Academic Projects
My dissertation project examined how we cite, on- and offline.
I collected over 10,000 texts from popular press and academic publications and analyzed the ways they used citations (using JavaScript & Plotly). Among my most interesting findings:
New academic writers in rhetoric and composition cite way more heavily than established writers.
Anchor text for links is on average 3 words and 20 characters long, in both Slate and Newsweek.
Newsweek articles with more links are shared on social media more often, to a point (see graph).
I wrote a Chrome extension called The Echo Chamber Factor that swaps words disproportionately used in left- and right-wing news media.
I collected over 37,000 texts from 15 websites identified by the MediaBiasChart 4.0 as “nonsense damaging to public discourse,” including InfoWars, Breitbart, Alternet, and Patribotics. For each word in the corpus, I calculated its “Echo Chamber Factor”: a score indicating whether it was more frequently used in left- or right-wing news media. Then I semantically paired words with the highest echo chamber factor and wrote a Chrome extension that would swap the words out in live text. Download the extension via the button below, or read more about it in my Computers and Writing presentation slides and script.
I surveyed and interviewed faculty and graduate students about multimodal training and attitudes.
We’ve had a lot of pushes toward online and multimodal teaching at A-State, but graduate students tell me those initiatives haven’t translated into their assignments. To understand why, graduate student James Ottoson and I decided to survey faculty and graduate students about their multimodal attitudes and experiences. We found, among other things, that faculty actually report higher levels of multimodal composing than graduate students (see graph). The chapter is forthcoming in Multimodal Composition: Faculty Development Programs and Institutional Change, eds. Shyam Pandey and Santosh Khadka, 2021, Routledge.
Recent Peer-Reviewed Publications:
“What a Waste: Why Obsolescence Is the Wrong Lens for E-Waste,” Trace: A Journal of Writing, Media, and Ecology, Issue 4, March 2020.
“‘Green Our Vaccines’: Jenny McCarthy’s Environmentalist, Ableist Rhetoric.” Studies in the Humanities, Sept 2020.
And Non-Peer-Reviewed (but still academic) Publications:
“‘Being Speaks Always and Everywhere throughout Language,’” Humanities in Transition, Critical Theory Special Issue July 2020
“Complicit Performance: Police Profiling, the Board Game,” In Medias Res: A Media Commons Project, January 2019
“Draftback to the Future: A Tool for Writing Process Analysis in Upper-Level Introduction to Writing Studies,” Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, Fall 2018
Instructor Reflection for Nikki Gordon's "Open the Box," Journal of Undergraduate Multimedia Projects, 10.1, Fall 2020
Other forthcoming projects include:
A study of anti-masker “Karen” rhetoric for a collection about COVID-19 and internet memes (2022).
A study of Tweets about the 2019 Blitzchung controversy for Computers and Composition (2022).
An examination of COVID-19 as metaphor, including as a metaphor for racism (2021; see preprint draft).