In Carolyn Miller's foundational text in Rhetorical Genre Studies, "Genre as Social Action," (1984) she asserts the utility in studying "homely discourses." Examining the quotidian genres we interact with on a daily basis does not "trivialize the study of genres," Miller states, but it actually "take[s] seriously the rhetoric in...
Sounding Images and Imaging Sound
Image and code from wired.com Ferdinand Saussure provided a framework and vocabulary that can be applied in composition classrooms to understand the "arbitrary" nature of representational forms including sound and image. He famously gave us the vocabulary of semiotics including the “signifier" and "signified" within a framework that leaves meaning...
Lesson Plan: Failure Interviews
Image Public Domain, Flickr The goal of this lesson is for students to interview someone who has failed at something—in a small or large, invisible or spectacular way. Typically, when we conduct interviews, we target experts within a field who can dispense some knowledge for our imagined audience. For this...
Lesson Plan: Combining Digital Literacies (Piktochart, iMovie, Audacity)
Acquiring digital skills does not just mean learning how to find one’s way successfully when navigating on the internet, but it also involves, especially in times of the Web 2.0, “how to go beyond simply creating multimodal texts to knowing how to design these texts using visual rhetoric to effectively...
Lesson Plan: Making Documents Accessible for Screen Reader Software
In an earlier blog post, the DWRL offered various free resources and tips for creating visual content that is accessible to people with visual impairments. For example, The WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool helps pinpoint errors on a webpage interface that may be difficult for screen readers -- software that...
Lesson Plan: Digital Video Reporting Project (with iMovie and Audacity)
Today's shift towards the vast complexity of digital literacies involves, perhaps more than any other medium, the skills of producing digital videos, including the so-called "fact-based" documentaries and video reports. However, these "facts" are still "made" to fit a rhetorical message with its point of view, narrative structure, and appeals...
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...
Accessible Data Visualizations
Are you reading this blog post from computer screen or an screen reader? Did you need to adjust the font or text size, screen brightness, or filter the interface through a browser extension or rely on an app like Accessibility to access this information? In her entry on "Access" in Keywords...
Lesson Plan: Visualizing Difference with Tableau Public
In his much referenced TED Talk, David McCandless says that “if you start working with [data] and playing with it in a certain way, interesting things can appear and different patterns can be revealed” (5:57-6:14). And Virginia Kuhn argues that there are “two main uses for information visualization: discovery and...
Managing Attention in the Classroom with Distraction
Two of the more ubiquitous problems instructors face today are, on the one hand, the pervasive distraction of smartphones, and on the other hand, the inability to gauge a student's comprehension of classroom material in the moment. Although the latter issue long precedes the emergence of the former, these are...