English 680V: Visual Rhetoric in a Technological Age (Purdue)

I have completely reconstructed my project idea (hence, the new info entry) to account for my indecisiveness and my desire to simultaneously discuss and produce visual rhetoric. Much like my project, this entry is a hybrid, attempting to propose, clarify and inform. So, here it is (bereft of a pithy title):

My project explores the intersection between science and rhetoric as I attempt to use the findings of neurocognitive scientists and the strategies of visual rhetoric. First, I intend to present an exploration of the current scientific literature. The corpus is quite large, so I will try to choose the most representative works to include and provide additional resources for further study. I believe this to be a particularly important resource because many rhetoricians are less familiar with the primary sources of scientific inquiry and the temptation to rely upon more popular (yet certainly reliable) sources is great. Unfortunately, in writing for a lay audience, frequently publications like Scientific American are unable to present the important intricacies of the research. I don’t expect to be able to capture all of these myself but hope to design and promote the site so that scholars from different disciplines to contribute their knowledge to the site. This idea was inspired by Henry Jenkins report of Survivor fans who pool their knowledge in attempts to “spoil” the show. Although I find the intellectual work of fans to be valuable in its own right, I understand Jenkins point that if this kind of dedication and collaboration could be applied to something like the electoral process, it could result in significant political change. I hope to encourage the same kind of collaborative work among disciplines studying the visual.

One of the problems that I frequently have with academia is the conflation of disciplinarity with division. When we “discipline” ourselves too rigidly, all parties lose as does the collective intelligence. Suppose all of those Survivor fans didn’t share their information? What I propose to do here is create a resource that draws together ideas from various disciplines, integrate those with current rhetorical theories and apply them to both production and analysis. In keeping with the spirit of collaboration, I invite other scholars from a variety of disciplines to contribute their own research, to provide additional resource information, and to lend their perspective on resources already contributed. I am not a scientist but I do take scientific findings very seriously and am avidly interested in understanding the available literature. I am relying on the contributions of other scholars to expand on of the entries that I contribute and provide different interpretations of the sources. Because I envision this as a reliable scholarly resource, some level of mediation and monitoring will be necessary

I see this as a hybrid of academic resource, scholarly analysis, and production with a conscious application of rhetorical strategy, particularly the information architecture of the site. I am especially interested in implementing many of the visual design strategies encouraged by Edward Tufte, Dan Brown and similar visual design theorists and practitioners. As an aspect of the project’s hybridity, it should also be a resource as an example of visual design applied with a conscious attention to rhetoric. My own research and experimentation in web design and the available resources of the open source community has allowed me to collect a variety of strategies to draw on. I’ve been told that I’m a maven and part of this undertaking is to make use of that curiosity and the enjoyment of sharing information.

This is quite a large undertaking and I realize that it most definitely cannot be accomplished in the better side of a month. So, I am taking the “working document” title seriously. At the same time I recognize that there needs to be a clear scholarly contribution even in the working stages of my project. I think that the most effective contribution would be the contribution of resources (starting the bibliography and annotating many of the contributions) and an extended journal that tracks my design implementation and decisions. Again, I hope that by making the production transparent, all aspects of the site can be used as a resource for fellow rhetoricians. In part this is a response to the focus on analysis that I think has been stunted the growth of rhetoricians, inhibiting our ability to apply visual rhetoric to our own production.

In part I am drawing on Rebecca Luce-Kapler’s understanding of writing as a way of establishing identity. She suggests that we should view writing as a kind of ecology, networks that draw together elements and which I suggest create an ongoing narrative of writing’s complexity. I think that visual rhetoric, particularly the visual rhetoric of websites, offers a particularly rich opportunity to demonstrate the ecological nature of writing and scholarship. So, I will be approaching this project as an ecology of visual rhetoric, pulling together traces from different disciplines that enrich and complicate our understanding of visual rhetoric both as artifact and as act.

Proposed deliverables:

• Concept model (affinity diagram) representing the conceptual architecture of the site
• Wireframes depicting site design
• An extended project log (hosted on the website and available as one of the site resources) reflecting design choices and implementations
• The beginning of bibliographies in several areas: neurocognitive science, art theory, and rhetoric with a minimum of ten annotations each.
• An annotated bibliography of the sources relied upon for design decisions and implementation
• A usable (if incomplete) website with the necessary structural elements to enable collaboration and usability

Sources:

• Brown, Dan M. Communicating Design: Documentation for Design and Planning. Berkeley: New Riders, 2007.
• Luce-Kapler, Rebecca. Writing With, Through and Beyond the Text: An Ecology of Language. Mahweh, NJ: Erlbaum, 2004.
• Rosenfeld, Louis and Peter Morville. Information Architecture for the World Wide Web. 3rd ed. New York: O'Reilly, 2006.