My flash fellowship, the re-lineator, will be a digital pedagogical tool for poets, scholars, and students of poetry who are interested in exploring the interpretive possibilities posed by altering a poem’s line break. The basic premise of the re-lineator is to create a web app that will allow students of poetry to copy and paste … Read more
The DWRL is excited to host a Pedagogy Talk with Casey Boyle on Friday, October 19 from 12-1:30 pm in Par 102. As part of an ongoing pedagogy series in coordination with the Department of Rhetoric and Writing, Dr. Boyle will be discussing an undergraduate course he is developing for the Spring 2019 semester. Access Designed is a … Read more
Undergraduate students sometimes have trouble leveraging historical context to the end of persuasion. Reasons for this include that they may not see contextualizing (including the use of historical context) as a discrete and substantial task worthy of the same creative intellectual effort given the construction of arguments. That contextualizing is sometimes taught as just one … Read more
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 further critical awareness. In a … Read more
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 for Disability Studies, Bess Williamson … Read more
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 representation.” With this in mind, … Read more
Although closed-captioning is usually thought of in terms of accessibility, it also highlights the larger rhetorical significance of sound—a significance which is most notably taken up in sound studies. The convergence of rhetoric with sound studies has become increasingly salient to rhetorical theory as noted in the review essay “Auscultating Again: Rhetoric and Sound Studies” … Read more
Existentially, this lesson plan is about challenging student conceptions of information dissemination and questioning notions of universality embedded in web narratives of access. We like to think of the internet as a democratic space of unlimited maneuverability. But for many users, it is not. Here, we want students to consider the overwhelming prominence of visual, … Read more
Over the last “decades a revolution has taken place in the area of communication”: a revolution that has “dislodged written language from its centrality which it has held […] in public communication.” Gunther Kress observes that in this foundational shift towards more diverse modes of communication, visual media have gained most prominently in “many areas … Read more
Teaching students how to analyze an argument is no simple task, as rhetorical analysis exists on a spectrum of complexity ranging from the most commonly encountered modes of persuasion, to analytical frameworks that push the definition of “rhetorical action” to its limit and beyond. What this disparity demonstrates is that rhetoric is generative, inventional, it … Read more