ENGL6344: Projects

Lodestars

The lodestars, diagrammed here, are not a project per se, but a set of points I am sharing as a kind of canopy oversky for the course. There are six: attention, artificiality, dataism, hypertext & hodology, database & narrative, and avatar & identity. Certainly these are not the only possible beacons in a course on rhetorics in digital environments. In an another semester, we could have picked usability, cognition, and memory; in another, virtuality, transnational feminism, and translation; in another, code literacy, environmental justice, and publishing; and so on. I don't want to exhaust these lodestars; rather, I point to them because I want you to know they are low-key there, guiding us, and I will at times encourage us to hold focus on one or two of them, or to write in relation to them, or to recognize among them how as some blinker into more luminous view, others fade. I may ask us (in class or in a ninety) to gamify them a bit, too: rank them in fluency order or interest order, write five questions about the one you consider least active in guiding your digital practices, characterize the changing nature of one line spanning two of the star-points...the list goes on. ✨

Nineties (30)

Nineties are focused pieces of writing that combine scopic awareness, style, and response to the assigned reading in the form of a question or a connection. The number ninety refers to word count; so, a ninety is a 90-word response: a wee genre designed to leave you feeling, in many cases, like you have more to say. But because we don't want to inconvenience ourselves too much with counting, a ninety can be between 85 and 95 words. Below 85, not a ninety. But above 95, in that case it must carry to the next multiple, 180 words (or, more precisely, 175-185 words). The logic of 90s owes to Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart's The Hundreds, a project where they wrote in dialogue with one another while adhering to units of writing that were 100 words or a multiple of 100. For ENGL6344, the goal each week is to write at least one Ninety, sometimes two. The goal for the semester is to write toward 20 nineties, or to aspire to the number of 90s that correspond with any particular grade on the grading contract in your Google Folder. Some Nineties may be prompted and composed in class. Others may be prompted and written outside of class. Others may be self-sponsored and altogether unprompted. And others still may be written and posted in dialogue with the initial entries made by peers, for example, in response to carnival blog entries or nineties posted on the blog. Other caveats and conditions apply: 1) nineties may be featured in class as focuses for our whole class or small group discussions in any week; 2) you are encouraged to develop nineties dialogically that respond to entries made in the past two weeks (or so); 3) you can pass on writing nineties in two different weeks, and 4) you must post at least five (or your eventual 20 or so) nineties to the class blog. I hope for this point to be clear: all nineties you write will be included in your person Google Folder; only some nineties (at least 5) must be posted to the class blog. Nineties shall be posted each week in your Google Folder no later than 1 p.m. before class on Monday. Nineties can also be used as starters for or as smaller pieces, for example, serving as a section of something you are thinking through for one of the blog carnivals.

I have added an annotated 90 to the document in your Google Folder where you will record the entries you develop this semester. The annotated version notes that each entry should include the following: a) title, b) datestamp, c) body text, d) wordcount, e) initials and author count (tally for you this semester), and f) sources, including associative references, listed with last name and year. Finally, although we won't be reading The Hundreds this semester, let's consider together whether we want to designate the final entry (or perhaps a portion of the reflection) as an exercise in indexing the entire collection. That is, in The Hundreds, Berlant and Stewart commission four indexers who revisit the entire collection of entries to discern patterns and to compose a gloss on the set. We'll talk through this more in class; the possibilities, I think, are more generative than daunting, but I'd like for us to resolve together whether we want to make space for indexing the set, or perhaps use RIDE Carnival #3 for looking across a subset of 90s (your own, those posted to the blog in relation to one or more lodestars, etc.) near semester's end.

Blog Carnival Series (60)

Blog carnivals are digital writing events organized flexibly around a shared question, set of questions, theme, or topic. They are also something of a throwback genre, or genre set, more openly and frequently practiced among bloggers in the aughts, though the Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative has continued to sponsor blog carnivals over the past two decades. Carnivals of this sort invite and even celebrate variety, provisional thinking, micro-research, and genuine, timely engagement with the ideas of others. When blog carnivals flourished most as an open, distributed, hive-like practice, they functioned like conversational sparks that would relay from one thread to another, with some yielding sustaining and multi-layered co-inquiry, and with others germinating into conference proposals (e.g., panels and roundtables) and other serendipitous collaborations. The blog carnival remains rich with possibilities for exploring interests, and doing so in ways that fall along a spectrum of research-based writing activity, from the formal to the informal, from the longer and more ornately organized to short series and to manifesto-like reactions. Within this project, the possibilities are rather wide open insofar as you will have opportunities to engage course materials, pose and respond to questions, and experiment with (or otherwise refine) your prose style, with digital writing, and with a sense of networked, (small) public-facing writing.

Calls for Entries

1. RIDE Blog Carnival #1 - Call for Entries
2. RIDE Blog Carnival #2 - Call for Entries
3. RIDE Blog Carnival #3 - Open Event CFE

Timing & Scope & Additional Details

1. Draft deadlines are posted on the class schedule: Carnival #1, Mon., Oct. 2, 4 p.m. ET; Carnival #2, Mon. Nov. 13, 4 p.m. ET; Carnival #3, Mon., Dec. 4, 4 p.m. ET.
2. Draft deadlines are for posting well-begun drafts in your Google Folder for review and feedback.
3. For Carnival #1 and #2, full, finished drafts shall be posted to the class blog no later than ~one week hence, or Oct. 9 for Carnival #1 and Nov. 17 for Carnival #2.
4. Carnival #3 will work a bit differently in that it will invite a wider set of possibilities. Whereas Carnival #1 and Carnival #2 will be guided by a set of questions, or a theme, Carnival #3 will truly be an open event, which will invite you to index (as experimentally or conventionally, as you wish) a subset of 90s from the blog, to respond to a blog entry or two from other carnivals, to extend or remediate your carnival entry from #1 or #2, or to develop another entry in light of some key question, curiosity, or connection you want to puzzle through nearer to the semester's end.

We will talk more in class about what else we might do with the carnivals, along the lines of opening the call to RW faculty, to people whose work we are reading, to RW alums, and so on. And we will look at examples from the Sweetland DRC to gain a better handle on what, if any, new and emerging possibilities surface for this kind of project, among the throughlines of networked writing practices and habits, writing pedagogy, and publishing. We will also spend time together looking at Wordpress plugins for things like footnoting, discuss conventions for keywords (i.e., labeling each entry using at least two of the lodestar terms), and more.

Reflection (10)

For this semester's sign-off (due Monday, December 11 by 4 p.m. ET), write an informal reflection that 1) accounts for significant shifts or insights with regard to your learning about (or with) rhetoric in digital environments, or, that 2) identifies selected, specific moments of surprise or insight linked with course readings, course activities or conversations, writing and responses you received, or any other self-initiated extension of the course that you consider meaningfully connected to the course goals or to the teaching you aspire to do, and/or that 3) contextualizes aspects of your semester that stand out as significant for any reason. The reflection should be at least 1000 words but not more than 1800 words.

Additional ungraded, or credit/no credit, items include the following.

At least one check-in meeting to discuss your work

Because individual, informal conversations offer a valuable opportunity for considering researchable questions, as well as for tailoring the course to your emerging interests and priorities, I have scheduled one on one conferences for us on Mon.-Wed., Sept. 25-27. These 20-minute meetings function as check-ins about how the class is going and about how your ideas are coalescing with regard to the blog carnivals.

One notes/annotation snapshots

At least once during the semester (indicated on the course schedule) upload to your Google Folder a snapshot of your reading notes. These can be Brooke Notes, marginalia, or some other notes system of your choosing. Please remember that PhD students include assigned readings from coursework on their preliminary exams reading lists; as such, this is an informal check-in designed to make sure you have a handle on an annotation system that is workable and sustainable for you.

In-class writing, activities, and heuristics

Several in-class writings, activities, and heuristics constitute an invaluable element of the course. Engaged, attentive participation during class makes a positive difference in the experience of the class for you and for your peers.

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