As a component of the Community of Inquiry Framework, social presence is typically defined as students “feeling real” enough to interact with and learn from peers online. This article complicates social presence for an online writing instruction (OWI) context, differentiating between social presence, social comfort, attitudes about online learning, and social learning. The study was initially designed to examine graduate students’ perceptions of social presence as an element of online teaching and learning in two sections of an Online Composition Pedagogy course offered in Spring 2020 and Summer 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic intensified the project, since students were now learning about hybrid and online pedagogy against the backdrop of their own experiences as emergency remote students and teachers. Analysis of 21 students’ reflections written during the courses indicates that distinguishing between social presence per se and social comfort, attitudes, and learning helps to account for the individual and social contexts of course participants. Ultimately, this article argues that simply inviting students to “feel real” or positioning yourself as a “real” instructor is not sufficient for establishing the types of social interactions that composition studies values.

In response to the numerous ethical issues involving big data, this article positions the infrastructural dynamics of big data storage and circulation as a concern for social and environmental justice. After identifying how big data accumulate in place-based ecologies that are made vulnerable to sustain ever-increasing quantities of data, the author explains how most, if not all, digital writing practices are relationally tethered to often distant places. In response, the author argues for developing and sustaining critical infrastructure literacies where big data infrastructures are not perceived as ethereal, cloud-like entities, but as materialities with relations to place, land, water, history, climate, culture, nation, and much else. Attending to infrastructure with a cultural rhetorics orientation attentive to relationality, accountability, and story, the article details four critical practices that place digital citizens within relational matrices where they are asked to account for how data practices affect a constellation of people, places, and environments.

As interest in online harassment rises in writing studies, so too does the need for new methodologies that account for the unique challenges that online harassment poses to social media researchers. Drawing from a research experience that left her vulnerable to harassment, the author presents three methodological concerns that harassment gives rise to: researcher safety, trauma and emotional fatigue, and publishing on online harassment. Throughout, the author provides actions social media researchers can take to prepare for potential harassment experiences during a research process. Ultimately, the author argues that researcher safety is a necessary prerequisite to other research concerns, such as participant and data safety, and should thus be foregrounded in research designs.

In this article, an analysis of multimodal representations in elementary school students’ descriptive texts about the mobile game Pokémon Go (PG) is used to discuss youths’ new literacy practices emerging from their out-of-school experiences (e.g., gaming, producing game-walkthroughs, and fan art). Social semiotic multimodal analyses of two students’ PG texts and their participation in talks around their texts are used to exemplify what occurs semiotically in the translation of meanings and designs across modes, media, and sites. Combining the analysis of the meaning potentials of multimodal representations with ethnographic accounts of their use in context produces the following findings: The PG writing task connects with the students’ life-worlds and the gaming context around PG prompts the design of their multimodal representations. The students are active creators of content and demonstrate purposeful and innovative uses of semiotic resources in self-representation, stance taking, and audience awareness. The iPad facilitates multimodal and digital crossovers between leisure activities and school subjects. The concluding discussion suggests how game-based literacy practices could be transferred into academic settings.