Trey Conner, USF St. Petersburg
Gina Maranto, University of Miami
Teaching multimodal and multimedia writing poses new challenges for those trained in traditional rhetoric. How do we read, inhabit, and participate in our students' rhetorical choices, made in the caesuras and links essential to writing in wikis and in other collaborative environments? These interstices of meaning and affect offer unique opportunities for community-building and experience in gift-economies of learning. What can we do as writing instructors do to help students translate capacities cultivated in these "between-spaces" across a broad range of rhetorical situations, on the web and beyond?
The first speaker will address what semiotician Scott McCloud calls "the gutter," the blank gaps between the frames, and consider the rhetorical dimensions of resonance. In discontinuous ecologies of information, the commons has evolved strategies of tagging and emergent classification schemes known as folksonomies. In ways analogous to sound's relationship to mathematics, these practices function to simplify and compress information, and, like any rhythmic practice, they also shortcut and "get in front" of rationalist tendencies and prescribed categories. In speaker one's story, musical practice informs an audience finder assignment mixing del.icio.us and wiki and piloted in a technical writing class; in subsequent editions of the assignment, students experiment with "metatagging" and the affective and nonsemantic dimension(s) of persuasion take on greater magnitude.
The second speaker will deploy theoretical approaches drawn from the Situationist International and the contemporary Italian group Stalker, in hopes of crafting a new paradigm for wiki writing. Stalker have abandoned conventional architectural modes of evaluating urban landscapes in favor of a new form of collective planning that draws on "video-art, comics, television, a universe of cross readings," conceptual and Land Art, and, most importantly, direct experience of the landscape.
In closing, the panel will share a brief wiki how-to meant to connect our topics to a workshop based on the Situationist practice of derive. Our aim is to engage C&W participants in an intervention that will constitute an experience of the liminality of the passage from workshop to Detroit to wiki. Wiki will provide space for participants to narrate our legwork in Detroit, and consider the ways computers and compositionalists can sustain productive liminalities, urban and virtual.
PbPrimer : learn how to alter this wiki
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