Hi there! I’m Katie, and I’m excited to be working as a DRC fellow this year. Digital rhetoric permeates my pedagogy, research, and administrative work. Hopefully I’ll be sharing resources related to those areas during my time here.
Speaking of pedagogy and digital rhetoric, this semester I’m teaching a course on discourse communities in social media. We’re asking way too many questions about how communication circulates online. It’s an interesting exploration into audience awareness, rhetorical analysis, and what it means to be a citizen in these communities. One of my goals as a DRC fellow is to make digital pedagogy resources available to instructors. I want to make it easier for everyone to teach digital rhetoric.
My research uses corpus methods to answer research questions, and I look forward to developing how-to guides for these methods for the DRC. Too often “corpus methods” is used to mean “weird computer-y stuff,” and I’d like to help change that. Corpus methods like vector analysis, text analytics, and lexical analysis are tools that can help us answer research questions. Like all tools, though, these methods are optimal for certain projects and less optimal for others. I’m still figuring out which methods best answer my research questions. I’ll share any results I have with the DRC.
Lastly, I’m interested in developing administrative resources for those of us who do that sort of work. More and more I’m seeing that departments and schools are interested in digital literacy. It can be hard to figure out how to work digital literacy into student learning outcomes—even though digital literacy itself is super important. I’m excited to figure out how to incorporate and assess digital pedagogy course-and-program wide.
With Lauren, I’m also helping out with the DRC’s social media accounts. I’d like to start having conversations with people about digital rhetoric. Please reach out if you’d like to join in.
I think that’s everything! Let me know if I can help you, or collaborate with you. You can email me at kwalkup@mail.usf.edu, or @klwalkup to find me on Twitter.
