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About the Interviewee

Douglas Eyman is Associate Professor of English and the Director of graduate
programs in Writing and Rhetoric at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.
His latest books are Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice and Play/Write:
Digital Rhetoric, Writing, Games. Dr. Eyman is also the senior editor and
publisher of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, one of the longest running, continuously published digital scholarly journals in the world.

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

Digital Rhetoric: Expanding Definitions

The Human in the Machine

Digital Rhetoric In the Classroom

Sustainability in the Digital Realm

Authorship & Audience in A Digital Age

Future Work: A Theory of Digital Rhetoric

 As an exclusively digital publisher, Xchanges 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.

Here, in the current installment of this series, University of New Mexico English MA student Elizabeth Barnett shares a video interview she conducted with Professor Doug Eyman of George Mason University. In addition to teaching courses in digital rhetoric, technical and scientific communication, editing, web authoring, advanced composition, and professional writing, Dr. Eyman is the senior editor of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. This issue of Xchanges focuses on graduate-student research in writing and rhetoric. Elizabeth and Doug began their discussion of issues with digital scholarship in the 21st century with a focus on the nature and definition of digital rhetoric.

Digital Rhetoric: Expanding Definitions

Xchanges: In your 2015 book Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice, you wrote, “the term ‘digital rhetoric’ itself has been applied to rhetorics of technology, network rhetorics, social media use, the use of rhetorical appeals in online discussion forums, website design, multimodal composition, and the study of new media (itself a contested term).”

Is “new media” still new? Has Digital Rhetoric moved beyond an emerging techne into an established realm of study as well as a means of production of persuasive communication and culture?

DE: I'd say the first question about new media is one that comes up quite a lot, especially for people newer in the field. "Is new media really new anymore?" is a refrain I hear often. “New Media” is a standardized phrase at this point, which indicates a kind of hybridization of media. We're looking at how image media, motion media, interactive media, and textual media all come together, and that hybrid version, that synthesis, is “new media.” We can almost call multimodal composition a form of new media as well, except that multimodal, currently, in the way it's theorized, actually bends quite a bit beyond the digital, whereas new media tends to stay rooted within the digital, in terms of the way people handle it. Multimodal composition is becoming a more expansive term in a lot of ways.

Xchanges: You talk about digital literacy being a prerequisite for understanding digital rhetoric. Let's go back. Is digital rhetoric concerned with new media, or is it concerned with all things multimodal?

DE: I think it's both and more than multimodality. There's a follow-up piece to the book that ended up in the journal Enculturation (http://enculturation.net/looking-back-and-looking-forward) that came out of the Indiana Digital Rhetorics Symposium, where I talk about what's not in the book. Digital rhetoric is concerned with how rhetoric operates in any digital realm. That includes new media and multimodal work but also includes the interaction between humans and algorithms, the ways code creates and operates as infrastructures for the activities that we engage in or that are engaged in by systems as well as people.

The idea of networks and the connectivity of networks is an important key for digital rhetoric, but we also don't want to lose sight of the embodied nature of people using technologies. At one point, people were saying, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." It was a [New Yorker] cartoon. People were saying, "The body's no longer there. It no longer has this representation, so that you can move beyond your corporeal references, and then that frees you up in some ways.” It turns out, that's not actually true. Coming back to the body and how the body operates is really an important component of where digital rhetoric is going. I would make the argument that rhetoric itself is a uniquely and innately human approach to communication. I don't really hold with the idea that we have animal rhetorics or computer system software agents that are creating rhetorical action on their own. I think, at the root, there's embedded humanness in it. I think with semiotics, you can get a lot of the same kinds of information and the same kinds of approaches as you would with rhetoric but applied to non-human actors. That's fine, but I want to reserve, in some ways, rhetoric as a human activity. This will probably be argued against by the folks who are interested in the new materialist/object-oriented approaches. I think there's quite a bit of value to that kind of work, but I see it as a way of re-centering, rethinking, flattening as a useful methodological tool, but the activities of rhetoric itself are always rooted and embedded in the human.

[video:youtube:0KFd6BWmNgk]

Those are the conversations that are happening around digital rhetoric or thinking through these issues of what constitutes rhetoric: Can a non-human actor or agency, can they operate rhetorically? Can they make rhetorical moves on their own? That's a really interesting space right now. Justin Hodgson actually has a book out. It just came out recently on post-digital rhetoric (https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814213940.html). We're moving from human to post-human, from digital to post-digital. I'm not sure what comes next. Maybe just post-rhetoric rhetoric.

There are lots of spaces where digital rhetoric can learn from other rhetorical frameworks and practices, especially from cultural rhetorics and Native American rhetorics and rhetoric that come from other places. We tend to be pretty deeply rooted in Western versions of rhetoric. Digital rhetoric also allows us to start expanding and seeing how some of these other rhetorical practices, other rhetorical frameworks, operate when you apply them in digital spaces. That's also a really interesting space in terms of what digital rhetoric is currently doing research-wise.

One of the things I think is really fascinating right now is a real push toward de-colonizing digital methods, opening up space that we have to different kinds of theories, different kinds of methods, and different kinds of communities, and then using some of these digital humanities methods to do social justice work. I’m thinking of work by Roopika Risam (http://roopikarisam.com/), Liz Losh (http://lizlosh.com/), and Dorothy Kim (http://brandeis.academia.edu/DorothyKim), among others, who as scholars are leading us in this direction.

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About the Author

Lauren J. Short is a PhD candidate in Composition at the University of New Hampshire. Her research interests include religious rhetorics, feminist rhetorics, and digital literacy pedagogy.

Contents

Introduction

Theory

Study Aims and Introduction to Research Framework

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion

References

Appendix: Interview Questions

Introduction

For decades, if not longer, many fields have taken an interest in how people read. In composition and rhetoric studies, scholars have attempted to break with the notion that reading and writing are two entirely separate entities, and should be taught alongside one another, a conversation in which I would like situate myself (Carillo 2014; Elbow, 1993). Furthermore, in the past decade, neuroscientists have taken a distinct interest in how the human brain reads (Dehaene, 2009; Wolf & Stoodley, 2007). While cognitive studies have shown that reading physical texts leads to higher comprehension reading texts on a screen, the convenience of technology is undeniable. Some students choose to forgo reading a printed text to save money (eBooks are often cheaper than their hard copy counterparts); for environmental purposes (saving paper and ink); and for accessibility and ease of carrying multiple texts in one place.

While many studies confirm that reading in print leads to higher comprehension than reading on a screen, oftentimes the difference is minor (Jabr, 2013). In fact, some studies have prompted scholars to look beyond initial reading comprehension and consider long-term memory. According to a study in 2003, for example, at the University of Leicester, 50 students were asked to read introductory course materials either in print or on an LCD screen. The study confirmed that after 20 minutes of reading, students who read in print or on screen scored “equally well” in a multiple-choice quiz (Jabr, 2013). If differences in comprehension and long-term memory recall are negligible, people may choose reading materials based on preference alone.

In order to better understand student reading preference, I have conducted an IRB-approved pilot study in which I interviewed six graduate students from a public state university in the northeastern United States about their reading habits in print and on screen. Given that research in this area has primarily focused on undergraduates, my interviews with graduate students should provide a fresh perspective for this issue. Graduate students tend to do much more reading than undergraduates and are required to comprehend those texts they’ve read and recall them. Such expectations require them to make use of some kind of reading strategies. The existing research has also appeared to be most intent on discovering students’ on-screen reading habits, whereas my study sheds light on how reading habits and/or strategies differ between on-screen and print and why. This study reveals the reasons why graduate students prefer reading print or digital texts and what makes a text difficult for them to interact with. This study will provide insight into what instructors can do to better serve their students when examining course-specific content. 

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About the Author

Bibhushana Poudyal is currently a doctoral student and Assistant Instructor in Rhetoric and Writing Studies program at The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). Her research areas are Critical Digital Humanities, Critical Digital Archiving, and Digital Humanities in Transnational Contexts. Presently, her inquiries are directed toward Theories and Praxes of Situating/Situatedness and Decolonizing-Depatriarchalizing of Epistemes, Epistemologies, Ontologies, Digitalism, and Digital Archives.

Contents

Introduction

Methodological overview of critical digital archiving project

Exigency for Critical Decolonial Digital Archiving Project

What is (or why) archiving and digital archiving?

Critical Digital Archiving: Terminological, Conceptual, and Methodological Shifts

Conclusion

References

ABSTRACT

This article presents an overview of theoretical and practical methods and approaches of my ongoing critical decolonial digital archiving research project in a Rhetoric and Writing Studies PhD program. The article is written through the intersections and interstices of theory and praxis of Critical Digital Humanities, Literary Theory, and Cultural Studies and it introduces my research which is conducted on two levels: theorizing the performance of digital archiving and building a digital archive. The article insists upon making digital archiving practices and theories critically aware, contextually situated, and culturally responsive. By discussing challenges, negotiations, and strategies involved in the act of decolonial digital archiving, this article provides a framework for other researchers interested in building digital archives through post/decolonial orientations and invites them to recognize complexities and reimagine possibilities of digital archiving work.

Introduction

This article argues that the methodical practices of archiving and digital archiving began as powerful corporate, educational, or/and research entities. Therefore, archiving requires a careful, reflective, critical, and non-hierarchical inter/outerdisciplinary engagement among academics and non-academics to decolonize digital archives. This collaborative engagement allows researchers and practitioners of digital archiving to be aware of inquiries regarding an agency to access, study, produce, create, build, and disseminate information and knowledge about the cultures of non-mainstream Others through digital spaces in general and digital archives in particular. By discussing the complexities involved in this specific performance of digital archiving, my article aims to invite students, teachers, and researchers to create collaborative ways to reimagine and restrategize the humble and open-ended rhetorical praxes of decolonizing digital archives. I call such practices critical digital archiving.

The performance of critical digital archiving does not pretend to offer one final solution or approach to decolonize digital archives. Rather, critical digital archiving requires a performance of techne–which points to “a heterogeneous history of practices performed in the interstices between intention and subjection, choice and necessity, activity and passivity” (Beisecker, 1992, p. 156). Critical digital archiving encompasses a poststructuralist approach of looking into the history of decolonial digital archiving performed through the non/dominant non/mainstream spaces without hierarchical binaric monumentalizing of one over another. Because as we do not have access to the one final definite way of building an ethical decolonial digital archives, we have to train ourselves to learn from every effort made towards it, from a heterogeneous history of practices. That is why, the critical digital archiving practice requires one to work through the intersections of inter/outerdisciplinary methodologies, theories, and praxes. And on that urgent needfulness of an inter/outerdisciplinary collaborative dialogue, Safiya Umoja Noble (2018) writes, “[N]ow, more than ever, we need experts in the social sciences and digital humanities to engage in dialogue with activists and organizers, engineers, designers, information technologists, and public-policy makers before blunt artificial-intelligence decision making trumps nuanced human decision making” (p. 8). Therefore, as acknowledged by Noble, these intersections and interstices of inter/outerdisciplinary methodologies, theories, and praxes are opportunities to study digital archives in multiple ways and through multiple vantage points. To do so, it is crucial to recognize that critical digital archiving requires not only technical capability to build archives in digital spaces, but also the theoretical enquiries about a digital ‘product’, what happens while building it, and the rhetorical ecologies that give birth to certain product and processes.

Digital archiving performed through historically marginalized and oppressed locations is radically non-linear, because it is not something that is performed entirely from outside of the oppressive system. Rather critical digital archiving uses the language, medium, platform, and tools of the system/institution to decenter the same system/institution. It critiques colonial/patriarchival (re)presentation via the act of archivization itself (Kurtz, 2006; L'Internationale, 2016). To further elaborate on this odd affinity between postcolonialism and archiving, I quote Matthew Kurtz (2006). He writes, archiving is “a literal re-centring of material for the construction and contestation of knowledge, whereas postcolonialism often works toward a figurative decentring of that same material” (p. 25). My research project engages with such complex questions to exhibit the nonlinear journey of performing decolonial archives and to envision possible futures for digital archives as a location of resistance.

Thus, in this article, I present the synopsis of negotiations, challenges, and strategies involved in theorizing and building a decolonial digital archive. For that, I will first provide a conceptual and methodological overview of my research project and then present a brief autobiographic account, which is dynamically at play while working in this project and at the same time, a crucial aspect of the exigency of the project. After that, I will engage in the critical inquiry of theory and praxis of archiving and digital archiving and explain why I am naming my methodology critical digital archiving by presenting my experiences while building the prototype of my digital archive. While doing so, I will offer the discussion of complexities involved in the decolonializing digital archive as a way towards strategizing possibilities.

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About the Author

Eric Reid Hamilton is earning his PhD in Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design at Clemson University. His research interests are at the intersection of Rhetoric and Philosophy, ranging from ancient conceptions to digital inventions. When not exploring the endless opportunities afforded by reading, writing, and teaching, he enjoys taking part in anything active and outdoors.

Contents

Introduction

Silenced within the Confines of an Academic Paper

Altering the Narrative or Narrating the Alternative

Walking the Walk by Talking the Talk: Alternative Manifestations within a Weekly Doctoral Colloquia

Works Cited

Introduction

Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.

- Kenneth Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form

Written discourses . . . certainly ought not to be called real speeches, but they are as wraiths, semblances, and imitations . . . but the semblances of corporeal bodies, giving pleasure to the eye alone, and are of no practical value . . . The written speech, which employs one hard and fast form and arrangement, if privately read, makes an impression, but in crises, because of its rigidity, confers no aid on its possessor. 

- Alcidamas, On the Sophists

There is no outside-text.

 - Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology

If one were to alter the academic paper in terms of form and content, in what ways might the format and framework be adjusted, modified, and even transformed, altogether, by and through the scholarly community’s very conceptions surrounding such endeavors, all of which would be done in order to adapt (to) the conversations surrounding it? As the famous Burkean Parlor demonstrates, you are never fully beginning an intellectual discussion nor ending one indefinitely but, at best, diving head-first into a booming dialogue in hopes of keeping up, engaging with, and possibly adding a bit to a discursive consideration that extends far beyond an individual or single meeting. With this monumental yet always inviting nature of discussioneven if those currently in the ‘Burkean parlor’ act as though they have been awarded the roles as gatekeepers (in fact, especially if that is the case)—in what ways may we better serve and open up the established parameters currently isolating academic discourse, ones which continue to exist even among those making a career out of (and into) these efforts?

The academic paper has the ability to meld an assortment of scholars and texts in order to create new knowledge, and yet, as with any established genre, the constraints embedded within such conventions could be seen as inadvertently hampering otherwise productive and complementary avenues of scholarly exploration, despite the best of intentions. This project is not a call for the dissolution of the academic paper, nor is it even meant as a harsh critique thereof. At the risk of sounding reductive: there are inherent benefits and drawbacks of any single mode and/or medium of discourse—a principle that has become a defining element within the blossoming discipline of Rhetoric and Composition. It wouldn’t require a particularly rigorous meta-analysis to see the irony of the selected medium currently being utilized if the author were to be contending that the academic paper is inherently flawed. Such an approach would also be presumptive, at best, coming from an aspiring scholar that is greatly indebted to the knowledge transmitted from works structured within that format. Rather, this essay is humbly illustrating some possible alternatives that could run parallel to contemporary conventions in order to widen the discussion and offer more affordances for scholarly discourse. By illustrating some notable critiques against the status quo penned by recognized post-structuralist and feminist writers throughout the last century along with a positive alternative framework established by the Conference of Composition and Communication’s Octalog panels, as well as some contemporary manifestations within a transdisciplinary doctoral program at Clemson University, we may demonstrate the shortcomings of traditional exercises in scholarly conversations while providing blueprints to build from in order to—not precisely emulate but rather—extend and strengthen the paradigms that constitute our discipline of Rhetoric and Composition, including all (cross- and trans-) disciplines for that matter.

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About the Author

Raquel L. Dean holds a B.A. in Psychology and a M.A. in English with an emphasis in Rhetoric and Technical Communication from Eastern Washington University. She currently works for Kalispell Regional Healthcare as a School-based Mental Health Worker and plans to obtain her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology in the near future. Her research interests lie in both psychology and technical communication, with topics including: minority mental health, child psychopathology (childhood trauma and anxiety disorders) and evaluating barriers among minorities when accessing and receiving mental health care, by facilitating usability tests to examine information design and observe the users' experience.

Contents

Introduction

Literature Review

Methodology

Test Goals and Objectives

Participants

Scenario and Test Tasks

Metrics

Results

Findings and Discussion

Conclusion

Limitations of Study

Recommendations for Future Research

References

Appendix A: Pre-Test Survey

Appendix B: Recruitment Email

Appendix C: Post-Test Interview

Introduction

This paper will explore the topic of the rhetoric of the way information is designed in the field of technical communication. Rhetoric, in the most traditional sense, is the art of communicating effectively and efficiently, to a specific audience, in means of persuasion or informing. Rhetoric is involved in the way information is delivered to a given audience. This paper will focus on a website that delivers information regarding mental health services. The purpose of this will be to explore how the website is designed, how the content is presented, and the kind of experiences users have when they interact with the website. Individuals can be informed electronically (website, emails, blogs), word-of-mouth (being told by someone who has utilized that service), or through print (brochures, flyers, mail). For individuals to receive mental health services, they must first be informed about those services. There are many variables that may affect their access and availability to utilize these services.

For the purposes of this paper, I define Latino/a based on how it is defined by the U.S. Census Bureau, and the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB): "Latino" is defined as “a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race (2018). It is important to note here that the terms "Latino" and "Hispanic" refer to the same ethnic-minorities description provided by the U.S. Census Bureau—the terms are interchangeable.

Research shows that Latinos are the largest ethnic minority group in the United States and are projected to reach 90 million by 2025 and 97 million by the year 2050 (Shobe, Coffman, & Dmochowski, 2009. & Rastogi, Massey-Hastings, &Wieling, 2012). There are 50.5 million Latinos in the United States, which constitute 16% of the total U.S. population, and 66% of that Latino population are Mexican immigrants (Rastogi, Massey-Hastings, & Wieling, 2012). However, Latinos are half as likely to seek mental health services as Whites. Research has shown that there are system-level barriers (lack of Spanish-speaking service providers, inadequate training in the delivery of culturally competent services), as well as patient-level barriers (different views of mental health and mental health treatment, concern regarding stigma, and poverty) (Adams, 2007).

Empirical studies continue to support that although progress has been made in the field of technical communication, there is still a digital divide. St. Amant and Sapienza (2011) stated that “over the past decade, electronic communication and new technologies have been steadily reshaping traditional communication practices” (406). Technical communicators must pay closer attention to how effective the delivery of their information design products is. According to Parry and Judge (2005) some populations are more difficult to reach with health messages, even among those with access to healthcare and preventative services (Clayman et. al 2010). In respect to the Latino population, its members may not have access and use the same information as non-Hispanics, due to language, cultural, and media-use differences (Viswanath, 2006).

The organization I chose to observe is Frontier Behavioral Health—a non-profit organization that offers individuals, ranging from youth, adults to elderly, access to psychiatric, psychological, and specialist consultation services. This project focused on facilitating usability tests that examined how Spanish-speaking Latinos interact with the Frontier Behavioral Health website. Through the facilitation of usability tests, I observed how the users interacted with the Frontier Behavioral Health website, assessed how the users navigated the website, and located specific information on a website. Frontier Behavioral Health expresses through their mission statement and values, under the “About” page of the website, that they are dedicated in providing clinically and culturally appropriate behavioral healthcare and related services to people of all ages in collaboration with community partners. Through the findings I collect from my usability tests, I will examine how users respond to the design of the Frontier Behavioral Health website.