Mapping A Geographical History of Digital Technology in Rhetoric and Composition
Ph. D. Dissertation
This textual dissertation functions in tandem with the Mapping Digital Technology in Rhetoric and Composition History project. It locates this project in its corresponding disciplinary and theoretical conversations, explicates project methodology, details the construction of project maps and online resources, interprets what selected map patterns suggest about field history, and posits how the project may be amended and extended.
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Productive Strife: Clark’s Cognitive Science and Rhetorical Agonism
2007 Humanities and Neuroscience Conference
This article written with Nathaniel Rivers posits that Andy Clark’s model of distributed cognition manifests socially through the agonism of human activity, and that rhetorical theory offers an understanding of human conflicts as productive and necessary elements of collective response to situation rather than as problems to be solved or noise to be eliminated. To support this assertion, the paper aligns Clark’s argument that cognition responds to situated environmental conditions with the classical concept of kairos, it associates Clark’s assertion that language structures behavior (Being There 195) with the long-held rhetorical stance that language is constitutive, and it examines the online encyclopedia Wikipedia as an enactment of what Clark and rhetorical theorists claim about productive agonism and the litigious nature of identity and cognition.
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Eddies in the River: Kairos and Complexity
2007 CCCC
It is possible to see potent connections between the ancient concept of kairos, which coalesced in an oral culture, and contemporary complexity theory, which is arising in an increasingly networked and digitized postmodern milieu. This work places these concepts, kairos and complexity, in an anachronistic conversation with each other in order to explore the shifts in the status of the rhetor (understood as author, persona, ethos, self, etc.). More specifically, this paper posits a framework in which the rhetor does not exist separate from its situation, but instead temporarily congeals through the rhetorical act, only to dissolve again. The identity of the rhetor thereby becomes a kairotic emergent property: a situated, contingent entity in world of perpetual flux.
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Meeting Community Needs Through Service Learning in Online Classrooms
This article, coauthored with Ryan Weber, provides a practical examination of service learning projects in online environments, and outlines their unique rewards and challenges. It draws from our experience conducting online service learning, and incorporates student writing, sample draft documents, and community partner feedback.
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Dumb People, Smart Objects: The Sims and the Distributed Self
Will Wright's The Sims has sold over 6 million copies, making it one of the most widely distributed commercial video games ever released. Perhaps surprisingly, this game has no explicit purpose nor goal, but is rather a microcosmic simulation of human life focused on quotidian activities such as eating, cooking, sleeping, and of course decorating houses. Indeed, it may be stated that structures and commodities—not simulated humans—are the true protagonists of the game: a claim befitting a program that was originally planned as an architectural simulation in which virtual humans only served to evaluate structures.
This paper explores how the digital denizens of The Sims are not representations of autonomous thinking entities, but rather managers of competing impulses broadcast by their commodified environments. Each Sim becomes an emergent node in a distributed cognition system: a being constructed by how it responds to the affordances produced by the material elements of its environment. This paper utilizes the work of complexity theorists, posthumanist thinkers, and social scientists to contend that the cognition model at work in The Sims provides productive insights into contemporary human identity. Using The Sims as a lens, it is possible to view humans as dumb responders in increasingly smart environments, a depiction that seems appropriate in a progressively networked, digitized, and commodified culture.
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A Body of Texts: Memento and Mētis
2006 Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference
The 2000 neo-noir film Memento presents the case of Leonard Shelby, who, as the result of an attack that also ostensibly caused the death of his wife, can make no new memories (a real affliction called anterograde amnesia). Because of his condition, Leonard's obsessive quest to find his attacker must be carried out through an archive of handwritten notes, Polaroid photos, maps, and, mostly strikingly, tattoos. These mementos constitute a bodily archive which, in the absence of memory, records and affirms Leonard's concept of self.
The purpose of this paper is to examine how Leonard's separation from history and reliance upon his bodily archive position him as a figure of mētis. Leonard is perpetually thrust into a kairotic moment in which he must rely completely on his mētic ability to weave his assemblage of artifacts and situational context together into a coherent whole. In essence, Leonard has off-loaded his memory onto the tattoos and fragmented texts that constitute his diffused body, making him an ahistorical mētic figure in a perpetual present.
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Domination, Subjugation, Payoff, and Sexuality in Simon Suggs
2005 ALA Conference
Although Johnson Jones Hooper's Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs is more a collection of vignettes than a single work, a motif of building emotional intensity toward a monetary payoff repeats throughout the Suggs episodes. This work explores how Suggs's sexuality becomes displaced into the elevated excitement found through con artistry. A modified version of this paper, presented at the 2005 American Literature Association conference, investigates how Suggs's quintessential statement that it is good to be shifty in a new country manifests in his sexuality and discusses the resultant ramifications for contemporary southern sexual identity.
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Reflecting Hybrid Pedagogy Through Multiple Classroom Structures
2005 CCCC RNF
This paper explores how multiple classrooms structures may be utilized to reinforce different composition pedagogies and proposes that that multiple classroom structures—specifically the conventional, small group, and individual conference classrooms—should be utilized in conjunction with current pedagogy to reinforce the various generalizable, socially constructed, and individuated elements of writing.
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The Bloodsucking Brady Bunch: Reforming the Family Unit in The Lost Boys
2004 PCA/ACA Conference
Like any product of popular culture, Joel Schumacher’s 1987 stylish teen vampire film The Lost Boys reveals the social contexts surrounding its creation. This paper examines the film’s representation of family structures through the lens of three relevant analogues: J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and the 1970s television program The Brady Bunch.
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Challenging the Word Processor Model of Digital Composition
2003 CCTE
This paper contends that the word processor, the most commonly-used tool for student writing, reinforces a model of composition as a single, linear task. This paper proposes a different model of digital composition that breaks writing into multiple tasks and differentiates text generation and formatting.
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A Hypothetical Writing Tool Better Suited to Long Composition than the Word Processor
Masters Thesis
This work examines the discrepancies between the prevalent tool of digital composition, the word processor, and the current pedagogical model of composition as a nonlinear, recursive process. The paper proposes a hypothetical software application, called NoMo, that is more representative of a nonlinear approach to writing and makes corresponding use of the digital platform.
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Aristotle's Complex Self: A Response to Fukuyama's Our Posthuman Future
In Our Posthuman Future, political economist Francis Fukuyama argues that the regulated development of biotechnology is the morally-appropriate compromise between its untenable prohibition and its unrestricted furtherance—an argument he predicates in part upon a separation between humanity and its environments that he attributes to Aristotle. This short work challenges this view of Aristotle by locating in his works a much more complex connection between humanity and its surroundings, both natural and constructed, than the one Fukuyama identifies.
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Magical Rhetoric as a Political and Social Force in Classical Athens
The claim of this short work is that the rhetoric taught by 5th and 4th century sophists offered a democratic wellspring of political power that manipulated sanctioned governmental structures. Consequently, Plato vilified rhetoric as magic—i.e. illusion and deception—to protect aristocratic rule.
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