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

• Prezi presentation

abstract
As the English department at VCU introduced a new, transdisciplinary PhD program in Media, Art, and Text, I was invited to present results from my recently completed national survey of multimodal teacher-scholars.

accompanying materials

• not available

see also

• Integrating multimodality in composition curricula (under Peer-Reviewed Articles)
• Data from the CCCC-Sponsored “Survey of Multimodal Pedagogies in Writing Programs” (under Technical Reports)
• Uncovering Theories & Practices of Multiliteracies & New Media Pedagogies (under Grants)

abstract
In two lecture-workshops (one for literature faculty and one for composition faculty), I presented an overview of the history of multimodality in English studies and how multimodal texts are assigned, composed, and analyzed/assessed in the various disciplines. This lecture was part of a year-long speaker series intended to support Kent State’s initiative to introduce multimodal composition in all of its first-year writing classes.

accompanying materials

• handout(s) not available

abstract
In this presentation, I address the recent MLA Task Force report, Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion (2006), which acknowledges an increasing need for thoughtful new strategies of evaluating digital scholarship in departments of English. I look at a contemporary heuristic (Warner, 2007) for reading and evaluating “webtexts” (texts that convey most of their meaning through text and hyperlinks) and compare them to “new media texts” that use multimodal elements to enact and convey meaning. The presentation is exploratory–just like the new media texts that it investigates–and discussion/interaction from the audience is encouraged.

accompanying materials

abstract
In this presentation, I discuss the contexts and definitions of digital scholarship, and ask the audience about their assumptions of such work. Then, using a  sample scholarly webtext, ask the audience to help evaluate it.

accompanying materials

• Scholarship, Art, or Fun?!

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