Conference Abstracts

Annotated Abstract: Panel Proposal – “Planners and Journals as Multimodal Technologies of Disability Access”

by Anonymous

CALL FOR PAPERS:

Our theme for the 2019 C&W conference is Mission Critical: Centering Ethical Challenges in Computers and Writing. With this theme, we ask for proposals that speak to our sense of mission in the C&W community in relation to our students and colleagues, our institutions and communities. We invite sessions that bring the fields’ challenges into sharper focus as well as those that describe and demonstrate the right balance of critique and creative making in response.

We are especially interested in work that blends research and pedagogy and that manifests in innovative, inclusive, and engaging scholarship. We call on colleagues to explore multimodal modes of composing, to experiment and push the limits of digital and other forms of writing, to bring new and underrepresented perspectives to the table, to gather and present evidence in a number of forms, and to support and engage audiences both within and beyond the academy.

Possible topics may include, but will certainly not be limited to:

• equity and access questions–and issues of inclusion and exclusion–in digital spaces
• design practices and styles, especially their cultural and social influences and effects
• intersection(s) between allied areas of inquiry such as digital humanities, technical and professional writing, and cultural rhetorics
• the development of literacies, and especially digital literacies, inside and outside of classrooms
• implementations of and responses to surveillance technologies, big data and uses of it, issues of privacy, etc.
• social media uses and abuses
• games, gaming culture, and learning
• the influences of digital writing tools and spaces on the first-year composition curriculum, including considerations like multimodality, infrastructural requirements, analytics, automated grading, etc.
• trends and rhetorical possibilities of digital writing tools and spaces in the upper-level and graduate writing curriculum

SESSION TYPE + SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS:

• Panel presentations: 3 to 4 presenters, 150-200-word abstract, 600-word proposal

ABSTRACT

[Attention getter] Planners and journals are objects filled with writing, often cherished and sometimes loathed by the authors. As multimodal technologies of writing, they reveal the interstices of the writing process and the emotional toll of the writing task. Paper planners and journals are more “digital” than ever before, emulating tracking technologies like Fitbits, integrating with digital calendars, and working as a distinctly visual and material medium for writing. [With the last two sentences, we were trying to sell this to a digital rhetoric audience, though we were focused on a “paper” technology.]

However, planners and journals as objects of writing are rarely discussed in terms of what they do to writers, or what they do to writing itself. In the vein of scholarship like Cydney Alexis’s recent exploration of how Moleskine notebooks function as a “‘facilitating artifact’ for the performance of the identity of ‘writer,’” this panel will explore the rhetorical work done and pedagogical opportunities afforded by journaling and planning. [My philosophy is to have one, and no more than two, well-known and current (<5 years old) citations in the proposal] The panelists argue that planning and journaling should be taken seriously as forms of writing in their own right as well as better understood as crucial practices of academic literacy. Notably, they offer ways for disabled academic writers to crip, revise, and access the academic writing process. [Two sentences that are the major takeaway for the whole panel–what will the audience get out of attending this presentation?]

Speaker one will report on findings from a qualitative interview research project exploring the experiences of college writers with disabilities; from this data, he will offer a discussion about “dynamic planning” as a mode of writing that many disabled writers to access academic writing tasks. In short, “dynamic planning” is a multimodal form of writing that breaks down and makes material the cognitive and mechanical tasks of academic writing, often through complex, deeply visual blend of digital and paper writing technologies.

Speaker two will examine bullet journaling as a multimodal practice that inscribes the experiences of people with disabilities into both analog and digital spaces. Bullet journaling is a method for planning and tracking to-do lists that was popularized around 2013 by graphic designer Ryder Carroll, who describes it as “a mindfulness practice that’s disguised as a productivity system” (Mejia). Bullet journaling is used by people with mental disabilities to track symptoms, triggers, treatment goals, daily tasks, and other details of everyday experience. Using the case studies of bullet journal forums and digitally published bullet journal “spreads,” speaker two will argue that bullet journaling represents the use of writing to claim control over identity and experiences of mental disability. She will also examine how online spaces interact with journaling literacy to engender a system of surveillance in which recovery, productivity, able-bodiedness, and able-mindedness become both performative and mandatory. Building on the other panelists’ presentations, she will conclude by discussing the possible affordances and limitations of bullet journaling as a tool for accessing writing in composition classrooms.

Speaker three will argue for a pedagogy of critical reflective writing called “process journal work” to trouble normative rhetorics of writing assignments and evaluations in a composition context. In a first-year writing course designed around the three pillars of Disability Studies, rhetorical analysis, and journal writing, students wrote and shared a series of detailed “journal reflections” describing their developing practices for drafting and revising a sequence of three major essays in narrative, analytic, and research-based genres. Students also participated in Journal Lab class meetings where students experimented with new journal practices and participated in a voluntary “Journal Show-and-Tell.” This presentation will report on the results of these initial experiments in teaching composition with a process journal pedagogy, and offer some strategies for implementing and assessing journal work in your own teaching. [If possible, here’s a few things to consider — can you offer a lot of different angles for the presentation? Here, we do two theoretical projects and one teaching project. We also use different methods. I also think if you can get people from different institutions it makes a big difference.]

150-200 Word Abstract

Our panel explores planners and journals as objects of writing that create a multimodal environment allowing disabled writers to access writing as an identity.  While often thought of as a solely “paper” technology, planners and journals have emerged as a complex system comprised of digital and paper writing tools. The speakers will explore disabled writers’ experience with planners and academic writing, the cultural rhetorics of bullet journaling for writers with mental disabilities, and the pedagogical use of journaling in first-year composition classrooms. The speakers argue that planning and journaling should be taken as a form of multimodal writing in their own right and incorporated into composition pedagogy as a practice of disability access.

“The Man was Necessary”: Serial Character-Space in Bleak House and The Old Curiosity Shop

by Immanuel Pipplestocking^[1]

One of the challenges Dickens poses for his readers is what can be an overwhelming number of characters who weave into and out of the narrative of his novels. Do you keep track of all of the characters or only some? And how do you choose? Alex Woloch’s concept of the character-space is a tool for considering these questions. With the idea of character-space, Woloch considers how textual competition between characters stratifies and consequently identifies the major and minor characters in a novel thereby helping the reader determine who to track and who can probably be ignored. However, although Woloch does consider how characters rise into prominence over the course of a novel, his analysis ultimately depends on the complete novel. While this model is helpful, how does character-space develop when we think about the unfolding of plot without a clear end already in mind? In particular, how do we read the development of character spaces in serialized novels that protract reading time over months and invite reader reactions in the form of book reviews to only a portion of what will become the finished whole? My paper begins to answer this question by considering a qualified version of Woloch’s model: serial character-space. I contend that attention to serial character-space opens up new avenues for considering how novels attempt to represent totality before they are completed and for recognizing how characters can be locally (in terms of plot) major while globally minor.

In my paper, I apply my model of serial character-space to two serialized novels by Charles Dickens, one published in monthly installments and the other in weekly installments. In Bleak House, the novel’s totality is present from the start but kept hidden as a secret network of character relationships. As that network is revealed piece by piece in each installment, characters’ potential for necessity or significance is constantly in tension between what the narrative has made known and what it holds back, which inductively creates the condition that all the novel’s Londoners are necessary. In The Old Curiosity Shop, episodic installments introducing a variety of locally major characters invite the reader to inductively imagine a totality that extends beyond what is fully represented in the completed novel but what always could be represented before the final installment.

Burning Down the (Digital) Library? Textual Preservation and Hoarding in Romola

by Immanuel Pipplestocking

In addition to expanding access and opening up the humanities to statistical modeling, the digital turn is also a preservation project. However, while digitization offers a new way to preserve the contents of material books, digitized copies become new artifacts to archive and curate. But, why do we save everything? Might the digital turn be a call to let go rather than to hold on more tightly to our printed possessions? My paper begins to answer these questions in the context of transitionary periods in history in which one media format is replaced by another—periods in which the older form has the potential to become obsolete. Drawing on theoretical accounts of textual archives from Foucault and Benjamin, I identify motivations for the public and private collecting of books into libraries and problematic overlaps between these motivations and recent scholarship on hoarding. My paper reads George Eliot’s representation of the Florentine transition from manuscript to print culture in Romola (1863) as a model for imagining alternative curatorial responses to wide-spread remediation.  By examining the hoarding impulses of the novel’s primary book collector—the titular heroine’s father—I analyze how the novel challenges those impulses as well as the archive more generally. To conclude, I argue that scholars and librarians need to view historical moments of mass remediation not as necessitating the expansion of archives but instead as important calls to question the scholarly impulse to hoard.

Keywords: George Eliot, libraries, hoarding, remediation, obsolescence, digitization

Staging Reception: Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Fictional Avatars Face Off in the Victorian Press

by Pulcherrima Bumbershoot

In past decades, reception theorists have called attention to the ways in which readers critique others’ texts and forge interpretive communities by creating media of their own, an interest often described using the language of “derivative” or “transformative” works. These terms’ oppositional connotations highlight ongoing debates about appropriate authorship and readership practices. This tension invites critics to question the boundaries between productive adaptation and “derivative,” inferior versions of existing texts. While scholars have only recently begun to analyze how readers navigate generic forms and contexts when adapting literary works, I argue that Victorian periodical columnists confront these same theoretical debates using performative strategies that have been under-theorized in contemporary scholarship. In my presentation, I consider the ways in which Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s 1867 novel, Circe, served as a touchstone for debates about author-reader roles. What began with an accusation that the novel’s (pseudonymous) author, “Babington White,” had lifted passages and plot from Octave Feuillet’s Dalila soon led to a forged apology letter (ostensibly by the novel’s real author, Mary Elizabeth Braddon) in The Pall Mall Gazette, a rebuttal purportedly written by Captain Shandon (a fictional character in Thackeray’s Pendennis), and a series of well-publicized think-pieces about how Circe had crossed the line between inspiration and plagiarism.  In this presentation, I apply Caroline Levine’s strategic formalist lens to Circe’s periodical reception. I argue that the discussion surrounding Circe can cast light on Victorian understandings of literary reception—conceptualizations that shape conversations about participatory culture in the present day.