Many of the blog carnivals of the 2000s responded to moments and events; I remember them as informal, self-selective with regard to participation, and staggered in time so as to foster dialogue and cross-hatched linking to one another’s entries. Simply, conversations played out. The carnivals that have endured through University of Michigan’s Digital Rhetoric Collaborative became slightly more special issue-like, in that they typically answer a common call and are entrusted to editorial oversight, often with a common publish date. Within ENGL6344: Rhetoric in Digital Environments this semester, our adaptation combines qualities from each approach. The call for entries rang out, and although most entries went through open review, the set reflects an editor-free organic quality, responsive to class lodestars but also licensed to roam peripheries and explore distal paths. About those six lodestars: hypertext & hodology applies to four entries, database & narrative was assigned categorically to three, and avatar & identity, two. The newer (orange) set of lodestars blinked in with less frequency, as attention and dataism each received just one tagging, and artificiality received none. But the low tallies for these last three are not an index for neglect, but rather a consequence of timing, since we are just beginning to consider attention, dataism, and artificiality more substantially at this point in the semester.
To the nine entries, then, in the order of their posting:
- Molly Ryan‘s “Kaleidoscopic Databaseology: Making Meaning of Knowledge Haunted and Corporeal” examines database logics operating tacitly in graduate school commonplaces, such as reading lists and committees. The entry keys these database formations as living and dynamic, determinative and stabilizing, albeit while introducing the concept of harmonoia, or the uneasiness felt when things are going well. [Avatar & Identity] [Database & Narrative]
- In “Han and the Hype of Hyperculture,” Jiya Nath gathers for comparison a medley of references to “hyperculture,” and, upon examining the variations, concludes that cultural heterogeneity is, indeed, jeopardized. The entry plumbs meanings of culture, as well, noting that twin conditions of compounding and casualization restrict senses of culture as deeply rooted. [Hypertext & Hodology]
- Patrick Greene writes, in “Big Data, Narrative, and Storytelling without a History,” about the degradation of the film-making imagination the ensues from greater dependence on algorithmic “invention.” The entry aptly questions whether “databases should be considered as legitimizing cultural authority” when that authority stands in the way of producing narratives new, distinctive, and inspired by contemporary exigencies. [Database & Narrative]
- As a direct engagement with the question, “What are digital rhetorics now?”, Temi Ojedele suggests in “Digital Rhetoric as New Rhetoric: Creating Multiple Rhetorical Paths Toward Inclusive Epistemologies” that digitalization’s “shrinking [cultural] distances” chances revitalizing “inclusive digital teaching methods, designs, and tools in composition and rhetoric.” [Hypertext & Hodology]
- Jenna Zan, in “Life, Death, and Joy with Chickens: Re-siting More Ethical Futures Through the Backyard Chicken (BYC) Online Community,” interweaves contrastive, time-bounded family stories, indulgent and ceremonial, to suggest the interrelationship among terrestrial and digital orders. The BackyardChickens.com (BYC) community serves in this entry as model case for the complex layering of materiality, ethics, mutualism, and joy punctuated across avian lifespans. [Database & Narrative] [Hypertext & Hodology]
- In “Another World, Another Universe: Griots and Their Hypertexts in 80’s and 90’s Ball Culture,” Julie Unger considers Adam Banks’ DJ as digital griot across three documentaries focused on the ball scene, or complex intersections of Black and queer pageantry and performance. Drawing on Byung-Chul Han’s theorization of hyperculture, the entry suggests that within the rhetorical ecologies of the ball scene, DJs in particular negotiated decentralized participation. These are worthy of noting toward more positive and recuperative examples of hyperculture’s effects. [Hypertext & Hodology]
- In the entry titled, “Exploration of Sakofanarration in Redefining Digital Rhetoric,” Gideon Kwawukumey situates Sankofanarration, which combines “Sankofa” (“go back and take”) and “narration,” as “a decolonial methodology and a tool we can use to reclaim the lost indigenous voices and identities in the digital space,” in relationship to digital rhetorics understood principally through the scholarship of Iris Ruiz, Adam Banks, Angela Haas, Alexandria Lockett, and Mary Hocks.
- Shuvro Das accounts for the myriad ways DJs are technical communicators. With Adam Banks’ figure of the digital griot foregrounded throughout, the entry titled “DJs as Technical Communicators: The Rhetorical Synchronicity of Hip Hop Culture” accomplishes this by introducing and contextualizing a plethora of examples from scholars who have championed linguistic justice tantamount to the social justice turn in tech comm. [Dataism] [Avatar & Identity]
- In “Be a Menace by Taking Selfies at the Circus While Playing Games and Eating Bread; or Is There Room for Joy in Non-things?”, André Jones presents a counter-polemic to Byung-Chul Han’s philosophical treatment of the fundamental distinctions between analog and digital photography. With points of contrast keyed to physical images and grief, universalizing digital-photographic playfulness, and a concern for declining hand-based dexterity, the entry concludes by suggesting the liberatory and joyful possibilities that follow when “political action is impossible.” [Attention]
We hope you find inviting, thoughtful, and generative the connections and the provocations gathered here. Comments are open with anticipation that further dialogue about rhetoric in digital environments may continue.