Announcing the Winner of the First UM Press/Sweetland Publication Prize in Digital Rhetoric!

The Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative, University of Michigan Press, and MPublishing are thrilled to announce that Daniel Anderson, Professor of English at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is the inaugural winner of the UM Press/Sweetland Publication Prize in Digital Rhetoric for his long-form webtext Screen Rhetoric and the Material World.  Look for publication of the project in 2013 from the Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative Book Series and UM Press.

Screen Rhetoric and the Material World is an innovative project that reconfigures the print-centric theories we use for composing—as well as reading, analyzing, and making sense of—screen-based media. The proposal identifies an ambitious goal in its opening line, where Anderson writes that the project will enact digital scholarship rather than treating it as an object of study or analysis, thus pointing to the important crux of his argument: “Why write about multimedia through alphabetic text?” Composed of multimediated tracks and textual layers, Anderson’s digitally born project is centered on screencasts and video clips. Highly complex in delivery, these video layers perform as well as comment upon the theories with which the project engages. Cross-modally, Anderson explores the post-human turn in composition studies and articulates a material framework that accounts for our interrelations with things, people, places, and ideas. Indeed, the very form of his project is inseparable from its content, embodying a central tension in composition studies: At what point does multimodal composing become a networked means to a printed end? What does it mean to practice an object-oriented rhetoric? Anderson’s project offers a powerful response to these questions.

The DRC is excited at the opportunity to publish this project, which advances an area central to our mission: the publication of innovative born-digital work.

The UM Press/Sweetland Publication Prize in Digital Rhetoric, which is funded by the Sweetland Center for Writing, is awarded annually to an innovative and important born-digital or substantially digitally enhanced book-length project that displays critical and rigorous engagement in the field of digital rhetoric.  The prize is open to scholars of all ranks and comprises a $5000 award and an advance contract for publication in the Sweetland Digital Collaborative Book Series.