Technology in the field of Rhetoric and Composition

The Watson Conference: the new work of composing

What’s it all about this year?

The purpose of the Watson Conference this year was to explore the act of composition in an time when new forms, techniques, medias and styles are coming to the ground of composition at an ever increasing rate. Presentation will be on everything from actual acts of this composition, theories on this composition, and pedagogical practices that might be applied in the classroom.

Key players

Katherine Hayles: Big Figure in new Media studies. Recently started a new program at Duke. New book out on Electronic Literature

Lev Manovich: professor of Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego where he teaches new media art and theory. Published The Language of New

Media

Key Players

Anne Wysocki: Teaches at Michigan Technical University. Very active in the field. Google her and you’ll see.

Janet Murray: professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she is the director of graduate studies in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture

Present and Absent Spaces: New Media Cities Jeff Rice from the University of Missouri discussed the use of space

in songs about Detroit in shaping the rhetoric of class struggle and moving up or across this divide. Jenny Rice, also from the University of Missouri discussed the ever present sense of technology within the city space and the way that it informed the way people conceived of writing about the city. This was mostly informed the change of technology over time and people’s perception of that change. The last reading by Cynthia Haynes from Clemson University talked about the use of more organic structures to create more harmonious architecture that would influence the use of the space.

Composing Maps, Mapping Composition: Time, Space, and Communication in a Mediated World The various papers in this panel discussed the ways that different

technology can give people new perceptions on the space they inhabit, both virtual and real. Charlie potter explored the ways that a sense of web-space is created through the use of search engines such as Google and how these engines privilege certain information in space. Justine Young had a similar project that looked at cognitive mapping as a way form of “mixing” as a form of new composition. Christopher Carter’s presentation looked at a person’s project to map the changes of different parts of Chicago and how this technology helped shaped the sense of space through time and composed a new sense of the city.

Designing Digital Scholarship (and Having it Count): A Case Built On Three Perspectives This particular panel focused on how to make digital scholarship

something that would be taken seriously in the realm of Academia. With things like student use of Wikipedia challenging the area the presenters offered up three different forms of serious academic work that used a similar form. Ben Mcorkle presented his wikified annotated bibliography site and discussed the advantages of being able to constantly update the sources for such an object. Susan Delagrange discussed her own attempts to get a piece of Digital work published and her experiences with revising such a work. The last presentation by Lewis Ulman demonstrates how designing multimodal electronic textual editions, distributed across multiple systems, invites rethinking traditional notions of reliability and textual witnesses.

The Materiality of Media

In this panel each presenter explored a different form of materiality in the act of composing. Stephanie wade did a presentation on having her students study political pamphlets and then creating their own multimodal pamphlets for different purposes. A very praxis oriented presentation. Kyle Mattson looked at the digital collections of old photos as a way of recording history and the decisions that must be made in transferring the information from one material form to another. The last presentation made an interesting and highly contested argument about the interactions of text and intertexuality and that there needed to be a break from the dichotoms thinking.

Why go to the conference?

Fabulous Box Lunches A chance to travel Something to put on the resume Mingling! Shmoozing!! Networking!!!