As a medium, the geoblog provides ways for establishing powerful and immediate articulations with spheres of discourse outside of the all-too-often rigid forms of academia. As a flexible archive, structured as an open process, the geoblog does not lend itself to immediate recognition as a necessarily academic object. As we argue elsewhere, geoblogs are not a way of “getting there”—and in fact there is no clearly defined “there” built into the geoblog. The bottom line is that the destinations prescribed by the practice of geoblogging are limited only by the various situations that we can construct within our curricula. Therefore, what the geoblog requires from us as instructors, and what it opens up in terms of possibilities for the composition classroom, is a necessary awareness of how location, situation and event influence the act of writing. Seen as yet another opportunity, what this engagement offers is a chance to foster a meta-perspective on the practices that compose lines of inquiry.

For one, the technology of “capturing” that the geoblog utilizes supplies the means of exposing and understanding how writing functions as a technology for making events “virtual,” or converting experiences into information for circulation and representation in the public sphere. To “capture” is to document now and analyze later, and geoblogging encourages mass documentation—the piling on of encounters—over canonization. (Catch it now! You can always delete it later!) Meanwhile, the process of submission to the “information cycle” of academic discourse favors a certain temporal and even physical distance from the event itself, privileging the analyses of a scholarly publication over the immediacy and experience of a live news report or, appropriately enough, a blog. True, geoblogging does involve analysis; however, it also dramatizes research (be it everyday or academic) by working through a single event from all angles of the composition process. The act of “capturing” initiates the subject into public discourse, making the event describable, reportable, analyzable, and perhaps even monumental. In other words, in working through this model of documentation and circulation, a geoblog makes itself available for a whole progression of sustained and layered writing engagements. Certain forms of writing become evidence for others as the status of the event as “information” circulates through a number of venues and generic conventions. If the geoblog is evidence, then the journey itself is the destination.

For example, consider the map over at the Virtual University Geoblogging Project:

In terms of both space and time, students can think of this virtual map as a geo-collection of situations, which are located through longitude and latitude, individual perspective, and the date and time of capture. When conceiving of situations this way, students can think through and also document Helen Liggett’s (1995) notion of space as “a generative component of social life” (p. 245) by attending to their own spatial practices, as well as to the representational spaces composed and mapped by their peers. Here, the geoblog is a feedback loop of contribution, circulation, and exchange, in addition to a productive rhetorical tool. By stressing location, the geoblog does more than database an event. It draws attention to how the event is captured: through what medium, through whose perspective, for what purpose, from what angle, and so on. Consequently, it helps students experience and become more aware of how evidence, arguments, and other forms of composition are produced.

Example Writing Prompt 1: “The Autogeographical Map” and Example Writing Prompt 4: “Re-Mapping” are just two ways through which students can use geolocation to begin unpacking how their own perspectives influence and are influenced by modes of production, spatial practices and representations of space. In “The Autogeographical Map,” students are asked to compose a “personal map” that, through whatever medium they choose, tells their peers something about them. Rather than ending the composition there, however, the students are also asked to write a letter to their peers explaining their approach, how they “composed” themselves, and what the personal map says about them and what it does not say. Later, after gathering, mapping, and analyzing captures in response to Writing Prompts 2 and 3, the students return to Writing Prompt 1: “The Autogeographical Map” through Writing Prompt 4: “Re-Mapping.” This prompt essentially integrates a series of situations and roles (e.g., the student as ethnographer, as peer reviewer, as academic writer, and as cartographer) into one composition in order to highlight how these situations and roles intersect. This paper opens the personal geography of the “The Autogeographical Map” up to some re-thinking and re-mapping, primarily because it asks the student to articulate how the capturing of space is a negotiation between the personal and the socio-cultural, the private and the public, the everyday and the academic. Each pin on the map is not necessarily “the student” or “the event.” It is an interpretation, which is experienced and then submitted to the information cycle of the geoblog for review, critique, and revision. And by geolocating each pin as an interpretation that happened there and then, students can “think small” about the complex conditions through which any given campus situation emerges.

In this way, geoblogging can be used to foreground the processes that make knowledge possible and to productively reposition students, encouraging them to understand themselves not simply as novice academic writers attempting to orient themselves in a determined structure, but as active participants in the construction of a whole series of situations. We are interested in the way that students cannot help but understand themselves as producers, not only of academic arguments, but of spaces and the discourses that enable and delimit meanings of all types and tendencies. Through their writing, students can construct a variety of situational compositions and think through how those compositions are used to map all aspects of social life.

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References:

Liggett, Helen. (1995). “City sights/sites of memories and dreams. In H. Liggett & D. C. Perry (Eds.), Spatial practices: Critical explorations in social/spatial theory (pp. 243-273). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.