Author: Heather Lang

“Gaming is social, participatory and has learning at its core. These are powerful things for social impact, and it makes sense for us to take full advantage of it.” –Asi Burak, president  and founder of Games for Change In August of 2014, Anita Sarkeesan, Zoe Quinn, and Brianna Wu came under attack for their feminist critiques of video games, gaming culture, and representations of women in video games. In the culture war that would become #GamerGate, conversations swelled about the ethics of gaming and representation, videogame journalism, and cultural critique, culminating in threats of violence against these critics (and others…

In the coming weeks, the Digital Rhetoric Collaborative will be focusing on digital activisms and ways of engaging activist and advocate discourse in online spaces. To usher in that focus, we’ll be dedicating a few Wiki Wednesday posts to interrogating Wikipedia as a site for making, sharing, and circulating meaning. For this introductory post, I was inspired by Jim Porter’s “Why Technology Matters to Writing: A Cyberwriter’s Tale,” and Jim Ridolfo’s “Rhetorical Delivery as Strategy: Rebuilding the Fifth Canon from Practitioner Stories” to share my experience writing for and publishing on Wikipedia. It’s my hope that sharing this story allows us to tease out some implications…

In 2011, survey data revealed that only 13 percent of Wikipedia contributors were women, while the vast majority of Wikipedia editors were white, middle-class men. This notable disparity has resulted not only in a silencing of women’s voices, but also in gaping content holes where traditionally “feminine” topics or knowledge have been excluded from the Wikipedia corpus. In the wake of this revelation, a number of activist groups have organized initiatives to encourage writing by and about women for Wikipedia. Last week, Dr. Adeline Koh, at Richard Stockton College, and Dr. Roopika Risam, at Salem State University, hosted the third…

This year’s National Day on Writing is themed “Write My Community,” a celebration of the ways in which writing helps us form, maintain, and support a variety of communities. As the Digital Rhetoric Collaborative fellows discussed how we might best celebrate the NDoW on our blog, we decided we wanted to explore the effects that digital rhetoric and composition have had on the NDoW. We also wanted to support the computers and writing community in sharing and circulating NDoW celebrations around the world. To accomplish the first task, I sat down to chat NDoW with Dr. Kathleen Blake Yancey, past…