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About the Interviewee

Justin Hodgson is an assistant professor of rhetoric, writing, and digital media studies in the Department of English at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. His book, Post-Digital Rhetoric and The New Aesthetic  is available as of March 2019. Justin is the founder and general editor of TheJUMP+, The Journal of Undergraduate Multimedia Projects. This juried, electronic journal publishes exceptional undergraduate multimedia projects from students around the world. It also serves as a pedagogical resource for teachers interested in and working in multimedia and digital composition and scholarship.

About the Interviewer

Elizabeth Barnett is an MA candidate in Rhetoric and Writing in the University of New Mexico's Department of English Language and Literature. Her interests lie in the pedagogy of multimodal digital composition and technical writing. 

Contents

Showcasing Undergraduate Work

Electracy and Thinking Digitally

Post Digital Rhetoric

Technology and Rhetorical Consciousness

Multimodal Composition

Challenges of Digital Publishing

Xchanges, as an exclusively digital publisher, is naturally subject to and keenly interested in the practical issues surrounding the future and preservation of digital scholarly work. In the exploration of issues surrounding digital scholarship, we’ve produced a series of three interviews with prominent academic scholars and editors whose work spans the intersections of rhetoric, pedagogy, publishing, and technology. We hope that Xchanges readers enjoy the viewpoints looking both back at what’s happened in the field of digital publishing and pedagogy in the last decade or two and forward to what lies ahead.

In the first of this series, University of New Mexico English MA student, Elizabeth Barnett, conducted a video interview with Professor Justin Hodgson of Indiana University, who heads up the editorial board of The Journal of Undergraduate Multimedia Projects, or, TheJump+. This issue of Xchanges focuses on undergraduate research, and the two began their discussion of issues with digital scholarship in the 21 century, particularly as it involves undergraduates in the academy.

Showcasing Undergraduate Work

Xchanges: TheJUMP+ showcases some astounding undergraduate multimodal composition work, highly creative and technically advanced. You have a submission formula that includes the student’s and instructor’s reflections, peer responses, and assignment prompts.

Why focus on undergraduate composition? Was the decision to include the supplemental materials solely based on THEJUMP+'s goal to also be an instructor resource? Or is there more to including these in a critical sense? Or to more fully situate the compositions regarding authors’ rhetorical choices?

JH: I graduated from Clemson in May of 2009, and I started at Texas that fall. One of the first classes I was teaching was a “Writing for Digital Environments” class, which is something they had on the books. I was only teaching one class, and it was like, "Okay, just getting used to life as faculty at a major school." I had this assignment, a weird little video remix assignment. A student made this project called “Communism.”  Much like you, I was amazed and thought, "My goodness. What? Who? I didn’t teach you any of these things and this is genuinely amazing."

I shared it with my graduate cohort from Clemson and some folks I've known outside of there, and I asked, "Well, where would these projects go?" If a student writes a really brilliant paper or poem or argument or some kind, we have journals for that. But not for these kinds of projects. I said, "You know what? We should just start a journal," and they said, "Yes, sounds great." That was Friday, and so by Monday, I had mocked up a prototype of what it's supposed to look like. That's how we started. We always talked about needing the repository for the stuff our students did because as a teacher I can only show my own projects, and I had to get permission, and there was no unified space for that. This inherently filled two roles, and because of that, I knew early on that I wanted to do a couple of things with student work as I was mocking up this project.

• One was that it had to facilitate a pedagogical value because, let's be honest, there's not a widespread interest in undergraduate journals. I think they do amazing work, and I think people in our field read them. But for young Writing Studies scholars, it's hard to get a really notable readership for their undergraduate scholarship as they're exploring topics. I know young scholars are writing, and a number of their articles have been cited by scholars in the field as well, but it's not the same dynamic as College Composition and Communication or Rhetoric Society Quarterly. I knew it had to have a pedagogical value, and they need to be built partly around that because that's who the audience is going to be. So it wasn't for undergraduates as much as it was for undergraduates in classes working with faculty.

• The second part was, and this is the rhetorical part, that they affected me forever, that these projects that are amazing or engaging or dynamic or whatever we want to call them, by design, and make me want to make things. I'm trained to offer a critical response, to start poking holes at it and saying what it stands for or what it does or why it doesn't look as [good], but when it comes to the digital, my gut reaction is, "I should do that with this video," or "What would I make?" or "How can I do this with something else?" I knew that in going in, we wanted to create responses from our editorial board to each piece such that each part of the project would form its own medial ecology. The result was that for each project there's like 10 or 8 little nuggets of things that go with it, sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on what the students give to us.

The reason for undergraduate work is very simple. One, they do amazing things, and there's no place for that to go, and two, while I do teach graduate classes, I have far more experience and exposure to undergraduates doing weird, wonderful media stuff, so that's why the undergraduate focus.

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About the Author

Skyler Drew is an undergraduate student studying public relations at York College of Pennsylvania, with minors in professional writing and speech communication. She plans to pursue higher education in the field of rhetoric and composition upon graduation at her current institution.

Contents

Introduction

Archival Methodology

Conversational Rhetoric and Tsumagari’s Letters

Feminine Rhetorical Identity Across Cultures

Tsumagari’s Intersectional Rhetorical and Future Research Applications

Conclusion

Works Cited

Introduction

During WWII, many Japanese Americans were forced into internment camps in the western and midwestern United States. These camps imprisoned men, women, and children of Japanese descent and were mandated under Executive Order 9066. These prisoners were required to uproot their lives and place themselves in these internment camps or face a punishment of a monetary fine and possible prison time (Reeves, 2015). Living in internment camps severed ties between prisoners and their communities, friends, and any relations who were not direct family or of Japanese descent (Ishizuka, 2006). Oftentimes, the only way to remain in contact with the outside world was through the mail, as visitation was limited (Tsumagari, 1942). Letters were essential for connecting people inside internment camps with close friends or loved ones who were not relocated. Letters were their most reliable mode of communication and were efficient at helping prisoners stay updated with the world outside the camp. This essay draws from the letters produced by the prisoners of these internment camps and focuses specifically on one Japanese American woman and her use of letters as communication. 

This paper examines the correspondence between Fusa Tsumagari, a Japanese American woman who resided in multiple internment camps between 1942 and 1945, and Clara Breed, her local librarian before Tsumagari’s internment. In these letters, Tsumagari rhetorically performs her intersectional identity as a Japanese American woman. I use the theoretical frames of conversational rhetoric, which helps make visible some of Tsumagari’s strategies for performing her feminine identity, as well as contrastive rhetoric, which helps make visible how both Japanese and American identities are constructed. This study contributes to the history of women’s rhetoric by considering how conversational rhetorical strategies get shaped by other cultural identities.

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About the Author

Eric Wisz is currently a graduate student in the University of Central Florida’s Rhetoric and Composition M.A. program. His research interests include writing center studies and instructor feedback on student writing.

Contents

Introduction

Instructor Feedback in Literature

Student Interviews

Participant Demographics

Discussion

Conclusion

References

Appendices

ABSTRACT

Instructor feedback on student writing has been a popular topic of discussion and research in the field of writing studies for the past few decades. As an undergraduate student researcher, I conducted one-on-one interviews with undergraduate students about their perceptions of and feelings towards written instructor feedback on student writing. Using a mock page of student writing, I created two examples of instructor feedback that I had participants read and discuss during the one-on-one interviews. This article reports on the qualitative data gathered from these interviews. Participants made a distinction and created a binary between comments that directed them to focus on the ideas of their paper and feedback that directed them to focus on word choice and sentence structure. Participants valued feedback framed from a reader’s perspective. Participants thought open-ended questions in feedback were helpful in seeing the relationship between and developing their ideas. They found suggestions and examples helpful in formulating their own revisions and explanation useful in learning grammar rules and discourse community norms. Participants saw the merits and benefits of a variety of feedback forms, which suggests that the form of feedback ought to be dependent on the context—what the feedback is discussing, the revision the feedback is implying, the skills and knowledge of the particular writer to whom the feedback is geared, where the writer is in their writing process, etc.—in which it is given.

Introduction

We assume that feedback on student writing plays a pedagogically prominent role in students’ development as writers, just as class instruction, course readings, student-instructor writing conferences, or peer writing tutoring sessions. Indeed, there is much overlap between these forms of instruction, but for the purpose of this article, I focus on written instructor feedback on student writing.

The meaning of written instructor feedback influences how students conduct their revision processes and future writing processes and, thus, how they view the act of writing. In his inquiry into instructor feedback on student writing, Straub (1996) finds that “the way comments are framed has a direct influence on the meaning of the comments” (p. 235). Thus, this article focuses on, more specifically, student perceptions of instructor feedback on their writing. My overall research question is the following: How do students perceive instructor feedback on student writing when different feedback approaches are presented? Student perspectives in this report take the form of transcripts from student interviews. Due to the limited scope of this project (12 student interviews), the data gathered from these interviews should not be generalized to all students. Rather, the purpose of this study is to contribute student voices to the ongoing discussion on instructor feedback practices.

I begin by offering an overview of some of the relevant literature from the field of composition studies pertaining to instructor feedback on student writing. I then outline how the interviews in this study were conducted and detail some relevant participant demographics. Finally, I discuss some of the students’ impressions, interpretations, and uses of instructor feedback and what this could mean for feedback practices. Participants made a distinction and created a binary between comments that directed them to focus on the ideas of their paper and feedback that directed them to focus on word choice and sentence structure. Participants tended to respond positively to feedback framed in terms of a reader’s perspective. Participants thought open-ended questions in feedback were helpful in seeing the relationship between and developing their ideas. They found suggestions and examples helpful in formulating their own revisions and explanation useful in learning grammar rules and discourse community norms. Overall, participant responses indicate that what qualifies as “good” feedback depends on the rhetorical situation of the feedback.

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About the Author

Kathryn Asay is an undergraduate student in the English Department at Weber State University in Utah. She will be graduating summa cum laude in December 2018 at the age of 21 with a bachelor’s degree in professional and technical writing and a technical writing institutional certificate. She is interested in gender equality, female representation, and botanical studies and hopes to integrate her interests in her future career as a technical writer.

Contents

Introduction

Background

Methods

Data/Findings

Implications and Conclusion

Works Cited

Works Consulted

Introduction

Shortly before Assassin’s Creed: Unity was released in 2014, questions began surfacing about why Ubisoft had no footage of playable female characters despite them being on the company’s feature list for the game. In response to the rising wave of questions, Alex Amancio, Ubisoft’s creative director for the game, stated, “It’s double the animations, it’s double the voices, all that stuff and double the visual assets…It’s not like we could cut our main character, so the only logical option, the only option we had, was to cut the female avatar” (LeJacq, 2014). Amancio’s comments sent fans and professionals reeling in a flurry of anger, some taking up the hashtag #womenaretoohardtoanimate as a means of firing back at Ubisoft. The situation escalated when Jonathan Cooper, former Animation Director for a different Assassin’s Creed game, countered Amancio’s statement by saying, “In my educated opinion, I would estimate this to be a day or two’s work...not a replacement of 8000 animations” (LeJacq, 2014).

Cooper’s statement and many others (Borrelli, 2014; Lindsey, 2014; Burch, 2014; Moleman, 2014) led to the inevitable conclusion that women weren’t necessarily too hard to animate—the developers had constructed the entire city of Paris on a 1:1 scale with impeccable attention to detail—but that the task of creating playable female characters simply wasn’t a priority or even an assumed standard. The entire situation sent the message that females aren’t as necessary in video games as males are. If Cooper is correct about female characters not being too difficult to animate, then why is there still a massive lack of female representation in video games?

This article posits that the gaming trifecta—a network of gamers, developers, and financial factors—impacts the representation of female playable protagonists. I will examine the potential reasons why playable female protagonists are typically excluded from video games with unchangeable, set protagonists, specifically through a case study of the Assassin’s Creed franchise, and identify the relationships among those reasons through my gaming trifecta theory, using a content analysis approach. This case study of Assassin’s Creed is important because Ubisoft has tried to integrate female protagonists into several of the franchise’s games but has done so in a way that players perceive as meaningless and mediocre. There continues to be a lack of female representation.

I have framed this paper around Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed franchise. Not only is Assassin’s Creed the highest grossing Ubisoft franchise—one of its recent releases sold 1.51 million units during the first week of its release (D’Angelo, 2017)—but its games attempt to provide a platform for female representation that other video games lack. Through the experimental platform of Assassin’s Creed, Ubisoft has tried several times to create non-optional and optional female-led video games. This situates the franchise as the perfect case study to examine female representation in video games that typically only have designated playable protagonists. Furthermore, the Assassin’s Creed franchise is known for its progressive ideals—they have a message that lingers on the screen before each game starts up that reads, “Inspired by historical events and characters, this work of fiction was designed, developed, and produced by a multicultural team of various beliefs, sexual orientations and gender identities.” Yet, for being so progressive and diverse as a development team, they don’t necessarily seem to consider diverse representation as an industry standard, but more like an indeterminate, long-term goal.

Xchanges Issue 13.2

Articles

• "The Gaming Trifecta: Understanding the Exclusion of Female Video Game Protagonists" by Kathryn Asay | PDF
  
  
• "Students’ Perceptions of Written Instructor Feedback on Student Writing" by Eric Wisz | PDF
  
  
• "Fusa Tsumagari, a Japanese American Woman, and Her Intersectional Use of Conversational and Contrastive Rhetorical Styles" by Skyler Drew | PDF

Interview

• "Profiles in Digital Scholarship & Publishing: Justin Hodgson," Interview by Elizabeth Barnett | PDF