Author: Phil Bratta

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Phil is a Ph.D candidate at Michigan State University in the Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures department. His current interests are in rhetorics of activism, visual rhetorics, embodiment, rhetorical ecologies, digital writing, and pedagogy. Check out more about his work on http://www.philbratta.com/

Phil Bratta, Malea Powell, and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss Authorial Roles & Digital Technologies The ghosts of authors past continue to haunt us today—those (white) writing men alone at their desks with a glass of bourbon, those (white) writing women in a room of their own with a lamp flickering, both solitary at and in their craft. We’ve known for at least three decades how these romantic images are unrealistic, exclusionary, outmoded, and dead. More recently, perhaps, we’ve come to a richer notion of author. Author at computer: working across networks, collaborating across time and space, accessing analog and digital resources; author as more than…

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During the Fall semester of 2014, a group of us took a graduate seminar on multimodal composing at Michigan State University (taught by Dànielle Nicole DeVoss). In the course, we read, discussed, and built on theories and practices in digital and visual rhetorics. In this blog post, we share one of our course assignments: a multimodal book review project that we hope will inspire further conversation and engagement with the DRC community. One of the tasks we faced in this course was immersing ourselves in past and current conversations around visual rhetoric and multimodal composing by focusing on themes of…

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Title: Welcome to Pine Point Author: The Goggles (Michael Simons and Paul Shoebridge) Publisher:  National Film Board of Canada Publication date: January 2011 Official Website: http://interactive.nfb.ca/#/pinepoint Although a little more than three years old, the interactive web documentary Welcome to Pine Point continues to offer an interesting experience for internet users to engage with story and multimedia. The Welcome to Pine Point project had originally been conceptualized by the Goggles (Michael Simons and Paul Shoebridge) as a book about, ironically, the decline of photo albums and print culture. What emerged, however, was a platform through which visual rhetoric and audience interactivity play as important…

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