Presentations Category
Tuesday, December 1st, 2009
citation
Ball, Cheryl E. (2009, Dec. 2). The contestation of multimodality in new media scholarship. Visual Culture Colloquium, Illinois State University, Normal, IL.
poster for talk, designed by Michele Melanie
abstract
Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy has been publishing digital media scholarship since 1996, and each new medium and digital technology offers authors changing ways that they can make meaning through visual, aural, linguistic, and other modes of communication. As editor of Kairos, it is my responsibility to understand the often cutting-edge and genre-bending moves authors make in their submissions to this rhetoric and composition journal. I will present a few examples of submissions (historical and recent) that required the staff and editorial board members to re-negotiate the ever-changing boundaries between ‘typical’ digital scholarship and “new media scholarship,” exemplified by the relationship between the visual and the linguistic (i.e., written).
accompanying materials
Tags: invited, lecture
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Thursday, October 29th, 2009
citation
Ball, Cheryl E. (2008, October 17). Designing digital scholarship (and having it count): A case built on three perspectives. Thomas R. Watson Conference on Rhetoric and Composition, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY.
abstract
In this panel session, three presenters spoke to digital projects they had undertaken (a digital archive, a wiktionary, and a scholarly webtext published in Kairos), discussing compositional, revision, and “counting” issues relating to tenure and promotion. I responded to the panelists based on my experience as editor of Kairos, as a junior faculty member using a lot of digital scholarship in my tenure case, and as a promoter/user of digital portfolios to make tenure arguments.
accompanying materials
Tags: invited, respondent, session chair
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Thursday, October 29th, 2009
citation
Ball, Cheryl E. (2008, October 16). Digital scholarship roundtable. Thomas R. Watson Conference on Rhetoric and Composition, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY.
abstract
In this session, five presenters — all editors of online journals or presses — speak to the state of digital scholarship, including issues regarding submission, tenure & promotion, professional development, and curricular importance. The majority of the session was for Q&A. I spoke about Kairos, the journal I edit.
accompanying materials
Tags: invited, professional convention, roundtable
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Thursday, October 29th, 2009
citation
Ball, Cheryl E. (2007, October 20). Bridging the comp/lit split with new media. The Purpose(s) of English: A Conference on the Future of English Studies, University of Illinois, Springfield, IL.
abstract
In “English Studies, Aestheticism, and the Art-Culture System,” Hardin (JAC: 1999) claimed that the split between composition and literature mimicked an unhealthy art-culture system of high (or valued) art versus low (or kitschy, nonvaluable) art within English departments. His purpose in making this comparison was not to say that composition studies, or its connection to rhetorical studies, was indeed a low form of art, but to suggest that English studies needed a bridge between low and high forms — one that would satisfy, or rather rectify, the traditional high/low, literature/composition, aesthetics/ rhetoric split but also one that would allow for students to take advantage of the both/and in their writing practices. New media production provides a 21st-century answer to this split. By having students produce new media texts, the departmental cultures of English studies can bridge the binaries of high and low, literature and composition, and aesthetic and academic discourse. In combining both aesthetic and textual (i.e., letterate) choices in meaning making, authors of new media texts draw on both academic and popular genres to make their points. I will demonstrate this possible bridge by discussing a student-produced new media text, focusing in particular on the rhetorical and aesthetic intentions the student demonstrated in his video, which uses academically styled voiceover, punk- and pop-rock soundtrack, original video and audio, and written text.
accompanying materials
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Tags: panel session
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Thursday, October 29th, 2009
citation
Ball, Cheryl E. (2007, October 6). Preparing for graduate school. MUSE Undergraduate Literary Studies Conference. Illinois Wesleyan University, Bloomington, IL.
abstract
This roundtable provided undergraduate students the opportunity to ask questions about how and why to apply to graduate school, what the expectations are for different kinds of schools, and how to choose which school(s) to attend.
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Tags: invited, roundtable
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Thursday, October 29th, 2009
citation
Ball, Cheryl E. (2007, May 18). How to get published in an online journal: An editors’ roundtable. Computers and Writing, Detroit, MI.
abstract
This roundtable/mentoring session offered audience members a chance to hear from online journal editors what distinguishes each of their publications from the other as well as basic principles for querying and submitting to online journals in rhetoric and composition. Time was left for each journal editor to meet in small groups with interested authors for a Q&A.
accompanying materials
Tags: mentoring, professional development, roundtable, session chair
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Thursday, October 29th, 2009
citation
Ball, Cheryl E. (2006, October 21). Report on a CCCC-sponsored survey of multimodal composition practices (But where are the two-year schools?). TYCA-West, Park City, UT.
abstract
A presentation on the results from the national CCCC Research Initiative grant survey about multimodal composition practices, with a particular focus on why there are so few community colleges represented in the survey sample. Time was left for audience response to gauge future projects assessing two-year school participation in multimodal composition.
accompanying materials
Tags: panel session, professional convention
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Thursday, October 29th, 2009
citation
Ball, Cheryl E. (2006, July). Multimodal composition practices: Overviews and impacts on tenure & promotion. Virtual Reality & Real Life (VR@RL) Conference [Online].
abstract
In this online asynchronous session, I presented results and discussion from the CCCC Survey on multimodal practices, with particular emphasis on the section about tenure and promotion issues for scholars working in digital media.
accompanying materials
Tags: invited, online, session
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Thursday, October 29th, 2009
citation
Ball, Cheryl E. (2006, May 27). Editing scholarship in a new media age. Computers & Writing, Lubbock, TX.
abstract
In this panel presentation, four presenters (editors of Kairos or authors for Kairos’s 10th anniversary issue) discuss the history and trajectory of digital writing studies’ longest-running online journal. I focused on the transitions the journal underwent as it progressed into its 11th year of publication.
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Tags: panel session, session chair
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Thursday, October 29th, 2009
citation
Ball, Cheryl E. (2006, May 26). A survey of multimodal composition practices: Report on a CCCC Research Initiative Grant. Computers & Writing, Lubbock, TX.
abstract
In this panel presentation, the six investigators of the CCCC Research Initiative Grant on multimodal pedagogies presented the findings of the survey results. I focused on the survey section about demographics and tenure and promotion practices for digital media scholarship.
accompanying materials
- once there was an outline…
see also
Tags: panel session
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Thursday, October 29th, 2009
citation
Ball, Cheryl E. (2006, May 26). First year out: Time- and face-management tips for junior faculty members. Computers & Writing, Lubbock, TX.
abstract
In this session, several newly hired tenure-track faculty members present advice, suggestions, and tips for managing the transition to their schools. I focused on how to balance professional and personal roles through time-management practices and on how to make sure your new colleagues get to know you, through what I called “face-management” practices.
accompanying materials
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Tags: mentoring, professional convention, professional development, session chair
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Thursday, October 29th, 2009
citation
Ball, Cheryl E. (2006, March 23). Revisiting the usefulness of current multimodal and new media theories. Conference on College Composition & Communication, Chicago, IL.
abstract
In this presentation, I discussed two sets of rubrics posited by new media scholars, Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen in their book Multimodal Discourse and Lev Manovich in his book A Language of New Media. I argue that these rubrics are only so useful for rhetoric and composition scholars because they don’t focus on rhetorical ways of understanding digital media texts.
accompanying materials
see also
Tags: professional convention, session chair
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Thursday, October 29th, 2009
citation
Ball, Cheryl E. (2005, October 21). Designing educational spaces for students & colleagues. Council on Programs in Technical & Scientific Communication, Lubbock, TX.
abstract
In this roundtable, I focused on issues of being a new faculty member in a department and how I created a research identity that was transparent, if a little “quirky,” so that colleagues could begin to recognize my research agenda.
accompanying materials
Tags: professional convention, roundtable, session
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Thursday, October 29th, 2009
citation
Ball, Cheryl E. (2005, September 7). Trans-cultural multimedia production in an English classroom. Conference of Open Source Learning & Instructional Technology, Logan, UT.
abstract
In English studies, the past decade has seen a dramatic shift toward analysis and production of multimedia texts (c.f. Cope & Kalantzis, 2000; Wysocki, Selfe, Johnson-Eilola, & Sirc, 2004). This shift is informed by the study of rhetoric, which we define as reading and composing texts with an understanding of a specific audience, purpose, and context. In Dr. Ball’s Perspectives on Writing and Rhetoric class, students analyze creative multimodal texts using multiple reading strategies, and then compose their own texts. Although this generation of students is typically well-informed about technology, most of them have never encountered a digital, multimodal text whose purpose is primarily aesthetic. Studying the rhetorical situation in what literary theorists such as Eco and Rosenblatt would call an “open,” readerdriven, adaptable text provides a rich learning experience for students.In this class, students read several examples of open texts including “Murmuring Insects” (Ankerson, 2001), which successfully uses Eastern and Western multimodal elements—including written, aural, visual, animated, and other modes of communication—to juxtapose calm with fear while honoring the events of September 11, 2001. In this presentation, we show this piece in contrast to student-produced multimodal texts that attempt to adopt cultural contexts of other writers, often unsuccessfully. We conclude by suggesting why some students’ attempts at adaptation in these creative and social media are hindered by localized contexts. In addition, we demonstrate how students who don’t attempt to adapt their creative work to other’s contexts often make stronger rhetorical choices in their multimodal texts while still meeting the needs of various audiences.
accompanying materials
Tags: session
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Thursday, October 29th, 2009
citation
Ball, Cheryl E. (2005, June 17). Hackers, schmoozers, & wonder: Rhetoric, technology, & aesthetics in new media spaces. Computers & Writing, Palo Alto, CA.
abstract
In this session, I presented on a “rhetoric of wow,” drawing on Geoffrey Sirc’s (2001) notion of a Happenings pedagogy and Philip Fisher’s (2003) poetics of wonder and thought. I apply that rhetoric to a student-produced video poem, to offer the audience a method of analysis/assessment of digital media texts.
accompanying materials
see also
Tags: professional convention, session chair
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