Tag: peer-reviewed
Monday, November 2nd, 2009
citation
Ball, Cheryl E., et al. (in progress). Talking back to teachers: Undergraduate research in multimodal composition. In Debra Journet, Cheryl E. Ball, and Ryan Trauman (Eds.) The new work of composing. Computers and Composition Digital Press/Utah State University Press.
abstract
This chapter is composed of 14 voices—12 undergraduates, 1 graduate student, and 1 faculty member (Cheryl E. Ball, contact author) from a multimodal composition class at Illinois State University. In a three-part chapter, we speak to the perceptions of undergraduate students’ technology use presented by scholarship, attendees at the Watson conference, and on our campus. The first section, presented as a video, reflects on conference attendees’ discussions of students who weren’t representative of the majority audience (professors and graduate students) at the conference. The second section, also presented as a video, asks how pedagogy needs to change to accommodate an increase in digital technology and what kind of cooperation is necessary between students and their teachers so both parties can effectively communicate to and learn from each other. The third section, presented as a MySpace page, argues that educators should incorporate social networks into their pedagogies because they offer a different way of composing. The sections will be presented together on the class blog, http://www.ceball.com/classes/239, where the index page will become a static Introduction to the chapter and each section will be presented as a page off the index. The benefit of hosting the site (for now) on the 239 class blog is so that readers can explore behind the scenes of our learning experience as we produced digital scholarship this semester.
status
- 12/08: proposal accepted for the collection
- 07/09: student projects revised
- 10/09: collection accepted by press
- 11/09: final chapter draft being readied for editors
accompanying materials
see also
Tags: chapters in-progress, collaborative, graduate, multimedia, online, open-access, peer-reviewed, service-learning, undergraduate, undergraduate research
Posted in Chapters | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
citation
Ball, Cheryl E. (2005). Digital scrapbooking and oral histories [pre-proposal]. Dee Foundation. $60,000. [not funded].
abstract
This project intended to collect oral histories of local Utah residents & scan their keepsake/artifacts for arhival purposes.
accompanying materials
Tags: external not-funded, peer-reviewed, principle investigator
Posted in External, Grants | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
citation
Ball, Cheryl E. (2008). The new work of composing: Editing an online (digital) multimedia book in English studies. Research Enhancement Award, College of Arts and Sciences, Illinois State University. $4,000 [not funded/waitlisted].
abstract
The New Work of Composing is the working title to the field of English Studies’ first digital, multimedia-rich “book” to be published in the field’s first fully online press: Computers and Composition Digital Press. This research grant will support the principle investigator, who is co-editor of The New Work of Composing, through a course release. During the release time, the PI will (1) provide initial feedback and editorial support for authors submitting to the collection, (2) edit the digital, multimedia submissions, which are due early in the spring of 2009, (3) study the process of editing scholarly, book-length, digital collections that contain multimedia elements, and (4) work toward the publication of a scholarly article about the process of authoring and editing large, digital multimedia collections to satisfy (in small part) the field’s increased interest in understanding and evaluating digital scholarship (especially digital books) for tenure and promotion purposes.
accompanying materials
Tags: internal not-funded, peer-reviewed, principle investigator
Posted in Grants, Internal | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
citation
Ball, Cheryl E. (2009). Composing The New Work of Composing: A Born-Digital Afterword Reflecting on Digital Scholarship for a Born-Digital Book. NEH 2009 Summer Stipend. $6,000. [Not funded]
abstract
The Modern Language Association reports that over 52% of humanities department chairs have no experience evaluating digital books for tenure/promotion, including “born-digital” books (i.e., a book that exists only in a digital format, with no possible print or analog counterpart). I intend to edit the first born-digital scholarly book in English studies, The New Work of Composing. This book will add to humanities’ understanding of writing in a digital age by providing an example of born-digital scholarship that will help us consider the new intellectual work of the “book.” The deliverables for this NEH summer stipend include designing the book’s interface and composing the afterword, a media-rich assessment of digital scholarship with an emphasis on the process of writing, designing, and editing the field’s first born-digital, scholarly book. Computers and Composition Digital Press—the humanities’ first digital-only, open-access, academic press—has asked for a prospectus in Spring 2009.
accompanying materials
Tags: external not-funded, peer-reviewed, principle investigator
Posted in External, Grants | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
citation
Ball, Cheryl E.; Ellison, Katherine; Thompson, Torri; Justice, Hilary; Neuleib, Janice; & Kalmbach, James. (2009). Assessing faculty & student multimodal teaching and learning practices across campus. Department/School Initiative in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Illinois State University. $10,000. [not funded]
abstract
This grant proposal was intended to fund a series of surveys and workshops to assess how teachers across the curriculum at Illinois State University implemented student-based projects using multiple media.
accompanying materials
Tags: collaborative, internal not-funded, peer-reviewed, principle investigator, SoTL, teaching-improvement effort
Posted in Grants, Internal | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
citation
Ball, Cheryl E. (2009, October 1). Creating sustainable teaching practices for multimodal scholarship. NEH Teaching Development Fellowship. $21,000. [under review]
abstract
I am requesting funding of $21,000 over the five-month period August–December 2010 to complete a teaching development project aimed at creating templates for multimodal scholarship, which I will use as the basis for my English 239: Multimodal Composition course at Illinois State University. These templates will use a selection of open-source software created in partial conjunction with University of Southern California’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy. The release time this stipend provides will allow me to travel to USC to work with these designers and to create three templates and three tutorials (on how to use those templates) so that my students can practice more cutting-edge and more sustainable digital humanities scholarly practices.
accompanying materials
Tags: external under review, peer-reviewed, principle investigator, SoTL
Posted in External, Grants | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
citation
Group Leader/Consultant, Humanistic Algorithms Project. (2008–2009). Humanities High Performance Computing Collaboratory (HpC). Principle Investigator: Kevin Franklin (UIUC); Project Leader: Virginia Kuhn (USC). National Endowment for the Humanities Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities Grant. $250,000 [External; ~$5,000 for travel/honoraria].
grant project description (from accompanying materials letter)
As one of the group leaders of the Humanistic Algorithms project—one of three humanities groups selected for the 2008–2009 HpC mini-residencies—you will collaborate with high performance computing specialists in order to identify, create, and adapt computational tools and methods. Your participation in this grant includes travel to three supercomputing centers for three different workshops tailored to address the specific challenges of your individual projects and research goals. The Humanistic Algorithms project is a collaboration between SEASR, I-CHASS, and the University of Southern California’s Institute for Multimedia Literary that focuses on building metadata algorithms for digital media content and creating a digital archive system in support of an open-access digital portfolio application for faculty and students at higher education institutions. Supercomputing workshops for the Humanistic Algorithms group include visits to the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center on February 26-27, the San Diego Supercomputing Center on March 19-20, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications from April 19-23 to participate in the third workshop and to attend the third annual HASTAC conference, Traversing Digital Boundaries. The year-long program will culminate in a final two-day conference in August 2009.
group/project abstract
Humanistic Algorithms: The University of Southern California’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy (IML) has faced a material challenge for the past eight years in realizing one of its primary goals: creating a digital archive system in support of the creation of digital portfolio application. The lack of sufficient computational resources for holding large collections of multimedia resources, most notably its robust digital portfolio of media-rich student projects and faculty teaching resources, has hindered IML’s creation of a pedagogical tool for faculty and students. The Humanistic Algorithms project is a collaboration between SEASR, ICHASS, and IML to address this challenge. The project is being imagined in phases, with the first stage to serve as a prototype to be completed by early June. SEASR will use data analytics to extract information from unstructured texts (i.e., raw textual data like websites, etc.) to produce semantic information that can be used to create meta-analyses of scholarly multimedia. From these meta-analyses, Humanistic Algorithms would like to contemplate: What are the components of scholarly multimedia? What is pedagogy in a networked world? How do we collaborate, train faculty, and teach students how to read and compose scholarly multimedia?
Note: Kairos (see under Edited Journals) is part of the corpus for the prototype algorithm, along with the IML student projects and two other scholarly, multimedia collections.
accompanying materials
Tags: accepted, consultant, external funded, peer-reviewed
Posted in External, Grants | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
citation
Designer. (2007). For Allison Warner [Author], Constructing a tool for assessing scholarly webtexts. Kairos: Rhetoric, Technology, Pedagogy, 12(1).
http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/12.1/binder.html?topoi/warner/index.html
abstract
This webtext presents a tool for assessing the scholarly value of online journal publications. It is part of a larger study that uses Kairos webtexts to investigate the scholarly nature of online texts. The goal of this larger study is to deliver a rubric as an instrument to facilitate the acceptance of online texts within English Studies as evidence of scholarship for professional advancement. In order to understand more fully how an online text can be recognized and valued for its scholarly legitimacy, it is crucial to explore the nature of successful (published) online scholarship. The assessment tool presented in this webtext is comprised of questions that help to reveal commonalities and deviations in the function and value of traditional (print) scholarly conventions toward defining an emerging genre of online scholarship. This webtext is designed using a web browser interface that should be familiar to many web readers. Web browsers enable readers to view web pages and provide a gateway to finding information online. This webtext was intentionally designed to draw attention to the interactive ways in which readers can approach texts that are created in or remediated for the Web. This design is mimetic to my thesis, that scholarly webtexts need both familiar and new assessment tools in order to be valued by academic stakeholders.
accompanying materials
Tags: collaborative, multimedia, online, open-access, peer-reviewed, published, webtext
Posted in Publications, Research Designs | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 20th, 2009
citation
Ball, Cheryl E. (2005). Trans-cultural multimedia production in an English classroom. Proceedings for Advancing the Effectiveness and Sustainability of Open Education Conference. Utah State University, 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 defi ne as reading and composing texts with an understanding of a specifi c 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.
see also
Tags: closed-access, peer-reviewed, print, published
Posted in Proceedings, Publications | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 20th, 2009
citation
Bemer, Amanda; Moeller, Ryan M.; & Ball, Cheryl E. (2009, September). Designing collaborative learning spaces: Where material culture meets mobile writing processes. Programmatic Perspectives: Journal of the Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication, 1(2). http://www.cptsc.org/pp/vol1-2/bemer_moeller_ball1-2.pdf
abstract
In May 2007, the Department of English at Utah State University (USU) redesigned its computer lab to increase mobility and collaboration during writing projects. Our study shows that despite the Professional and Technical Communication (PTC) field’s efforts to promote writing as a socially active, collaborative practice, many students view computer labs as spaces for conducting isolated, single-authored work. In this article, we discuss how a combination of movable furniture and mobile technology, including wireless access and laptops, can enhance student collaboration in group-based writing assignments. The lab included both desktop and laptop seating areas, so the authors created a modified worksite analysis designed to evaluate team collaboration in this new layout. These material changes in the lab allow students to configure the space according to their needs, offering them some measure of control over three crucial elements of successful collaboration: formality, presence, and confidentiality.
accompanying materials
see also
Tags: articles published, collaborative, graduate student, grant outcome, online, open-access, peer-reviewed, SoTL, teaching-improvement effort
Posted in Peer-Reviewed Articles | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, October 20th, 2009
citation
Journet, Debra; Ball, Cheryl E.; & Trauman, Ryan. (in progress). Digital scholarship and the new work of the book in composition studies. In Debra Journet, Cheryl E. Ball, & Ryan Trauman (Eds.) The new work of composing. Computers and Composition Digital Press/Utah State University Press. http://ccdigitalpress.org
status
- Update 07/09: Prospectus with introduction submitted to CCDP.
- Update 10/09: Verbal confirmation from press editor that collection has been accepted.
- Update 11/09: Email confirmation from press that collection should proceed.
abstract
This introductory chapter to the digital media collection, The New Work of Composing, asks what constitutes a “book” in age of digital scholarship? In a period of digital production, we are pushed to consider what a book is and what it does. How do modes and media change not only how knowledge is produced but also what kind of knowledge is made possible? Which assumptions about the print book—its scope or range, its intellectual possibilities, the kinds of interactions it fosters—are transferable to digital books and which are not? This project lays the groundwork for these questions. The New Work of Composing contains 14 multimodal chapters that are organized around five clusters of issues of related to digital composition. In the introduction, each chapter is described, and the book’s interface is also discussed (e.g., how to read this book).
accompanying materials
see also
Tags: chapters in-progress, collaborative, multimedia, online, open-access, peer-reviewed
Posted in Chapters | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 20th, 2009
citation
Ball, Cheryl E.; Fenn, Tyrell; & Scoffield, Tia. (in review). (Multimodal, multimedia, multigenre) Composition: Narratives on teaching and learning with new media. In Carl Whithaus & Tracey Bowen (Eds.) Multimodal literacies and emerging genres in student compositions.
status
- Update 6/08: Collection received advanced contract from Utah State University Press.
- Update 4/09: Utah State Univ Press downsized; asked to send mss elsewhere.
- Update 10/09: Collection reviewed by Pittsburgh University Press; co-editors responding to reviews.
- Update 11/28/09: Email notification by editors for new revision deadline of Feb. 1, 2010, to be reviewed again by Pittsburgh UP.
abstract
In this chapter, we overview an individual-classroom implementation (i.e., non-programmatic) of multimodal, multimedia, and multigenre composition, in which the distinctions between those terms will be discussed by the instructor–author. The second and third authors (who were students in the class) took on teacher-roles in class based on their histories of composing with multiple modes and media; they reflect on those histories and how prior experiences played a role in the designs of their final projects, which included a video documentary and several supplementary texts designed with different media and different rhetorical situations in mind. Our purpose in this chapter is threefold: (1) to outline and discuss problems with a new media composition syllabus with sequenced assignments that step students through composing in different modes, media, and genres; (2) provide narratives of students’ experiences composing texts in such a course, with a focus on their transferable critical literacies; and (3) offer lessons learned whereby teachers can help students produce more interesting, relevant, and powerful texts than the original syllabus inspires.
accompanying materials
Tags: chapters under review, closed-access, collaborative, peer-reviewed, print, SoTL, undergraduates
Posted in Chapters | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, October 20th, 2009
citation
Ball, Cheryl E. (under review). Toward a reading heuristic for new media texts. Writing spaces: Readings on writings. http://writingspaces.org/
abstract
Using terms familiar to composition, rhetoric, and their related disciplines (i.e., purpose, organization, emphasis, etc.), readers can shift their use of these concepts from written communication to interpret new media texts. I provide a reading of a new media text, “Murmuring Insects” (Ankerson, 2001) to show this transferability in reading new media. The reading and subsequent heuristic that this chapter offers pays attention to the many contexts in which new media texts are produced and read and focuses on interpreting the design elements of a text in relation to its purpose.
status
- 4/15/09: Chapter proposal submitted
- 5/20/09: Chapter proposal accepted
- 7/15/09: Publication contract received & signed
- 8/15/09: Chapter submitted to editors
- 1/10: Expected publication date
accompanying materials
Tags: chapters under review, online, open-access, peer-reviewed, print
Posted in Chapters | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 20th, 2009
citation
Ball, Cheryl E., & Kalmbach, James. (forthcoming, 2009/10). On the rawness of reading and writing new media: Materialities, histories, and happenstance. In Cheryl E. Ball & James Kalmbach (Eds.) Reading and writing new media (pp. 1–14). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton.
abstract
This chapter is the introduction to the edited collection, Reading and Writing New Media. It introduces the concept for the book: a happenstance of theory about new media in digital writing studies suited to the particular moments in time (mid- to late-2000s) in which the book is published.
status
- see entry for edited collection (linked below)
accompanying materials
see also
Tags: chapters in-press, closed-access, collaborative, peer-reviewed, print
Posted in Chapters | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 20th, 2009
title/status
- Editor, 2008-present
- Co-Editor, 2006-2008 (with Beth L. Hewett)
- Section Co-Editor (CoverWeb, with Beth L. Hewett), 2001-2006
description
Kairos, which began publishing online in 1996, is an internationally recognized, peer-reviewed journal in digital writing studies. It has a readership of over 45,000 readers a month from over 180 countries and an acceptance rate of 10 percent. The journal publishes three sections of full-length scholarship (Topoi, Praxis, Inventio) and three professional development sections (Reviews, Interviews, Disputatio), which are editorially reviewed by their respective section editors. Issues are openly available on the Web at http://kairos.technorhetoric.net, and are published twice a year, in August and January, with special sections occasionally occurring as a third issue in May. In December 2008, Kairos was recognized by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals for its redesign (the journal’s third look in 13 years), which garnered the CELJ Best Design Award.
Kairos has a longstanding reputation for theoretical and technological innovation, collaborative authorship, editorial mentoring and outreach, and collaborative review processes, all of which support the unique scope and practices of the journal: publishing digital media scholarship that incorporates web-based media to make meaning. The majority of the scholarship Kairos publishes cannot be printed because these web-based articles (i.e., “webtexts”) use interactivity, multiple media including video and audio, and other nonlinear elements to make their scholarly arguments.
see also
Tags: bi-annual, collaborative, editor, mentor, multimedia, ongoing, online, open-access, peer-reviewed, webtext
Posted in Edited Journals, Publications | 1 Comment »