DRC’s Webtext of the Month seeks to recognize composition innovation online. On this new page and site feature, you will find a monthly celebration of webtexts, work that embraces the affordances of digital technology and digital media to tell stories, make arguments, express ideas, and communicate meaning anew. These texts go beyond the alphabet and beyond the conventions of print. They are hypertextual and multimodal. We think they are elegant and engaging. We think they are worth sharing and thinking about.
With this new feature, we hope to draw more attention to published work that stretches traditional notions of academic scholarship, popular news articles, and creative writing to attend to, incorporate, and critique digital technology and media. By turning to these works as products of digital rhetoric, we wonder how our understanding of rhetoric might be pushed and pulled and ultimately critically analyzed. Here, we hope to find out.
As we browse web publications, we consider projects for the feature that meet the following criteria:
- Published in an online journal or website or as an ebook within the past three years
- Consist of a navigable, participatory space
- Involve multimodal components
- Require technology for the production and reading of the text
- Utilize design to develop arguments and make meaning
We’ll scour the web to bring you the best of what’s out there, to curate a selection of webtexts that will chart digital rhetoric in action and hopefully inspire further innovation. Stay tuned for reading experiences that will, we hope, thrill you.
And if you read/view/interact/experience any webtexts that you think we should feature or just want us to know about, please share! You can send an email to DRC Fellow Lindsey Harding or tweet at us, @SweetlandDRC, @linzharding.
Later this week, we’ll launch our first Webtext of the Month. Stay tuned, but for now, here’s a little hint:
