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Notes and Overview for Week 01

ENGL 5362, Fall 2023

Important: No assignments or course documents, including the syllabus, should be considered to be in their final form until the first week of class begins.

Each week, I’ll post notes and an overview of the week’s content (just like this document). These docs will detail specific readings, assignments, and due dates for each week. Usually.

Game of Thrones meme, Samuel Tarly reading a book.
Figure 1: Always read the instructions

Agenda

  1. Introduce each other and compose ourselves
  2. Questions about the syllabus and Blackboard ever so briefly
  3. Talk about this week’s readings and probably what we already know about rhetorick
  4. Look at the Online presence project
  5. Talk about what it means to “Read like a grad student” in all of its deceptive simplicity

Form/Content and Rhetoric

Assigned readings can always be found on Blackboard. Addional resources should be there, and if not are accessible through our Library)

You were to have read the following today:

Without being game-the-system-ish about it, why did I put these together? Most of them don’t even cite about each other and may not recognizeably be about the same things if you asked most readers.

What does form/content and rhetoric have to do with it?

Works I’ll mention or that might help with additional background on today’s topics:

Notes/Questions for readings

what is “digital rhetoric”?

primary activities of digital rhetoric (according to Eyman) include:

field mapping: where are we in here?

Questions from you-all

  1. The first article (Lanham) talks about the “transparency” of the alphabet (266) and the last reading (Warde) talks about achieving the “transparent page” (4). Could we discuss as a class the ways in which we think digital forms/spaces help us achieve this desired “transparency” or if they do help us?
  2. In the third article (Porter) he mentions that the five components “prompt rhetorical decisions regarding production” or that they “help us write” (208). I was thinking of the 5 Knowledge Domains (Beaufort) and how they might interact with/fit under the rhetorical knowledge domain. It got me thinking about how we have to reconsider the rhetorical domain for digital forms/spaces. What other parts of the writing process do we need to look at or reconsider when dealing with the digital form? All of them?
  3. Does this complication of content [from Dush] affect all writings? For instance, is there less of a need to consider assets when publishing children’s books due to the simple nature of the book or would there be more to consider specifically because of the audience?
  4. With writing becoming more of a content that can be dissected and repurposed, do you think that plagiarism would become stricter with its use or would it ease up under the umbrella of ‘repurposed content.’
  5. What in the sweet Sam hell is a codex book? I didn’t realize until about halfway through the selection that it was written in 1985, a year after I was born! I’m going with that’s why I don’t comprende “codex book.” I also didn’t see anywhere where it stated what exactly it was. I googled and the just of what I got was they are essentially printed books. They just gave it a fancy name. Is that accurate?
  6. In “The Electronic Word: Literary Study and the Digital Revolution”, they mention that textbooks are going to have to decide if they are going to be in the business of information or textbooks. This was written in 1985. Do you think they have decided on the business of information or textbooks all these years later? (I would like a fellow teacher and student perspective on this question.)
  7. “Recovering Delivery for Digital Rhetoric” was written in 2009. In this article, they discuss how we have serious accessibility issues that need to be addressed as we move towards primarily publishing public information online. Do you believe this accessibility issue still holds true today?

Lanham, “The Electronic Word: Literary Study and the Digital Revolution”

Dush, “When Writing Becomes Content”

(reading note--the level one of this outline above are just my notes/transformations of the intro--I could now read the full article and sit down and try to answer the questions or flesh out notes in summary, as I have here in the nested parts of the list)

Porter, “Recovering Delivery for Digital Rhetoric”

Reading like a grad student: a time to read and a time to skim

An important academic skill is learning how to read different things differently. As research people (this is one of the whole points of graduate study in English), you need to be able to find and process lots of information and sources. And you need to develop a keen sense for understanding relevance and goals for different types of ifnormation so you can know when to read deeply and when to read quickly.

You may have been told in the past not to skim. Those people were wrong. There is a time (now) and a place (here). If you only read what you read in great depth, you will 1) have less breadth of knowledge and 2) quickly become ovoerwhelmed by how much there is to read and how much you haven’t read, and then 3) not read stuff at all because of anxiety.

Nobody reads an academic article (or chapter) effectively one time through. You engage with it several times and in different ways–quick up first, slower later.

Why to skim:

Reading strategies:

  1. understand what different genres are, why they are written
    • primary sources: might be literrary works, rhetorical artifacts, texts, or qualitative/quantitative data
    • theory: provides philosophical or methodological approach to an issue or phenomenon
    • original research: criticism, empirical studies, problem-solution articles, disciplinary overviews
      • in rhetoric/writing studies fields, you commonly bump into either “scholarly analysis” (aka criticism or a reading) or empirical studies (with methods, results, etc.)
    • literature review: organizes and surveys what key scholarship has been written on a specialized topic
    • book review/review article: summarizes and makes claims about the quality of other published works
    • practical or how-to: instruction for how to use or apply a theory, method, or practice (often pedagogy in writing studies)
  2. understand your purpose for reading or your professor’s purpose for assigning a reading
    • are you identifying? analyzing? comparing? evaluating? responding?
    • are you getting the basic sense or knowledge of a new field or topic?
    • are you planning a simmilar study?
    • are you organizing materials to select what to read later?
    • are you reading to get research ideas or investigate a topic for a paper yor project you have to write?
    • are you reading to collect lines of argument or evidence, to support or critique an argument?
  3. adopt a system for note-taking and reference management
    • reference management software such as Zotero, [Mendeley], etc. Install add-ons or plugins for your browser to make collecting and organizing citations easy; can integrate with your word processor and create Reference Lists quickly for editing and polishing. (We’ll look at reference management in the future if you have never done so)
    • write notes in a document or in your ref mgmt software (or even a notebook), the absolute worst way to take ntoes is by annotating PDFs and you should never do it. “collect notes, not articles”
    • note taking should be sustainable and standardized a bit, but not too system-y or cryptic of a system
    • note taking shouldn’ tbe too insider-y, imagine you are writing notes for someone else who needs to decide whether the text is worth their time (i.e., yourself ten years from now)
  4. layered or intentional reading
    • skimming: getting the gist: going through titles and abstracts only to decide what might be relevant and pack it away. used with keyword searches and reference/citation searches (more on that later) to find things without reading yet.
    • scanning. Hop to what you need and read just that; searching a document to answer a question relying on textual cues and keywords.
    • close reading: in-depth investigation of specific parts/elements of a text or the whole; carefully read the whole for comprehension. When you need to understand an argument or are looking at primary sources for evidence, you’re probably close reading
  5. hyper-reading, or “computer-assisted human reading” and Machine reading/Distant reading (human-assisted computer reading) (Sosnoski, 1999; Tham & Grace, 2020)

AIC Method of Reading is good for a first read of anything

  1. read the abstract if there is one
  2. read the introduction (section, paragraph, or chapter if it’s a book)
  3. read the conclusion (section, paragraph, or chapter)
  4. read the first sentence of body paragraphs or first paragraphs of sections (or subheadings if the article has meaningful subheadings); Remember high school–topic sentences are indeed your friend.

After reading:

1) try to summarize the main ideas and support or details of what you read before you dive in to particular points 2) reflect on how this thing connects to class discussions, your experiences, other examples 3) evaluate the merits and weaknesses of what you’ve read

Tips:

For further reading:

For Next Time

Journal entry for week 2

Write a short (300ish+ words) digital literacy autobiography for your next journal entry. (Also, include a handful of questions based on/out of our readings, which are all about interfaces and ideology.)

Write about a technology that has affected your skills, abilities, and/or experiences as a writer and/or as a reader. This is not a research paper. This assignment is an autobiography—-a piece in which you tell a story about yourself as a writer and/or as a reader, specifically a story about how technology has changed your approaches to writing or to reading. Don’t feel like you have to tell a full autobiographical narrative; this could just as well be a scene, a sketch, or a series of brief anecdotes.

You might write about:

These are only examples—choose any narrative thread you wish to unfold your autobiography.

Potentially helpful invention points:

Online presence project

https://cdmandrews.github.io/5362/project-1

To Read for Sept 7 (Digiality, Interfaces, Ideologies)

Required:

Any two of:

Possibly: