Past Research Projects
Video/Games (2014-2015)
Overview
Over the past decade, video-game players, critics, fans, and creators have integrated games and digital video in a variety of remarkably inventive ways. Video/Games will build upon this inventiveness, exploring the ways that digital video can function in tandem with video games in order to advance and contribute to rhetoric and writing pedagogy and scholarship.
Goals of the Project
While past iterations of DWRL gaming groups have focused on building games, this group will explore ways of remediating games to critical and rhetorical ends. Its goal will not be to write games criticism, but rather to invent critical and rhetorical arguments at the intersection of video games and digital video. To this end, group members might use digital video to critique games (as Anita Sarkeesian does in her Tropes vs. Women video series, for example). Group members might also remediate video games to illustrate and support critical rhetorical arguments, or create tutorials for instructors interested in incorporating games in the classroom. Bearing in mind the lab’s focus on rhetoric and pedagogy, the group will not simply engage in games studies; members will explore ways in which video games and videos about games can be read and repurposed by teachers, scholars, and students of rhetoric and writing.
Excitable Media (2014-2015)
Overview
This project group will explore and push the rhetorical limits of social media platforms, researching and practicing inventive uses of these composing technologies. Rather than positioning social media as antithetical to critical thinking and attentive rhetorical practice--as is common in mainstream discourse--members of Excitable Media will explore ways that scholars, teachers, and students of rhetoric and writing can use social media to encourage and enact rhetorical and critical reflection.
Goals of the Project
As Liz Kinnamon argues in the introduction to #Social Media Anxieties: A Zine on Digital Failure and Attachment, the most popular social media sites--e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram--are “becoming calcified” in their own unique structures of feeling: Facebook for announcing life’s successes, Instagram for what were once Kodak moments, and so on. In exploring social media as a ground for rhetorical invention and innovation, Excitable Media will attempt to interrupt this calcification. The primary goal of the group, therefore, is to find out what is possible for students, teachers, and scholars of rhetoric when we re-think the capabilities of social media and the rhetorical uses to which such media might be put. The group’s exploration of this question will help to situate their project within a larger scholarly discourse. However, group members will not only need to consider the question conceptually--they will also be encouraged to experiment with and enact innovative composition practices using social media technologies, perhaps even using social media to report and publish the group’s findings.
Audio & Video Research Group (2011-2012)
During the 2011-2012 academic year, the AVRG researched and created a prototype for an online tutorial series, including interviewing target audiences, researching extant video tutorials, creating and posting a sample video, and branding the series.
The group additionally AVRG on the lab's library of Speaker Series talks by recording all lab speakers and making the videos available through the lab's website and social networking sites. The group also filmed and/or audio recorded all major lab events.
Through this group, the DWRL and the Undergraduate Writing Center collaborated on a writing process video series called, simply, "WRITE." The video series features writers talking about all the aspects of their writing process that don't fit in a paper handout. The video series begins with the assumption that writing is embodied and situated in places. Writers at all levels--from undergrads to professionals--talk about how they work, where they work, the applications and technologies they use, and the situations they find themselves in.
Gaming Pedagogy (2012-2013)
In 2012-2013, the Gaming Pedagogy group researched the potential and applicability of a broad range of games in the classroom, from tabletop games, brief educational games, commercial video games, or serious games made by independent groups. Previous research groups have already laid the groundwork for such an endeavor by creating lesson plans on video games in the classroom and a master list of serious games on topics ranging from cancer treatments to Middle East politics to American civics. The Gaming Pedagogy group was tasked with creating an eBook that showcased this research. Ultimately, members researched the potential utility of eBooks in the DWRL and produced an eBook on that topic.
Immersive Environments Group (2010-2012)
The Immersive Environments group in the DWRL has historically explored the intersection of pedagogy, gaming, and virtual worlds.
During the 2010-11 academic year, the Immersive Environments group developed Battle Lines, an alternate reality game for teaching rhetoric, research, and digital literacy skills to undergraduates. Alternate reality games distribute a narrative across multiple media and environments, enticing players to solve puzzles by visiting websites, analyzing data, researching their environment, using library resources, and collaborating with other players. For its innovative pedagogical techniques in the service of rhetorical education, the group won the 2010-2011 John Slatin prize for Mastery of Electronic Media in Education.
In 2011-2012, Immersive Environments completed the second stage in this project. During the fall of 2011, the group adjusted the pre-existing Battle Lines game for use in a RHE 312 class by altering clues to better fit the learning outcomes for the course. The group then implemented the game and performed a case study in a single RHE 312 class in the spring. The team compiled the data from the study for publication in Kairos.
Engaged Networks (2009-2010)
Engaged Networks researched and sustained the DWRL's social media presence on Twitter and Delicious and developed new collaborative relationships with partners both on and off campus.
The group set out to make the popular digital humanities websites Connexions, Merlot, HASTAC and New Media Consortium more accessible and useful to DWRL members by researching their offerings and distilling them for ease of use.
Engaged Networks also collaborated with the Voices of Marlin Project, working with the students of Marlin ISD to developed both traditional and non-traditional teaching tools that could be shared with other teachers.
Geo Everything (2009-2010)
From 2009-2010, the Geo Everything group explored the relationship between geo-everything and emerging trends in writing. Specifically, the group engaged with recent developments in Google Earth, Google Maps, and other applications; and offered rich opportunities for interactive and collaborative writing. The group further researched how geolocation technologies embedded into mobile devices open up possibilities for undergraduate pedagogy and graduate research.
Rhetorical Peaks (2006-2010)
Originally designed by the Game Design/Virtual Communities Workgroup in the then-CWRL, Rhetorical Peaks is a video game designed for use in a freshman-level rhetoric and writing class. The game puts its player in the role of an undergraduate student whose rhetoric professor has died mysteriously. The player’s tasks are to explore the town of Rhetorical Peaks, interact with a variety of characters, and gather evidence to be used in a causal argument about the death of the professor. Rhetorical Peaks is probably our best-documented research project, and you can find more information about it here.
