of our cities. It is a mutiny, challenging the ever-one-way street. The bicycle is a philosophy, a way of life, and I am using it like a hammer to change the world [....] ~Travis Hugh Culley, The Immortal Class

Culley's most lucid and effective arguments center on the experience of navigating an urban landscape built specifically to exclude bicycles. Such navigation considers the liminal, the interstitial, and those spaces consciously unseen by the automobile. More importantly, since most American cities were not built with cyclists in mind, subversive bicycle wayfinding can reveal things about the city--things which are generally ignored by mapping technologies--which can enrich our understanding of urban space.

When a motorist sees a biker run a red light, cutting through four lanes of traffic going twenty to thirty miles an hour, the driver is generally going to think that the messenger is totally insane, has no regard for anyone, and doesn't even care enough about life to look before rolling out into a stampede of steel.

[...] motorists will likely never understand this because they will never address the innate advantages a bike has over a car.

The kind of perception that drivers have behind a windshield, a set of small mirrors, a thousand-pound engine, and dashboard seriously limits their view of a cyclist's experience. The speedometer, the doors, the little sticker that says that the steering wheel is equipped with an explosive airbag, the seat belt, all of these aspects to driving a car condition the driver's mobility and perception.

Cyclists work with a much more open sense of immediate space than drivers do. They have at least 330 degrees of unobstructed vision [...] and about 720 degrees of hearing. [...] I see wholes, even at the highest speeds I can reach.

[...] Most drivers don't have this kind of metaphysical connection to their cars. The car for most people is an anesthetic, a wall between themselves and the world. ~Travis Hugh Culley The Immortal Class

Ultimately, and most importantly, Culley's experience as a bike messenger gave him a perspective on city planning that I invoke here as crucial to the present and future (grassroots) engineering of our cities beyond the dominance of the automobile.

How can a government of car-numbed, suburban politicians intelligently manage a street or organize a city when they are unable to see beyond their dashboards and their own symbolic aggression? Can a governing body that is so remarkably ignorant of the dynamics of a cyclist's behavior represent a cyclist's needs? And furthermore, should a governing body that only knows how to drive through a city be chosen to manage it? ~Travis Hugh Culley The Immortal Class

These questions bring us back to the technological tools increasingly available to those who experience the city on an alternate or cross-hatched grid, who navigate the interstices unseen by the comparatively massive population of steel-ensconced citizenry.

Lines and signs marked the street lanes explicitly for automobiles. The pedestrians were sanctioned to cross inside carefully drawn white lines. I was somewhere in between, unsure of which directions to follow. ~Travis Hugh Culley, The Immortal Class

Our tools need to be used in the interests of alternate wayfinding, of uncovering and communicating--on a larger scale--the liminal spaces conducive to navigating the city via bicycle, while simulatenously claiming a greater and safer propotion of the currently cross-hatched spaces of shared navigation.

In other words, we need strategic rhetorics of mapping, wayfinding, and user-generated local communication that makes bicycles more visible and viable in our urban environments. Leveraging some of the new tools available to us--in the spirit of the Grassroots article noted above--may help us do so.

Twitter, Mobile Devices, and User Retention

2009-06-03T14:32:00.009-04:00

As I've argued on this blog and elsewhere, the mobile component of Twitter is essential to a rich user experience. Having SMS updates enabled or using a mobile client such as Tweetie or Twitterific is a key factor in getting the most out of Twitter as a robust communications platform and as a framework for ambient research. While I've maintained this position over the last few months, I recently had the misfortune/opportunity to experience Twitter sans mobility, and I didn't like it much.

As you may know, one of my primary areas of research is the study of writing and rhetorics on ubiquitous and mobile small-screen devices. In fact, my impending move to Ball State University includes support for a new, more robust mobile device and data plan, as well as affiliation with the Center for Media Design, where I hope to procure funding and develop empirical studies of mobile media consumption and ambient communication.

The long and the short of the story is that my phone broke last week. More specifically, my phone's screen functioned intermittently and not very well, mostly not at all (though banging it on my desk seemed to help at times). There was no disruption is service or functionality--messages and calls still came through just fine--but I couldn't read those messages or determine who might be calling. As you might imagine, this presented some problems. I'm the type of person who will go on using something until it just won't work anymore (I still have--and use--a Palm Vx, for Pete's sake!), but this was something different.

My first order of business was to remove device updates from Twitter. That "solved" some of the problem, but I was still faced with incoming calls that I couldn't see, and additional text messages from others that I couldn't read. Moreover, my engagement with Twitter was rather poor. I figured it would be easier to elaborate on some of this via video:

So, certainly my experience here is purely anecdotal, but I am left wondering how mobile adoption might enrich one's experience of using Twitter, how it might make it easier for a new user to engage in conversation and to feel as though they are part of a larger community, and how their reading and writing practices travel with them. My unintended experiment in reverse-engineering the mobile UX of Twitter gave me a very different, rather underwhelming perspective on the service. In explaining Twitter going forward, I know that I'll be emphasizing mobile usage even more.

Wave Hello to Your New CMS

2009-05-29T12:51:00.006-04:00

Have you seen Google Wave yet?

For my colleagues in Rhetoric and Writing Studies, Technical and Professional Communication, New Media, and related fields, Wave represents your future course management system. Wave is going to make Blackboard, WebCT, Drupal, Wordpress, and other iterations of academic course management systems look awfully old-fashioned.

Now, a caveat. I have no more information about Wave than you yourself can obtain from any number of places, including first-look reviews from Tech Crunch, Mashable, and Google's Blog. I've even embedded the I/O keynote presentation which demos the new platform below.

That said, I do know a little something about working with CMSs from the perspective of writing research, curriculum, and pedagogy (as do many of my colleagues in the field who may be reading this post), and I can tell you that if the end-product performs anything like the demo, we can expect to use Wave to great effect in academe as soon as Spring 2010 (and more likely Fall 2010).

I want to do a couple of things in this post: first, I'll provide a little background on the idea of sympatry in the design of digital communication platforms. Then I'll discuss some of the highlights of the Wave demo from within this context, specifically addressing Wave's potential as a robust CMS for rhetoric, writing, and communications courses.

Finally, I've embedded the demo below. At around 80 minutes, it's not something you can digest quickly. However, it's very much worth your time if you're at all interested in exploring more effective CMS options. I also want to note that my enthusiasm for Wave is not based upon it's slick UI and the trappings of bleeding edge technology; Wave is significant because it's the first potential CMS I've seen that actually approximates sympatry, reveling in the complexity of contemporary, distributed, and digital knowledge work.

Sympatric Design Platforms

Back in 2007, I presented a paper at SIGDOC called "Agency, Invention, and Sympatric Design Platforms" (if you don't have access to the article through ACM and would like a copy, please don't hesitate to contact me). I argued that course management systems like WebCT and Blackboard (and, to a certain extent, even wikis) fostered frameworks of traditional writing pedagogy, partitioning student-users as isolated, individual producers of text-centric discourse.

Some of the problems with such platforms include poor or non-existent interoperability with other communication platforms where students already participate (such as IM clients, social network sites, etc.), little or no interface malleability (WebCT, for example, is essentially impervious to user-driven design changes), poor or non-exitsent collaborative writing/editing tools, poor collaboration with other institutional communication tools (like university email), little or no interoperability across courses a student might be taking (each course a walled garden), and a host of administrative issues for course designers.

The main issues for me, however, were the ways in which these course management systems reinforced problematic norms of traditional writing pedagogy. WebCT and Blackboard partition users as individual producers of alphabetic text. As an instructor working with and teaching postmodern notions of rhetoric, the course platforms themselves undermined my work, making distributed and collaborative knowledge work the exception rather than the rule, making student-driven design malleability a non-starter, and rendering alphabetic text as really the only valuable mode of communication, pushing visual and aural discourse to the margins, or to another digital space away from the CMS. Because of these problems, many instructors in my field have developed their own CMSs, using Drupal, WordPress, wikis, and blogs.

In 2007, I described traditional course delivery platforms (like BB or WebCT) as allopatric, a term from anthropology which theorizes speciation events as occuring through genetic separation and boundary formation. In terms of design and pedagogy, an allopatric classroom environment sees creativity emerging through separation, fostering traditional norms of text-centric individual creative genius in writing activity. This is a tremendously problematic position for folks in our field ascribing to notions of rhetoric as epistemic and ontological. The social turn has essentially argued exactly the opposite, in fact. Yet such norms are perpetuated in our predominant course delivery platforms.

I argued that sympatric design platforms should be developed, fostering collaboration, UI malleability, multi-modal rhetorics, and interoperability. Sympatry, in short, is the antithesis of allopatry. In genetic terms, sympatric environments see speciation occuring in the same geographic area, through genetic recombination and hybridization. A sympatric CMS, therefore, would foreground real-time collaboration, robust integration with other communication tools, and rhetorical knowledge work as complex, social activity. At the time, Microsoft's SharePoint was the platform closest to approximating this kind of complex distributed work. How things have changed in two short years.

Introducing Wave

Hopefully you're still with me. I provide the context above because without it my discussion of the Wave demo just won't make much sense. I recognize that borrowing terms from anthropology is somewhat problematic and even awkward, but I think the idea of sympatry in the design of digital communication platforms is still solid.

Vic Gundotra describes Wave as a "personal communication and collaboration tool," a description which barely hints at Wave's potential as a CMS for writing courses. In the notes to follow, I highlight some of this potential within the context of postmodern digital rhetorics. Wave, in other words, may actually be able to approach sympatry in communications platform design.

Wave is truly a platform--it's not an app, but a framework for communication ecologies that comes with a set of APIs that will (hopefully) enable robust extension and application development that operates within Wave (think of the iPhone application ecosystem, or the myriad Firefox extensions). Wave is premised on conversation and communication, not messages, as in email or threaded message-board posts. These conversations are hosted in the cloud, and thus always already internetworked; in other words, if I were typing this post on a Wave (such an option is built into the system, by the way), you would see it growing character by character, just as you experience speech, hand movements, and other bodily interaction in face-to-face conversation.

This real-time writing activity, just like face-to-face conversation, thus enables collaboration in a way that even current IM clients cannot approach. Rasmussen describes this as being able to devote 100% of your time to reading and writing. While this is certainly debatable, it introduces something to digital writing activity that has so far been absent.

Waves are essentially communication events that take a variety of forms--standard one-to-one asynchronous email-like conversations, group IM conversations in real-time, wiki-like environments for asynchronous collaborative document production, and even etherpad-like real-time collaborative writing. But Waves also enable something else: collaborative real-time blogging, webinar-like group interaction, collaborative real-time slideshow or presentation production, etc. These are, of course, just a hint of what can be done. Since Wave's APIs will be available to developers, the possibilities are as yet undetermined (think of the variety applications that have been built on the GoogleMaps API alone...).

Some other points of note: conversations in Wave include the ability to create private replies, so that backchannels can arise within primary communication spaces. You know how wikis have that cumbersome "previous versions" function? Wave has a "playback" function, so that if you enter a conversation some time after it began, you can hit playback (it's just like it sounds), bringing you up to speed by threading previous contrubutions contextually. Google is working on drag and drop operability between desktop and Wave (like dropbox), allowing you to add files, photos, videos, etc., instantly sharing that info across participant UIs.

Many writing instructors use blogging applications in their work. Waves can be published straight to Blogger. This is not simply embedding the content from the Wave, but embedding the full Wave on the blog, which means real-time, contextual collaboration on the blog. I could be editing from a Wave, you can be editing on the blog, and anyone viewing the blog can see this activity in real-time. Such embedding of Waves in blogs is important for student agency, allowing them to recontextualize work from the CMS to an environment which better reflects their own design choices.

Wave aggregates web conversations within the Wave UI. For example, I can integrate Tweets into a Wave, or conversations and information from FriendFeed. I can create Waves that pull data on a specific search term; like Gmail, I can search Google from within a Wave, embedding links with a couple clicks. I can import contacts not on Wave into the UI, allowing me to bring together previously splintered conversations and contacts. In collaboratively written Waves, there is support for illustrations, photos, videos, font differences, language differences--all in real-time; we are no longer talking about discrete and individualized text-centric writing production. Wave can enable complex rhetorical knowledge work, giving writing instructors a viable platform for teaching and exlploring that work.

From an application development perspective, Wave-as-platform has tremendous potential. But from the perspective of communication design, Wave is not revolutionary--this is what a CMS should be within the context of postmodern rhetorics, where writing isn't the product of isolated, creative genius, but the conflation and integration of overlapping publics.

I've said enough for now. If you're still with me, enjoy the Wave demo:

Memorial Day Weekend

2009-05-27T18:53:00.002-04:00

A couple of quick shots from the backyard. My 6 year-old is sporting a new summer dress--with galoshes--in the 90 degree El Paso heat!

In a Snapshot

2009-05-22T18:24:00.007-04:00

I recently completed a final draft of my dissertation, Un/Commonplaces: Redirecting Research and Curricula in Rhetoric and Writing Studies. The document is now in the hands of my dissertation director, Dr. Helen Foster, for a final review. I'm hoping any subsequent revisions and edits will be minor. . .

I'll have more to say about this project at another time (and will share it here, in its entirety), but I thought that I'd copy every word of the main document (around 50,000 of them), and paste them into Wordle for a quick snapshot of the terms and trajectories that comprise the dissertation research. My focus, borne out in this word cloud, is on writing and complex rhetorical knowledge work.

Atwood, Clock

2009-05-19T13:58:00.002-04:00

Randoms

2009-05-15T12:43:00.001-04:00

Representing Space

2009-05-12T15:19:00.005-04:00

When I close my eyes and remember my childhood, I am running across a bumpy field in Holland, the ball at my feet. I am 12 years old, wearing the red-and-black of my club, Ajax Sportman Combinatie, and we are playing against some farmers' kids from a local village. Each of them is a head taller than us, and the Dutch are the world's tallest nation. It is a cold autumn Saturday morning. ~Simon Kuper

This post is about landscape photography, and about the manipulation and representation of public space. This post is also about football, the (mostly) fluid manipulation and representation of public space.

I've recently purchased a book of photographs called European Fields: The Landscape of Lower League Football by the famed Dutch photographer Hans van der Meer. I am running short of superlatives that will adequately describe this collection of landscapes so I'll keep it simple: it's stunning.

Van der Meer captures and weaves together so many of the things that inspire me, and thoughtfully articulates such representations--discursively and visually--in a way that is impossible to digest in one sitting. You see, these photographs are not about football, they are about spaces, places, and publics. Football, you see, is about spaces, places, and publics.

In 1988 someone in the Spaarnestad Archive in Haarlem, Holland's largest photo archive, showed me a pile of old football photographs. They were beautiful black and white prints of the Dutch national team's international games from the beginning of the twentieth century until the mid-1950's. Most of the photographs were taken from behind the goal, but some from a position up in the stands. The space in the images looked so obvious to me that I wondered why I had never seen football pictures like them before.

Taken with old large-format cameras, each photograph was pin sharp. You were allowed to see the entire setting of the match. The pitch was only the foreground. You could also distinguish the faces of hat-wearing men in long coats in the opposite stand, the flags on top of the roof and the trees beyond; sometimes even houses, or traffic in a street in the distance. I found these unintentionally photographed details touching.

In the archive you could see how radically the photography of football had changed at the end of the fifties: space disappeared from the images. In a sport which is all about the position of players on the pitch, the photographers had given up one of their most powerful weapons: the overview. ~Hans van der Meer

More importantly, photos of contemporary football elide the quotidian realities of the game: it's rarely played as spectacle, yet nearly always photographically represented as such, in the cathedrals of sport where comparatively few are granted admission. Yet variations on the sacred spectacle are played in the publics of the everyday, nearly everywhere. Van der Meer's photographs offer representations of everyday publics, "as far away as possible from the Champions League."

The precursor to Van der Meer's European Fields was Dutch Fields, a work that respected landscape architect Dirk Sijmons calls "the best collection of photographs about the Dutch landscape" he had ever seen. Van der Meer is interested in the "second world" beyond the pitch--in the juxtaposition of publics--the manipulation of space from touchline to touchline, and the orderings of space beyond both.

Many of the collection's most remarkable representations of public space are muted and difficult to spot. In Consett, England, a muddy community pitch sits opposite a skinny wooden fence, duplexes and row homes arrayed haphazardly up a hill, the sky a slate, formless gray. The action on the pitch, in the forground of the image, escalates just outside the 6-yard box, as the Blackhill Comrades mount a menacing attack. To the far right of the image, a shaggy-haired blonde boy, perhaps 12, stands on the back stoop of his family's duplex in short sleeves, taking in the action with neither glee nor contempt. It is what it is.

In Marxloh, Germany, two teams kick up dust on a pitch that resembles a baseball infield, all gravelly dirt and white chalk lines. In the distance beyond, impossibly tall smelter smoke stacks rise above the trees that ring the pitch.

In Lourmarin, France, players from Lourmarin JS and Cheval Blanc, teams with nearly identical kits, anticipate a corner kick, while a handful of spectators sit upon a stone wall that separates a car-lined street from the pitch. Across the street are tasteful, tile-roofed commercial buildings, two or three stories high, with signs that advertise a pharmacy, La Poste, and Credit Agricole.

In Salon de Provence, France, the detail is easy to miss. A keeper stands alone on a dirt pitch, framed at the left of the photograph, hands on hips, standing near the top of the 18-yard box. His shadow stretches long to the right, streets, trees, and homes in the background. Directly behind and parallel to the goal is a medium-sized chapel, its roof, bell, and cross striking against a pale blue sky. To the far right of the image, just inches from the touchline, stands a priest in full vestments, hands drawn up in a prayerful pose. Like the keeper, he takes in the action at the other end of the pitch.

These photos are rarely about football, and always about public space. Public space in each of these photographs is often about football.

In Brilliant Orange, David Winner argues that "space is the unique defining element of Dutch football," that "no one has ever imagined or structured their play as abstractly, as architecturally, in such a measured fashion as the Dutch." Winner's assessment of the ways in which the Dutch fluidly manipulated the space of the pitch is astute and inspiring. And yet I wonder, how are young players in the dusty streets of Angola being shaped by the space that surrounds them, as they play right now? How will the kids playing in an alley of Marseille shape the limited space of their makeshift pitch? How does public space structure football, and football structure space? And how will we represent such interaction where it occurs?

[The above photos may be found in there original contexts here.]

Doubt

2009-05-09T19:15:00.004-04:00

A couple weeks ago, my wife and I made our first trip to the Wise Family Theater on the UTEP campus. One of her former students, Alejandra, is now a theater major at UTEP, focusing on production and stage management (not surprisingly, she has studiously avoided becoming my student too...). The department was in its second week of showing the play "Doubt," and as stage manager for this production, Alejandra graciously gave us tickets to see the play. I could not have been more impressed.

I'll start with the design of the posters that graced campus in the last few weeks. I'm not sure who designed them, but they literally graced our campus, making a clean, striking, and evocative visual argument advertising the event. I noticed the posters on several occasions, admiring the sparse style even before I knew of Alejandra's involvement with the production.

When we arrived the night of the play and took our seats, I was stunned by the design and quality of the set itself--a design which clearly echoed the impressive stylistics of the posters. I wish that I had taken my camera, or even made time to visit the next day, as the atmosphere was expertly shaped by three powerful objects suspended high above the stage: a rustic and empty doorframe to the right, a leafless and wicked tree, hanging prone to the left, and a beautiful round stained glass window in the center, shining brilliant colors on the stage at various points during the performance.

The acting was phenomenal, the story was gripping and thought-provoking, and the production, of course, was flawless. It was hard to believe that this was Alejandra's first major turn at stage direction. I am not easy to impress, and having never previously attended a production on campus, I will admit that my expectations were fairly low. I was wrong to have such an attitude. In short, the play was brilliant.

After the play, we visited with Alejandra, and she was excited to share her copy of the script with me. I was, of course, fascinated by her interaction with the document, how her writing and naming of scenes co-structured the course of the production. We are very proud to be Miners, and very proud of Alejandra. She's got a bright future...

Close

2009-05-02T11:26:00.002-04:00

Garden

13th and Kincaid

2009-05-01T11:07:00.000-04:00

Eugene, Oregon

The Age of Glosses?

2009-04-30T16:48:00.005-04:00

Mitch Ratcliffe (@godsdog) recently posted a lengthy treatment on the future of the book for his occasional ZDnet column. It's an intriguing read, and definitely worth your time if you're interested in such things (as I am). Ratcliffe is a cerebral journalist, and he's likely to invoke theorists like Deleuze or Foucault to support an argument. This is one of the reasons why I like him, and why I follow him on Twitter.

His post, "Books: Entering the Age of Glosses," begins with the following assertion:

Here’s the key to thinking about the future of writing, something straight out of the manuscript era: the humble gloss or “scholia,” for those who prefer the Latin.

Ratcliffe follows this thread, picks up on others (including a very interesting discussion of curation and cryptography that's worth concerted attention), and generally covers substantial ground in his exploration of reader-response in digital environments. However, I'm troubled by the reverse-engineering I see here (and in so much new media scholarship); why should the "key" to the future of writing be formulated from within a paradigm fundamentally at odds with digital discourse? Why should the "key" be found among our print-based past, amongst dusty, closed, self-contained artifacts that talk to each other in only the most rudimentary form possible?

I've been known to comment on blog posts from time to time, and I took a moment to relay my thoughts on the "future of writing" as conceived from within print-based paradigms of the past:

A Normative Approach

Some very interesting insights here, Mitch. I'm excited about your work on the future of writing, and I eagerly look forward to your forthcoming book.

I do, however, have some trouble with the general framework from which you seem to be exploring the future of writing. Based on this entry, you are applying norms of print-based textuality to digital space, and this, I think, is a mistake. It's one that continues to be repeated in a variety of fields (not the least of which is my own--Rhetoric and Writing Studies--which continues to proffer hermeneutic norms of print-based textuality to all manner of meaning-making).

This is to be avoided, I think, if we are ever to effectively explore the potential of writing in digital environments. Quite simply, print-based norms are not seamlessly analogous to digital writing, and remediating those norms brings along all of the baggage of book culture and applies it, ipso facto, to digital writing (even when we pretend or hope that it does not).

In a certain sense, marginalia seems quite a suitable analogy to commenting, for example. But it's dangerous to extend that analogy into discussions of what writing might be in digital environments, because it so profoundly limits what we can see, reverse-engineering digital writing through the framework of book culture. Marginalia and glossing privileges The Text, not user interaction (see for example, C. Davidson, 1986 for more on marginalia). Glosses are furtive, individual acts, isolated and contained. Blog comments, tweets, et al., are fundamentally social and public, privileging interaction between users rather than the hailed alphabetic text. It's not about the book alone, but about the writing that extends beyond.

This is but one example, and the prevalence of normative, print-based approaches to writing in digital environments is overwhelming. So, more than anything, I stress caution in privileging such a framework.

A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing.

I am encouraged by novel approaches to writing in digital environments (like the unbook, for example), and am skeptical of those that attempt to seamlessly graft old ways of seeing onto new, and drastically different paradigms. In some sense, this grafting and reverse-engineering is natural--and therein lies the heart of the matter--the "key" to productively exploring the future of writing. We need to rethink what we assume we no longer have to think about (Kopelson, 2008).

Randoms

2009-04-26T10:57:00.003-04:00