If you recently taught a course in writing, rhetoric, and/or technical, professional, or business communication with a significant thematic focus on writing with or about data, we invite you to publish it as part of the Sweetland DRC Syllabus Repository. Please consider submitting your syllabus so that others might gain inspiration for their future courses by filling out this form. The deadline to submit is Wednesday, June 25th 2025.
What is the Sweetland DRC Syllabus Repository?
The Sweetland DRC Syllabus Repository is a public, crowd-sourced collection of syllabi of courses taught by our contributors. We see the syllabus repository as a library of diverse classroom artifacts that may offer insights into the course design choices, texts, readings, projects, and classroom or online activities that instructors who have taught at the intersections of digital studies can share. We hope these syllabi will function as mentoring texts for instructors designing or redesigning courses, offering inspiration as we think deeply about our work’s pedagogical and justice-oriented implications. You can view the existing repository here: https://www.digitalrhetoriccollaborative.org/syllabus_repository/
What are we looking for?
Today, we live in what’s known as the Zettabyte era, a period of human and technological history characterized by our collective wealth of information. In 2023, we produced 120 zettabytes of data globally (Emirler, 2023). Unfortunately, we also live in a post-truth era, characterized by our wealth of mis- and dis-information.
Therefore, learning how to write with and about data is crucial for students seeking to generate effective writing in a variety of contexts.
We are looking for writing, rhetoric, and/or technical, professional, or business communication courses at either the undergraduate or graduate level that have significantly integrated theories, ideas, method/-ologies, or texts about writing with data into at least one module, unit, or project.
By “data,” we mean “representative measures of phenomena captured through some form of measurement or observation, or derived or inferred values produced through calculations such as statistics or modelling,” (Kitchin, 2024, p. 45) including:
- Quantitative data
- Qualitative data
- Data visualizations
- Data storytelling
- Big data
- Data methodologies
- Bias and algorithms
- Ethical, social, cultural, political, and environmental implications of data
- Data infrastructures
- Data access and control
- Data justice
- Data feminism
- Data colonialism
We encourage respondents to submit syllabi that highlight how data overlaps with and complicates the teaching of themes and clusters of interest to rhetoric and writing studies scholars, including (but not limited to):
- Composition studies
- Digital rhetoric and multimodality
- Visual and design rhetorics
- First-year writing
- Technical communication
- Professional writing
- Business communication
- Computers and writing
- Writing analytics
- Coding literacy
- Anti-racist pedagogy
- Design thinking
- Disability studies
- Circulation studies and social media rhetoric
- Writing across the curriculum/writing in the disciplines
- Rhetoric of health and medicine
- Feminist rhetoric
- Queer rhetoric
- Research methods
- Composition or rhetorical theory
How to submit:
Please submit your syllabus with this form: https://forms.gle/CCUAJowUq3uqZizr6
[Submitting a syllabus through the form requires signing in through a Google account.]Please send in your entries by Wednesday, June 25th 2025.
If you have any questions of would prefer to submit your syllabus via email, contact the editor of this repository, Marie Pruitt, at virginia.pruitt@louisville.edu.
Disclaimer
The DRC Syllabus Repository is a collaborative project depending on generous scholars who agree to put their syllabi in this repository for you to refer to and use. Please be advised that the syllabus authors are obliged to ensure the complete, accurate, teachable, and reliable content of the syllabi. We, as editors, appreciate their contribution and efforts, but have entered no agreement with syllabus authors to endorse the content of the syllabi. All syllabi will be shared with a CC-BY-NC license, which enables wide use of materials. To learn more about this visit this link (https://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/deed.en). Submitting a syllabus requires signing in through a Google account.
References:
Emirler, S. (2023, December 29). World Tour of Data in 2023–120 Zettabytes and Counting! Medium. https://medium.com/@senaemirler/world-tour-of-data-in-2023-120-zettabytes-and-counting-e0865bb4b1cd
Kitchin, R. (2024). Data. In Critical data studies: An A to Z guide to concepts and methods (pp. 45–46). Polity.
