"Profiles in Digital Scholarship & Publishing: Douglas Eyman"

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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

Xchanges: There is talk in the U.S. and the U.K. about the need to regulate algorithms, as they seem to be operating on their own to guide people into more and more radicalized viewpoints in social and digital media. How does studying “digital rhetoric” deepen students understanding of how this works?

DE: My contention is basically that people control these algorithms. For me, there's a human element at the root of what's happening, but that doesn't mean that the algorithms don't have an effect. Clearly, they do have a very powerful effect, and studying the effects of algorithms on people and how we interrelate with them is an important part of digital rhetoric for certain. Especially looking at how algorithms and big data are being used in policing, for instance. That's a really important place. The degree to which our daily lives are surveilled, collected, and codified is astounding. Once you start actually doing research on stuff, it's just frightening. Companies are buying this data and using it in all sorts of different, quite interesting, and sometimes horrifying ways. Now, this information can be used by companies, and the kind of predictive analytics you could get out of this big data are just absolutely fascinating. That's definitely a realm for digital rhetoric. Big data and algorithms interact. It's always an interaction, and it's that interaction that positions it in the realm of rhetoric as opposed to the realm of simple computer science analysis.

It just means that humans have to be paying attention to the technologies that are using us as we use them and see how those effects happen. The effects aren't happening on their own. They're put into place and put in motion in some ways and are being used in different ways by people.