Note: Day-to-day schedule is subject to change

Unit 1: Writing Objects of Knowledge

Sept 4: Course introduction

Topics

  • What are our disciplinary backgrounds?
  • What exactly are “disciplines,” and how does writing both reflect and construct them?
  • How do we locate and talk about the aspects of writing that vary with discipline?

In Class

  • Neal Lerner, “Writing is a Way of Enacting Disciplinarity,” in Linda Adler-Kassner & Elizabeth Wardle, Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts in Writing Studies

Sept 9: Genre as Data / Data as Genre

Topics

  • What does “good writing” look like in our fields?
  • What writing do we consider “scientific” or “technical?” How do we know?
  • Where does data-driven writing appear, what does it look like, and how is it valued and authorized?
  • What do we mean by “discourse,” or a “discourse community?”
  • How does genre structure the data we collect and represent?

Readings

  • Catherine Schryer, “The Lab vs. The Clinic: Sites of Competing Genres,” in Aviva Freedman and Peter Medway, Genre and the New Rhetoric

Please bring in an example of what you consider “good writing” in your field or intended profession.

In class

  • Damore Google Memo: “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber”

Sept 11: Conventions and Standards

Topics

  • How are categories of technical knowledge named and organized?
  • Who controls vocabularies? Who decides those schemes and what counts?

Readings

  • Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, “To Classify is Human,” from Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences

Sept 16: Objects and Objectivity

Topics

  • What kinds of knowledges do we value in the technical professions?
  • What methods do we use to construct arguments in and about our fields?

Readings

  • Kristine L. Blair, “Technofeminist Storiographies,” in Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes, The Routledge Handbook of Digital Writing and Rhetoric
  • James H. Collier with David M. Toomey, “Persuasion and Critical Thinking” (Ch6: Part 1), from Scientific and Technical Communication:Theory, Practice, and Policy

Sept 18: Peer Review

Topics

  • What do our processes for writing look like? Are they solitary or social?
  • Why do we peer review? What are your misgivings, if any?
  • How do we provide useful feedback to one another?

Readings

  • Richard Straub, “Responding–Really Responding–to Other Students’ Writing,” in Wendy Bishop, The subject is writing: essays by teachers and students

Further reading (if you’re interested!)

  • Melinda Baldwin, “Scientific Autonomy, Public Accountability, and the Rise of ‘Peer Review’ in the Cold War United States,” Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society

In Class

  • Peer Review

Due: working draft of Discourse Analysis assignment

Sept 23: Objectivity, cont.

Topics

  • What’s the relationship between “objects” and “objectivity?”
  • What associations do we have with mechanical technologies and their ability to help us represent the world?
  • What is the relationship between accuracy and objectivity in communicating our models of reality to others?

Readings

  • Lorraine Daston and Peter Gallison, “Prologue: Objectivity Shock”, and half of “Trained Judgment” (pp. 309-346) from Objectivity

Sept 25: Objectivity, cont.

  • By what processes do we transform our perceptions into data?
  • As “author-scientists,” how do we learn and select from the possible forms that our data might take?

Readings

  • Lorraine Daston and Peter Gallison, second half of “Trained Judgment” (pp. 346-361), from Objectivity

In class

  • Review of terms from Daston and Gallison
  • Anne Freadman, Uptake and “Anyone For Tennis?”

Unit 2: Writing Networks

Sept 30: Writing recycles and transforms

Topics

  • Does writing convey existing knowledge? Create knowledge? Put existing knowledge in our own terms?
  • What are strategies we use for reworking our own writing? Others’ writing?

Readings

  • Cary Moskovitz, “Self-Plagiarism, Text Recycling, and Science Education,” in BioScience
  • Joe Harris, “Coming to Terms,” from Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts

In Class

  • Start conducting research for Literature Review assignment

Due: Discourse Analysis (with peer review)

Oct 2: Social networks of scholars

Topics

  • How do we refer to existing research in the scientific disciplines and technical professions?

Readings

  • Ann M. Penrose and Steven B. Katz, “Reviewing Prior Research,” from Writing in the Sciences: Exploring Conventions of Scientific Discourse

Oct 7: Social networks of scholars, cont.

Topics

  • How do writers in the sciences and technical professions refer to one another’s work?
  • What is seen as “new,” or “original?”
  • How do we refer to our and others’ data?

Readings

  • Carol Berkenkotter and Thomas N. Huckin, “You Are What You Cite: NOvelty and INtertextuality in a Biologist’s Experimental Article,” in Genre Knowledge in Disciplinary Communication: Cognition/Culture/Power

Oct 9: Writing as a technology

Topics

  • How do we think about writing itself as a “technology” for social communication?

Readings

  • Dennis Baron, “From pencils to pixels: the stages of literacy technology,” in Gail Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe, Passions, Pedagogies and 21st Century Technologies

Please look over the Penrose & Katz and Berkenkotter and Huckin readings so we can build on those concepts in more detail.

Due: Annotated Bibliography for Literature Review assignment (ungraded)

Oct 14

No Class: Indigenous Peoples’ Day

Oct 16: Digital reuse and remix

Topics

  • How do digital media and technologies influence how the writing we engage with or how we anticipate others engaging with us?

Readings

In Class

  • Peer Review

Due: working draft of Literature Review

Oct 21: Coding as writing / writing as coding

Topics

  • How are digital and data-driven technologies influencing our processes for writing?
  • Is it useful to think about writing and coding as similar practices?

Readings

  • Annette Vee, “Introduction”, from Coding Literacy: How Computer Programming is Changing Writing

In Class

  • Abstract activity and drafting

Due: working draft of Literature Review

Oct 23: Peer-review and writing day

Unit 3: Writing Networked Ecologies

Oct 28: Data in our lives

Topics

  • When and how are aspects our lives quantified in data in our contemporary moment?
  • How and why do algorithmic analytics reproduce structural inequality?

Readings

In class

Due: Literature Review Assignment (with peer review)

Oct 30: Writing platforms

Topics

  • How do technical platforms constrain rhetoric?
  • How do technical platforms constrain our roles, structuring our lives and our work?
  • From what platform might engineers work toward justice?

Readings

  • Miriam Posner, “The Software That Shapes Workers’ Lives,” in The New Yorker
  • Excerpt from Langdon Winner, “Technical Arrangments As Forms of Order,” in “Do Artifacts Have Politics?”, Daedalus

Nov 4: Algorithmic power

Topics

  • How is rhetoric moderated in digital spaces?
  • How does power direct circulation in digital ecologies?
  • Who benefits? Whose voices are heard or not? Who is affected?

Readings

  • Dustin Edwards, “Circulation Gatekeepers: Unbundling the Platform Politics of YouTube’s Content ID,” Computers & Composition

In class

  • Brian Ott, “The Age of Twitter: Donald J. Trump and the Politics of Debasement,” Critical Studies in Media Communication
  • Data & Society Explainers & Reports

Introduction to tech issues assignment

Some books for further reading, if this topic piques your interest

Nov 6: Algorithmic ethics & resistance

Topics

  • How might we anticipate or resist algorithmic mediation?
  • How do we negotiate agency over our and others’ data?
  • When things go wrong, who do we hold accountable?

Readings

  • John Gallagher, “Writing for Algorithmic Audiences,” Computers & Composition
  • Jessica Reyman, “The Rhetorical Agency of Algorithms”, in Aaron Hess and Amber Davisson, Theorizing Digital Rhetoric

In Class

Nov 11

No Class: Veteran’s Day

Unit 4: Writing Data

Nov 13: Data systems

Topics

  • What forms can and do data take?
  • How do we collect and model complex, multiply-mediated data?
  • What is our subjective role as people who generate and communicate data?
  • How do we communicate failure of engineerered systems?

Readings

In class

  • Nancy G. Leveson & Clark S. Turner, “An Investigation of the Therac-25 Accidents,” in Computer

Nov 18: Data rhetoric

Topics

  • How do data argue?
  • What rhetorical choices do we make in data’s collection, transformation, and presentation?
  • How do context and rhetorical choices affect data and what audiences conclude from them?

Readings

In Class

Due: Tech Issues Memo assignment

Nov 20: Data lab day

Topics

  • What are some methods we can use to present and visualize data?
  • How can we leverage our existing knowledges to create using different tools and platforms?

Readings

  • Sword, et al, “Seven Ways of Looking at a Data Set,” in Qualitative Inquiry

In Class

Please bring your laptops to class. If you don’t have one available or you do and can’t bring it for whatever reason, please see me at least a week prior to class, and we can arrange something.

  • Due: first ideas for Writing Data and Data Visualization assignments*

Nov 25: What is data visualization?

Topics

  • What kind of visualization have we encountered and produced in our work?
  • What are some common tenets of “good” data visualization?

Readings

  • Robert Irish, exceprt from “Strategies for Reporting with Visuals,” from Writing in Engineering: A Brief Guide

In class

  • Georgia Lupi and Stefanie Povasec, Dear Data project

Nov 27

No Class: Thanksgiving Recess

Dec 2: Potentials for data visualization

Topics

  • What are some ways we can be transparent with our rhetorical choices and constraints when visualizing data?
  • How might we push the rhetorical limits for visualizing data?

Readings

In Class

Dec 4: Wrap Up

  • Course Review
  • Course Evaluations

Due: Writing Data

Due Dec 11, noon: Data Visualization & Reflection assignment (scanned by email, or in mailbox in 405 Lake Hall)