57,927 research outputs found

    Student Labour and Training in Digital Humanities

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    This article critiques the rhetoric of openness, accessibility and collaboration that features largely in digital humanities literature by examining the status of student labour, training, and funding within the discipline. The authors argue that the use of such rhetoric masks the hierarches that structure academic spaces, and that a shift to the digital does not eliminate these structural inequalities. Drawing on two surveys that assess student participation in DH projects (one for students, and one for faculty researchers), the article outlines the challenges currently faced by students working in the field, and suggests a set of best practices that might bridge the disparity between rhetoric and reality

    Entering the Digital Commons: Using Affinity Spaces to Foster Authentic Digital Writing in Online and Traditional Writing Courses

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    Despite the fact that the field of rhetoric and composition has been closely allied to the digital humanities for many years, instructors in these disciplines often remain on their own in terms of adopting, implementing, and evaluating digital technologies. While theoretical scholarship in digital rhetoric is advancing, instructional practices lag behind. Surveying 72 doctoral-granting rhetoric and composition programs, researchers found innovation in the implementation of new media comes primarily from solitary instructors (Anderson and McKee, 74). This article presents several ways in which writing instructors can leverage digital spaces to improve their pedagogies. In particular, the article focuses on digital spaces that James Gee calls “affinity spaces”. While Gee’s notion of affinity spaces often refers to gaming, the concept may be expanded to include virtual spaces that learners visit voluntarily such as blogs, ezines, social media sites, and digital backchannels. By leveraging such spaces, and implementing them using Michelene Chi and Ruth Wylie’s ICAP (Interactive, Constructive, Active, and Passive) framework, writing instructors can construct powerful learning environments. These digital spaces are not only part and parcel of the digital humanities; they are prime territory for engaging students in rhetorical processes – whether analyzing rhetorical messages or generating rhetorical artifacts

    Multimedia of the Mind: Digital Rhetoric and Interdisciplinary Acquisition

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    Multimodal digital narratives are currently in the spotlight for acquisition into the digital humanities. The narrative form is emerging with great research interest, the form having no previously established traditions. This research paper attempts to define the nature of multimodal digital narratives and their implementation into modern society. Specifically, the paper addresses the digital rhetoric appropriated by multimodal digital narratives and how it translates into modifying perceptions of society. This multimodal digital rhetoric is then explored in the context of digital activism and education, formative social discourses the augment societal perceptions. Digital rhetoric is utilized to augment a user’s reality to distort and influence societal perceptions. Audio, visuals, user interface, reading, and text all filter into digital rhetoric, compounding an author’s ideas with each added element. All aspects of a digital narrative are tended to create user immersion, creating a multi-sensory narrative. The quality of user immersion and variability in narrative navigation, provides a personalized meaning individual to every user. Digital rhetoric is a means in which the author shapes the limits of what a user retains from the narrative itself. Examining instances of multimodal digital narratives reveals the quality of societal distortion. By using my research to create the multimodal digital narrative, “Promise of Paradise,” I explored digital activism though the platform, Twine. Authors model reality through a predetermined system that allows for authorial intent. The system and elements, designed by the author, indicate motivation and display the specific intent an author has in the creation of their multimodal digital narrative. These concepts speak of immense power and capability, filtering into digital activism and modern education

    Digital Sound Studies

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    The digital turn has created new opportunities for scholars across disciplines to use sound in their scholarship. This volume’s contributors provide a blueprint for making sound central to research, teaching, and dissemination. They show how digital sound studies has the potential to transform silent, text-centric cultures of communication in the humanities into rich, multisensory experiences that are more inclusive of diverse knowledges and abilities. Drawing on multiple disciplines—including rhetoric and composition, performance studies, anthropology, history, and information science—the contributors to Digital Sound Studies bring digital humanities and sound studies into productive conversation while probing the assumptions behind the use of digital tools and technologies in academic life. In so doing, they explore how sonic experience might transform our scholarly networks, writing processes, research methodologies, pedagogies, and knowledges of the archive

    Digital Rhetoric of Cosmopolitanism: A Case Study of Thai Students at Michigan Technological University

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    This dissertation lies at the intersection of social sciences and humanities. It aims to examine digital rhetoric of cosmopolitanism of people from a marginalized culture as situated in the context of a transnational experience. I view that this rhetoric encompasses digital practices of cosmopolitanism or cosmopolitan repertoire, a set of skills or strategies used in communication via social media in everyday life. I also argue that this rhetoric is connected to other elements in its broader social and cultural networks. To illustrate these ideas, a case study of Thai students at Michigan Technological University in the United States is conducted to investigate their digital practices as they engage with the Other on social media. The final goal of the study is to identify the strategies of digital practices that might be used to negotiate or resist power embedded in the digital environment. To reach this goal, this study proposes using the interdisciplinary approach as the methodology. The methodological framework of this project is designed by consolidating various perspectives from new cosmopolitanism and digital rhetoric with a postmodernist lens as a background. The highlight of this framework is an application of the cosmopolitan ontological framework and the ecological perspective to study digital practices on social media in the context of participants. Within this framework, several qualitative methods are employed for data collection and analysis, namely interviews, participant observations, online observations, and rhetorical analysis. Overall, digital technologies like social media play an important role in establishing and maintaining relationships with people from other cultures. In this context, participants perform their cosmopolitanism in various types of cosmopolitan relationships by relying on a number of digital practices. These practices can be synthesized to form a cosmopolitan repertoire comprising digital literacy skills, multimodal communication skills, language skills, critical thinking skills, rhetoric, and ethics. The rhetorical analysis reveals that participants’ digital practices of cosmopolitanism are influenced by power embedded in some perceived factors in their ecological boundaries. Participants also rest on cosmopolitan repertoire in their negotiation of power. In its contributions, apart from some theoretical and pedagogical implications, this project also helps to shape the idea of digital rhetoric of cosmopolitanism by proposing a definition and a model to explain its ontological dimension. These contributions can lead to more understanding of digital rhetoric of cosmopolitanism and call for further study in this scholarship in the future

    To the Humanities: What does Communication Studies Give?

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    This special issue of Review of Communication presents new offerings of the study of communication, forging present and future humanities. This Introduction engages the six essays in this special issue—which extend and intersect across categories of the humanistic study of communication: communication philosophy and ethics, rhetorical theory, history, pedagogy, criticism, and digital humanities—to explore their contributions in defense of the humanities. Taken together, these essays explore the study of communication as (1) a resource for inquiring and exchanging with concepts, practices, and embodiments of difference, the other, and the posthuman; (2) a means of examining the ontological, epistemological, technological, existential, performative, and ethical implications of our communicative being, our being constituted by symbolic action and mediated exchange in ever-present yet always variant material and affective environments, spaces, and places; (3) a discipline emerging from rhetoric, one of the original liberal arts, yet developing in transdisciplinary ways, transforming the binary of humanities and sciences; (4) a tool for decolonizing knowledge(s); (5) a tool for exploring, critiquing, engaging, and creating with the new media of our digital lives together; (6) a long-standing yet ever inventive method and mode for public humanities; and (7) a praxis of resistance. These essays bring to light what studying communication offers the humanities: a plural, public, reflexive, and ever inventive enterprise for examining being human together on this planet

    To the Humanities: What Does Communication Studies Give?

    Get PDF
    This special issue of Review of Communication presents new offerings of the study of communication, forging present and future humanities. This Introduction engages the six essays in this special issue—which extend and intersect across categories of the humanistic study of communication: communication philosophy and ethics, rhetorical theory, history, pedagogy, criticism, and digital humanities—to explore their contributions in defense of the humanities. Taken together, these essays explore the study of communication as 1) a resource for inquiring and exchanging with concepts, practices, and embodiments of difference, the other, and the posthuman; 2) a means of examining the ontological, epistemological, technological, existential, performative, and ethical implications of our communicative being, our being constituted by symbolic action and mediated exchange in ever-present yet always variant material and affective environments, spaces, and places; 3) a discipline emerging from rhetoric, one of the original liberal arts, yet developing in transdisciplinary ways, transforming the binary of humanities and sciences; 4) a tool for decolonizing knowledge(s); 5) a tool for exploring, critiquing, engaging, and creating with the new media of our digital lives together; 6) a long-standing yet ever inventive method and mode for public humanities; and 7) a praxis of resistance. These essays bring to light what studying communication offers the humanities: a plural, public, reflexive, and ever inventive enterprise for examining being human together on this planet

    Taking Persephone: The Rhetoric of Consent in Rachel Smythe's Webtoon Lore Olympus (2018)

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    Lore Olympus is a webtoon that reimagines the taking of Persephone in an animated, comic style. In this paper, I discuss the rhetoric of consent through a visual analysis using the intersecting fields of classical reception, feminist rhetoric, and digital humanities. I use two versions of the taking of Persephone for my analysis: Ovid?s Metamorphoses and ?The Homeric Hymn to Demeter.? My analysis is split into two parts, with the first being a visual analysis of 4 panels of the webtoon, focusing on how each depicts the rhetoric of consent. The second part of my analysis is focused on the rhetorical devices within the text that serves as visual metaphors to symbolize layered meaning to readers. My findings suggest that Lore Olympus does not allow its female characters agency in removing the aspect of consent using concepts such as voyeurism and class systems to strip female characters of their agency

    Keeping the Human in Digital Humanities: A Twitter Case Study

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    The rapid expansion of digital humanities has led to questions about how best to define this emerging field and how to harness the new approaches to knowledge that it offers. In this thesis, I explore key characteristics of digital humanities. I also hope to show ways that digital humanities methods can be applied with a case study related to vaccine conversations on Twitter. I will first discuss three key characteristics of digital humanities: interdisciplinarity, collaboration, and democratization. Next, I will explore how these characteristics influence the activities of this field, particularly the ways that computers and programs (machines) relate to humans through intellectual work. Finally, I will apply what I have discussed to analyze Twitter conversations with the hashtags, #vaccines, #vaccineswork, and #antivaxx. The goal is to use digital humanities approaches to understand how vaccine rhetoric is used on the internet and how misinformation can be spread.Bachelor of Art

    The Digital Public Humanities: Giving New Arguments and New Ways to Argue

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    In response to the latest crisis in the humanities, advocates have marched, rallied, fundraised, and-especially-argued. This essay contends that communication scholars can support the growing case for the humanities by analyzing argumentative strategies, and more specifically, by offering ethical argumentative strategies that avoid replicating structures of domination. In particular, we look to Mari Lee Mifsud\u27s theorization of rhetoric as gift, which follows Henry W. Johnstone in conceptualizing argument as something other than winning over an adversary. We place Mifsud\u27s theorization of the gift in conversation with the methods of the digital public humanities (DPH), which acknowledge and offer abundant resources for meaning-making. Through the methods of DPH, we offer a response to the humanities crisis that activates the humanities\u27 already broad constituencies by giving resources for humanistic inquiry rather than seeking to capture adversaries. Our case study is Photogrammar, a DPH project for organizing, searching, and visualizing the New Deal and World War II era photographs funded by the U.S. federal government. The project forefronts visual, nonlinear, and interactive argumentation in order to engage publics in generative humanistic inquiry. By enlisting participants and sharing expertise, Photogrammar shows how humanities advocates can deepen attachments to the humanities and build broad constituencies of collaborators and allies
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