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

So here’s my project and it’s all y’all’s fault that it ain’t done.

While trying to bring together a semester’s worth of exploration, I came upon the difficulty that Morgan explores in her term project: this doesn’t work as a linear text. Not knowing where I wanted to start assuming prior knowledge on the part of my reader, I found myself writing in blurbs, each targeted at an 18 year-old audience (Thanks, Pepper). So then I decided that this whole InDesign thing wasn’t quite so bad after all (mad props to the ICaP Doc group) and started experimenting with a textbook style document design.

The biggest porblem (other than that I'm a novice with InDesign) is that I still don't have a strong sense of who will encounter this text and in what context.

Posted here are drafts (I tried not to make them ungly, but I kinda failed) of some pages. I’ll post more as I piece them together.

And here’s the outline for the sections of the project:
(Working title)
Being on-line: A beginner’s guide to how internet technologies are changing what and how we are.

Posthumanism (what’s at stake? Assumptions about what it means to be human, mental rather than physical modifications of that)
Spectatorship (looking and being looked at - where does the internet put us?)
Internet as Social Space (Being aware of communities and coercion on-line)
Being and Performing (Drag, performance and performativity)
The Screen Phase (The adolescent counter part to the mirror phase, how the imaginary and symbolic orders can get all conflated)

Each section, in addition to the types of pages you see here will include:
Further readings sections
Questions to consider
And maybe some quests for knowledge (assignments modeled more on learningtoloveyoumore than on composition classrooms)