Hosted by the Sweetland Center for Writing, the Digital Rhetoric Collaborative (DRC) is an online, community webspace by and for scholars and teachers working in computers and writing and digital rhetoric. It is also the home of a digital book series with the U-M Press.
Forthcoming Digital Rhetoric Collaborative Books
This past year the DRC awarded the 2022 Sweetland/UM Press Book Prize to Christa Olson and Brandee Easter for Accounting for Visual Rhetoric. This prize is given to a born-digital or substantially digitally enhanced book-length project that displays critical and rigorous engagement in the field of digital rhetoric. It includes both a cash award and an advance contract for publication in the Digital Rhetoric Collaborative book series of the University of Michigan Press.
Accounting for Visual Rhetoric offers a “systematic rhetorical account of images.” Olson and Easter theorize six primary rhetorical functions that focus on how the visual pursues rhetorical ends. As Olson and Easter write in their overview, the project “begins with three rhetorical functions already well accounted for in existing scholarship, namely the visual’s pedagogical, catalytic, and iconic aspects. It then elaborates three neglected visual rhetorical functions: oversight, noticing, and the physical processes of sight themselves.” Accounting for Visual Rhetoric pushes visual rhetoric into new questions and concerns, especially urging movement beyond the troubled yet enduring confines of rhetorical studies’ classical frameworks.
DRC Graduate Fellows
This fall, the DRC welcomes its tenth cohort of graduate student Fellows. The program aims to recognize graduate students around the country currently working in digital rhetoric who want practical experience in online publishing and website development. Fellows are selected on a yearly basis by the editors and board of the DRC, and receive an annual stiped of $500 as well as recognition on the DRC website.
DRC Fellows commit to attending monthly online team meetings to plan projects that extend the DRC website and its contributions to the community of scholars interested in computers and writing. They work independently and collaboratively to complete two projects within the year of their term.
Last year’s fellows continued to work with creativity and passion during the COVID-19 pandemic, and they created innovative materials that include, among others, a Teaching and Learning Materials Collection and a DRC Talk Series. The Sweetland DRC Teaching and Learning Materials Collection is a public, crowd-sourced collection of prompts, exercises, and lesson plans by DRC contributors. The DRC Talk Series engages digital rhetoricians and former DRC alums on how they engage in digital methods in their classes and professions. Keep your eyes open for upcoming collaborative projects from our new fellows, including a collection of digital stories from multilingual writers and continuing our Hack & Yack conversations.
Sarah Akomoh is a second year M.A literature major at The University of South Florida, where she also teaches in the English department writing program. Her research focuses on the rhetoric of voice, femininity, trauma and visibility – especially for Black women in Africa and the diaspora. When she’s not teaching, Sarah writes for personal interest, or spends time working out at the gym.
Alexandra Krasova is a Ph.D. candidate in Composition and Applied Linguistics and a Teaching Associate in the English Department at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Being a multilingual speaker, Alexandra focuses her research on multilingual students’ digital storytelling and explores their translanguaging practices as well as their multilingual identities construction. Alexandra is a Fulbright Scholar Alumna, who was teaching Russian language at the Critical Languages program at Indiana University of Pennsylvania for three years and currently volunteers for the Kathleen Jones White Writing Center. Being a Former Wikipedia CCCC Fellow and a current Digital Rhetoric Collaborative Fellow, Alexandra educates her students on Digital Writing, Literacy, Rhetoric and Composition.
Laura Menard is a PhD student in Rhetoric and Writing Studies at Bowling Green State University. Her research focuses on various forms of media rhetoric and its weaponization against women, particularly marginalized women in serial killer cases. She is also interested in racist rhetoric in local laws and court rules, and feminist rhetoric in popular culture. You can follow Laura on Twitter or her blog.
Nitya Pandey is a fifth year PhD in the Rhetoric and Composition program at Florida State University, Tallahassee. Her interest areas are digital writing, online writing instruction, affect, multimodality, and response. Her dissertation investigates the process of responding to students’ writing in online writing classrooms through the lens of care ethics.
Chris Turpin is a first-gen college student hailing from Appalachia. For as long as he can remember he’s been fascinated by computers. During his teens he dropped out of high school to pursue digital activism, becoming involved in several hacker groups. These experiences led him to pursue higher education, starting at a small community college his grandfather helped build. He’s currently working on his dissertation which explores how computer hacking has shaped our understanding of information technology and how to improve cybersecurity pedagogy.
Jiaxin Zhang is a Ph.D. candidate in Technical Communication and Rhetoric at Texas Tech University, where she teaches first-year composition and technical writing courses. Her research interests include UX and usability, content strategy, and digital rhetoric. You can follow Jiaxin on Twitter.
