Author: Whitney Lew James

Themed around Textual Transaction, the 2019 MLA conference was held in Chicago, IL from January 3-6. Presentations, workshops, and talks took up the conference theme as it intersected with everything from literature, to pedagogy, to scholarly identity, and we are pleased to present reviews of some of these sessions. As with past years, the DRC invited MLA attendees to review sessions centered around digital rhetoric, digital pedagogy, and digital humanities, and received the following thoughtful engagements with MLA sessions: MLA Session 089: What We Teach When We Teach Digital Humanities: Curriculum and Experience Review by Kristin vanEyk MLA Session 200:…

The Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative is seeking reviewers for the 2019 MLA Annual Convention. We are particularly interested in conference reviews relating to digital rhetoric, digital pedagogy, and the digital humanities, though you can propose another session to review. Reviews are published on the DRC website to help facilitate conversations about conference sessions among attendees and others who may not have been present at the conference. If you would like to be a reviewer for a #mla19 session, please visit our Google form to sign up for a session to review. Reviews can be composed in written text (500-1500 words)…

The below film is in the spirit of and in response to Jacqueline Rhodes’ “think-practice” in “Becoming Utopias: Toward a Queer Rhetoric of Instantiation” as well as Rick Wysocki’s “The World Outside the (Web)Text” think-practice on his editorial work for the Making Future Matters keynote webtext. Wysocki’s think-practice was prompted by questioning “what other ways the body could be made visible in digital rhetorical production or, in my case, digital editorial labor.” He settled on “a snapshot of a becoming” through screenshots and video of his digital editing and composing process even as he recognized the incompleteness of the documentation—a…

Presenters: Nicholas Mennona Marino (University of Louisiana at Lafayette), Kim Lacey (Saginaw Valley State University), and Morgan Elizabeth Wentz (Northern Arizona University) I was drawn to this panel because of the discussion of public and digital rhetorics. Each presenter considered different facets of digital public rhetoric: genre conventions and ethos in online communities, questions about knowledge-making and memory in the digital age, and how to incorporate social media into the classroom. Nicholas Mennona Marino, “See You on the Boards: Representations of the University on 4chan’s /r9k/” Marino began his presentation by noting that the focus of his talk had shifted…