Fanfiction Reviews and Academic Literacy: Potential Impacts and Implications

This study is meant to elucidate how fanfiction-related activities can incorporate many types of critical review, to call attention to what has been overlooked as significant forms of learning, and to understand and take advantage of the opportunities fanfiction\u27s unconventional writing affords in lieu of more deliberate learning environments. This thesis was undertaken due to the significant gap in work done by aca-fan — a portmanteau of academic and fan— scholars who have strong links to the fanfiction community and culture. The aspects explored are the technical writing skills and techniques demonstrated in fanfiction reviews, the influence of the nontraditional online learning environment, the rhetorical strategies that reviewers use to give feedback, the significant categories of things that reviewers comment on, and the value of skills taught peer-to-peer in this manner. The results of my research suggest that peer review in a relaxed, non-academic context leads to improved confidence and skill among a wide demographic range. This thesis proposes that fanfiction writing, reading, and reviewing supports learning. The evidence suggests that it be incorporated where applicable in formal classroom learning to supplement traditional understandings of grammar, syntax, tone, and the use of universal tropes

T&C Magazine Issue 02 - Winter 2014

Articles include: Honor Code Uncovered // Winter Chills Bring Community Thrills // Inside Unpaid Internships // Looking for Love in Virtual Places // 3, 2, 1 ... Action // Uptown Eats // A New Spin at Otterbein // Performing Arts Students Breathe Life into Campus // Beyond Borders // Save the Date // A Winter Wonder Wardrobe // Palm-Powered Playhttps://digitalcommons.otterbein.edu/tcmagazine/1001/thumbnail.jp

BArd Observer, Vol. 8, No. 7 (February 9, 1998)

News is whatever sells newspapers. The Bard Observer is free.https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/observer/1458/thumbnail.jp

EYE/I AND EYES/WE: REFLEXSIVITY AND INTERSUBECTIVITY IN AFRICAN GLOCAL VISUAL AND AUTO ETHNOGRAPHY

This dissertation aims to explore West African transnational experiences in order to further understand how identity markers and politics manifest anxieties for transnational migrants and their movements between America and Africa. It engages and expands contemporary understandings of transnationalism with a focus on generational migrants. Generational migrants are defined as 1.5 through second-generation offspring of African immigrants. For the purposes of this research, "1.5-generation" is defined as an individual who was born in Africa and spent most of their lives in America, while "second-generation" is used to connote an individual who was born in America to African parents. Reflexivity, intersubjectivity, as well as identity negotiation and/or “code switching” are explored to explicate the experiences of generational migrants. Influenced by the theories and arguments of Stuart Hall, John Arthur, Joanna D’Alisera, W. E. B. Dubois, Pnina Motzafi-Haller, Audre Lorde, and Chandra Mohanty, this dissertation argues for a multiplicity and fluidity of identity (i.e.: holding multiple and sometimes contrary communities while constantly moving between continents), but also I am advocating for the possibility of fluidity in the reflexivity as one moves between these identity markers to create epistemological questions, constitute authorship, and expand representation. This argument is explored in each chapter via problematizing familial structures, African Fashion, ethnographic filmmaking, and auto-ethnographic writing. These contributions will transform the conceptualizations of African diasporic identities from one that is historically limited by bicultural formation into one that asserts the complexity of diasporic consciousness, which will construct new texts

Eating and repeating : mimesis in food rhetorics

textThere is emerging, in the discipline of rhetoric and composition, a rhetoric of food. In this dissertation, I map the various approaches to food rhetorics, and I look at three different foods: burritos, kale, and kombucha. Using these foods as commonplaces, I explore the social and rhetorical discourse around them. I use “a cultural biography of things” methodology to describe the history of the burrito and use that history to contextualize Chipotle Mexican Grill’s new media strategies. Throughout the cultural biography of the burrito and the analysis of Chipotle’s marketing, I highlight a theatrical mimesis that blurs the lines between imitation and reality. I suggest that kale can be associated the books of Michael Pollan, whose work, I argue, constitutes a genre that establishes a set of conventions for how we think and communicate about food. I begin by looking at how Chipotle builds its corporate ethos by citing Michael Pollan’s books on its website. Then I approach Pollan’s body of work as a genre, showing how it establishes certain conventions in food discourse. We see transmissions of these conventions throughout food networks. I look at how fermented foods, like kombucha, travel through alternative food networks, like groups of “fermentos” led by Sandor Katz, until they have proliferated to the point of becoming mainstream. I show how Michael Pollan engages with the world of countercultural food movements like fermentos and argue that Pollan’s engagement with fermentos signals a move into posthuman rhetorics. Building on the idea of micropolitics, I posit a compostmodern micro(be)politics that re-articulates the human not as an agentive individual governed by autonomy, but as an ecology itself, situated within other ecologies. I conclude by reading “nobody cares what you ate for lunch” memes as a response to and provocation to an abundance of online food talk. We can read these memes as evidence of the significance of online food discourse. Instead of taking the memes at face value, we can ask, “who does care about food in online networks?”Englis

The Abstraction of Meaning in the Digital Landscape and the Communities that Form There

Computer-mediated technologies are changing how we communicate; the boundaries between oral, visual, and verbal communication, already difficult to distinguish, has blurred, becoming a construction with its own grammar and diction. One such visual/verbal-mixed unit of communication is the internet meme, an image, text, video, or performance meant to be circulated within digital communities. This open-ended medium begs for rhetorical study in this evolving digital landscape. Preceding scholarship that has blended the field of rhetoric with internet memes has tended to focus on a study of circulation (Mills; Taecharungroj and Nueangjamnong; Guadagno, et al.) or the use of specific forms and modes within memes (Huntington; Segev, et al.; Davis, et al.). It seems only recently that an eye has turned towards meme-sharing communities and the larger effects these meme communities have on the internet and non-internet culture altogether (Shifman; Milner; Massanari). This thesis attempts to add to the literature an analysis of specific internet communities’ incorporation of ironic, absurd, and surreal elements in their visual rhetoric. Through an analysis of subreddits /r/DankMemes, /r/DeepFriedMemes, and /r/SurrealMemes, I will attempt to answer how these communities make meaning out of digital objects, as well as how they form create and reinforce the boundaries of their communities through interactions with such objects

How We Read

"What do we do when we read? Reading can be an act of consumption or an act of creation. Our “work reading” overlaps with our “pleasure reading,” and yet these two modes of reading engage with different parts of the self. It is sometimes passive, sometimes active, and can even be an embodied form. The contributors to this volume share their own histories of reading in order to reveal the shared pleasure that lies in this most solitary of acts – which is also, paradoxically, the act of most complete plenitude. Many of the contributors engage in academic writing, and several publish in other genres, including poetry and fiction; some contributors maintain an active online presence. All are engaged with reading’s capacity to stimulate and excite as well as to frustrate and confuse. The synergies and tensions of online reading and print reading animate these thirteen contributions, generating a sense of shared community. Together, the authors open their libraries to us. This is how we read.

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse