listening to repeating

This coming week (from May 20th to the 23rd), I’ll be attending my third Computers and Writing conference, this year at Purdue University.  (The last two I attended were at Wayne State and UC-Davis.)

I’ll be involved in a few conference invents, including a Friday panel titled, “Tinkering with Rhetorical Expertise: Reappraising Functional Literacy,” with Derek Van Ittersum, Annette Vee, and Kory Lawson Ching.  Here’s a quick description of what we’ll be discussing:

This panel responds to efforts in the field to rearticulate functional literacy by turning to the trope of tinkering.  Rather than imagining tinkering as mending an imperfect text, we instead seek to reframe tinkering to focus on the experimental or clever solutions to technological and rhetorical questions.

I’m really looking forward to it, especially since I’ll be in most brill company.  During my portion of the panel, I’ll be speaking to the roles that code, prototyping, and making stuff might play in computers and comp.

On Sunday, with six other folks I’m also contributing to the conference’s final town hall, “Articulating New Configurations for Virtual Scholarship.”  Michael J. Salvo is moderating:

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Aside from SLSA, I’m also happy to say that I’ll be presenting at this year’s Watson Conference, “The New Work of Composing,” at the University of Louisville, October 16-18.  Here’s the schedule, as well as the lineup of featured speakers.

Together with Jamie Bono (University of Pittsburgh) and Curtis Hisayasu (University of Washington), I’ll be participating in a panel entitled, “Composing with Metadata in Mind.”  And below’s the description of what we’ll be doing—or at least attempting to do:

From marginalia to markup, metadata plays an increasingly ambiguous role in how we understand composition, revision, and collaboration. In fact, there’s apparently no end to metadata in the “second generation” World Wide Web: seemingly infinite tags mapped onto a photo, one blog entry alone in fifty categories, and a long list of Google-baiting comments underneath a video all have equal claim on the term. That said, how should metadata function in networked writing environments? How, when, and for whom is it productive? And how does foregrounding it change the work of composing? Unlike approaches that consider metadata as little more than an organizational afterthought, this panel explores options for positioning metadata as an emergent part of composition. From the vantage of instructors in English composition and digital media, we contextualize metadata’s potential as a critical and creative tool. Focusing on gebologging, in particular, the first panelist attends to metadata as a means of “localizing” compositional practices, such as digital photography, and mapping them onto larger socio-political landscapes. Through a discussion of folksonomic tagging, the second panelist addresses metadata’s ability to facilitate dynamic collaboration and form organic discourse communities by creating symbolic links between texts. The third and final panelist returns to geoblogging, but from a different angle, by unpacking how geospatial data and the desire for precision intersect with capturing, documenting, and situating everyday events.