Sunday, February 25, 2007

history

It might as well have been an abyss over which my relatives sailed from Eastern Europe to here. Only they themselves made it across. No chairs, no jewelry, no books, no clothing even made it over; all dropped into that hole. Even their thoughts from before that moment dropped into that hole.

They came across and nothing came with them.

This is my history.

Friday, February 23, 2007

“It's thoroughly depressing to see how not-far we've come in the last 30 years.”

Washington Monthly had a little discussion Thursday about Wimbledon's announcement that women would now play for the same amount of prize money as men. The comments read as though it is 1960: "This is not about men and women, this is just about economics!" "But men are objectively better athletes!" "Men play 3 out of 5; the women don't." "It's the men that the audiences come to watch (except for the short skirts on the women)."

The title comment above was one of the few voices responding to the night-at-the-bar chest-thumping that characterized the conversation.

Thursday, February 22, 2007

discussing Decoding Advertisements

We started with a little background in structuralism, as a way into understanding where semiotics comes from and the matters it considers important: structures. Yes, well.

And then we looked at how Williamson introduces semiotic terminology bit by bit, building a complex system of relations among the terms but also then, necessarily, building more and more complex systems for analysis -- which leads into the question of how much the system itself calls into play the dense ideological structures Williamson says we can never escape.

But that may be moving too quickly to the end of our discussion.

From the beginning, we all could see that the Williamson book does build, does have its own structure: Williams starts from the notion of difference as the base semiotic notion -- that we have language only because we define terms by considering something in its differences from other things -- to the notion of sign, to sign as signifier and signified, to the idea that a signifier-signified pair can itself be a signifier for another signified, to the idea that such layering become referent systems, all of which only point within or to each other. And so what is denoted is never "natural" or "real," but only ever, finally, the product being sold. We are caught up, then, in formal structures that only ever point at, circle about and within, other structures.

As we talked, we came to see and understand that Williamson's initial set of example ads depend completely on a particular type of ad, one in which there are two objects, with the qualities of one object transferring to another. In questioning how Williamson's structural analyses might work on more recent advertising (Alexa brought up the ongoing Absolut series of ads, for example, which depend on audience knowledge of the series) we talked about how Williamson's system of 1978 relied on then-available ads -- but Williamson would be ready with reply to newer ads: she could extend aspects of the structure she builds (such as the notion of how hermeneutics works in advertising ["by being given something to decipher, our comprehension is channeled in one direction only" 78], as well as her understanding of the purposes of advertising to build always internally-facing referent systems, to speak of the referent system of Absolut ads as building off audience desire to be in the know -- but the know is not something outside the system, and instead is completely inside the system, completely self-referential. Williamson would probably have a field day.

But it was questioning like that that led us to name a concern with Williamson's approach. Williamson acknowledges the powers of advertising because of these self-referential systems she describes, these systems that hold us within them so that there seems to be no outside, such that we "become signified by, and then summarized by, things": we become -- we are -- the "sum of [our] consumer goods" (179). Williamson also acknowledges the "danger in structural analysis, because of its introversion and lack of context" (178). That is, structural analysis (as Williamson presents it) is just as circular, system-building, and therefore all-inclusive of itself, as advertising: which begets the other?

There is a sense of defeat about the book, a pessimistic giving-in to the all inclusiveness of the system: Williamson ends by saying that the value of learning to decode isn't learning the code but learning to change the system. How is that ever possible if the system is -- by its very definition -- all-encompassing? But Alexa's question also led us to question how changes in ads come about, how changes in -- for example -- conceptions of male and female come about (because the first perfume ad we could find was for man scents), or changes in technological systems that shift what is advertised and how. The system of advertising is *not* cut off from other systems -- technological, cultural, geographic, gender, ethnicities -- and so ought not be discussed outside those other systems. What sort of semiotic analyses would help us with such extensions? (And would they only build bigger and even more inescapable structures?)

Other questions that appeared as we discussed, and to which we ought to return:

  • How would you use a semiotic visual methodology in teaching undergraduate courses like Revisions or Tech Comm? What use would there be for people in your classes in such teaching? What would you emphasize? What cautions would you give?

  • Semiotic analysis (as Williamson presents it) is a form of compositional analysis, by definition: it focuses on how ads are composed. Whereas Bang, Dondis, or Arnheim appeal to (an ideology of) the universal body as the explanation of why visual compositions work, Williamson appeals to ideology itself. How is Williamson's approach NOT an example of teaching people to have a "good eye" (to follow Rose's critique) -- with the "good eye" here being one that judges visuals not in terms of beauty but rather in terms of late twentieth century academic critiques of bad consciousness?

  • Given that Williamson's system depends on transfer of meaning among different signifier/signified pairs, how applicable is such a system to other kinds of visual genres (film, plays, TV shows) where there rarely are -- as in advertising -- present at the same time such sr-sd pairs? Or do we need to shift what we consider to be the sr-sd pairs?

Thursday, February 15, 2007

brought to you by Hallmark(tm):

It was 28 years ago today that Dennis and I met.

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Happy Woman Professor Day

Okay, yes, this is most often what it is, as Barbara Ras writes it: "I want to shake the magnolia tree to see if I'm strong enough / to move any of the darkness inside its tangle of branches."

This morning at school began with Shannon, talking about teaching, coming up with strategies for moving an 8am class. Shannon is sick but is there and (as always) thoughtful and quick, and as she speaks of different people in her classes my office fills with them. We talk about the exact wording of what you say at the beginning of a class and whether you put something on the board or ask people to write about it. How all our small moves build larger patterns, and what single parts of the weave you can pluck all at once to have another pattern that morning and you only realize it afterwards as you walk away grinning. Shannon is smart about all of this, and I learn.

Then Shawn and I talk about his comps: he's moving back and forth between two-dimensional visual design and immersive games, asking about the entanglements of engagement and persuasion (how are they different?) in those differing visual objects. We figure out a few new things together about the library's database and e-journals, and find some new articles, and we talk about the connections you make with the people with whom you work and how they become really visible at a daughter's first birthday party while the wrapping paper is flying through giggling fingers. (Well, that later part is how I am remembering it later, how I will remember these meetings, as though Lily was there so graciously helping Christy and Hina with the presents on my office floor while Shawn's ideas glittered about the room with his grace and smarts like the light off the wrapping paper.)

Professor Hawhee came to the phone from snow shoveling or pushing but I got to speak to her twice today because during that first call Marilyn knocked on my door to remind me of our noon meeting. Our noon meeting is our writing group: Vicky, Marilyn, and I had read one of Marika's conference presentations, and we were talking about all the different article possibilities in the presentation. Marika makes sentences like magnifying lenses and Marilyn and Vicky are *smart* and the hour disappeared. Delightfully. Next week we read from Vicky's book and the week after we read from Marilyn's book, and then it's my CCCC presentation, which I've started writing, at least the first sentences that make me laugh and that chances are will be nowhere near the final version.

In our weekly meeting about the writing program, Christy, Moe, and I... well. I look forward to that meeting. Christy thinks about teaching with ethical rigor, gently teasing apart situations with such respect for who people are that I sometimes am tempted to make up problems so I can just keep listening and being made smarter. And Moe is Mr. Magic-out-of-the-Hat, so creative in coming up with assignments and workarounds it's as though he lives inside his collections of old ads, magazines, and costumes. And he is human, and styling, and way smart; his dissertation is going to be a genre-bending wonder, to which I am looking forward oh so selfishly. (And he comes with Liz, who is a gift to the world of textures, generosity, animations, and delight.)

Lynn came to office hours, to talk about science writing and snowboarding. This is a woman who makes me happy to think about the emails of 2 or 5 or 10 years from now -- like emails from Jana, davina, Kristin, Anna, Mavis, Jessie, Lisa, Vicki, Asha, Karen, Becky, Jess, Hannah, Pavi Elle, Jen, Amy, Diane, Emily, Erica, Erin, Nia, Katie, Eve, Orsolya, Evelyn, Josh, Aaron, Donovan -- emails about success and work and thinking and life and families after undergrad studying, emails that fall out of the morning inbox like petals, emails from friends.

Then I got to talk with Professor Hawhee again, laughing. Her warmth and piercing smartness made me think about talking -- just the talks of this past week -- with the ever graciously thoughtful Professor Hawisher, the ever sharpfunny Professor Ball, the bright and generous Professor Hocks, the Manta-wearing Professor Grabill who cracks me up and makes me think we can be f-ing brilliant together with Professors Sidler, Hart-Davidson, and to-be Lackey.

And I haven't even begun to mention the gifts of Professor Arola and Professor Jasken, and that Sajdyk woman. And Teacher-Kitchen Master Buchanan and Teacher-Dean-to-Be Corbin.

Why am I a Happy Woman Professor?

All that is above is just the today and some-of-this-week part; I need to add into the longer mix Johndan, Kate, Stuart, Geoff, Karla, Ellen, Linda, Cindy, Diana, Scott, Heidi, Barclay, Dickie, Madeleine, Marcia, Alice, Chuck, Brent, Matt, Paul, Anne, Jackie, Mary, Michelle, Collin, Eva, Amy, Joyce, Susan, Carrie, Martha, Derek, Jonathan... Any writing I do is thanks to every name here -- and many I have missed -- and all their ideas and generosity.

Oh, and the classes I get to teach.

Off, laughing.

........

But wait, there's more:
blogos
first efforts
see jane compute
blog her
neither necessary nor sufficient
lilysea
the most cake

Monday, February 12, 2007

et tu, Google?

Really, why should it be a surprise that Google has used the same techniques in North Carolina as Walmart used here in Houghton?

See Rough Type on Google's massive tax breaks -- and on elderly people being "persuaded" out of their homes.

Sunday, February 11, 2007

our last 6112 discussion

We started our discussion of Donis A. Dondis's Visual Literacy by looking at a range of two-dimensional art pieces, asking what Dondis's approach encouraged or allowed us to say about the objects. We quickly ran up against the absence of the social / cultural in her approach. For example, when looking at Raphael's painting of Galatea we could talk about the arrangement and relationship of abstract elements and how they directed our eyes and attentions around the picture, and we could name (because they are represented) -- but not talk about -- humans, water, and animals. We were also very aware that could not speak much of gender, ethnicity, mythology, frescoes, the Renaissance; we knew from our experiences outside the painting that those factors and more shaped our viewing, but we needed to turn to other sources to inform our talk.

We looked at a Chinese painting and could apply Dondis's analytic frame to it: we could say that the colors are equally subdued, with little contrast except for the red; this is a landscape with few objects in it, and the boats are painted to blend into what is around them, as is the body of the flutist who stands out only subtly in the lower middle because of a shift in line. Most of us were uncomfortable with going any further, with coming to any judgments about the painting (for example, "This is about the smallness of humans in the landscape" or "This is about the passing of time in fall, about grabbing hold of the gentle moments of enjoyment"): we could see that it has been painted in a tradition unknown to most of us. Yang was able to tell us that this painting was probably a response to or illustration of a poem, a traditional Chinese use of painting. (Am I getting that right, Yang?)

We acknowledged that Rose's critique of compositional visual methodologies -- that they "do not encourage discussion of the production of an image…. nor of how it might be used and interpreted by various viewers" -- seemed an accurate critique for Dondis's approach. We raised but did not discuss much, however, our concern that Rose lays the blame for this lack of social-cultural reflexivity on how compositional approaches can be tied to the notion of the great artist or "the good eye" -- when Dondis's reasons for her system are different. The implication of Rose's critique is that compositional methodologies are used by critics to establish what are the best and most beautiful or otherwise worthy art objects; they are used, that is, to establish the tastes and so hierarchical placements of some people (I am thinking of Bourdieu and Distinction here). But Dondis is interested in larger cultural participation; she is interested in the thoughtful consumption AND production of visual objects by a wider range of people. Rose approaches visual methodologies as occuring strictly after the fact: they are, for her, to help with analysis of existing objects; she does not discuss them as possible approaches for anyone wishing to participate in the production of visual objects. Dondis sees production as a necessary part of cultural participation. Are compositional methodologies necessary -- or necessary and sufficient -- for producing thoughtful visual productions? Are visual productions necessary for -- and useful for -- cultural participation?

In our discussion, however, that thread about different understandings of the purposes of compositional methodologies very quickly led into something more compelling for our particular backgrounds and interests, and that is Dondis's definition of "literacy." Dondis uses her notion of "literacy" as the grounding for her arguments about how we should approach the visual (although she does reiterate, initially, that for her there are shortcomings with her approach because the verbal is more conventionalized than the visual). Steve pointed out that Dondis's definition of verbal literacy -- "To be considered verbally literate, one must learn the basic components of written language: the letters, words, spelling, grammar, syntax." (x) -- seems equivalent to Street's notion of "autonomous literacy" (which was published approximately 10 years after Dondis's book). While Dondis acknowledges that there are varying degrees of verbal literacy (from the ability to write "simple messages" to "increasingly complex and artistic forms" [10]) and so, comparably, "visual literacy" "means increased visual intelligence" (185), this does not change how she sets out to build a model of visual literacy parallel to her understanding of verbal literacy.

And so Dondis offers the visual equivalent of letters: for visual production, there are the "basic elements" of dot, line, shape, direction, tone, color, texture, scale, dimension, and movement. Syntax is covered through what Dondis describes as "the potential of structure in visual literacy" through denotative "psychophysiological" perceptions of balance, stress, leveling and sharpening, a preference for the lower left of a picture plane, attraction and grouping, and positive and negative; the meaning of these latter "short circuits the intellect, making contact directly with the emotions and feelings" (22); these contribute to our ability to build meaning through the techniques of kinds of contrast that Dondis describes in one chapter.

Dondis also claims that there are three levels to visual meaning: the representational, the abstract, and the symbolic (and these would be worth comparing to Pierce's index, icon, and symbol). The first arises out of "reality," "the basic and dominating visual experience" (68): it is the attempt to faithful recreate direct visual observation of the world. The second is "the reduction of multiple visual factors to only the most essential and most typical features of what is being represented" (71), and it

conveys the essential meaning, cutting through the conscious to the unconscious, from the experience of the substance in the sensory field directly to the nervous system. (81)

The symbolic "is an information-packed means of visual communication, universal in meaning" (72). It is not clear whether these levels are meant to correspond to some some aspect of verbal literacy, as the basic elements and techniques correspond to letters and syntax, but for Dondis both producers and receivers of visual compositions -- if the producers and receivers are to be considered visually literate -- have to be able to work with all three levels separately and entwined.

It is when she moves on to discuss style, that Dondis begins to address social and cultural aspects of visual composition. As with the levels, Dondis does not describe a verbal equivalent to style; instead, style is for her an unconscious cultural background that exerts influence over the choices composers make in working with elements and techniques of visual composition. Although Dondis acknowledges that there are and have been many different styles historically and geographically, she argues that all styles can be fit into five categories: primitivism, expressionism, classicism, the embellished, and functionality.

The last categorization is a symptom of what everyone in class noted as being a feature of every level of Dondis's arguments: she claims universalism for all aspects of visual composition -- for production and analysis -- and none of us were comfortable accepting that universalism. Dondis offers few non-Western, non-canonical examples, and offers no analysis of the material conditions of production (the marketing of art, the historic gendering of artistic production, and so on) that we know shape how we understand what we see. There is no discussion of advertising, of other than the fine arts.

In spite of our complaints, I think that following Rose and Dondis we have questions like these remaining:


  1. Are compositional methodologies always necessary for starting analysis (especially if we take seriously Rose's arguments that all visual methodologies must "take seriously" "the image itself")?

  2. Is something like visual literacy necessary for full cultural participation?

  3. How can we know the limits of our methods of visual analysis, in terms of being reflexive about our geographical and cultural positioning?



Anything I missed?

Friday, February 9, 2007

grand rounds

Grand Rounds, like the Carnival of Teaching, always make me feel like those times in a coffee shop when I overhear compelling words from the next table: can I listen without tipping my chair?

We're invited to Grand Rounds, though, and it's a gift to listen in on what is -- often -- intimate and close talk, on what is figuring-it-out in words, out loud. Nurses and doctors quietly write -- well -- about what confounds, moves, or angers them.

The latest Grand Rounds, on "The People behind the Medicine," is about nurses and doctors making quick decisions about their professional roles as they treat others -- or are treated by others. The posts make me think about decisions we make as teachers about the self-consciousness we have toward students, about how we decide how much to open ourselves to the people in our classes and how much to stay at a distance, all depending on what we think is happening and needs to happen. I cannot imagine what it is to be a nurse in the Periodic Intensive Care Unit, and I am inexpressibly glad that my decisions can't so directly kill someone. But I know we can make others miserable or exalted. We don't need the education doctors get in how to live and think after someone has died under your knife or prescription -- but I would like beginning and continuing education in how to be alert to how much our teacherly ways with others matter, and in how to acknowledge that -- as with medicine -- the luminous right decision toward one person is not for someone else.

What would a Hippocratic Oath for teachers look like?

Tuesday, February 6, 2007

something like this: teaching digital production in a writing/theory program

I will be giving a presentation on production and the visual at Florida State in April (a chance to see Kathi Yancey and Kris Fleckenstein -- I am looking forward to this, hugely); David Blakesley and I will be there together, playing off each other. David may make a machinima, and I...

Well, I...

I am thinking about the possibilities. I have been needing for a while to write on production. Our latest job search, for someone to teach "critical approaches to media production," put me onto a committee with people who use Word for their scholarly or fun production, and so it became clear early on that definitional differences were the undercurrent. Our attractions to various candidates were very much tied to our differing notions of what production is and how it ought to play out in a program that has some theoretic bent, and we recognized this -- but we had no time for discussion, because it would have required the equivalent of several conference presentation panel ramblings and dinners afterwards.

By looking through a good deep set of applications, applications from people bringing all sorts of backgrounds and worldly engagements into their own work, people whom in the best of all possible worlds we would have hired as a collective, I saw my own teaching differently, and saw where some of my frustrations are. And I realized that, perhaps, we (an amorphous "we") still aren't too much past a discussion from Computers & Writing Gainesville (1998?), about "teaching software versus teaching writing" -- and at that time, even, the discussion was self-aware about being at least 10 years old. (For a crisper update and discussion of this than mine, see Kathie Gossett's take.)

No more do I want to teach classes that are titled along the lines of "Introduction to Multimedia Development" (a title that felt detergent-new and -fresh 10 years ago but now...) or "Introduction to Web Development." Perhaps it is just our school, but people come into such classes with the expectation that the class will be about learning software and nothing else. This past semester I did teach "Introduction to Multimedia Development," in which people did research in local historical archives and then built interactive pieces for helping others learn about local history (and boy did they build some great stuff). On the first day of that class, when I asked about people's expectations about what would happen, the common response was, "We're going to learn Flash!" I said that, yes, they'd be learning something about Flash, just as, back in first and second grades we were all taught how to hold pencils and paper and how to sit so that we could write -- but those were only the first steps toward using the technology to engage with others, toward considering how pencil and paper embed us into certain cultural structures of thinking and interacting, etc. etc. You know how this goes.

Twice during the semester, when we did class evaluations, I asked people in class what most stood out to them in what they had learned, what they thought they could apply most in the future, what helped them understand the ethical and moral dimensions of digital communication. "Flash!"

I clearly underestimate the cultural capital of knowing this software.

And perhaps I should also be pining for *a series of classes* -- working off the analogy of learning software as being like learning pencil and paper -- recognizing that all of what *I* (the selfish teacherly I) want to happen in class cannot possibly happen in one semester and must happen across a layering of classes.

Nonetheless, my sense of responsibility pushes me now toward thinking that the classes I should be teaching should be called, simply, "Public Writing" or "Digital Citizenship" or "Engaging with Digital Communities." Just as in "regular" writing classes, production is assumed. The readings and assignments center on how we engage with and act within different publics and privates, and production is -- as in a "regular" writing class -- a form either of reflection and action (or, as always, both). The "tools" are folded into the learning: you have to learn something about a game engine to build an environment that fosters first-person shibbolething; you have to learn something about Flash to build an argumentative essay about how different technologies enable differing forms of argument; you have to play with Photoshop to remix those characters from SL. Reflexivity about the technology has to be there, but so does placing the technology more into its cultural articulations from the beginning, rather than pulling it out as though it were a neutral little hammer.

The trade-off is that people then only learn the software so much, just enough to make a little argument or two. And this is where I could come back to wondering about the need for series of classes, and for a discussion about the professionalization of technologies: we have, in the past, spent many years of education on the commonly shared technologies of a certain kind of writing, the writing deeply tied to pen and paper -- and now we live in a time of technologies that separate out and that each have their own steep learning curve. All these latter technologies -- and I am thinking here within the bounds of software: Flash, Photoshop, FinalCut, Maya -- also have long learning curves if one is to be fluent. They also have long learning curves for parallel/congruent abilities one has to develop: to become a graphic designer or 3D artist, one has to devote some considerable attention to visual conventions, and so on with film, video, gaming, etc.

With that professionalization -- with that emphasis on professionalization and the taste that develops alongside becoming a professional with a technology -- comes a decrease in wider public participation. If the Photoshop picture you make shows you not to be aware that fuzzy edges are outrĂ©, then others will look with disdain (viz the Worth contests). If your Flash piece has code in all the different layers instead of only in the opening screen, well… you show yourself not to know what you are doing. If you are not willing, in other words, to spend the time to learn the software to a level of professional polish, then you can't participate. Feh.

So: teaching software only as a part of the whole process of developing arguments and pieces of cultural questioning would help me teach also about how taste develops, how people get to be recognized as able digital citizens -- or not. Teaching more of a "figure out enough to do what you want and to take control" helps develop confidence in being a non-professional in a world where professionalization is another gate. Teaching more of a "figure out enough to do what you want and to take control" can help shift tastes toward a more generous approach toward texts that look non-professional for all sorts of good reasons, texts that we might otherwise dismiss precisely because they don't look like what we're accustomed to.

Okay.

Hmmm.

I think there is something here toward a presentation on production. But I also want to make something, too, in which to embed this discussion. And it sounds as though it's going to have to be something un-pretty, ungainly, and unprofessional in all the right ways.

But people gotte be making stuff, because that's a non-trivial entry to public participation these days.

Sunday, February 4, 2007

for 5931 folks: statements of teaching philosophies

For our February 15 meeting, we're asking you to post -- on your blog -- rhetorical analyses of the teaching philosophies of others. We're asking you to do this for two reasons: thinking more on rhetorical analyses for your teaching of them and thinking toward your own teaching philosophies.

Below are links to advice given by various teaching centers from various universities about what statements of teaching philosophy are supposed to do and how teachers are supposed to achieve all that. Such statements have multiple purposes (which makes them good for rhetorical analyses): they are a form of reflection for teachers, to help them clarify why they do what they do in classes; they can be public documents sent to hiring committees as part of a job application.

Below are also links to samples of statements, some from rhet-comp and some from other fields.


So: WHAT TO DO
Read through the guidelines, and draw up for yourself an understanding of the purposes, contexts, and audiences for statements of teaching philosophy. Use your sense of purposes, contexts, and audiences to post on your blog a comparative analysis of two statements. You can analyze two statements from rhet-comp, or one from rhet-comp and one from another discipline. (Lots of samples from other disciplines are linked from the general guidelines pages.)

GENERAL GUIDELINES ON WHAT STATEMENTS OF TEACHING PHILOSOPHY ARE AND DO
from Ohio State, with linked samples lower down on the page
from The Chronicle of Higher Education
from Iowa State
from the University of Michigan, with lots of links to example from other disciplines
some comments by MetaSpencer on Statements of Teaching Philosophy

STATEMENTS OF TEACHING PHILOSOPHY examples from RHETORIC AND COMPOSITION
John Walter
Judith Van
Laura Nutten
Susan Miller-Cochran
Mine

PS -- Know that I put all this together while Dennis watched a Richard Prior DVD in the background, as, um, research for a section in a class on rhetorics of humor.

Friday, February 2, 2007

Thursday, February 1, 2007

make it known...

The good professor Hawhee posted on a search string -- "happy woman professor" -- that led some one person to her blog... and the comments led to this:


Hear ye! Hear ye! Let it be known that February 14, 2007 will mark the observation of "Happy Woman Professor Day," a day inspired by a depressing google search string and comments on that search string (including my own overly cynical one). Thanks to, among others, Anne, Google, (or better, the anonymous googler) and Cara.

During this day, women professors across the academy will post blog entries about things they love about their profession. Go ahead, get mushy. And please advertise widely.


So, yes, please. Go!

enter! send!

To acknowledge and support the growth and acceptance of scholarship, research, and teaching in our field, we present on an annual basis the Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award. The award honors book-length works that contribute in substantial and innovative ways to the field of computers and composition.

In recognition of the changing nature of publications in computers and composition research, theory, and practice, the Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award is open to not only printed and bound books but also large hypertexts, multimedia programs, and Web sites. The Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award complements existing awards for best article (the Ellen Nold Award) and best dissertation (the Hugh Burns Award). Computers and Composition will honor the winner during an awards presentation held during the Computers and Writing Conference. Winners will receive both a plaque and a modest cash award.

To nominate a book for the Distinguished Book Award, the nominator must write a letter outlining the ways in which the work contributes to scholarship, research, and teaching in computers and composition, and submit the letter and three copies of the book (or arrange to have the publisher send three copies of the book). Potential categories of emphasis for nomination include originality of research and/or application, methodological sophistication, and scope of work.

{Dates of eligibility for this awards is January 1 through December 31 of 2006.}

Deadline for nominations is March 15. Send nominations for the Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award to:

Anne Frances Wysocki
Distinguished Book Award
Humanities Department
Michigan Technological University
Houghton , MI 49931

If you have any questions, please contact me...