This study examined adolescents’ perspectives on their multimodal composing goals and designs when creating digital projects in the context of an English Language Arts class. Sociocultural and social semiotics theoretical frameworks were integrated to understand six 12th grade students’ viewpoints when composing three multimodal products—a website, hypertext literary analysis, and podcast—in response to a well-known literary text. Data sources included screen capture and video observations, design interviews, written reflections, and multimodal products. Findings revealed how adolescents concurrently composed for multiple purposes and audiences during the literature analysis unit. In particular, students viewed projects as a platform to emotionally affect and entertain a broader audience, as well as a conduit through which they could represent themselves as composers. Emphasis was placed on creating cohesive compositions—ranging from close modal matching to building meaning at a thematic level and creating a multisensory experience indicative of the novel’s narrative world. These findings contribute a multidimensional understanding of adolescents’ various and interacting multimodal composing goals and have implications for leveraging modal affordances in the classroom.

Coding, like other forms of written communication, is both science and art. This is not a new or revolutionary idea. In 1974, Donald Knuth published "Computer Programming as an Art" and declared that "[a] programmer who subconsciously views himself as an artist will enjoy what he does and will do it better" (p. 673). In 1984, Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution introduced us to the Hacker Ethic, one tenet of which is that we can create art and beauty on the computer (p. 31). Many other authors and coders have argued similar cases about the socially situated nature of programming since.

Technical communicators should be conscious of how the algorithms that govern "middleware" (software that structures the presentation of data) constrain their ability to represent information. We use critical theory from the digital humanities to discuss how critical visual literacy allows designers to better present contextual information to enhance the user experience. We illustrate this approach with an example of medical communication by using social network analysis software to demonstrate the spread of Ebola in Africa.

In two experimental studies, we examined the effects of types of written production mode (hypertext writing versus linear writing, Study 1 and 2) and learning mode (performance versus observational learning, Study 2). Participants in Study 1 (Grade 10) were initiating the more formal academic argumentative text, while in Study 2 students (Grade 11) were familiar with the genre. Dependent variables were students’ content knowledge, self-efficacy for writing and text quality. For the independent variable written production mode both studies did show interaction effects between learning condition and pretest scores. For content knowledge, students with lower prior content knowledge performed best in the hypertext condition; students with higher prior content knowledge in the linear condition. For self-efficacy, linear writing was most effective for students with initial high self-efficacy (Study 2 only). For text quality, students with relatively very strong initial writing skills performed best in the hypertext condition, students with weak initial writing skills in the linear condition (Study 2 only). For the independent variable learning mode for the hypertext text learning activity (performing versus observing), almost no differences in effects could be observed: performing the hypertext learning activities or observing these performances did not make a difference, except to students with relatively low initial topic knowledge: students with low prior knowledge performed better in the performing condition. These complex patterns of interactions between learning conditions and pretest variables are discussed.

Except for metaphor, tropes are arguably irrelevant to the analysis of science and technology. Among tropes, moreover, hyperbole and irony seem particularly ill-suited as the former exaggerates, while the latter undermines, two strategies at odds with a language intent on closely following the contours of the world of experience. While neither hyperbole nor irony has a place in the professional discourses of science and technology, both play a role in their popular representations. Hyperbole expresses our sense that these achievements exemplify the sublime, a form of experience applied at first to feelings of awe generated by great literature, then in succession to natural wonders like the Grand Canyon, triumphs of science like Newtonian physics, and such technological achievements as the computer and the Large Hadron Collider. While the Collider, the largest and most powerful experimental apparatus ever built, is an unalloyed technological triumph worthy of hyperbole, some of the alterations in social life that the computer has ushered in are open to skeptical debate. This is especially true to the extent that computer-facilitated communication has taken the place of the face-to face interaction that makes a robust social life possible. Irony is this skepticism’s vehicle.

The bouleutêrion (the council house or assembly hall) was the meeting place of the council of citizens in ancient Greece under democracy. The architecture of bouleutêria has been less studied than has the architecture of theaters and religious monuments. The standard study remains William McDonald’s The Political Meeting Places of the Greeks (Johns Hopkins University Press), published in 1943. The study by Christopher Lyle Johnstone and Richard J. Graff that follows here builds on McDonald’s work but analyzes bouleutêria from a distinctly rhetorical perspective: in “Situating Deliberative Rhetoric in Ancient Greece: The Bouleutêrion as a Venue for Oratorical Performance,” they study bouleutêria from the perspective of places of oratorical performance. Theirs is the first study of oratorical sites in ancient Greece that includes both computer-generated reconstructions of the sites, enabling scholars to evaluate sightlines, and technical acoustical analysis, permitting judgments of what was likely heard from particular locations in a particular bouleutêrion. The increased interest in the material conditions of oratorical performances among rhetoric scholars and the uniqueness of Johnstone and Graff’s approach led to the decision to devote virtually this entire issue to their study. The responses to Johnstone and Graff by two scholars, Peter O’Connell, Classics, University of Georgia and author of The Rhetoric of Seeing in Attic Forensic Oratory (University of Texas Press, 2017), and James Fredel, English, Ohio State University and author of Rhetorical Action in Ancient Athens: Persuasive Performance from Solon to Demosthenes (Southern Illinois, 2006) complement Johnstone and Graff’s study.

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.

Under the rapid advances of digital technology, traditional paper-based forms of reading and writing are steadily giving way to digital-based literacies, in theory as well as in application. Drawing on a study of literacy in a medical workplace context, this article examines critically the shift toward computer-mediated textual practices. While a considerable body of research has investigated benefits and issues associated with digital literacy tools in medicine, we consider the affordances of paper-based practices. Our analysis of verbal interaction and textual artifacts drawn from a qualitative study of oncology visits indicates that the uses of pen and paper are advantageous for both doctor and patient. Specifically, they allow doctors to process and package information in ways that are favorable to their personal modus operandi, and they enable patients to participate in the medical visit and take an active role in managing their medical treatment. Understanding the affordances of paper-based literacy provides insights for refining digital tools as well as for motivating the design of possible hybrid forms and digital-analog intersections that can best support medical practices.

In The Iconoclastic Imagination, Ned O’Gorman sets himself to a difficult task. He surveys over a half-century of political thought, political discourse, and political imagery in order to examine and evaluate the relationship between visual and political cultures. It is to O’Gorman’s credit as a thinker and as a writer that he does not sacrifice depth for breadth. Indeed, his book is an exemplary work of rhetorical criticism, for it advances not only our understanding of neoliberalism as a rhetorical production, but also, and perhaps more significantly, it advances our understanding of how to do visual rhetoric.As a rhetorical history, the book offers a unique perspective on neoliberalism. Tracing the ideology’s origins to postwar efforts to reimagine the role of the nation-state, O’Gorman establishes that neoliberalism is best understood in the context of broader efforts to redefine what constitutes the legitimate exercise of state power. This history adds nuance to previous accounts of neoliberalism, particularly in its account of neoliberalism’s attitude toward images, an attitude that O’Gorman astutely identifies as iconoclastic. As manifested in images of national catastrophe—the Kennedy assassination, the Challenger disaster, and the 9-11 attacks, among others—the iconoclastic attitude regards as impossible the existence of any image adequate to representing America’s political processes more generally. For his part, O’Gorman demonstrates the error of this attitude by using these same images to represent a particular political process and to make his case for iconic representation as “the means by which we grasp our political existence” (16). This insight into the relationship between political and visual representation frames a series of case studies in which O’Gorman unpacks the ideological valence of images without reproducing neoliberalism’s hostility to visual representation. When understood in the context of rhetorical studies, this is a significant accomplishment. As with any discipline influenced by the linguistic turn, we too often regard images as vectors of oppression and false consciousness and seek to reveal them as such. Bruno Latour characterizes this attitude as a subtle and pernicious form of iconoclasm that reduces the critical operation to the trick of uncovering the trick; by exposing the manipulator behind the image, big ideology, big media, big whatever or whoever, we undermine the truth value of an image (“Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 30, 2004, pp. 239–42). However, the ease of the operation precludes deeper insights into images. Specifically, iconoclastic criticism cannot account for the processes by which we come to view certain representations as legitimate. This shortcoming, in turn, makes it difficult to comprehend the role played by images in various fields of human endeavor including, but not limited to, the political.It will come as no surprise to the reader that Kenneth Burke touched on the limits of the iconoclastic attitude, though he didn’t discuss images, at least not explicitly. Rather, he concerned himself with how to confront human error without undermining the belief in human progress necessary to positive social action. He voiced this concern in Attitudes Toward History, where he enjoined critics to strive for a “maximum of forensic complexity” that strikes a balance between “hagiography and iconoclasm” (226, 107). If we extend this call to the task of visual rhetoric, then our goal, to appropriate a phrase from James Elkins, is to make rhetorical criticism “more difficult” (Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction, p. 63). O’Gorman does exactly this in The Iconoclastic Imagination.Take, for example, the chapter titled “Zapruder,” in which O’Gorman traces the circulation of the eponymous film to throw light on a productive paradox of iconic iconoclasm. With each appearance—first in Life magazine, later in a television special, still later in the movie JFK—the Zapruder film occasions new efforts to resolve the tension between our collective dependence on representation and our growing distrust of images. In this account, the Zapruder film is the repeated focus of a grand critical effort to uncover the truth behind the image by dismantling it. And in every instance, we see the critics come to a similar conclusion: the film cannot allay suspicions about the official version of events, and neither can it offer a stable alternative. Instead, the film can, and does, signify the inadequacy of images to the task of representation, which in turn supports neoliberalism’s ongoing rejection of images as adequate to representing economic and political processes. The Zapruder film thus becomes an icon of iconoclasm.Ironically, the processes of signification that make the Zapruder film an icon of iconoclasm also make the Zapruder film available to O’Gorman’s decidedly iconophilic critique. As conceived by Latour, iconophilia, like iconoclasm, reveals the human hands behind the creation of images. However, where iconoclasm reveals the work of human hands to expose the image as a vector of false consciousness, iconophilia does so to gain insight into the image as an epistemological resource. And as elaborated by Finnegan and Kang, Latour’s conception of iconophilia encourages a stance on political imagery that does not look for something behind or beyond the image, but instead focuses on the flow of images to account for their function as inventional resources (“‘Sighting’ the Public: Iconoclasm and Public Sphere Theory, QJS, vol. 90, 2004, pp. 395–396). This is precisely the stance taken by O’Gorman, and in taking it he models what Burke might call a healthy attitude toward images—an attitude that embraces representation as salutary for democratic politics while at the same time acknowledging the ways in which the processes of representation can, and are, used to advance the neoliberal rejection of the same.All that having been said, and as O’Gorman points out in the final pages of his book, this approach has its limits. What happens when neoliberalism’s catastrophes do not yield images? What happens when, as with the 2008 financial collapse, we have no image of failure? Does neoliberalism escape critique? O’Gorman worries that the answer is yes. However, I wonder if this pessimism owes to O’Gorman’s treatment of the icon as the sine qua non of political representation. Perhaps, if we look to a different species of sign, namely the index, we will find cause for optimism.In Charles Sanders Peirce’s theory of signs, the index differs from the icon insofar as it signifies not primarily through resemblance, but instead though a causal connection to its referent (Philosophical Writings, 102–103). This is not to suggest that an index cannot resemble that to which it refers, but that it need not resemble it. For example, a fingerprint is an index, but so too is a weathercock; of these two, only the former resembles its referent. Nevertheless, in both cases the indexical reference is a representation amenable to interpretation and critique.O’Gorman suggests the representational possibilities of the index in his chapter on CNN’s coverage of the 9-11 attacks, in which he argues that CNN’s televisual coverage adopted the “style and logic” of the interface. In his analysis, CNN adopted a mode of representation that owed more to the referential logic of the computer interface than to the older, mimetic logic of photojournalism. This leads O’Gorman to posit the interface as a “new sort of icon,” one that does not represent limited or absent information, but instead organizes an abundance of incoming information into a coherent image of catastrophe (144–145). The interface as icon metaphor does important work, as it allows O’Gorman to uncover relationships between new technologies of representation and the neoliberal aesthetic. Nevertheless, it obscures the extent to which we can regard the interface as an index—a representation that reveals not through its resemblance to an event but through its referential connection to the same.With respect to the 2008 financial collapse, I propose we direct some of our theoretical and critical energies toward exploring the index as mode of representation. For although it might be true that the collapse did not yield an icon of iconoclasm, it did yield an abundance of indexes of catastrophe, signs linked to their objects by a causal connection. These indexes of catastrophe appeared in the form of “For Sale” signs, foreclosure notices, and half-finished housing developments. As critics, we can assemble these materials to create an image of catastrophe that will, in turn, serve as the basis for an iconophilic critique modeled after The Iconoclastic Imagination. It therefore seems to me that we need not worry about a lack of images, though we might need to make visual studies still more difficult. Fortunately, I think we’re up to the task.

Winners of the Gail E. Hawisher & Cynthia L. Selfe Caring for the Future Scholarship share their experiences and their suggestions for increasing diversity and inclusion in the Computers and Writing community.

Visualizing Digital Seriality" explores the modding community surrounding video games through a case study exploring how serialization relates to digital cultures. Through a series of data visualizations, the topic of seriality and methods of distant reading are offered to enhance critical code studies through digital humanities methods.

Ghost bikes function as MEmorials, or a public acknowledgement of the unspoken costs of petrocultural values. However, ghost bikes are temporary monuments: they are often stolen or taken down by public authorities within just a few days or weeks after their installation. We created the mobile augmented reality experience “Death Drive(r)s: Ghost Bike (Monu)mentality” to visualize MEmorials of ghost bikes digitally.

This study addresses the current debate about the beneficial effects of text processing software on students with different working memory (WM) during the process of academic writing, especially with regard to the ability to display higher-level conceptual thinking. A total of 54 graduate students (15 male, 39 female) wrote one essay by hand and one by keyboard. Our results show a beneficial effect of text processing software, in terms of both the qualitative and quantitative writing output. A hierarchical cluster analysis was used to detect distinct performance groups in the sample. These performance groups mapped onto three differing working memory profiles. The groups with higher mean WM scores manifested superior writing complexity using a keyboard, in contrast to the cluster with the lowest mean WM. The results also point out that more revision during the writing process itself does not inevitably reduce the quality of the final output.

Phatic refers to the rhetorical function of creating effective communication channels, keeping them open, and establishing ongoing and fruitful relationships, all of which are vital in the age of digital rhetoric, social media, and global intercultural exchange. In this realm, the professional communicator functions less as an originator of new information and more as a space designer, a facilitator of others’ online interactions, a curator of user-generated content, and a communication leader. The phatic function—especially relevant to online interactions such as virtual teamwork, intercultural communication, and user help forums—deserves significant attention as a primary purpose for professional communication.

Book Review| June 01 2017 Old Rhetoric and New Media Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice. By Douglas Eyman. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015; pp. 1 + 162. $75.00 cloth; $29.95 paper.The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. By John Durham Peters. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015; pp. 1 + 409. $30.00 cloth; $20.00 paper.Networked Media, Networked Rhetorics: Attention and Deliberation in the Early Blogosphere. By Damien Smith Pfister. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014; pp. ix + 272. $69.95 cloth.Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities. Edited by Jim Rodolfo and William Hart-Davidson. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015; pp. v + 330. $90.00 cloth; $30.00 paper. Katie P. Bruner; Katie P. Bruner Katie P. Bruner and Paul R. McKean are doctoral students at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Paul R. McKean; Paul R. McKean Katie P. Bruner and Paul R. McKean are doctoral students at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Ned O’Gorman; Ned O’Gorman Ned O’Gorman is Associate Professor of Communication at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Matthew C. Pitchford; Matthew C. Pitchford Matthew C. Pitchford and Nikki R.Weickum are doctoral students at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Nikki R. Weickum Nikki R. Weickum Matthew C. Pitchford and Nikki R.Weickum are doctoral students at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2017) 20 (2): 339–356. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.20.2.0339 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Katie P. Bruner, Paul R. McKean, Ned O’Gorman, Matthew C. Pitchford, Nikki R. Weickum; Old Rhetoric and New Media. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 June 2017; 20 (2): 339–356. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.20.2.0339 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2017 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The essays in this volume were selected from the 2016 Symposium of the American Society for the History of Rhetoric: “Rhetoric In situ” held in Atlanta, Georgia. The archaeological term in situ describes an artifact found in its original resting place. Artifacts not in situ are generally considered to lack context and possess less value to the archaeologist. This theme was, in part, inspired by Richard Leo Enos’s call for “rhetorical archeology,” including the discovery of new texts and recognition of nontraditional artifacts, as well as new approaches with greater attention to context (40). Similarly, Patricia Bizzell and Susan Jarratt have argued that one way to enhance our study of rhetoric’s traditions might be to “examine the rhetorical activity of a particular historical period in depth, with traditional, non-traditional, and new texts providing contexts for each other, and all embedded in much ‘thicker’ historical and cultural contextual descriptions than scholarship has provided heretofore” (23). Such a synchronic approach might demand new or borrowed methods, for example, those of cultural geography, archaeology, or art history. The essays included here reflect concerns about the scope of the rhetorical tradition, methods of rhetorical historiography, the recovery of nontraditional rhetorical artifacts, and ways of addressing rhetorical context, all of which lie within the expansive bounds of rhetoric in situ.The essays in the issue are organized somewhat thematically, grouped around Dave Tell and Diane Favro’s keynote addresses. Perhaps unsurprisingly, all of the essays are deeply rooted in place—the Mississippi Delta (Tell), Atlanta (Adamczyk), northern Georgia (Eatman), Jordan and Syria (Hayes), Rome (Favro), Athens (Kennerly), and Ancient Cairo, Oxyrhynchus, and Nag Hammadi (Geraths). The attention to methods used by the authors in this collection stand out. The first two essays by Tell and Adamczyk offer the kind of “thick” contextual work referenced by Bizzell and Jarratt but offer a diachronic approach to examine how memory and place change over time in relation and response to complex historic, social, and economic factors. The next two essays (by Eatman and Hayes) use a “participatory approach to rhetorical criticism … to analyze embodied and emplaced rhetoric” referred to as “in situ rhetorical fieldwork” (Middleton et al., 1). Favro’s approach bridges the essays that use participatory methodology and the classically focused essays that follow through the use of experiential technology. This technology allows the contemporary scholar to experience ancient places. The last two essays (by Kennerly and Geraths) turn to place as a lens to investigate (the reception of) canonical figures/texts informed and reformed by archaeological discoveries.Dave Tell’s keynote “Remembering Emmett Till: Reflections on Geography, Race, and Memory” opens the symposium issue by articulating the importance of the “politics of being on site” and the interrelationships of money, topography, affective power, and race in remembering Till. While Tell argues that “memory is established by place,” he concludes that the inverse is true as well: “the sites of [Till’s] murder have been transformed by its commemoration.” Similarly, Christopher Lee Adamczyk, in “Confederate Memory in Post-Confederate Atlanta—a Prolegomena,” argues for considering the changing physical and social contexts of memory sites over time. In this case, Adamczyk examines how monuments in Oakland Cemetery (an obelisk and the Lion of Atlanta) representing the “lost cause” narrative were located outside (spatially and ideologically) Atlanta, which was considered a progressive model of the “New South”; however, in the early 20th century a complex set of circumstances including the expansion of the industrialized city into the area once used as Civil War battlefields ultimately changed the relationship between the city and the “lost cause” narrative.Also focused on the geographic South, Megan Eatman’s essay, “Loss and Lived Memory at the Moore’s Ford Lynching Reenactment,” uses rhetorical fieldwork—participant observation at lynching reenactments—to access embodied memory. She marks this approach as in tension with the archive, which tends to present lynching photography from the perspective of white supremacists who took the photos and inadequately accounts for loss. Here Eatman advocates for participatory methods as an opportunity to access the “repeated embodied transfer of cultural memory” and to decenter racist narratives of lynching. Though focused on a very different moment in time and place—2014 Jordan—Heather Ashley Hayes’s “Doing Rhetorical Studies In Situ: The Nomad Citizen in Jordan” is closely related to the previous essay, particularly in its critique of power, though the emphasis shifts from a focus on emplaced rhetoric to a focus on embodied rhetorics about place. Hayes argues explicitly for participator rhetorical fieldwork not just for the sake of documenting “the moment of rhetorical invention,” but as a means for the rhetorical critic to “co-create imagined rhetorical possibility,” “destabilize colonial power,” and “to suggest that a literal transportation of the rhetorician into a space where discourse is being produced can, and should, be considered one way the arc of materialist rhetoric can intersect with struggles for decolonizing our field.”The final set of essays in this volume shifts to the classical period where the in situ methodologies discussed in the first set of essays becomes more challenging, if not impossible, given that access to place is limited. The classical essays begin with another keynote address from the symposium by Diane Favro, architectural historian and the founder and director of UCLA’s Experiential Technology Lab. In “Reading Augustan Rome: Materiality as Rhetoric In Situ,” she takes a research question: Did the changes to the city of Rome by the emperor Augustus effect the way an average viewer experienced the city? Using digital humanities technology, Favro is able show how a contemporary researcher can still experience the ancient landscape to answer such questions. Kennerly, while also focused on the classical period, departs from the participatory and experiential, instead using situatedness as a lens to examine Socrates. She argues that simultaneously we know more of the “hyperlocalized” Socrates through archeology and the decontextualizes Socrates through his reception. Socrates was, Kennerly argues, an outsider in Athens and as such is often a resource for others in liminal spaces—here Martin Luther King Jr. and James Baldwin. Cory Geraths “Early Christian Rhetoric(s) In Situ” closes the volume by answering Enos’s call for a rhetorical archeology—both recounting the discovery of gnostic texts in the 19th and 20th centuries and suggesting the implications of those texts for the field, including a better understanding of women’s participation in early Christian rhetoric.The scholarship from the 2016 symposium envisions the future of the history of rhetoric as richly embodied and emplaced, intertextual, dynamic in methodology, and importantly, engaged with discourses of power in an effort to recover diverse voices, memories, and experiences.

Research problem: The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of the cultural intelligence of a dyad (a team of two persons) on its global virtual collaboration processes and outcomes. Research question: Does a dyad's cultural intelligence have an effect on global virtual collaboration processes and outcomes? If yes, which effects does that cultural intelligence have? Literature review: We review literature on the management of cultural diversity in global virtual collaboration and cultural intelligence. The literature suggests that cultural diversity in global virtual teams is mainly managed with rigid approaches, which are ineffective in many situations. Leveraging cultural intelligence has the potential to improve global virtual collaboration. However, its effects at the team level or in a virtual setting are not yet clear. Methodology: We used a collaboration simulation with 70 participants recruited from two public universities in China and Germany to study the effects of cultural intelligence. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected through questionnaires, voice recorders, and computer logs. Bale's interaction process analysis was used to code the voice recordings, and ordinary least-squares regression was used to test the hypotheses. Results and conclusions: The results indicate that cultural intelligence has an effect on global virtual collaboration; the lower cultural intelligence and the higher cultural intelligence in a dyad exert different effects on global virtual collaboration. Specifically, the lower cultural intelligence significantly influences the frequency of collaborative behaviors, which further influence group satisfaction. In contrast, the higher cultural intelligence significantly influences the deliverable quality. The findings advance the understanding of the effects of cultural intelligence at a dyad level and on proximal behavioral outcomes. The study has practical implications for global virtual collaboration practitioners and collaborative virtual environment designers. The study is limited by using student subjects and a self-report measure of cultural intelligence, as well as by examining global virtual teams in their simplest form. Future studies are suggested to examine contingency factors on the relationships between cultural intelligence and global virtual collaboration processes and outcomes.

Previous research has documented the potential of digital projects for immigrant students to capitalize on their transnational knowledge. Yet, there are only limited insights on the practices and perspectives of immigrant adults in digital/multimodal composition. In this article, we explore how visual media are used by adults and adolescents as resources in the production of digital texts, and as artifacts to elicit accounts and memories. We draw from transnational approaches to theorize the role of technology in facilitating connections with students’ home countries. We use social semiotics and testimonio lenses to examine media they selected to represent their hometowns in (or nearby) the Mexican state of Michoacán. Lastly, we adopt methods of practitioner inquiry and artifactual literacy to elicit information about participants’ understandings and choices in the composition process. Our findings show that while transnational ties were relevant for all participants, their understandings about their hometowns differed across generations. Adults represented the homeland as a source of healing and miracles, while youth focused on concerns about crime and corruption. We also document the complexities of access to visual media through search engines. We show the ways family networks, travel, and media consumption shaped the composition choices students made, as well as how their current circumstances, roles, and concerns led them to share testimonios of struggle and faith. We discuss contributions to digital writing research across generations, and implications for pedagogical practices that leverage students’ transnational ties and migration histories

Much of the research on youth digital literacies relies on the experiences of exceptional cases, while less is known about more typical youth who share their writing in online spaces. Through the examination of a novice writer in an online space, this article explores the convergence of factors shaping young people’s networked writing and addresses recent critique of the New London Group’s(1996) Designs of Meaning framework. Data were gathered during a two-year ethnographic investigation of an online affinity space, The Sims Writers’ Hangout, and analyzed through a Designs of Meaning lens. Data sources include the writer’s posts on the site, responses she received from others, her Sims fan fiction texts, interview responses, and researcher field notes. Findings of this study make visible the multiple factors influencing this writer’s choices, revealing how Available Designs from within and outside the site shaped her creations and how she leveraged her online participation to Design products that met the expectations of this audience. This analysis contributes to the field’s understanding of how online affinity spaces influence youth digital literacy practices and argues that a Design perspective makes such shaping more visible. The article also argues for a more complicated notion of affinity space audiences as collaborators, rather than just supportive reviewers. These findings suggest the need for continued study of typical participation in online spaces and future research to examine networked writing within classroom contexts.

Welcome to the second issue of our third year of publication. As the journal has become more established, we are seeing a wide range of fascinating research and teaching work related to response to writing in both first and second language contexts. This issue is no different. In this issue, we present two research articles, two teaching articles, and a book review. In the first piece, “L2 Learners’ Engagement with Direct Written Corrective Feedback in First-Year Composition Courses,” Izabela Uscinski examines how second language learners of English engage with feedback from their college writing teachers. Uscinski draws on Svalberg’s (2009) definition of engagement, suggesting that it “encompasses not only the cognitive realm, but also affective and social.” To better understand how writers make use of written corrective feedback and whether it leads to meta-awareness and noticing of language structures, she recruited eight Chinese-L1 first-year college students taking a stretch composition course at a university in the United States. She asked the students to meet with her when they had received grammar feedback from their teachers and recorded the computer screen as they revised their essays. Playing back the recordings, she then asked the students to discuss what they had done and why.

Winner of the 2017 Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award Cámara Retórica: A Feminist Filmmaking Methodology for Rhetoric and Composition is a video book comprised of six video-essay chapters that connect film and video production, feminist filmmaking, and Rhetoric and Composition. Drawing from interviews conducted with ten faculty and graduate students in the field who produce and teach the production of moving images, as well as original footage and clips created by rhetoricians and filmmakers, Cámara Retórica weaves a visual and aural tapestry that performs the kind of feminist, moving-image scholarship it argues can be transformative for Rhetoric and Composition.

Aim: This research note narrates existing and continuing potential crossover between the digital humanities and writing studies. I identify synergies between the two fields’ methodologies and categorize current research in terms of four permutations, or “valences,” of the phrase “writing analytics.” These valences include analytics of writing , writing of analytics , writing as analytics , and analytics as writing . I bring recent work in the two fields together under these common labels, with the goal of building strategic alliances between them rather than to delimit or be comprehensive. I offer the valences as one heuristic for establishing connections and distinctions between two fields engaged in complementary work without firm or definitive discursive borders. Writing analytics might provide a disciplinary ground that incorporates and coheres work from these different domains. I further hope to locate the areas in which my current research in digital humanities, grounded in archival studies, might most shape writing analytics. Problem Formation: Digital humanities and writing studies are two fields in which scholars are performing massive data analysis research projects, including those in which data are writing or metadata that accompanies writing. There is an emerging environment in the Modern Language Association friendly to crossover between the humanities and writing studies, especially in work that involves digital methods and media. Writing analytics accordingly hopes to find common disciplinary ground with digital humanities, with the goal of benefitting from and contributing to conversations about the ethical application of digital methods to its research questions. Recent work to bridge digital humanities and writing studies more broadly has unfortunately focused more on territorial and usability concerns than on identifying resonances between the fields’ methodological and ethical commitments. Information Collection: I draw from a history of meta-academic literature in digital humanities and writing studies to review their shared methodological commitments, particularly in literature that recognizes and responds to pushback against the fields’ ostensible use of extra-disciplinary methods. I then turn to current research in both fields that uses and critiques computational techniques, which is most relevant to writing analytics’ articulated focus on massive data analysis. I provide a more detailed explanation, drawing from my categorization of this work, of the conversations in digital humanities surrounding the digital archives that enable data analysis. Conclusions: A review of past and current research in digital humanities and writing studies reveals shared attention to techniques for tokenizing texts at different scales for analysis, which is made possible by the curation of large corpora. Both fields are writing new genres to compose this analysis. In these genres, both fields emphasize process in their provisional work, which is sociocognitively repurposed in different rhetorical contexts. Finally, both fields recognize that the analytical methods they employ are themselves modes of composition and argumentation. An ethics of data transformation present in digital humanities, however, is largely absent from writing studies. This ethics comes to digital humanities from the influence of textual studies and archival studies. Further research in writing analytics might benefit from reframing writing corpora as archives—what Paul Fyfe (2017) calls a shift from “data mining” to “data archaeology”—in its analyses. This is especially true for analyses of text, which in particular foreground writing and analysis of writing as acts of transformation. Directions for Further Research: I recommend that future efforts to find crossover between digital humanities and writing studies do so by identifying their common values rather than trying to co-opt language and spaces or engaging in broad definitional work. I further provide a set of guiding principles that writing analytics might follow in order to pursue research that draws upon and contributes to both digital humanities and writing studies. These research projects might consider and account for the silences of writing corpora—unseen versions of documents, and documents’ elements not described in structured data—while attending to the silences that these efforts might in turn (re)produce.

Background: A shift of focus has been marked in recent years in the development of automated essay scoring systems (AES) passing from merely assigning a holistic score to an essay to providing constructive feedback over it. Despite all the major advances in the domain, many objections persist concerning their credibility and readiness to replace human scoring in high-stakes writing assessments. The purpose of this study is to shed light on how to build a relatively simple AES system based on five baseline writing features. The study shows that the proposed AES system compares very well with other state-of-the-art systems despite its obvious limitations. Literature Review: In 2012, ASAP (Automated Student Assessment Prize) launched a demonstration to benchmark the performance of state-of-the-art AES systems using eight hand-graded essay datasets originating from state writing assessments. These datasets are still used today to measure the accuracy of new AES systems. Recently, Zupanc and Bosnic (2017) developed and evaluated another state-of-the-art AES system, called SAGE, which enclosed new semantic and consistency features and provided for the first time an automatic semantic feedback. SAGE’s agreement level between machine and human scores for ASAP dataset #8 (the dataset also of interest in this study) was measured and had a quadratic weighted kappa of 0.81, while it ranged for 10 other state-of-the-art systems between 0.60 and 0.73 (Chen et al., 2012; Shermis, 2014). Finally, this section discusses the limitations of AES, which come mainly from its omission to assess higher-order thinking skills that all writing constructs are ultimately designed to assess. Research Questions: The research questions that guide this study are as follows: RQ1: What is the power of the writing analytics tool’s five-variable model (spelling accuracy, grammatical accuracy, semantic similarity, connectivity, lexical diversity) to predict the holistic scores of Grade 10 narrative essays (ASAP dataset #8)? RQ2: What is the agreement level between the computer rater based on the regression model obtained in RQ1 and the human raters who scored the 723 narrative essays written by Grade 10 students (ASAP dataset #8)? Methodology: ASAP dataset #8 was used to train the predictive model of the writing analytics tool introduced in this study. Each essay was graded by two teachers. In case of disagreement between the two raters, the scoring was resolved by a third rater. Basically, essay scores were the weighted sums of four rubric scores. A multiple linear regression analysis was conducted to determine the extent to which a five-variable model (selected from a set of 86 writing features) was effective to predict essay scores. Results: The regression model in this study accounted for 57% of the essay score variability. The correlation (Pearson), the percentage of perfect matches, the percentage of adjacent matches (±2), and the quadratic weighted kappa between the resolved scores and predicted essay scores were 0.76, 10%, 49%, and 0.73, respectively. The results were measured on an integer scale of resolved essay scores between 10-60. Discussion: When measuring the accuracy of an AES system, it is important to take into account several metrics to better understand how predicted essay scores are distributed along the distribution of human scores. Using average ranking over correlation, exact/adjacent agreement, quadratic weighted kappa, and distributional characteristics such as standard deviation and mean, this study’s regression model ranks 4th out of 10 AES systems. Despite its relatively good rank, the predictions of the proposed AES system remain imprecise and do not even look optimal to identify poor-quality essays (binary condition) smaller than or equal to a 65% threshold (71% precision and 92% recall). Conclusions: This study sheds light on the implementation process and the evaluation of a new simple AES system comparable to the state of the art and reveals that the generally obscure state-of-the-art AES system is most likely concerned only with shallow assessment of text production features. Consequently, the authors advocate greater transparency in the development and publication of AES systems. In addition, the relationship between the explanation of essay score variability and the inter-rater agreement level should be further investigated to better represent the changes in terms of level of agreement when a new variable is added to a regression model. This study should also be replicated at a larger scale in several different writing settings for more robust results.

Aim: This research note focuses on some of the consequences of big data as an emerging methodology. Its purpose is to provide a brief literature review of the method’s development and some of the critical questions researchers should consider as they move forward. Salvo (2012) contends that big data as a form of design of communication itself “is necessarily a rhetorically-based field” (p. 38). With big data as an up and coming methodology (McNely, 2012; Salvo, 2012), using caution in its application is a necessity for scholars. Not only should researchers seek out the unseen and untapped applications of big data, but they should learn its limitations as well (Spinuzzi, 2009). You adopt a methodology, you adopt its flaws. Problem Formation: This section identifies a gap in the field as it relates to some of the consequences of applying big data as a methodology and seeing it as a rhetorical tool. As big data gains steam in the field of humanities, some are sure to question what they see as a flaw: the act of quantifying language. This argument is not new nor is its rebuttal. Harris (1954) discusses the distributional structure of language with each part of a sentence acting as co-occurents, each in a particular position, and each with a relationship to the other co-occurents (p. 146). Salvo (2012) argues that the combination of these new methodologies and technologies “knits together invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery in ways that challenge conceptions of print based literacy and textuality” (p. 39). While big data itself has several rhetorical methodologies embedded within, deciding which one to use depends on the amount of data and how it’s aggregated. • Information Collection: As described above, this research note functions primarily as a brief review of literature. This section focuses on how writing analytics developed from content analysis in mass communications and shifted into latent semantic analysis assisted by computer technology. Riffe, Lacy, & Fico (1995) offer a clear explanation of content analysis, which was developed with comparably small data sets in mind: “Usually, but not always, content analysis involves drawing representative samples of content, training coders to use the category rules developed to measure or reflect differences in content, and measuring reliability (agreement or stability over time) of coders applying the rules” (p. 2). Finding a representative sample of content was once a more feasible methodology, but in the digital age that amount of content exponentially increases every day. Conclusions: As latent semantic analysis is an extension of quantitative content analysis (and vice versa)—and knowing that an adopted methodology carries adopted flaws—it makes sense to turn to some of the concerns voiced by mass communication scholars in order to understand limitations. While quantitative content analysis grew in popularity in mass communication, so did the refining of its methods. Reporting the reliability of a study adds credibility to the study itself, and when a human coder is involved, the reporting of this intercoder reliability becomes imperative (Hayes & Krippendorf, 2007; Krippendorf, 2008, 2011). While intercoder reliability measures the degree to which coders agree, researchers should also be keenly aware of the theory and valence informing their study, which impacts their coders, which ultimately impacts the results of the study itself. Directions for Further Research: As the field of writing studies begins to adopt big data methodologies, researchers must continue to challenge and question their applications, implementations, and implications, turning to familiar questions from our own fields. Big data is exciting and new, but it’s not the methodology to explain it all. It’s just as rhetorical as every other methodology—it’s just better at hiding it.

Drawing from their experiences teaching two different activism-focused writing courses, the authors consider the benefits, pitfalls, and potential dangers of activist writing pedagogy. Scott provides a retrospective on a rhetoric and writing course focused on the employment of digital rhetoric, while Katherine reflects on an activist-rhetoric course that culminated in the execution of an annual Take Back the Night rally. Despite the risk of “politicizing the classroom,” the authors argue that activist pedagogy, when thoughtfully implemented, can help students (no matter their political leanings) learn how to write, act, and think—necessary skills for a democratic society. Yet, while both authors support activist-focused rhetoric and writing courses, they also examine the ethical, pedagogical, occupational, and even legal issues that might arise from teaching such courses.

0Make, O Muse...0.1 Knowing I was speaking about disruption, I thought what's more disruptive than playing punk music for an academic talk? So I played punk for you. I'll play some more punk for you after the talk. It's hard to be complacent when you listen to punk. If you want, stick that in your head as the soundtrack for today's talk. Punk and disruption may also produce in your mind's eye the image of friends working in a garage or the basement, and I encourage you to keep that image in your head, because whether they're taking a new approach to rock and roll or inventing the Apple computer, the garage tinkerer and inventor is our muse today as we reflect on making disruptive and innovative action in our discipline and our organization.1CCCC1.01 I've been coming to the C's for a long time, since I was a graduate student in the '80s. For me (like many of you, I'm sure), the CCCC is a natural academic home. And it's easy to see why: a wide range of pedagogical approaches visible in the program, all our theories on display, varied interests (FYC, creative nonfiction, creative writing, linguistics, rhetorical theory, history, technical and professional writing), and a general concern about writing both in the classroom and in society. The convention has one of the friendliest and most helpful group of members in higher education. It's a culture of fun (witness C's the Day and its Sparkleponies), and a culture of sharing and learning, where most of us are like Chaucers Clerk in that would we [all] learn and gladly teach1.02 We have an acceptance rate that's stingy-but not too stingy- so that we can put a lot of people on the program. There are workshops on Wednesdays, and we serve as a magnet for other organizations such as TYCA, ATTW, and WPA-GO to meet at the same general time.1.03 And during this same span of time that I've been coming to our convention (which is, unbelievably, almost thirty years), I have seen the C's take steady and meaningful steps to become more than a guild of writing teachers and researchers, but also an organization committed to openness, access, inclusivity:We have established travel and research scholarships that are designed to enable travel to and participation in the convention for both international and domestic scholars who may not have travel support from their institutions. These awards, along with reduced registration fees, have benefited a host of traditionally marginalized scholars, including contingent faculty, graduate students, retired members, Latin American scholars, tribal fellows, LGBTQ scholars, among others. And the one that started it all, the Scholars for the Dream in 1993, includes membership in NCTE/CCCC, travel assistance, and mentoring to help foster future leaders in our organization.We have an inclusive leadership structure, where elected positions on the executive committee, nominating committee, and chair rotation are broadly representative of the diversity of our organization. And we continue to evolve in this respect. Did you know, for example, that we have in the last five years added elected positions on the EC for graduate students and contingent faculty?What sort of new discussions are possible in governance with broader representation?We have created and supported research throughout our organization, rewarding scholars at all levels, from our undergraduate posters to graduate students, our book and article awards, and our wildly successful research initiative.We have taken steps to ensure inclusivity without regard to rank, tenure, job title, or type of institution. We feature undergraduate research posters, a graduate student on the EC, a thriving cross-generational (XGEN) initiative, and SIGs for grad students and retired professors. The program includes papers and roundtables from graduate students, adjunct and contingent faculty, tenure-track faculty, non-academic or alt-ac practitioners-from private institutions, two-year, four-year, regional universities, and R1's. …

Research problem: Organizations continue to rely upon virtual teams, yet knowing how, and for how long, individual members' computer-mediated communication (CMC) anxiety affects virtual team interactions and performance outcomes is not well-known. Research questions: (1) What is the relationship between CMC anxiety and virtual team participation? (2) How does this relationship influence the perceptions of individual performance? (3) Does this relationship persist over time? Literature review: A literature review including communication and media structures, input-mediator-output team effectiveness, and individual CMC anxiety elements indicate researchable negative effects upon virtual team interaction and participation in CMC environments. Higher levels of individual CMC anxiety could dampen participation quantity, participation type (task versus social), participation quality, and perceptions of individual performance. Further, the initial negative interactions and behaviors could persist over time. Methodology: This quantitative quasiexperimental study involved surveying, observing, and coding the interactions of 22 virtual project teams (consisting of a total of 110 individuals) over a span of four months. The teams used a CMC tool with shared file space and discussion boards to coordinate database design and implementation work. Data were collected from questionnaire surveys, individual message postings, and team project scores. Individual message postings were coded to measure participation quality (task focus and topic introductions) and participation quantity (message count and words per message). Data were analyzed using repeated-measures multivariate analyses along with follow-up univariate statistical testing. Results and conclusions: The results indicate that individuals with higher levels of CMC anxiety participated less, sent fewer task-oriented messages, introduced fewer novel topics, and were rated more poorly by team members on their performance compared to individuals with lower levels of CMC anxiety. The results also show that CMC-anxious individuals do send relatively more social-oriented messages, perhaps to compensate for typical apprehensive communication behaviors in a virtual team environment. In addition, participation quality and quantity and perceptions of performance by CMC-anxious team members do not significantly improve, even with repeated interactions over CMC. Although study participants evidenced high engagement with the project tasks, the study is limited by its use of student subjects. The study suggests the importance of team leaders and role definitions for virtual teams, to counteract potential unintended effects of CMC technology use masking actual participation and contribution of virtual team members. Future research could investigate the efficacy of interventions for reducing the negative impacts of CMC anxiety in virtual team performance, as well as the influence of individual structures such as CMC anxiety in the use of CMC and team structures in the virtual team environment.

This study investigates the meaning of communication skills from employers’ perspectives. Students enrolled in a business communication course were asked to contact potential employers in their fields of interest, requesting information about important communication skills in those fields. Using content analysis, two coders familiar with business communication analyzed 52 of the resulting open-ended responses. The analysis of 165 skills suggests employers recall oral communication more frequently than written, visual, or electronic communication skills. Of oral communication subskills, interpersonal communication was mentioned more than other workplace communication skills.

Recently, research into the intersection of computer games and technical writing has been increasing, with more conference presentations and publications interrogating communication within the comp...

This study investigates Grade 12 students’ global and local strategies for writing from the Internet. Analysis of screen captures, think-aloud protocols, and interviews showed two global writing strategies: 1) Students created mediating planning documents; they alternated between researching online and creating mediating planning documents, then drafted a text, and then revised. 2) Students created no (or almost no) mediating documents; they wrote directly from the source documents, alternating frequently between researching, drafting, and revising. Each global strategy comprised several sub-ordinate strategies (e.g., search using a combination of content and rhetorical keywords; take hard copy notes; draft a text out of the sequence in which it appears in the final text; use automatic spelling and grammar checkers to guide review). Some of these strategies are similar to those used in print-based writing from sources. However, using the Internet also resulted in new researching and writing strategies. We argue that writers created task environments and used strategies that maximized the affordances of the Internet, electronic writing medium, and internal cognition, and minimized their constraints. This work extends classical cognitive work on writing as well as more recent work on writing from sources.

Book Review| June 01 2016 Autism and Gender: From Refrigerator Mothers to Computer Geeks Autism and Gender: From Refrigerator Mothers to Computer Geeks. By Jordynn Jack. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014; pp. 320. $95.00 cloth; $30.00 paper. Jennifer A. Malkowski Jennifer A. Malkowski California State University, Chico Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2016) 19 (2): 353–356. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.19.2.0353 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jennifer A. Malkowski; Autism and Gender: From Refrigerator Mothers to Computer Geeks. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 June 2016; 19 (2): 353–356. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.19.2.0353 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2016 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| June 01 2016 The Emergence of the Digital Humanities The Emergence of the Digital Humanities. By Stephen E. Jones. New York: Routledge, 2014; pp. vi + 212. $150.00 cloth; $37.95 paper. Jessica Rudy Jessica Rudy Indiana University, Bloomington Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2016) 19 (2): 360–362. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.19.2.0360 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Jessica Rudy; The Emergence of the Digital Humanities. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 June 2016; 19 (2): 360–362. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.19.2.0360 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2016 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.