Building a Better Back-End: Editor, Author, & Reader Tools for Scholarly Multimedia

This Level II Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant proposal would support building an editorial management system and reader tools for scholarly multimedia, a unique form of digital scholarship. This prototype will be built on the open-source, editorial management system Open Journal System (OJS), which has been widely adopted but currently only handles the editorial process for digitized print scholarship. This prototype would create plug-ins for OJS so that it could manage the multimedia-intensive portions and unique review systems inherent in scholarly multimedia

New media reading strategy

This dissertation addresses the need for a strategy that will help readers new to new media texts interpret such texts. While scholars in multimodal and new media theory posit rubrics that offer ways to understand how designers use the materialities and media found in overtly designed, new media texts (see, e.g,, Wysocki, 2004a), these strategies do not account for how readers have to make meaning from those texts. In this dissertation, I discuss how these theories, such as Lev Manovich’s (2001) five principles for determining the new media potential of texts and Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen’s (2001) four strata of designing multimodal texts, are inadequate to the job of helping readers understand new media from a rhetorical perspective. I also explore how literary theory, specifically Wolfgang Iser’s (1978) description of acts of interpretation, can help audiences understand why readers are often unable to interpret the multiple, unexpected modes of communication used in new media texts. Rhetorical theory, explored in a discussion of Sonja Foss’s (2004) units of analysis, is helpful in bringing the reader into a situated context with a new media text, although these units of analysis, like Iser’s process, suggests that a reader has some prior experience interpreting a text-as-artifact. Because of this assumption of knowledge put forth by all of the theories explored within, I argue that none alone is useful to help readers engage with and interpret new media texts. However, I argue that a heuristic which combines elements from each of these theories, as well as additional ones, is more useful for readers who are new to interpreting the multiple modes of communication that are often used in unconventional ways in new media texts. I describe that heuristic in the final chapter and discuss how it can be useful to a range of texts besides those labelled new media

Bad Ideas About Writing

Bad Ideas About Writing counters major myths about writing instruction. Inspired by the provocative science- and social-science-focused book This Idea Must Die and written for a general audience, the collection offers opinionated, research-based statements intended to spark debate and to offer a better way of teaching writing. Contributors, as scholars of rhetoric and composition, provide a snapshot of major myths about writing instruction in these essays. This collection is published in whole by the Digital Publishing Institute and in part by Inside Higher Ed.https://commons.erau.edu/oer-textbook/1010/thumbnail.jp

Bad Ideas About Writing

Bad Ideas About Writing counters major myths about writing instruction. Inspired by the provocative science- and social-science-focused book This Idea Must Die and written for a general audience, the collection offers opinionated, research-based statements intended to spark debate and to offer a better way of teaching writing. Contributors, as scholars of rhetoric and composition, provide a snapshot of major myths about writing instruction in these essays. This collection is published in whole by the Digital Publishing Institute and in part by Inside Higher Ed

Bad Ideas About Writing

Bad Ideas About Writing counters major myths about writing instruction. Inspired by the provocative science- and social-science-focused book This Idea Must Die and written for a general audience, the collection offers opinionated, research-based statements intended to spark debate and to offer a better way of teaching writing. Contributors, as scholars of rhetoric and composition, provide a snapshot of major myths about writing instruction in these essays. This collection is published in whole by the Digital Publishing Institute and in part by Inside Higher Ed

Bad Ideas About Writing

Bad Ideas About Writing counters major myths about writing instruction. Inspired by the provocative science- and social-science-focused book This Idea Must Die and written for a general audience, the collection offers opinionated, research-based statements intended to spark debate and to offer a better way of teaching writing. Contributors, as scholars of rhetoric and composition, provide a snapshot of and antidotes to major myths in writing instruction. This collection is published in whole by the Digital Publishing Institute at WVU Libraries and in part by Inside Higher Ed. Supplemental files feature archived episodes of the Bad Ideas About Writing Podcast, read by Dr. Kyle Stedman of Rockford University.https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/dpi-textbooks/1000/thumbnail.jp

Finding the Right Platform : A Report on Building a Publishing Platform Crosswalk

This Report from the Field introduces a collaboratively authored set of documentation that compares digital publishing platforms that are typically used by library publishers. This report discusses how we created this set of crosswalks that compare 10 publishing platforms, most of which are academy-owned and open-source. These platforms are used to create eBooks, digital humanities projects, journals, collections, and community projects, and the crosswalks compare a set of common features each has, including hosting options and cost, ingestion options, interactivity, archive and preservation features, export options, accessibility, and other features. We walk readers through how to use this Creative-Commons-licensed tool to compare platforms, features, and project types, with the hopes that users (be they librarians or authors) can easily compare and make decisions about which platform might best suit their publishing needs

Show, not tell: The value of new media scholarship

Abstract In this article, I consider the changing nature of publications in relation to technology and tenure, presenting a taxonomy of scholarly publications: online scholarship, scholarship about new media, and new media scholarship. I offer a focused definition of new media texts as ones that juxtapose semiotic modes in new and aesthetically pleasing ways and, in doing so, break away from print traditions so that written text is not the primary rhetorical means. By applying this definition to scholarly online publications, readers can be better prepared to recognize and interpret the meaning-making potential of aesthetic modes used in new media scholarly texts. I conclude by offering an analysis of a scholarly new media text, "Digital Multiliteracies.&quot

Selling Family Planning: Using Social Marketing Principles to Reduce Unplanned Pregnancy

The problem of unplanned pregnancies is one which has challenged communities the world over for decades. The social, economic and public health implications of the problem convey upon it immense importance and a position of prominence on the social and health agendas of the United States, its island neighbor Bermuda, and throughout the developing world. No single approach or solution has been identified, but in the past two decades, several programs have demonstrated long-term effectiveness in reducing unplanned pregnancies and impacting the behavior of those at risk for unplanned pregnancies. From these success stories, evidence is mounting which identifies the programmatic elements most useful and effective in preventing unplanned pregnancies. Applying social marketing principles to the complex problem of unplanned pregnancy prevention is a logical endeavor given the publicized success of its techniques. The following discussion will describe the extent of the problem of unplanned pregnancy in the United States and in Bermuda. The principles of social marketing will be summarized and will be considered in the context of their application to the problem of unplanned pregnancy prevention. The rationale and value of using social marketing to address the challenge of unplanned pregnancy prevention in a variety of communities will be demonstrated.Master of Public Healt