ALBERT

Description: As a field concerned with the production, consumption, and analysis of texts, English studies is also necessarily and uniquely tied to the technologies that support those activities. As those technologies evolve, the field evolves new research and teaching practices and new ways of using and thinking about digital tools. No longer the sole purview of a handful of specialists, digital texts (multimedia, Web content, digitized material, etc.), tools (software and hardware), and user practices (how readers and writers interact with, read, compose, analyze, share, and remix digital texts) pervade the field, from literary studies to writing studies and beyond. Although many English studies professionals have assimilated, investigated, and experimented with digital tools and associated practices on their own, such work is often facilitated by strategic collaborations. In fact, as this collection’s chapters demonstrate, forming collaborative partnerships is often the most productive way—if not the only way—to address research, professionalization, teaching, program development, and other challenges that arise as the field responds to digitality. Collaborative Approaches to the Digital in English Studies joins the ongoing conversation about collaborative work in the humanities. Instead of focusing exclusively on the digital humanities or emphasizing only the large-scale computational analysis or archival projects typical of that field of study, the collection focuses on a variety of projects led by or involving English studies professionals in particular. In doing so, the collection demonstrates growing interest in and diverse application of collaborative methods within the field and provides examples of the exigencies that have prompted a move away from the stereotypical lone-scholar model of scholarly work toward collaborative endeavors. The first aim of the collection is to present readers with compelling examples of how English studies professionals are employing collaborative approaches to the digital, thereby providing an up-to-date perspective on the nature of the work colleagues are doing as they come together around technology-related research and teaching questions. The second aim is to provide readers with concepts and models they can use in their own work as educators, researchers, and administrators. With chapters by Joyce Neff, Liza Potts, and Carl Whithaus; Lisa Spiro, Laura McGrath; Jim Ridolfo, Martine Courant Rife, Kendall Leon, Amy Diehl, Jeff Grabill, Douglas Walls, and Stacey Pigg; Sean McCarthy and Lauren Mitchell Nahas; Matt Barton and Kevin Moberly; Magnus Gustafsson, Donna Reiss, Art Young, and Linda Bradley; Caroline Cason Barratt, Jill Parrott, and Erin Presley; Monica Bulger, Jessica Murphy, Jeff Scheible, and Elizabeth Lagresa; Alan Liu; and Jentery Sayers.

Description: The New Work of Composing is a book-length collection whose purpose is to examine the complex and semiotically rich challenges and opportunities posed by new modes of composing, new forms of rhetoric, new concepts of texts and textuality, and new ways of making meaning. In particular, this book explores how digital media are shaping our understanding of scholarly projects within composition studies, including the need to reconsider print-centric conceptions of composing; theorize and illustrate new digital genres and interrogate definitions of authorial identity; consider how digital media change our understanding of (virtual and scholarly) space and place and allow new possibilities for embodiment; explore political implications of using new media in scholarship. Twelve chapters that respond to these objectives were solicited from participants of the 2008 Thomas R. Watson Conference on Rhetoric and Composition and were reviewed by the book’s editors. The book includes a foreword by N. Katherine Hayles and responses to the themes above written by Marilyn Cooper, Paul Prior, Diana George, and Andrea Lunsford. Authors include established scholars in digital writing studies and digital humanities, as well as new voices.

Description: Technologies of Wonder: Rhetorical Practice in a Digital World considers the theoretical and pedagogical implications of designing academic scholarship in interactive digital media, and proposes renewed emphasis on embodied visual rhetoric and on the canon of arrangement as an active visual practice. This project uses the concept of the Wunderkammer to argue for techné and wonder as guiding principles for a revitalized visual canon of arrangement and as new models of invention and intervention in multimodal scholarly production. Technologies of Wonder also presents examples of how this rhetoric of inquiry can be applied to multimodal projects in the classroom. New digital technologies offer viable alternatives to linear, less embodied traditions of academic scholarship. Emerging at a time when academic presses are under considerable economic pressure, Technologies of Wonder also serves as a model for how rigorous intellectual projects can be published and disseminated in less costly, more accessible formats.

Description: Together, computerized writing environments (e.g., physical spaces, hardware, software, and networks) and the humans who use and support such technologies comprise complex ecologies of interaction. As with any ecology, a human-computer techno-ecological system needs to be planned, fostered, designed, sustained, and assessed to create a vibrant culture of support at the individual, programmatic, institutional, and even national and international level. Local and larger infrastructures of composing are critical to digital writing practices and processes. In academia, specifically, all writing is increasingly computer-mediated; all writing is digital. Unfortunately, at far too many institutions, it is difficult to sustain ecologies of digital writing. How then to best plan, foster, design, sustain, and assess the complex ecologies framing the study and practice of digital writing that we do (or hope to do) as teachers, scholars, learners, and writers? The audience for this collection is teachers, scholars, administrators, and graduate students working in fields of composition studies, computers and writing, technical/professional communication, literature, education, and English education. We all face the same dilemma: More and more of our work and instruction takes place in electronic environments, but budget constraints and assessment mandates loom, and often our positions within or institutions prohibit us from active participation in central computing endeavors. This necessarily multivocal collection refines our discussions of the many components of sustainability, providing contextual, situated, and flexible modes and methods for theorizing, building, assessing, and sustaining digital writing ecologies. Section I: Sustaining instructors, students, and classroom practices. Introduction to section I / Heidi McKee -- Political economy and sustaining the unstable : new faculty and research in English studies / Kelli Cargile Cook, Ryan (Rylish) M. Moeller, and Cheryl E. Ball -- A portable ecology : supporting new media writing and laptop-ready pedagogy / Kristie S. Fleckenstein, Fred Johnson, and Jackie Grutsch McKinney -- Stifling innovation : the impact of resource-poor techno-ecologies on student technology use / Anthony T. Atkins and Colleen A. Reilly -- Video for the rest of us? Toward sustainable processes for incorporating video into multimedia composition / Peter J. Fadde and Patricia Sullivan -- Portfolios, circulation, ecology, and the development of literacy / Kathleen Blake Yancey -- Section II: Sustaining writing programs. Introduction to section II / Danielle Nicole DeVoss -- The administrator as technorhetorician : sustainable technological ecologies in academic programs / Michael Day -- Sustainability and digital technology : program analysis via a "three-legged" framework / Patricia Ericsson -- The hybrid academy : building and sustaining a technological culture of use / Beth L. Brunk-Chavez and Shawn J. Miller -- Using the LEED evaluation tool to assess the sustainability of first-year computers and writing programs / Kip Strasma -- Digital studio as method : collaboratively migrating theses and dissertations into the technological ecology of English studies / Jude Edminster, Andrew Mara, and Kristine Blair -- Section III: Sustaining writing center, research centers, and community programs. Introduction to section III / Dickie Selfe -- Sustaining a research center : building the research and outreach profile for a writing program / James E. Porter -- Sustaining community and technological ecologies : what writing centers can teach us / Jeanne R. Smith and Jay D. Sloan -- Sustaining (and growing) a pedagogical writing environment : an activity theory analysis / Mike Palmquist, Kate Kiefer, and Jill Salahub -- Genre-informed implementation analysis : an approach for assessing the sustainability of new textual practices / Lisa Dush -- Section IV: Sustaining scholarship and the environment. Introduction to section IV / Danielle Nicole DeVoss -- Sustainable digital ecologies and considered limits / Lisa Lebduska -- Old world successes and new world challenges : reducing the computer waste stream in America / Shawn Apostel and Kristi Apostel -- Sustaining scholarly efforts : the challenge of digital media / Cynthia L. Selfe, Gail E. Hawisher, and Patrick W. Berry -- Afterword : sustainable writing programs : a continuing agenda / Charlie Moran -- Author biographies and photos.

Description: Stories That Speak to Us—a digital collection of scholarly, curated exhibits—is designed to investigate literacy narratives from a number of perspectives: to explore why they are important, what information they carry about reading and composing, why they might be valuable, not only for scholars and teachers, but also for librarians, community literacy workers, individual citizens and groups of people. As the editors and authors collectively suggest, literacy narratives are powerfully rhetorical linguistic accounts through which people fashion their lives; make sense of their world, indeed construct the realities in which they live. Literacy narratives are sometimes laden so richly with information that conventional academic tools and ways of discussing their power to shape identities; to persuade, and reveal, and discover, to create meaning and affiliations at home, in schools, communities, and workplaces, are inadequate to the task. For this reason, the collection focuses on the work of both narrative theorists and literacy educators. The curated exhibits in Stories That Speak to Us provide analyses of narratives selected by the author/scholars from among the more than 3,500 narratives preserved in the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (DALN), a publicly available online archive of personal literacy narratives in a variety of formats (text, video, audio) that recount contributors’ literacy practices and values in their own words. The motif of exhibits and curators is employed in part to suggest the relationship between the narratives “on display” in this particular project and the much larger collection of narratives in the DALN as a whole—the narratives “on display” here constitute less than two percent of the entire archive. The Stories That Speak to Us collection allows visitors to study the literacy narratives in the exhibits directly via links to the DALN, while the essays in this collection constitute something analogous to exhibit catalogs. The individual exhibits examine themes such as “betweenity,” scaffolding, digital divides, ethnolinguistic vitality, ludic literacies, black women’s literacy narratives, the convergence of local and global discourses about literacy, feminism and digital literacy, and transnational “thirdspaces” of literacy. At the end of the collection, we suggest some ways to explore, and provide some tools for exploring, these and other topics in the entire archive.

Description: Writing has changed due to the affordances of digital technologies, and writing assessment has changed as well. As writing programs integrate more digital writing work, students, teachers, and administrators face the rewards and challenges of assessing and evaluating multimodal and networked writing projects. Whether classroom-based or program-level; whether in first-year writing, technical communication, or writing-across-the-curriculum; whether formative or summative; and whether for purposes of placement, grading, self-study, or external reporting, digital writing complicates the processes and practices of assessment. The chapters in Digital Writing Assessment & Evaluation place emphasis on assessment of digital writing—the methodological, technological, and ethical approaches for and issues involved with assessing multimodal, networked texts (and the student learning they represent). Authors address questions such as: How do different approaches to assessing traditional writing (8 1/2 x 11 word-centric texts) port—or not—to the assessment of digital writing? What challenges and opportunities for assessment do multimodal, networked texts present to teachers, program administrators, state-wide organizations, etc.? What material and technological resources are needed when assessing digital writing and/or how might existing resources need to be modified? How are processes and products of selection, collection, and reflection different (or not) with the multimodal affordances of digital technologies? How do guidelines and outcomes of groups such as CCCC, NCTE, WPA, AAC&U, impact approaches to assessment? How might these guidelines and outcomes need to be revised to better address digital writing assessment? How might the multimodal, networked affordances of digital writing affect issues of equity and access? How might groups often disenfranchised by more traditional assessment be impacted by digital writing assessment? How might eportfolios be designed for showcasing the collaborative composing processes of multimodal and/or networked writing? By what criteria should program administrators and instructors assess and select course-management and/or eportfolio systems? The fourteen chapters are organized into four sections, addressing equity and assessment, classroom evaluation and assessment, multimodal evaluation and assessment, and program revisioning and program assessment. Andrea Lunsford provides the foreword to the book; Edward White is the author of the afterword.

Description: Transnational Literate Lives in Digital Times is a book-length project designed to document how people outside and within the United States take up digital literacies and fold them into the fabric of their daily lives. This research contributes to our knowledge of the impact of digital media on literate practices and also provides a basis for developing approaches for studying and teaching successful practices. The goal of the book is to suggest different and increasingly accurate ways of understanding the life histories and digital literacies of those with transnational connections, attempting to take into account local perspectives and the complex processes of globalization. With its multimodal format, the project represents the authors' first attempt at crafting a born-digital book. We dedicate this book to all coauthors of Transnational Literate Lives in Digital Times and to the community of rhetoric and composition/writing studies, especially those who also claim computers and composition as a field. We also dedicate this book with great admiration to all those who have contributed to making Computers and Composition Digital Press (CCDP) a reality. The scholarly collective devoted to computers and composition has supported all of us far more than the individuals involved know, and, for this, we thank them. We are especially grateful to Michael Spooner, Director of Utah State University Press, for his long-standing support for our work. We're not sure what we would have done without him, but we are certain that the end results would have been far less effective without his magic touch. Because this born-digital book has touched all our lives for many years, we ask that all future citations of this book acknowledge the three of us as authors: Patrick W. Berry, Gail E. Hawisher, and Cynthia L. Selfe.