Hyperglyphics

since it’s summer, after all! I’ve been completely derelict in my blogging duties and obligations for the last couple of months but, in my defense, it was a crazy spring work-wise. But I can’t say I’m sorry to have put the blogging on hold since it was done largely so I could have time to work with my students and their writing (including, for some of them, their own blogging). But now it’s time to be selfish…

and think about my own writing and research while I’ve got an easier schedule. Not that that has been on hold, really, since I presented work at three conferences this spring in the midst of my teaching and writing certificate administrating. But I’m getting ready right now to head off to Computers and Writing, my favorite conference, which is being held this year at Purdue University. I am looking forward to being inspired, stimulated, challenged, and entertained by brilliant colleagues in the field, as I always am at C&W. And I’ve been writing and researching furiously for the past week, too, to get my presentation ready. Here’s a little taste of what I’ll be talking about:

Performance, of course, introduces physicality – embodiment – back into the rhetorical equation and, though I can’t really go into a lot of detail on the subject of emodiment here, I do want to gesture (pun intended) to it briefly. Virginia Skinner-Linnenberg calls compositionists to re-connect delivery to the rhetorical process from which she argues, following Welch, it has been detached, by reinstating the physical body in the writing classroom and making writing an embodied performance that is “more than simply moving a hand across paper (or typing at a keyboard)” (55-56). Though social media – and all computer-mediated – interactions may appear to also sublimate the physical body and materiality, as Katherine Hayles reminds us that “for information to exist, it must always be instantiated in a medium” (13). Bolter and Grusin, similarly, point out that media are real, real objects in a real world. And, of course, Judith Butler has called on us to consider the way performative iteration and re-iteration work to constitute the material body (2). So when we compose – perform – our new media texts, we are always bringing embodiment (often of various kinds) into the process. In Windows and Mirrors, Bolter and Gromola criticize the notion that the act of writing “leaves [the] body behind” in favor of a disembodied abstract ideal self (168). Using the example of Gromola’s dynamic typeface, Excretia, in which characters morph and change on the computer screen, they argue that “we cannot leave our embodied selves entirely behind when we enter cyberspace in any of its forms” (169).

I’ll post the whole paper later as well as a link to the Prezi visual presentation. And I’ll be tweeting, FB’ing and blogging from (and certainly after as it all percolates in my brain) from C&W.