Abstract This article profiles a University of North Carolina Greensboro undergraduate research digital humanities opportunity. The authors explain how their faculty-student-library team met challenges of generating a digital exhibit while overcoming typical resource constraints. They articulate three sites of applied knowledge the student gained from this research and detail the project design and efforts to call attention to invisible undergraduate research (UR). Such visibility facilitates additional course-based research opportunities and helps institutional stakeholders imagine further enterprising opportunities for UR despite time and material constraints.

This introductory article argues that contemporary academic teaching contexts are filled with anxiety. Students enter the classroom with a host of uncertainties, while teachers often suffer the burden of personal and professional anxieties of their own. Although many of these are historically specific, rooted in particular political, economic, and ecological circumstances, the authors argue that they may be productively approached through the strategies outlined in this introduction and the articles of this cluster of articles. They advocate tackling the question of anxiety consciously, responsibly, and tactfully, guided both by teachers’ experiences and by their knowledge of theoretical approaches to course content. Drawing principally from affect theory, but also enfolding concepts from intersectional feminism, digital humanities, reader-response theory, and other critical methodologies, the authors share tactics for working with anxiety rather than striving to eliminate it or ignore it. They argue that, once we see our pedagogy as anxious, we begin to see opportunities to broach it as a subject that can productively engage with the core tenets of academic inquiry.

This article argues that the primary role of the instructor is to help students understand and work with the difficult emotional states that arise from struggling to learn. Drawing on Sianne Ngai’s theorization of “ugly feelings” and using his own experience with digital humanities instruction as a case study, the author offers ways to center emotional work, especially work involving frustration and anxiety, in the classroom. Asking students to develop failed prototypes and reflect on the process, for example, can provide them with a better sense of what it might mean to succeed. Giving the same exercise twice, with artificially imposed difficulties the second time, might help them learn concrete steps for working through mounting irritation. In short, frustration and anxiety are not things that emerge from time to time—they are ever-present. The author argues that it is the job of instructors to develop ways to prepare students not for the unexpected failure but for the inevitable frustration that comes even with success.

This essay discusses how and why one instructor uses a wiki as a space for students in a partially online American literature survey course to construct a class time line of American literature and history. Through participation in the class wiki, students are able to engage with course content in more expansive ways and to play active roles in creating course content; as such, the wiki is a space where the traditional teacher-student hierarchy is dismantled, as students and teacher collectively share the responsibilities of developing, assessing, and revising timeline content. In discussing the learning opportunities a wiki offers in a literature survey course, the author also argues that instructional technology and online tools should not be incorporated into courses merely to follow trends in digital humanities. Instead, digital and technological components should be thoughtfully integrated into humanities courses in ways that enhance and expand learning while furthering the objectives of the particular course.

This article argues that getting students to learn about archival preservation and research in the context of an underpreserved, underresearched history offers a number of pedagogical rewards. Colleges and universities are pushing to increase community-based learning opportunities for undergraduates. At the same time, digital humanities initiatives are making it increasingly possible for undergraduates to work hands-on with primary sources, and a number of university-sponsored efforts are being made to process and digitize neglected African American archives. Many of these projects make use of graduate student labor, but few have recognized the benefits of engaging undergraduates in processing local and minority archives as part of their classroom experience. This article argues that such classes would not only build mutually beneficial relationships between town and gown but also encourage students to recognize that the approach to history they are familiar with—one that emphasizes national leaders and “major” events—is part of the same tendency to value the powerful that has caused African American history to be underpreserved. Preserving and publicizing local histories counters this tendency and may help produce a younger generation of scholars who are attuned to politics of power and privilege within the scholarship they encounter and produce.

This essay, focusing on Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes’s 1930 play and infamous literary collaboration, explores the possibilities of combining new digital tools with traditional scholarly approaches to better understand how the multilayered racial discourse of African American literature in the early twentieth century informs this signal collaboration. Moreover, Christian outlines the benefits of including African American literature in digital humanities projects.

Public writing spaces, such as blogs and social media sites, are expanding quickly with new websites, web applications, and other interfaces constantly available to users. As these digital composing spaces continue to expand, it is important that writers are capable of operating within them, yet many composition students lack the rhetorical awareness to present effective arguments in multimodal digital interfaces. To address this issue, the author designed a project to introduce students to public writing while reflecting on the implications of the permanence of their writing, the searchability of these public spaces, and their responsibility as writers. This project began by asking students to reflect on their own online personae, be it through Facebook profiles, personal blogs, or online class forums. Utilizing websites like Yelp and YouTube offered students the opportunity to see how others present themselves online and the effectiveness of composers in these digital spaces. Taught in an online course format, this project demonstrates how writing can live outside of the traditional classroom space and contribute to the students’ community. For the writing teacher, it creates the occasion to delve into students’ understandings of ethics in online writing while illustrating the rhetorical components necessitated by composing in digital media.

This article on digital writing identifies a range of genres that are employed by gamers, many of which evince dialogic rhetoric. Such discourse offers potential to decenter group power relations and thus suggests an opportunity to promote a democratic classroom.

This article describes an assignment that involves students in an exploration of the rhetorical practices common in Facebook, making use of rhetorical savvy that they have—but generally are not aware of—to teach the often-challenging skill of rhetorical analysis. The class discusses articles about Facebook use and redefines traditional Aristotelian rhetorical concepts in the context of the visually rich and collage-like texts that are Facebook profiles. Students take their cues from an anthropologist's analysis of identity representation on dorm doors to explore rhetorical practices of exaggeration also discernable in Facebook profiles. Students and teacher note features from Facebook pages that suggest tendencies to be popular versus being an individual or signs of addiction to the networking tool. This assignment that brings academic analysis to bear on non-academic literacy practices like the construction of Facebook profiles encourages students to reflect critically on daily activities that involve more complex rhetorical skills than they might otherwise notice. In addition to making students' often-tacit rhetorical knowledge explicit, breaking down the usual division between school and non-school rhetorics in this exploration of Facebook helps to educate teachers about their students' digital literacy practices.

With the long-term decline in the cultural capital of literature and a steep decline in tenure-track hires in literary studies, faculty across English are rethinking their relationship to writing. As interest in digital media grows, together with rising enrollment in courses in creative, civic, and professional composition, can the figure of writing provide a sense of disciplinary coherence? What will it take for literature faculty to agree that they, too, are interested in writers and writing?

In this article we focus on new methods of multimodal digital research and teaching that allow for the increasingly rich representation of language and literacy practices in digital and nondigital environments. These methodologies—inflected by feminist research, new literacy studies, critical theory, and digital media studies—provide teacher-scholars a promising set of strategies for conducting research and for representing students' work and our own scholarship in digital contexts.

In this essay, Tulley and Blair combine instructional and editorial perspectives to analyze how the process of digital composing reshapes often entrenched notions of authorship and composing practice within the English major by having students reenvision a traditional print genre, the book review, in digital space.

This essay explores the potential for wikis in English classrooms and writing pedagogy through discussion of a class project involving Wikitravel. Topics include the influence that wikis have on collaboration, an example of networked writing, and the role of writing with technology in knowledge creation.

Research Article| April 01 2006 Teaching Digital Rhetoric: Community, Critical Engagement, and Application DigiRhet.org DigiRhet.org Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2006) 6 (2): 231–259. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2005-003 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation DigiRhet.org; Teaching Digital Rhetoric: Community, Critical Engagement, and Application. Pedagogy 1 April 2006; 6 (2): 231–259. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2005-003 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Duke University Press2006 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.