Going Gentle...

All this week, I’ll be leading a workshop at Lafayette Collegewith my colleague Ryan Omizo. We’ve been asked to provide a gentle introduction to the Digital Humanities and to help the new colleagues we are about to meet to think about how they might incorporate computational methods into their work as scholars and teachers. Throughout the workshop, we’ll invite participants to reflect and share their experiences. I’ll be sharing mine here on my occasional blog about Teaching with Technology.

This workshop is a special instance of TwT, but like all such occasions, it’s every bit as much a chance for me to learn new things as it is for the others attending. In this first post, I’m hoping to offer a glimpse into my own life as a researcher working at the intersection of DH, rhetoric and writing studies, and user experience. I’ve personally found this kind of self-portrait very helpful when I talk to others in DH because, perhaps notoriously, each scholar comes to DH from different disciplinary, institutional, and pragmatic angles. Hearing how others “Do DH” is a pretty important way that the DH community sustains itself and invites new individuals into the fold. This is what “The Day of DH” is all about, for example.

A Busy May
 

Results from the Hedge-o-Matic

The beginning of the Lafayette workshop caps a busy month for Ryan and me as well as another of my frequent collaborators in the world of rhetoric & DH, Jim Ridolfo. I flew to Pennsylvania immediately after doing two sessions at the Rhetoric Society of America conference on work with both Ryan and Jim. Ryan & I presented on a project called The Hedge-O-Matic, an article and an app that we recently published in Enculturation. Also on the panel were Enculturation editor Jim Brown and Production editor Kevin Brock. After a great intro by Jim who framed the project in terms of a well-known, but perhaps underappreciated structure in classical rhetorical education – the progymnasmata – I discussed the theoretical and ethical commitments behind the HoM. Ryan presented on the way our theoretical questions led us to make specific methodological choices, including how we trained the HoM to process and analyze text. And finally Kevin Brock did a reading of the HoM’s source code from a critical code studies perspective with a focus on the kinds of arguments the code itself can be seen to make when understood as a rhetorical text.

I also chaired and presented in a roundtable session at RSA organized by my colleague Jim Ridolfo, with whom I co-edited Rhetoric & the Digital Humanities. The roundtable was our way of continuing the conversation we hoped to begin with RDH by inviting early career scholars working in Rhetoric and DH to give brief updates about their cutting-edge work.

Krista Kennedy gave us an exciting preview of her forthcoming book Textual Curation, and framed the session beautifully with an overarching framework for digital composing. Seth Long demonstrated computational techniques for investigating authorial agency – by humans and non-humans – with a detailed and eloquent analysis of U.S. Presidential State of the Union Addresses. Jen Sano-Franchini argued for a feminist approach to user-experience design and showed three sample applications created by her undergraduate students that enacted values derived from radical feminist thought and UX. Casey Boyle proposed a speculative project – Quintillianism – to take more expansive advantage of the affordances of digital spaces, extending education beyond the boundaries of the four-year degree. Finally, Laura Gonzales impressed everybody in the room with an elegant, updated model of the work of translingual writers doing translation work based on extensive fieldwork with two different community organizations and over 6000 coded translation “sessions!”

It was an inspiring session for Jim and me. We also used the opportunity to announce our next project called #rhetops and issue a call for participation. If you have work that fits, please get in touch.

Thinking About Computational Thinking
Before RSA, Ryan & I gave a full day workshop on computational rhetoric at the Computers & Writing Conference in Rochester, NY.  So this really has been something of our Spring tour! But a common theme throughout has been computational thinking, and helping our colleagues wrap their brains around what its benefits and limitations may be for the kinds of work they do.

Looking forward to much more of that this week in Easton, PA! And I'll have more to say about it too. Stay tuned!