Increasingly we depend on social media and online publications for access to news and information that affects our lives and informs our decisions. With the speed of circulation and the everydayness of digital mediation, critical engagement with contextual elements of online environments is paramount to current rhetorical education. This lesson...
Wearables Lesson Plan: Yelp
Yelp is a virtual marketplace that has been shaping our spatial orientation for many years, since it was founded in 2004 and has increasingly expanded worldwide since 2009. Despite its vast impact on our daily life, its digital rhetoric has hardly been researched and is usually taken for granted without...
Speaker Event Recap: Professor Patrick Jagoda
The Digital Writing and Research Lab’s speaker series consistently brings talented scholars working at the intersections of rhetoric, technology studies, and digital humanities, to the University of Texas to present their research. In February of 2017, The DWRL hosted Patrick Jagoda, associate professor at the University of Chicago. Dr. Jagoda...
Workshop Recap: R and Twitter
In the first workshop of the fall semester, Lars Hinrichs brought his knowledge of English Language and Linguistics to the DWRL for an introduction to R and Twitter. While Twitter’s reputation certainly preceded itself, the workshop began with an introduction to R -- a necessary introduction for those of us...
The Rhetoric of the Digital Marketplace: Yelp
[cs_content][cs_section parallax="false" separator_top_type="none" separator_top_height="50px" separator_top_angle_point="50" separator_bottom_type="none" separator_bottom_height="50px" separator_bottom_angle_point="50" style="margin: 0px;padding: 45px 0px;"][cs_row inner_container="true" marginless_columns="false" style="margin: 0px auto;padding: 0px;"][cs_column fade="false" fade_animation="in" fade_animation_offset="45px" fade_duration="750" type="1/1" style="padding: 0px;"][x_image type="none" src="http://www.dwrl.utexas.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/yelp-logo-vector.jpg" alt="Yelp logo" link="false" href="#" title="" target="" info="none" info_place="top" info_trigger="hover" info_content=""][cs_text]We all did it. We all used Yelp. If you want to find out,...
Invisible Knowledge
Since you’re reading this online publication, I imagine that you, like me, leave hundreds of digital traces every day. A lot of these traces are things we can see--things like emails, texts, blog posts, twitter posts, photographs, Youtube comments, or Facebook likes. But today I’m particularly interested in the invisible,...
We Need to Talk About Credibility
Last week I hid someone from my Facebook news feed. We’ve all done it, and I’m sure people have done it to me. I was tired of seeing things that I found obnoxious or insipid or offensive or false or all of the above, and rather than unfriend them, I...
The Art (and Rhetoric) of Trolling
Matt Breece, a graduate student in Rhetoric, has been teaching the Rhetoric of Trolling for two semesters, accidentally becoming a trolling expert. I talked to him about his course, which he is teaching this semester in one of our DWRL classrooms. --Interview transcription-- Sarah Welsh: Hi Matt Matthew Breece: Hi...
Lesson Plan: Thyncing about Technology & Emotion
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Scandals and the Digital Code in the Presidential Race
[cs_content][cs_section parallax="false" style="margin: 0px;padding: 45px 0px;"][cs_row inner_container="true" marginless_columns="false" style="margin: 0px auto;padding: 0px;"][cs_column fade="false" fade_animation="in" fade_animation_offset="45px" fade_duration="750" type="1/1" style="padding: 0px;"][x_image type="none" src="http://www.dwrl.utexas.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/clinton-trump1.jpg" alt="A close-up picture of Donald Trump on the left and Hillary Clinton on the right. On the picture, it seems as if they look at each other from a...