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I had mixed feelings about Network Sense. I thought that the idea was fantastic, especially for graduate students as Mueller said that his thin descriptions were directed towards. I see so much use in being enabled to discern discipline-wide patterns that would otherwise be completely incomprehensible. But even so, Mueller spent less time on his thin descriptions and distant reading that I would have liked. I felt like I was watching an episode of Survivor while I read that book, like I was constantly having suspense built up, having my anticipation of these amazing thin descriptions increased. I found myself thinking, "Yes! You're right, Mueller! There is too much scholarship now for someone to read generally in RCWS. Thin descriptions are so necessary and useful," then instead of receiving those thin descriptions, I found myself reading 30 pages of methods, or 30 pages of theoretical framework, or 30 pages of failed attempts at thin description. I wanted to start skim...

In the spirit of Mueller's Network Sense , I have taken all of the blog posts we have produced for this class and plugged them into TagCrowd to see what a visualized Word Cloud of "English 605" would look like. I set the visual to include our top 75 words, and I removed a couple of everyday words like "included" or "used." This is the result: academic access archives book change chapter class classroom codes community composing composition computers context create crisis culture design develop different digital discourse discussion example family ideas identity individuals information interest internet issues language learn literacy material meaning media memory modes multimodal objects obsolescence online open pedagogy people personal point possible practices project publishing question reading research retrofitting rhetorical share social sound stories students study systems tec...

Sharing digital resources for research is a kind of gift. It's also a way of embracing and expressing the infinite reproducibility of digital resources that doesn't apply to physical ones. For those who might be interested, I just came across Blackwell's Companion to Digital Humanities . It's available free digitally and has entries on History, Principles, Applications, and Production, Dissemination, and Archiving.  I hope you find it as helpful as I am!

          The question that I try to answer here is “what can writing studies do to combat academic publishing oligopolies?” and “what can we do as teachers to combat academic publishing oligopolies?” I see these questions as worth answering because, basically, academic publishers damage public good in a direct exchange for higher and higher profit margins. When I first decided to get involved in this battle, I didn’t realize it, but there are two separate and distinct fronts on which the battle is being fought: the first front is academic textbook publishing, and the second is scholarly article and book publishing. Though similar, both fronts on this battle have their own separate problems and potential solutions. This paper will focus on what instructors can do to combat detrimental publishing practices in relation to academic textbooks.             Regardless of whether open-access...

Design from/for Systems of Boundary Objects: Retrofitting Obsolescence & Encounters at Interfaces This post traces the development of my term project, through in-class planning, an encounter with seemingly obsolete research media, a discussion of digital rubbish, applications of the concept in ideas and pedagogy, some theoretical groundings, and a brief view forward. As I've stated in a previous post , my project this semester centers on the idea of retrofitting obsolescence. In simplest terms, this is an attempt to understand not just how technology and technology use changes over time, but specifically how users encounter old and seemingly useless technology in new an innovative ways. If retrofitting is a way of troubleshooting and engineering to give old objects (and possibly ideas) new meaning, and obsolescence is the state of being outdated or no longer useful, then retrofitting obsolescence is a special kind of creativity. It is a kind of giving that breathes new...