Saturday:

O.02 Technologies of Writing: Rhetorics of Place

Jeff Rice‘s talk, “Spatial Identities: Writing Cities,“ was really engaging. He called into question the way Google Maps or MapQuest constructs our ideas of place, arguing that there is something more than just the map and the route. Place should also take into account various information databases that we have in our heads: databases of people, places, associations.

A great follow-up to his talk was Jenny Edbauer‘s (The Pennsylvania State University) talk “Dense Feelings: The Affective Metonymy of Local Places,“ in which she argued for a new way to think of feelings and place: that places are structured affectively. Places frame affect as structural in two ways, she said: 1) affect as metonymy (places stand in for a scattered body; i.e., neighborhoods orient people in an expansive place; affect simplifies a complex area); 2) affect as structural legitimization (place meanings are legitimized through affect). Great ideas for thinking about place.

Dennis Lynch (Michigan Technological University) then talked on “Feeling Indirectly: Writing to Discern,“ during which he asked how literally we should take the relationship between ethics, rhetoric, and place. I didn’t quite follow all of his talk, but he draw on Judith Butler’s work on ethics (which I should look into).

P.05 Negotiating Cyber Faces for Social Spaces: Constructions of Individuals Inside Online Communities

Three graduate students at Miami University-OH shared their research on online identity work. Wioleta Fedeczko shared her research on Hoodwink’d, a website community in which users have to solve riddles to join (it’s somewhat difficult, she says) and then can comment on other people’s sites in ways that only other Hoodwink’d members can see. Gina Patterson shared her research on working class queer folk and their online use, drawing from queer theory (Judith Butler: what forms of community have been created and what violence was done to create those communities?; Judith Halberstam: defines queer as non-normative). Abby Dubisar discussed her interviews with first-year students who used Facebook and who saw Facebook as part of the college experience (which is very interesting to me, as I went to undergraduate school just before Facebook, though it does make sense).

Friday:

F.06 old + old = new: Writing Multimedia, Remixing Culture, Remixing Identity

Some graduate students and an undergraduate student from Michigan State shared some really interesting ideas and experiences of their own literacy and analyses of some digital artifacts that interrogated issues of copyright, remixing, design, race, and culture. I thought a lot of their ideas were pretty interesting, and they shared their bibliography (yay!), but I didn’t take great notes. I might email one of them, Matt Penniman, and ask a question regarding remixing and cities, since his talk was pretty interesting and made me think about top-down approaches to city-planning and the valuation or devaluation of local cultures and economies (he drew from Richard Florida’s Cities and the Creative Class).

G.06 The Rhetoric of Recovery: Reconstructing Palestinian History Before 1948

I didn’t write down which speaker I took notes from, so it was either Anis Bawarshi (University of Washington, Seattle) or Matthew Abraham (DePaul University, Chicago), but his discussion of the marginalization and stigmatization of academics in the USA who discuss Palestine and speak against Israeli imperialism was pretty interesting. He made the case that perhaps Palestinians and Arabs serve as the “new Jews,“ and that perhaps Israel now serves as a wall for Europe against the East/Orient.

H.04 Representing Identities in Religious Discourses: Proclamation, Silence, and Social Responsibility

I went to this talk to listen to my professor Vicki Tolar Burton and her talk “Community Literacy in John Wesley’s Methodism: New Lives for the Poor.“ I’d say the talks during this session were interesting and well-presented, but I didn’t really take notes on it, and nothing inspired comes to mind.

I.31 Rhetorical Agility and Online Identity

Sara Jameson and my talk, “Who Are We/Who Are They? Self-Presentation by GTA’s Online“ (subtitle different from that printed in program), was first. I’ll post our talk at some point.

Thomas Burkdall (Occidental College, Los Angeles) shared some of the ways he’s used podcasting in the classroom, and our explored what exactly a podcast was defined. He proposed terms such as audio esssays, commentaries, and narratives, but then settled on viewing podcasts as thoughtcasts, a word suggested by one of his students. I liked that he stressed that podcasts brougth the canon of delivery back to rhetoric.

Melanie Kill‘s (University of Washington, Seattle) talk “Rhetorical Agility and Online Identity: Composing Self on MySpace“ was about the multimodal work that is done by agents online who create MySpace pages. It was pretty informative, and she shared images of MySpace pages and explained what all went into them.

The question and answer session that followed was fun, and we got to share experiences with Blackboard, MySpace, and Facebook.

J.16 1963: The Origin of Modern Composition, Part 1

In his engaging talk “Writing Classroom as Warhol’s Factory,“ Geoffrey Sirc (University of Minnesota, Minneapolis) lamented that description and narrative had been removed from the writing curriculum in 1918 by Kurl (I think that’s the name I heard, though I should research to find it I’m right); the focus of the writing classroom became exposition. Sirc argued (as he often does) for the “writing classroom as collection depot.“ He quoted from Baudrillard that the best criticism is fun, amusing, and entertaining, and asked (I think this is a Baudrillard quote), “Can you imagine a dandy talking to the public without scoffing at them?“

Anne Wysocki (Michigan Technological University) spoke on “Inventing Humans: Computers, Metaphors, Writing, 1963.“ She explored science fiction books and nonfictional texts on computers in 1963 and the metaphors they used. I seem to have not taken as many notes on this talk as I should have…

Thursday:

A.23 Forging a Scholarly and Professional Identity Online: Blogging as Discovery and Externalization of Self

Geoffrey Middlebrook, Sandra Ross, and LauraAnne Caroll-Adler (University of Southern California, Los Angeles) all discussed their use of Blackboard and blogs in their composition courses, including basic writing, first year composition, and advanced writing courses. Middlebrook has his students engage in conversations online within communities of blogs within their discipline (the examples he gave were of a history major and an economics major whose blogs were cleverly titled and who had engaged in strong discussion with great posts on their blogs, as well as posting comments on more “expert“ blogs in their respective fields. I felt that they were rehashing something I was already aware of (though it was great to see how they were doing in their situated context!). One thing they reminded me of, though, was Charles Lowe and Tara Terra Williams’s Into the Blogosphere article. I remembered the article, but their discussion reminded me to check it out for a discussion of student ownership of blogs, so I’ll have to do that.

B.4 Globalism, Identities, and Digital Literacies

Gail E. Hawisher (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), in her talk “Redesigning Global Literacies in the 21st Century,“ showed a few videos from her international graduate students and discussed design. She cited a few texts that I think would be worthwhile to look into: Gunther Kress’s essay in Hawisher and Selfe’s Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies, in which he says that we should not focus on the past, but need to instead focus on the future; and Dan Norman’s Emotional Design: People and Things (2004).

Dene Grigar (Washington State University, Vancouver) brought up three terms that are pretty important in her talk “The Telebody: Case Studies of the Intersection of Globalism, Identity, and Technology of the Media Arts“: telemetics, telebody (Steve Gibson’s term having to do with “altered human beings in a digital world“), and telembody (from Loxana-Hemmer (sp?), the act of embodying and controlling global space as well as being embodied and controlled by that space). Grigar mentioned the books At a Distance by Chandler and co-author, a book about art and activism, and Writing Machines by Katherine Hayles, which offers a broad definition of writing (on page 20).

Cynthia Selfe‘s (The Ohio State University, Columbus) talk “Literacies, Identities, and Families in Global Context“ followed the literacy practices of one of her students who was staying in contact with her family in her home country, which was interesting, but I don’t remember anything more specific.

During the Q&A afterward, someone in the audience mentioned the book Imagined Communities by Anderson, in which the author looked at print in the nineteenth century to show how they were used to create an imagined community of a nation.

C.26 Textual Transgressions Online: Plagiarism and Fraud in Weblogs and Wikis

This session was fascinating and humorous. Clancy Ratliff (East Carolina University) talked about plagiarism in blogs, and discussed the ways that some people plagiarized and reactions to it. In specific, she mentioned the institutional reach of the academic definition of plagiarism, which seems to be in effect in the blogosphere, and the ways in which bloggers use copyscape.com in order to track whether anyone has plagiarized their work.

Rebecca Moore Howard (Syracuse University) had perhaps the most humorous talk I’ve heard so far because she showed a website by a professor somewhere who had termed himself a “plagiarologist“ and was bent on fighting plagiarism to a ridiculous degree. Howard noted that copyright and plagiarism are different issues, as copyright has to do with law and property, but plagiarism is separate from law and locationally and institutionally defined.

When she looked at how plagiarism was discussed on blogs, she noted that bloggers who had been plagiarized often interpellated their readers as vigilantes whose job it became to identify, pursue, shame, try, and judge the plagiarizer. Readers were treated and seemed to act as detectives, warriors, or hunters, and often plagiarism was treated as a disease. Interestingly, though, Howard noted that it didn’t seem as though the named and outed plagiarists were ever really punished, and it seemed that they continued life as normal without any retribution (other than shaming).

Sandra Jamieson (Drew University, Madison, NJ) discussed supposed fraud in writing by comparing the cases of Fry’s book title and the YouTube videos from lonelygirl15. Her talk was really interesting, especially in her discussion of Derrida, when she discussed our expectations of the presence of the author and our expectations for truth in text. She mentioned a JAC article “Myth of Presence“ that I’ll have to check out.

E.34 “Structure, Sign, and Play“: Serious Design á la Derrida 40 Years After

Unfortunately, Lebbeus Woods (Cooper Union School of Architecture, New York) had suffered a heart attack (and is recovering, luckily), so he wasn’t able to make his talk. Victor Vitanza (Clemson University)’s talk “Design as Dasein (sign)“ was fascinating, though, and kept my attention really well, even though I often felt lost (Derrida still goes over my head). Vitanza discussed scars and quoted Petra Kuppers’s The Scar of Visibility: “living in the scar is living in the borderlines“ (my quote might not be accurate). He also quoted someone else (though I didn’t catch who): “We communicate across our lacerations and scars.“

Cynthia Haynes‘s (Clemson University) talk “Muddy Waters/Serious Games (play)“ also went over my head a bit. She discussed Derrida’s belief that we should create solidarity around something that is not yet known, and his claim that we can find something in the city that can’t be found in the state because the state hasn’t held up to its promises to us yet (and probably won’t). She discussed divided cities, like Jerusalem, and made comparisons to such a city in World of Warcraft, which was interesting. She called into question the boundaries/conflations of war and game, and while I found her talk engaging as well, I didn’t feel like I followed it completely.

As someone in the crowd stated when they asked for questions, “I’m not smart enough to have questions.“

Wednesday:

The Future of the History of Rhetoric and Composition (Sponsored by the Coalition of Women Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition)

I unfortunately didn’t take notes during Linda Ferreira-Buckley‘s (University of Texas at Austin) talk “Archival Research and the Construction of Women’s Histories,“ except to note that she referred to Jacques Derrida’s paper on archives, “Archive Fever,“ published in 1996 by the University of Chicago Press. Derrida discusses the ways in which archives are used to remember and honor groups, and sometimes to forget them.

The second talk in the event was Kate Adams‘s (Loyola University) talk “A Future for Pedagogical Research and the Construction of Women’s Histories,“ in which she argued that there are two questions we must ask when doing archival work: 1) “So what?“ and 2) “Why me?“ (i.e., Why not someone else in another field? What do I, as an interested person, and as someone schooled in rhetoric, bring to these archives that someone else would/could not?)

Bo Wang‘s (California State University, Fresno) talk “Generating a Dialogue between East and West: Research in Asian Rhetoric“ argued for (from my memory) the use of Chinese rhetorical theories when researching Chinese texts, not the colonialization of the texts by Euro-American theories of rhetoric (e.g., not using Aristotelean rhetoric to understand Chinese argumentation or discourse).

Because Mary Hocks (Georgia State University) could not attend, Anne Wysocki (soon to be of University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee) discussed the ways in which corporations are creating and having us create our culture (e.g., voting for American Idol or Survivor winners and losers; the number of people who voted in the most recent Survivor vote equaled a quarter of those who voted in our last presidential election). She mentioned a 2006 book Rainbow’s End by Ving, about the future and digital technology in which a discussion is held, after all the books in a library have been digitized, whether traditional books should all be destroyed. The book is eerily similar to Henry Jenkens’s conception of the present in Convergence Culture, wherein Jenkens discusses collective intelligence and our society in which participants are interacting with a new set of values that we don’t yet understand; we are no longer just consumers and producers, but both. However, all of the subjects of his book are hyper-consumers. The concern, then, is trying to find spaces outside of a monolithic capitalism/economy for change. Wysocki brought up the book A Post-Capitalist Politics by JK Gibson-Graham (who is/are two women writing under one name). The premise of the book is that we believe in one monolithic economy, yet there is not one. Instead, using global feminism, the authors argue that we need to look at localized economies and work toward change that is “good enough.“ She also mentioned the book The Threshold of the Visual World by Kaja Silverman, but I don’t remember the context or reason.

After the talks and questions, we broke into discussion groups, and most people unfortunately left (it was late at night, though). I was one of four men in the room before we broke up; I think I was the only one to stay for discussions. I had a great talk with Kathleen Welch (University of Stony Brook SUNY) and Joyce Irene Middleton (East Carolina University), as well as a graduate student at the University of North Carolina (she gave me her card, but I can’t seem to find it at the moment) about women and online media, including blogs, MySpace, and online dating. It was a great talk, and both I and the UNC doctoral student discussed our research with Kathleen and Joyce.

I had to use my iSight on my MacBook because I don’t have a digital camera, so pardon the crappy pictures (and the fact that they’re reversed because of the iSight; I’m not motivated enough to flip them around myself). A shot of my bed:

And a shot of the other side of the room, with our sink:

It wasn’t much, but hey, $18 a night is so much better than $300 in the Hilton. And I learned to love the NYC subway system.

I’m excited for CCCC to start tomorrow (though I think most of my day tomorrow will be spent writing my Feminist Philosophies paper at a coffee shop or somewhere). It should be fun hearing great ideas get knocked around and getting involved in discussions, and also meeting people whose blogs I read (though remember their real names instead of their blog’s name or username may prove difficult). Well, off to sleep!