Introduction

Put simply, this project stems from our collective difficulty in defining—for ourselves, for colleagues, and for students—what digital rhetoric is and does. In fall 2014, we wondered together: How do we define digital rhetoric? How is it different—if indeed it is—from digital humanities and other kinds of rhetoric? And what makes one a digital rhetorician? These questions are, of course, entirely too broad to be useful as research questions, so we began to brainstorm the kinds of things we would need to know in order to answer them. In doing so, we generated 10 questions about scholarship, methods, and teaching, the answers for which we thought would be robust enough to hold some potential for describing the emerging subfield of Digital Rhetoric. We then posed those questions to scholars and teachers working in Digital Rhetoric who were among the presenters at the Indiana Digital Rhetoric Symposium (IDRS), held in spring 2015 in Bloomington, IN. Here, we focus on four of those questions, all oriented towards pedagogy and teaching:

• What are the outcomes for teaching with/in digital rhetoric, and how do you achieve those outcomes?
• If you had to pick one reading/book/essay/scholar to assign your students in digital rhetoric, what would it be and why?
• What is your favorite assignment in digital rhetoric and why?
• How (if at all) do you assess digital rhetoric in the classroom?

In what follows, we argue that by looking at the course outcomes, readings, assignments, and assessments that circulate in and through classrooms engaged in digital rhetoric, we see sufficient coherence to claim something like digital rhetorical pedagogy. By naming and describing this coherence, we have a modest aim: to provide a resource for the subfield of Digital Rhetoric and the larger field of Rhetoric and Composition that both represents the diversity of thinking from our participants and also synthesizes those responses into a cogent—if occasionally contradictory—picture of what it means to teach digital rhetoric. In attempting this work, we cannot claim to present a comprehensive view of how digital rhetoric is taught across the (sub)field; rather, we present this multimodal and interactive set of video interviews, accompanying transcripts, commentary, and other metatextual elements as a kind of kaleidoscopic snapshot of converging and diverging perspectives among a specific set of scholars who identify themselves as teachers and/or practitioners of digital rhetoric. Across the video responses, what we see—and what we have worked to demonstrate through the webtext—is that there are useful consistencies and meaningful variances in the way we teach, design, assign, and assess digital rhetoric. Given this modest primary aim, the nascent status of Digital Rhetoric as a subfield, and the generosity of the participant interviewees, we have a secondary, “pay-it-forward” aim: to arrange and design a webtext useful for both newcomers to and experienced teacher-practitioners within the subfield of Digital Rhetoric.

The initial observations from this project were published in a special issue of enculturation that is devoted to the IDRS proceedings. We framed these initial findings as both a primer and a teaser for the larger project, and here, we invite readers, viewers, and listeners to experience the audio-visual interviews, the written transcripts, and the scholarly commentary simultaneously. To that end, we’ve created what we hope will be an intuitive, accessible interface, one that will help those interested to create new connections across the four pedagogical foci.

But first, some background.

The Symposium

The occasion for our project—for actually having viable answers to our questions, as described above—was the IDRS, which was held in the spring of 2015 at Indiana University. As we detailed previously in enculturation:

the purpose of the symposium, according to its website, was “to foster conversations at the intersections of rhetoric, media, and technology” by “(1) explor[ing] Perspectives and Definitions of Digital Rhetoric and (2) articulat[ing] the ways in which digital rhetoric connects to, yet is distinct from, digital humanities” (link). As a practical matter, the Symposium offered an opportunity for key figures in the field to interact and dialogue with one another in a moment where the subfield of digital rhetoric appeared to be crystallizing: through research and scholarship, through our field’s hiring practices, and through curriculum and pedagogy.

Given the occasion and the nexus of perspectives that would be represented by the 32 scheduled presenters, this seemed to be an ideal occasion to engage with the ways in which digital rhetoric is conceived, discussed, and practiced across the (sub)field. Thus, we sought to explore ways of knowing and doing in Digital Rhetoric by documenting our colleagues’ perspectives in response to our ten questions over the course of the three-day Symposium. At the IDRS, we conducted interviews with 25 different scholars individually and video-recorded their responses. In the remainder of this introduction, we connect our overall project, and this webtext specifically, to some of the scholarship in the subfield, outline our methods and participants, and provide suggestions on how to navigate and encounter the resulting webtext.

Scholarly Backdrop

As Doug Eyman (2015) noted in the Introduction to Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice, “more than one academic discipline and intellectual tradition can make claims to being the ‘home’ of digital rhetoric” (1). For us, that home is Rhetoric and Composition. Our mutual interests in rhetoric, digital culture, and pedagogy emerge both from broad, recent movements within the Humanities to articulate itself in a digitizing world (e.g. Gold 2012; Gold and Klein 2016) and from the older and narrower disciplinary history within communities like Computers & Writing (a history that Eyman deftly overviewed in his Introduction). More specifically, this project’s inception takes place against the backdrop of two coinciding moments: one in which the subfield of Digital Rhetoric is beginning to take shape with and against Composition, Literature, and the Humanities, and a second in which an interest in how digital technology inflects pedagogy continues to be an increasingly dominant theme across the Humanities generally.

As evidence of the first moment, we point to Eyman’s proposal for—and review of—definitions of digital rhetoric in his introduction, in which he stated that digital rhetoric is “the application of rhetorical theory (as analytic method or heuristic for production) to digital texts and performances” (13). Working from this definition, he built on James Zappan’s (2005) list of “primary activities” in which the field engages. For Zappan, those included:

• the use of rhetorical strategies in production and analysis of digital text
• identifying characteristics, affordances, and constraints of new media
• formation of digital identities
• potential for building social communities (319).

To these, Eyman thus added:

• “inquiry and development of rhetorics of technology
• the use of rhetorical methods for uncovering and interrogating ideologies and cultural formation in digital work
• an examination of the rhetorical function of networks
• theorization of agency when interlocutors are as likely to be software agents (or ‘spimes’) as they are human actors.” (44)

In reviewing Liz Losh’s 4-part definition of digital rhetoric from Virtualpolitik (2009), Eyman also argued that Digital Rhetoric is “closely connected” with other fields, including Digital Literacy, Visual Rhetoric, New Media, Human-Computer Interaction, and Critical Code Studies. He went on to describe his sense of the relationship between Digital Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities (DH), the latter of which he said is

currently used as a kind of catch-all description for a very broad range of approaches and methods that involve use of digital technologies (from geographical information systems, to 3-D modeling and simulation, to large-scale text mining and data visualization) to study humanities subjects (including history, art history, literature, and archaeology). (58-59)

Digital Rhetoric, on the other hand, has a more well-defined set of definitions, methods, and practices and a coherent disciplinary history, which he notes in the primer video linked above. He also cited a lack of NEH funding for digital rhetoric projects, suggesting that the trends of interest in DH have been primarily concerned with traditional forms of cultural heritage materials such as books, newspapers, film, etc., to the exclusion of ‘born-digital’ artifacts. It is here, Eyman argued, that Digital Rhetoric is well positioned to participate in and contribute to the Digital Humanities, and he suggested that such a turn is imminent.

What is important for our inquiry is that, among the available definitions for digital rhetoric—from Welch, Zappan, Bogost, Losh, Eyman, and others—and among the listed disciplinary connections, there are few mentions of pedagogy. From this perspective, one might assume that the teaching of digital rhetoric is not, itself, integral to (defining) the subfield of Digital Rhetoric. Or, one might assume that using the term “digital rhetoric” itself somehow obfuscates attention to teaching in ways that, say, “digital literacy” does not. (After all, each of the authors listed above is also a teacher.) From another perspective, however, attention to digital rhetorical pedagogy predates all of these definitions: the first issue of Kairos, for instance, was published in 1996—three years before Welch’s groundbreaking Electric Rhetoric (1999).

Within the wider orbit of the Humanities, attention to pedagogy in digital environments has lagged behind the subfield of Digital Rhetoric. Though perhaps still the “catch all” that Eyman described, Digital Humanities has, however, given increasing attention to the pedagogical implications of engaging humanistic inquiry online. In particular, the Debates in the Digital Humanities books series and MLA’s Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities project have been slow to lay the foundations for fruitful and rigorous connections between teaching and new directions in humanities research.

Debates in the Digital Humanities (2012) included a full section—including four chapters and four “blog posts”— on “Teaching the Digital Humanities.” Most of these contributions contextualize the rise of DH during the perceived decline of the Humanities teaching in higher education more generally (Waltzer), explore the effects of DH on graduate education (Reid), or offer perspective on the differential manifestations of DH in different institutional contexts (Alexander and Davis). But, as Brier noted, though “pedagogy is not totally ignored by DH’s growing cadre of practitioners [...] teaching and learning are something of an afterthought for many DHers” (390-1). This observation seems to be borne out in the same volume, where nearly 400 pages are devoted to disciplinary and research methods, and only one chapter and a few short blog posts are devoted to teaching.

Similarly, the follow up collection Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016 devoted only two chapters to pedagogy: one on teaching “small digital humanities” to connect classroom contexts to digital political advocacy (Earhart & Taylor), and a second, the wryly titled “How Not to Teach the Digital Humanities” (Cordell). In some ways, this short piece outlined as thorough a sense of DH pedagogy as we have found: by identifying a disjunct between the concerns of DH practitioners, who prefer “meta-discussions about the field,” and the dispositions of students “who do not care about DH qua DH,” Cordell was able to create a space for the beginnings of a digital humanistic pedagogy. This pedagogy urged that students take up “substantive investigations of specific projects, thinkers, methods, books, or articles” and outlined four strategies for such investigations: one, start small; two, attend to both the present state and the history of technology; three, scaffold everything; and four, consider local context. Moreover, books that identify explicit, mutually-informative links between rhetoric and DH, such as Jim Ridolfo and Bill Hart-Davidson’s award-winning Rhetoric & The Digital Humanities (2015), focus largely on outlining theory, methodologies, and methods that forge interdisciplinary research connections and forecast future trends in scholarship and publication. Except for one chapter geared towards curriculum, there was little discussion of pedagogy.

This partial review is, perhaps, an unfair shake for Digital Humanities—which has needed to spend much of its early energy in self-definition, interdisciplinary exploration, and methodological and epistemological justification—and for these two volumes in particular, as DH has attended somewhat more to pedagogy in other venues. For instance, the Journal of Interactive Technology & Pedagogy, launched in 2012, has eleven issues that address teaching humanities with technology from disciplinary, institutional, and classroom perspectives (in addition to subsections that include teaching materials and useful anecdotes). Similarly, HASTAC meetings and initiatives have formed broad social networks for practitioners at the intersection of teaching and technology. Finally, and perhaps most closely related with the disciplinary concerns of the volumes mentioned above, is the MLA Commons’ Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models, and Experiment project, which described itself as “a curated collection of downloadable, reusable, and remixable pedagogical artifacts” (Description). Taking as its rationale the fact that “scholarly examples of digital pedagogy remain limited,” the project presented a keyword glossary of 60 terms, wherein each term is explored through a “curatorial statement” and a set of curated pedagogical artifacts (Description). The overall effect of the project, for us, is the feeling of encountering a massive, rich digital archive, wonderfully exhibited and pedagogically exhilarating, the components of which are difficult to synthesize into pedagogy.

This may be the fault of a lack of imagination on our parts, but the inability to identify digital rhetorical pedagogy hearkens back to 2005, when Zappan noted that “Digital rhetoric is thus an amalgam of more-or-less discrete components rather than a complete and integrated theory in its own right” ( 323). We find that, at the current moment, we wonder the same about digital pedagogies in the humanities and about digital rhetorical pedagogy in particular. And so here we hope to take forward the best impulses of the works above—that there is much disciplinary work to do and, within it, also a need for “scholarly examples of digital pedagogy.” We also hope to build on the insightful work we’ve reviewed both in the subfield of Digital Rhetoric and in fields adjacent to it, and to follow in the footsteps of Kairos, Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities, and the Journal of Interactive Technology & Pedagogy. And we hope to carry Zappan’s question another step forward: in the second decade of the 21st Century, is digital rhetorical pedagogy an amalgam of discrete components or is it a complete and integrated praxis in its own right?

Finally, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention other multimodal projects in Rhetoric and Composition that use audio and video to incorporate multiple voices and perspectives on the same topic, question, or set of questions. Among them, Todd Taylor’s Take 20 (2007) and Claire Lauer’s “What’s in a Name?” (2012) served as both inspiration and method. Take 20 was a film project that sought to capture thinking about the teaching of writing in American higher education by interviewing writing teachers and researchers about their formative experiences and classroom practices; the documentary was influential in our formation as academics and informed the creation of our questions here. Similarly, Lauer’s “What’s In a Name” reflected the field’s multiperspectival, contradictory thinking around the term “multimodality” through audio interviews, commentary, and accessible design. We hope that this text attends to “digital rhetoric” with as much complexity and nuance as “What’s In a Name?” did with multimodality.

Methods

We started with questions. Following our initial interests, and through several rounds of reiterative invention and feedback, we generated and honed 10 interview questions we felt could reasonably approach an answer to what digital rhetoric is and what it does.

Against this backdrop and in order to investigate the theme of the Symposium, we invited all 32 of the IDRS presenters to sit down with us. Counting ourselves, 25 different scholars accepted, and—with IRB approval and consent forms signed—25 were able to answer 10 questions about their research, pedagogy, and scholarly influences in digital rhetoric. With generous logistical support from Indiana University and the conference organizers (and interviewees) Justin Hodgson and Scot Barnett, we video- and audio-recorded each interview and shot b-roll during conference downtime. We then transcribed each interview and began the laborious process of timelogging and clipping each response. We coded each interview deductively, looking for patterns, themes, resonances, rifts, and disjunctures that could be organized into thematic clusters. As we found and explored those clusters, we presented small slices of our preliminary findings at several conferences: Rhetoric Society of America, Computers & Writing, and the Conference on College Composition & Communication.

The questions, interviews, and analysis—and the arguments about digital rhetoric that emerge from them—are the foundation for a project whose multiple phases are in ongoing development, beginning with the overview/introduction video for enculturation, moving ahead with this webtext and a focus on pedagogy, and proceeding from here with a larger work that hopes to articulate the conjunctions (and disjunctions) among digital rhetoric and digital humanities. The overarching goal of the project is to “inquire into the ways Digital Rhetoric define, teach, theorize, assess, support, experience, and engage in digital rhetoric and how these practices and ways of thinking are similar to yet different from work in Digital Humanities and Rhetoric and Composition more broadly” (Davis, McElroy, and Lee).

Participants

Angela Aguayo	Steve Holmes
Kristin Arola	Rory Lee
Sarah Arroyo	Elizabeth Losh
Estee Beck	Stephen McElroy
Casey Boyle	Jeff Rice
Kevin Brock	David Rieder
Collin Brooke	Thomas Rickert
Jim Brown	Nathaniel Rivers
Matthew Davis	Crystal VanKooten
Matthew Demers	Jennifer Warfel-Juszkiewicz
Doug Eyman	Jon Wargo
Bill Hart-Davidson	Kathleen Yancey
Justin Hodgson

Acknowledgements

Finally, we owe an enormous thanks to those involved: Cameron Eigner, Bruce Bowles, and Heather Lang for logistical support and transcription assistance; Doug Eyman and Ben McCorkle for conference responses and guidance; Justin Hodgson and Scot Barnett for making space for us at IDRS; and, mostly, to all the interviewees who generously offered their time and considerate responses to our questions.

Enjoy.