Author: Becca Tarsa

Step One: Become a DRC Fellow. If you’re anything like me, this should do the trick. Networking can be challenging for me. I came to Comp/Rhet late, when I was already halfway through my graduate school career. Making the switch from Literature to C/R made me a much happier, engaged and successful student, but it also made me feel a bit isolated. There was a lot of catch-up to do, and I was a bit unsure how to go about forging the kind of professional and academic relationships my peers seemed to find so rewarding. Joining the DRC Fellows has…

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Kimberly Christen Withey opened her keynote address, “Centers and Margins: Access and the Ethics of Openness in the Digital Humanities,” by asking us to reflect on “the “cultural logics of digital technologies, and out interactions with these tools” – specifically those of search engines. The large-scale projects devoted to digitizing, curating, and analyzing knowledge that dominate digital humanities offer exiting new possibilities for information circulation. Withey’s talk acknowledged the exciting potential of such work – but argued that the ethical questions such projects raise are being seriously neglected. Withey used the UCLA 2009 manifesto as an example of the way…

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What is it? Created in 2006, Twitter is a social information platform specifically designed to encourage brevity and wide-ranging networks. Twitter was inspired by the brevity of the coded language taxi dispatchers use to communicate with each other. Neither blogging tool or social network as traditionally defined, Twitter has been described by its creators as a “social information network;” it currently has more than 500 million users worldwide. Storify, launched in the fall of 2010, is a tool that allows users to curate and annotation a selection of Tweets in order to highlight a particular thread of conversation, incident in the Twitter…

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What is it? Video games have seen a significant recent upswing as tools for teaching composition. These approaches treat video games as texts – to be consumed, analyzed, discussed and even created by students themselves. As more and more tools for easily building games have made their way into mainstream availability – many of them freely availably online – composition instructors have begun experimenting with video games as a form of teaching students project design, multimodal composition and rhetorical awareness. As objects for study, video games come in all shapes and sizes. Students can play browser-based online games, such as…

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