Author: Elizabeth Fleitz

Session #i2, “Preserving Spaces of Wonder in an Age of Surveillance: Getting Started with Digital Cryptography,” was a mini-workshop held on Sunday morning. Virginia Tech PhD Candidate Andrew Kulak led the workshop, explaining about the necessity of security and privacy in the digital age, and led participants through the process of encrypting and decrypting documents. Citing the rise in recent hacking events, Kulak mentioned several tips for keeping one’s digital information safe. Student grades, banking information, and academic research are all legitimate information that is usually stored digitally, and may come under threat from hacking. Cybersecurity, Kulak argues, is a…

Fake news–the buzzword that makes composition teachers shudder–seems to be taking over our digital spaces. The prevalence of fake news, and the ease by which it is shared on social media, make digital literacy more important now than ever. Buzzfeed reported that during the months of August through November 2016, there was a larger engagement on social media with fake news stories, as compared to engagement with mainstream news stories (Silverman, 2016). A 2016 Pew Research poll found that 64% of Americans say that fake news is becoming a problem, causing “a great deal of confusion” (Barthel, Mitchell, & Holcomb,…

Presenters Danielle Nicole DeVoss, Michigan State University Heather Noel Turner, Michigan State University Christopher Wyatt, Chatham University Review In this well-attended session, the presenters (Danielle Nicole DeVoss, Heather Noel Turner, and Christopher Wyatt) discussed their research in their upcoming edited collection Type Matters, which will be published in 2017 by Parlor Press (and to which, in the spirit of full disclosure, this reviewer is also a contributing author). Each presenter discussed the rhetorical nature of typeface, how not only is design rhetorical, but typography is rhetorical as well. Danielle Nicole DeVoss, the first presenter, opened the session with an overview of the theory…