Author: Sara West

In many ways, I feel like I’m already living digital rhetoric’s future. Let me explain: I’ve been in universities since 2007, at a time when digital technology became more accessible, more powerful, and more handheld. In 2006, Twitter was founded, and Facebook removed its restrictions to allow everyone 13 and older to join. The original Macbook Pro was also introduced in 2006; the first-generation iPhone was released in 2007. The Android Operating system was released in 2008. Just typing all those dates is kind of mind-blowing. Along with the technological changes of the time, I moved through institutions whose understanding…

As their time with the DRC draws to a close, the 2016-2017 DRC Fellows offer reflections on their time, what they’ve learned, and where they go from here. David Coad The DRC has been a wonderful experience of engaging in and promoting community in our scholarly world. I am using this post to share some things I’ve learned about digital community building—something I am interested in and something I believe is very key to the DRC, it’s purpose and success. I recently published an article in Computers and Composition about graduate students engaging in community building on Twitter at the 2015…

This month, we’re featuring another podcast as our webtext of the month. You might remember our post on Serial a couple of years back, and it seems only fitting that we tackle another wildly popular podcast from the same producers. In this post, I’ll be looking at the multimodal nature of S-Town, very similar to that of Serial. But while Serial’s website single-handedly introduced all the facets of the podcast (including court documents, maps, transcripts, etc.), S-Town’s story has been told not only across media but across different media outlets as well. In this text, I first introduce S-Town and…

At the end of our 2016 election year, we distributed a CFP that asked digital rhetoricians to consider how we might teach in the post-election moment. In their responses, our contributors focused on extending conversations on digital and media literacy in our “post-truth” moment. They shared lesson plans, readings, activities, and reflections on meeting the challenges of teaching digital rhetoric after the election. Our contributors: Considered how digital infrastructures shape our experiences. Brett Keegan shared his lesson plan for teaching how filter bubbles shape our “perceived political ‘realities,’” and Dawn Opel challenged students in a web design course to build…