conference

c&w catch all

/ Jana Rosinski / Leave a comment

I struggled to write a post that encapsulated perhaps what cannot be so tidy/condensed: conference happenings. The shortform blog post was turning into an epitaph as soon as it was being written. If I could break the rectangular confines of this textbox, this list would appear more scattered. Perhaps on a seismograph, as constellations with varying intensity, as electricity passing through conductor points, as a comic with thought and dialogue bubbles, as areas of increasing/decreasing temperature on a heat map, or as a map of a territory in the making…As is, though, it is a [nested? network? worknet?] list:

thinking about the price of participation in the field (as the typecast poor graduate student)

search the Twitter conversations

attended: Resonance, Refinements, and Rip-offs (an awesome session by Jody Shipka and Mary Hocks) – condensed as keywords/phrases: sonic literacy, (social) resonance, thing power, agency as affectivity, embodied knowledge, auditory imagination, traces/tracing found artifacts, opening blackboxes through multimodal composing

attended: Multimedia and the Teaching of English, 1920-1970: A Distant Reading of English Journal and CCC (an awesome session by Jason Palmeri and Ben McCorkle) – condensed as keywords/phrases: pre-history of computers and composition, long history of multimedia and multimodality through technologies terms, distant reading sees field emerging, “what can we learn about new media by studying past moments when media were new?”, bar graphs, word clouds as “dated”, distant to close reading through data as heuristicScreen shot 2013-06-12 at 11.09.42 AM

 

 

 

 

attended: Archives and Other Multi-Literate Practices (an awesome session by Claire Lauer and Colleen Reilly) – condensed as keywords/phrases: Digital Methods Initiative (DMI – coming from sociology and interest in Bruno Latour) and their tools wiki – particularly Issue Crawler (makes networks), take ownership over terms as a field, bar graphs, clusters of influence, MLA job info lists as data to mine/visualize

noticed (in the sessions I attended):

  • distant reading and data visualization trending (?) – what is the exigence?
  • prominence of bar graphs as data visualized (+/-: what is made visible/what remains unseen) – there were moments when the bar graphs felt like a gate to me (in my position); instead of making visible, they made me aware of that which I can not/do not see because I don’t know enough
  • questions about what becomes of these visualizations/data sets – focus is on making visible and connectivity, but heard gestures toward “edited collections” (slow, black and white paper renderings) of work which seems counter-intuitive to the nature of the methodology

place/space/time re-presented:

ethernet glitch luckycat pepsipepsipepsi troncar

coffeemeccawootang

 

MMLA 2012 and conference parlor invitations: RSVP

/ Jana Rosinski / 2 Comments

Last weekend I presented at the 54th Annual MMLA Conference in Cincinnati for the first time. I delivered a paper from my developing MA project in the Teaching Writing in College section, on a panel themed “(Re)Defining First Year Composition” – a variation of debt, the conference’s theme. A hearty thank you to Andre Buchenot for chairing the panel. I enjoyed the opportunity to discuss my work to a representative sample of “outside” folks. It was sort of novel to be the sole student (re)presenter from EMU.

lone student presenter

Spending the weekend with literature folk. I left with questions of disiplinarity and where/when/through what we converse and share ideas, especially having given a paper on conceptual borrowing and imagining through metaphor. Where are these inbetween spaces? Intermedias and intermediaries? Is the new Burkean parlor the conference venue – the hotel or convention center lobby and hallway? Or is this “unending conversation” metaphor unbegun? Sometimes I wonder, as I scan the faces that (don’t) populate the room. Not to crash the literature party, or be a party pooper, I will note feeling this way at 4C’s as well, and even more so not getting accepted to present at 4C’s next spring. Who is on (gets to be on) the conference guest list?

Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.

Is this parlor: a waiting room, an oil painting, a haunting echo in mahogany paneling, a members only clubhouse, a conversation in an elevator, a paperbound journal, a divided department, a history, a mythology, a snapshot, a missed connection?

répondez s’il vous plaît

Please, as notice of attending, or as regrets.

C(CCC)ing is Believing

/ Jana Rosinski / Leave a comment

Not sure how a month has slipped by, but (March 21-24) I attended my first Conference on College Composition and Communication in St. Louis: Writing Gateways. With my fellow EM-Journalers, we presented a poster chronicling our first year as a publication – “Lessons in Generative Design, Publishing, and Circulation: What EM-Journal’s First Year Has Taught Us” (the podcasts for our poster can be found here). The poster session was pretty cool (even though it’s kind of separate from the rest of the conference) because it allows for gawking, exploration/interaction, and conversation to varying degrees, dictated by the passerby (do I want to just look at this? Do I want a closer look? Do I want to talk about this? etc.). I think we were well received, and not only had the interest of various institutions, but are publishing our poster in Kairos.

There were too many sessions of interest to attend, but I picked the following:

Wednesday, March 21- arrived

  • “Master’s Degree Consortium of Writing Studies Specialists” John (Dunn) and Derek’s (Mueller) meeting (EMU folk)

Thursday, March 22

  • “Stories Take Place” Malea Powell’s Chair’s Address
  • A + B Digital Poster Sessions – we presented during the A session
  • C.31 “Bodies Writing in Space: Rhetorics of Natural-User Interfaces” Marilyn Cooper (chair), David Reider, Anne Frances Wysocki, Kara Van de Graaf
  • D.29 “Gateways into the Disciplines: Navigating Different Disciplinary Contexts to Support Writing Across Campus” Nicole Guinot Varty (chair), Becky Morrison, and Dave Nassar (EMU folk)
  • E.22 “Composing Lived Time in Material Form” Kathleen Blake Yancey (chair), Devon Fitzgerald, Erin R. Anderson, and Jody Shipka

Friday, March 23

  • F.05 “Gateways of Grateways? Rethinking, Re-envisioning, Remediating Composition’s Materials and Practices (a New Media Spin)” Justin Hodgson (chair), Anthony Collamati, Bump Halbritter, and Doreen Piano
  • G.12 “The Visual and the Spatial in Multiliteracies: Gateways to Rhetorical Potential” Jennifer Wave (chair), Robin Snead, and Dana Gierdowski
  • H.13 “Latour and Rhetoric: Kairos, Contingency, Techne” David Lynch (chair), Scott Barnett, Marilyn Cooper, Carl Herndl, and Anne Frances Wysocki (respondent)
  • J Featured Session “Access: A Happening” Jay Dolmage (chair), Samantha Blackman, Qwo-Li Driskill, Paul Kei Matsuda, Margaret Price, Cindy Selfe, Melanie Yergeau, and Amy Vidal
  • K.23 “Multimodality, Visual Rhetoric, and Marshall McLuhan” Stephen McElro (chair), Ron Brooks, Browyn T. Williams, james Jackson, and Michael Tardiff

Saturday, March 24

  • L.18 “Everyone Knows This Is Nowhere: Writing in the Musical Age” Jeff Rice (chair), Jenny Rice, Geoffrey Sirc, and Thomas Rickert
  • M.22 “Don’t Crash the Gates, Craft Them!: Reconsidering the Craft of Writing” jeff Rice (chair), David M. Grant, Kristin Prins, and Sergio Figueiredo

I got to see who is creating the scholarship that interests me so much, the ideas that initiate and connect and reinforce my own thinking, and discover new fragments to collect and come back to. Derek was even nice enough to introduce us (Chelsea, Adam and me) to Jeff and Jenny Rice and Geoffrey Sirc (me as the girl who checked out hoarded his book from the library for over a year). I found out I didn’t get the GAship while there, but found myself excited at really contemplating the pursuit of a PhD for the first time. It seems like something I can do. At this conference, with this work and this group of people for support, I feel like an academic – not just a student of an academic institution. CCCC left me feeling like I can do work that matters (and maybe that work will continue on at the University of Kentucky…).