Tag: CCC

Collectanea 25.25 Microthemes-Slash-Felt

/ Derek Mueller

Week of June 16, 2025

Microthemes

“One new approach that I incorporated was the use of microthemes. A microtheme is defined as ‘an essay so short that it can be typed on a single five-by-eight inch note card.’ There are four types of microtheme that I have used successfully. These are (1) summary writing, (2) supporting a thesis, (3) generating a thesis from provided data and (4) quandary posing. Each can be used to have students focus on a small segment of material and write short responses” (33).

—Janet D. Hartman. (1989). Writing to learn and communicate in a data structures course. Proceedings of the Twentieth SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, 32–36. https://doi.org/10.1145/65293.71191

A reference to Hartman’s work on microthemes appears in Chapter 5, “Writing to Learn,” from Bazerman et al.’s 2005 collection, Reference Guide to Writing Across the Curriculum. As I followed this farther, I stumbled upon Trish Roberts-Miller’s 2020 blog entry, “Teaching with Microthemes.” Initially I’d been wondering about whether writing-to-learn bore even the smallest hints of drawing-to-learn, but so far I haven’t found anything connect them directly (over and above the “[blanking]-to-learn” phraseology). So, that’s it–microthemes widened to an etcetera, miniatures, the dinky heap of speck genres we have named as a way to patch wee scale pedagogical interactions and large scale genres.

Felt Sense

Figure 1. Think of it as a snowball.

F. sheds. A lot. A LOT–a lot. And so, what might these wool heaps become? From a 2009 Maker page and from elsewhere, we’re lint-rolling for ideas.

“But that hair! It gets everywhere. I’ve seen it floating around like snowdrifts under the couch, and of course it gets on every piece of clothing in the house! Grooming your dog is the best way to keep the hair from finding its way into your wardrobe permanently. The hair that you remove from the dog when you brush her can be put to crafty use! It can be felted, just like sheep’s wool. Well, not exactly like wool, but close enough! Don’t let the soft fibers go to waste. Use some pipe cleaners and a felting needle to create a replica of your pet, made from her fur!” –Brookelynn Morris

Methods of Placing

“Some methods of placing freshman writing before students are particularly interesting. Fifteen schools [out of 186 respondents] place themes on a bulletin board for student inspection. In nine schools, themes are returned and circulated in class for reading and comment. Three schools place themes which exemplify certain assignments on a reserve shelf in the library for use by students in the course. One school devotes the entire May issue of its alumni bulletin to the publication of freshman composition work. The yearbook, a printed anthology of themes used as a text, and a local newspaper are all used as media for the presentation of freshman writing.”

This, from the first CCC article, Edith Wells’ report on a survey of 400 colleges and universities’ first-year writing publications.

—Edith Wells. 1950. “College Publications of Freshman Writing.” College Composition and Communication 1.1.

Food Poisoning

Figure 2. “Easy Queasy.”

Stick Henge Update

Writing this week about branching indices in the morning and then in the afternoons, when the skies cooperate, piling sticks to hengiform monument. Stick Henge has three perimetering arc segments; each amounts to a cradle held vertical by hammer-set wooden posts. Two sets of posts are 3.5 feet tall; the third is seven feet tall. The twiggy offshed from the two black cherry trees and the catalpa have been piled into the cradles, along with a few branches from the red oak, though that one is harder to cut and slower to sculpt with. I thought I might be able to get Stick Henge finished by solstice, but Thursday’s work session convinced me that even as it is well begun and more than half done, not unlike a book project, the finishing shall be a Zeno’s paradox considering there is a slower-more to do and even after that another stick can always be placed atop.

5ives

Writing’s Microgenres

  1. Microthemes (Hartman, 1989)
  2. Aphorisms (Haynes, 2016)
  3. Representative anecdotes (Rice, 2015)
  4. Hundreds (Berlant & Stewart, 2019) (or nineties, my preferred variation)
  5. Crots (Weathers, 1980)

What other microgenres can you think of? I am teaching two sections of ENGL3844: Writing and Digital Media this fall, and I think I might build the class around microgenres and digital circulation.

Somewhat of a Virgule

“I have been hailed by a slash, called into these questions (How has the slash between rhet/comp come to be and to mean? Will the slash between rhet/comp persist?) by a virgule, a solidus, a dia/critical mark (of sorts). It is not a task I take lightly, nor one that I find distasteful. I am somewhat of a virgule myself, poised on the cusp of a slightly disreputable figure. (I once bristled when an oh-so-proper official of the MLA requested that I remove a slash from the title of my already-accepted MLA conference presentation. Before the program went to print, you see. I said no. The slash was necessary, and it stayed. For once in my life, it was an either/or decision.) Such it is with rhetoric/composition—both doomed and/or fortunate to live with this aporetic virgule between them, listing like a slightly disfigured lightning bolt” (para. 1).

—Cynthia Haynes. (2003). “Rhetoric/Slash/Composition.” Enculturation 5.1. https://parlormultimedia.com/enculturation/5_1/index51.html #slash #virgule #punctuation

Serpents/Jungle Fowl

Unexpectedly, ill-advisedly, Betty briefly took an interest in doppelgänger Hisstilla. The encounter was short-lived, peaceful. I am convinced there are at least two black racers canvassing Wonder Hollow, this younger, smaller one at the front (east), and an older, larger one at the back (west).

Figure 3. Betty, Hisstilla; Histilla, Betty. 🫱🏿‍🫲🏽
About Collectanea

Collectanea is a series I’m trying out in Summer 2025 at Earth Wide Moth. Each entry accumulates throughout the week and is formed by gathering quotations, links, drawings, and miscellany. The title of the entry notes the week and year (the fourth in this series from Week 25 of 2025, or the Week of June 16). I open a tab, add a little of this or that most days. Why? Years ago my habitude toward serial composition and, thus, toward blogging, favored lighter, less formal, and more varied fragments; gradually, social media began to reel in many of these short form entries, recasting them as posts dropped a Facebook or Instagram or Twitter (while it lasted), albeit with dwindling ripple effect into the ad-addled and algorithm-ambivalent streams. This space, meanwhile, began to feel to me like it wanted more thoughtfully developed entries bearing the shape and length of what you might find on Medium or Substack. But, because I am drafting toward a book project most mornings, I don’t quite have reliable essayistic bandwidth for Earth Wide Moth this summer. Collectanea, if it goes according to my small bites chicken scratch plan, will be a release valve for the piling up of too many tabs open, functioning as a shareable, intermittent (weekly?) repository for small pieces cut and pasted from stuff I am reading, and also as a scrapbook for illustrations. -DM

The diverter pond’s liner experiment. #wonderhollow #rollcall

Collectanea 24.25 Vacui-Editors-Proximity

/ Derek Mueller

Week of June 9, 2025

Figure 1. Hisstilla (Northern black racer or Eastern rat snake, she won’t say) sunning in the Catalpa tree, back edge of the holler, a few steps away from the Phone of the Wind and in-progress Stick Henge.

Horror Vacui 🕳️

“At Physics IV, 8, 216a26-7, Aristotle cracks a joke. It is one of the relatively few deliberate jokes in the corpus, and its occurrence here is not without significance. Aristotle in these chapters is arguing against those who believe in the existence of the void, or vacuum, or empty space; he says, ‘even if we consider it on its own merits the so-called vacuum will be found to be really vacuous.’2

To be sure, this is not a very funny joke; what is interesting about it, though, is that it underlines the general attitude of dismissive flippancy that seems to run through Aristotle’s consideration of the void.
He seems to refuse to take the hypothesis of the void at all seriously. He never argues directly that the void does not or cannot exist,3 but contents himself with criticizing the arguments that other thinkers had advanced in its favour. And even this criticism seems disorganized4 and strawmannish—it doesn’t really meet these thinkers on their own terms; moreover, it is heavily bound up with Aristotle’s peculiar views about the phenomena and laws of motion.5 One comes away with an uneasy feeling that the problem itself has not been addressed, that Aristotle has been unable or unwilling to give his real reasons for disliking the void; it seems almost as though he suffers from an irrational aversion to the void, a neurotic horror vacui, and will clutch at straws to refute it.”

—John Thorp. (1990). “Aristotle’s Horror Vacui1. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 20(2), 149–166. #emptiness #vacuum #void #clearings

CCC Editors

  • Kara Taczak & Matt Davis, Feb 2025- (U Central Florida & UMass-Boston)
  • Malea Powell, Feb 2020-Dec 2024 (Michigan St U); 4 years, 10 months
  • Jonathan Alexander, Feb 2015-Dec 2019 (UC-Irvine); 4 years, 10 months
  • Kathleen Blake Yancey, Feb 2010-Dec 2014 (Florida St U); 4 years, 10 months
  • Deborah Holdstein, Feb 2005-Dec 2009 (Governors St U; Columbia C Chicago); 4 years, 10 months
  • Marilyn Cooper, Feb 2000-Dec 2004 (Michigan Tech); 4 years, 10 months
  • Joseph Harris, Feb 1994-Dec 1999 (U Pittsburgh; Duke U); 5 years, 10 months
  • Richard Gebhardt, Feb 1987-Dec 1993 (Findlay C; Bowling Green St U); 6 years, 10 months
  • Richard Larson, Feb 1980-Dec 1986 (Lehman C CUNY); 6 years, 10 months
  • Edward P.J. Corbett, Feb 1974-Dec 1979 (Ohio St U); 5 years, 10 months
  • William Irmscher, Feb 1965-Dec 1973 (U Washington); 8 years, 10 months
  • Ken Macrorie, Feb 1962-Dec 1964 (Western Michigan U); 2 years, 10 months
  • Cecil B. Williams, Dec 1960-Dec 1962 (Texas Christian U); 2 years, 10 months
  • Francis E. Bowman (noted as interim), October 1959-October 1960 (Williams took a Fulbright at U Hamburg) (Duke U); 1 year
  • Cecil B. Williams, Feb 1959-May 1959 (Oklahoma St U); 4 months
  • Francis E. Bowman, Feb 1956-Dec 1958 (Duke U); 2 years, 4 months
  • George W. Wykoff, Oct 1952-Dec 1955 (Purdue U); 3 years, 2 months
  • Charles (Chas) Roberts, March 1950-May 1952 (U Illinois); 2 years, 2 months

〜

Recently I was revisiting Lisa Ede’s editor’s introduction to the collection of the Braddock award-winning essays, On Writing Research: The Braddock Essays, 1975-1998. I noticed the book’s frontmatter included an up-to-date at the time list of CCC editors, Charles Roberts through Joseph Harris, which in turn pointed me to the Wikipedia entry to see whether an up-to-date now list was there, which in turn nudged me to attempt a little bit of updating, so I added institutional affiliations and lengths of terms. A section of this manuscript I’m working on deals only tangentially with this stuff; thus, it’s fitting for Collectanea. Depending upon how you score the Williams-Bowman terms in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Taczak and Davis are editors #16 and #17, or, for the interims-do-count crowd, #18 and #19; they’re the journal’s first co-editors, however you add it up. No institutional affiliations repeat, except Duke with two (Bowman and Harris). Irmscher’s nine year term is longest; Roberts’ is shortest.

Donelon as Elondon

Figure 2. “Elondon as Donelon.”

“In the 2015 anthology First Comes Love: Power Couples, Celebrity Kinship, and Cultural Politics, Vanessa Díaz, an assistant professor of communications at Cal State Fullerton, wrote a chapter analyzing the term ‘Brangelina’ and the practice of combining celebrity couples’ names into one. Díaz, currently a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA, pointed out that most previous notable portmanteaus were either self-created (Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball’s ‘Desilu’ production company, John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s ‘Lenono Music’) or used by as a term of derision (Bill and Hillary Clinton as ‘Billary’). But the ‘Brangelina’ tag arose during an intense period of competition between celebrity tabloids, and it was part of a wave of gimmicky namings that helped feed public fascination with famous couples—but only certain famous couples” (para. 2).

—Spencer Kornhaber. (2016, September 22). Brangelina’s Mystique Was Because of the Word “Brangelina.” The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/09/brangelina-brad-pitt-angelina-jolie-divorce-vanessa-diaz-interview-celebrity-marriage-nicknames/501050/. #strangeloop #blends #tobetwo #celebrity #combos

As A Kite 🪁, The Nation on Elon Musk’s Drug Use

“In the last few years, the mind of Elon Musk has dramatically moved in two directions, one lateral and the other vertical. Ideologically, he has shifted from a moderate big-business centrist who supported Barack Obama to a far-right partisan of Donald Trump, a White House adviser whose contentious tenure ended last Wednesday. Cognitively, Musk has gone from being hyperbolic but still grounded in reality to being—or so it would seem—almost permanently high as a kite.”

—Jeet Heer. (2025, June 2). Elon Musk’s Real Drug Problem Is Much Worse Than You Think. The Nation. https://www.thenation.com/article/society/elon-musk-drug-use-ideology/ #ideology #alteredstates #mind #ketamine #extremism

5ives

5ives, or Merlin’s Lists of Five Things was one of the early standouts for me among 21st century, digital progymnasmata. The site’s first Internet Archive snapshot shows it was well underway by September 4, 2003, though the earliest entries don’t bear datestamps to follow the sun dial’s shadow any more finely than this. The last entry, Five Musicians to Whom I’ve Drunkenly Introduced Myself, was posted on December 2, 2016, and the site has subsequent sporadic snapshots through this spring, April 2025. Now the URL shows “error establishing a database connection,” so 5ives, well, it’s a gone. And yet. The list of five things still toe taps, still sparks synapse. Gones branch out; what looks like disappearance can be ulteriority, a slow circulation, tacit and inobservable. Why not give 5ives a try here from time to time?

The Wonder Hollow Hens Ranked by How Many Eggs They Laid This Week

  1. Perla
  2. Betty
  3. Tiny Honey
  4. Wizard
  5. Lightfoot
Fivure 3. A screenshot of the last entries posted at 5ives: Merlin’s List of Five Things on December 2, 2016, and July 2, 2015.

Operative Proximity, or Why I Am Growing [Snoring Sounds] of Literature Reviews

“We apply what [Albert North] Whitehead said about a philosophical system’s dynamic self-relation to the relation between generative works. Certain authors’ works share orientations that place them in operative proximity to each other. These are less doctrinal principles than motivating presuppositions that set the conditions of possibility for what the thinking can produce and work it continuously from within. The concepts of different authors working from a similar presuppositional field have the same characteristic Whitehead sought: they connect on the level of what each leaves effectively unsaid for another, by dint of mutual oversaturation. So rather than critiquing, we draw out threads and weave them into a movement of thought emergent in the between. If this is successful, it creates a transindividual field of consistency that becomes our habitat of thought. This way of approaching works constitutes a ‘minor’ treatment of the texts: sidestepping general discussion of ‘major’ concepts (periods, schools, doctrines, stock philosophical problems).”

—Erin Manning, Brian Massumi, Stacey Moran, and Adam Nocek. 2022. “3Ecologies Project: An Interview with Erin Manning and Brian Massumi.” Techniques Journal 2 (Spring).

Reptile Life

As I was taking the garbage to the Rogers drop-off site last Sunday, Hisstilla was napping in the middle of Rosemary Road. So, rather than wait, I grabbed a longish stick from alongside the road and scooted her safely to the edge before continuing on my way. I’ve seen her three times this week, twice while F. was with me. In almost four years that’s more snake encounters in one week than ever before, which gets me thinking, what if she has a stunt double—the racer’s two bodies.

Figure 4. Look, it’s Hisstilla (or her doppelgänger?) in the road.
About Collectanea

Collectanea is a new, provisional series I’m trying out in Summer 2025 at Earth Wide Moth. Each entry accumulates throughout the week and is formed by gathering quotations, links, drawings, and miscellany. The title of the entry notes the week and year (the third in this series from Week 24 of 2025, or the Week of June 9). I open a tab, add a little of this or that most days. Why? Years ago my habitude toward serial composition and, thus, toward blogging, favored lighter, less formal, and more varied fragments; gradually, social media began to reel in many of these short form entries, recasting them as posts dropped a Facebook or Instagram or Twitter (while it lasted), albeit with dwindling ripple effect into the ad-addled and algorithm-ambivalent streams. This space, meanwhile, began to feel to me like it wanted more thoughtfully developed entries bearing the shape and length of what you might find on Medium or Substack. But, because I am drafting toward a book project most mornings, I don’t quite have reliable essayistic bandwidth for Earth Wide Moth this summer. Collectanea, if it goes according to my small bites chicken scratch plan, will be a release valve for the piling up of too many tabs open, functioning as a shareable, intermittent (weekly?) repository for small pieces cut and pasted from stuff I am reading, and also as a scrapbook for illustrations. -DM

Mint sprigs growing mid-creek in the stretch we have with fondness and great creative effort dubbed Mint Creek. #wonderhollow #rollcall

Resisting “Resisting Entropy”

/ Derek Mueller

Quick question: What’s the last “review essay” published in CCC you can name without searching?

I couldn’t come up with a title, much less the names of all of the books in any review essay. I recall reading Kris Blair’s piece (had to look up the title: “New Media Affordances and the Connected Life”) from CCC 63.2, but I could only remember three of the five books covered in that review: Dilger and Rice’s From A to <A>: Keywords for Markup because I already own a copy, and two others because I knew something beforehand about their authors and would claim an interest in their work. Otherwise, working from memory, I can’t come up with much–a vague recollection of another review essay by Schilb and one more by Villanueva on style. After reading the Villanueva review essay, I picked up a copy of Holcomb and Killingsworth’s Performing Prose, but that was as much motivated by a Twitter exchange with a colleague as by the review.

Thus, when I started to see an unusually high level of discussion circulating about Geoff Sirc’s “Resisting Entropy,” a review essay published in the latest issue of CCC (Feb. 2012, 63.3), my first thought was something like, “Well, this sure is an awful lot of activity for a review essay.” People were discussing it on Twitter, but I also received an email message from a student on the same day NCTE circulated the bulk email announcing the issue–an email message bringing up several questions and concerns based on things Sirc wrote. I hadn’t read the then-day-old review yet, but I hurried my pace in getting to it.

As far as I know, review essays covering multiple books began appearing in CCC seven or eight years ago. Before that reviews focused on single titles. The review essay provides readings of and recommendations for a small collection of titles, presumably titles that have come out in the last three or so years and that share a topical thread. And as I understand it, there are a few motives behind the switch to review essays: 1) they are more tightly packed than individual book reviews , 2) they promote a more rigorous appearing scope which in turn justifies known scholars to write them, 3) the known scholar bi-line gets people to read them, and 4) clustering multiple books into one review essay means readers will encounter book reviews at the edge of (and perhaps just beyond) titles they would have otherwise already been likely to check out.

I’ve read Sirc’s review essay, and although I realize it is poor cccarnival mmmanners to sidestep much substantive discussion of the article itself, all I want to say for now is that I appreciated the candor in his definitively recommending (or in not recommending, as the case may be) each of the four titles subject to review. The essay is polemic. Fine. It even toes the line between unapologetic critique and demolition-ball tear-down. But, despite however much or little I agree with Sirc in specific moments (i.e., there are points that resonate, others that trouble and confuse; I may well elaborate on a few in another entry), I know where he stands on these titles, and these titles become more decidable as a result. I want that nudge toward decidability from a review essay, and I suspect Sirc’s “Resisting Entropy” is one CCC readers will remember for awhile–both for the hot stove arguments the essay stokes and for the titles covered in doing so.

Call: CCCarnival

/ Derek Mueller / 19 Comments

 First posted July 14, 2008.

Related entries:
Splitting Images
Kopelson’s “Sp(l)itting Images”
more thoughts on rhet/comp disciplinary futures
Response to Karen Kopelson’s “Sp(l)itting Images; or, Back to the Future of (Rhetoric and?) Composition”
New Echo, New Narcissus
Pedagogy of Rhet/Comp Job Market Imperatives
Carnival on Kopelson: The Pedagogical Imperative and Borrowing Theory
Spitting Images
Joining the CCCarnival: Kopelson’s “Sp(l)itting Images”

Kopelson’s Back to the Wall: Resisting Responsibility
Inversion and Dissolution
Theory and Interdisciplinarity: Kopelson Part Two
Kopelson carnival – my first take
CCC Carnival: Sp(l)itting Images
Karen-ival
Kopelson (1): Stuck on paragraph 4
The Pedagogical Imperative: Kopelson Part I

Anyone interested in a carnival? After glancing the latest CCC
(59.4) at a coffee shop Saturday morning, I had the distinctive and lasting impression that
"Sp(l)itting Images; or, Back to the Future of (Rhetoric and?) Composition"
would be a good choice for a swarm of late July entries.  Kopelson’s
article covers a lot of ground, from a survey of grad students and faculty at
two institutions, to three of the chasms in the field (pedagogical imperative,
theory/practice split, and the brambles of identifying by varying ratios among
those two terms, rhetoric and composition), to a call for concerning ourselves
less with ourselves.  Ripe! because I endured a great range of responses
while reading it.

Here’s what I’m thinking: If you’re in, do what you can to post some sort of
response by one week from today–the 21st. I’ll try to keep tabs on all of
the links, but feel free to send a trackback. Then we can kick around
spin-offs, interjections, and retractions through the end of the month.

Also, here is how I will measure the success of the carnival:

12-15 participants: Wow.  There really is living comp/rhet blogosphere.
9-12 participants: Terrific.  Something told me the article was carnival
worthy.
6-8 participants: Just great.  There is a value in reading what others
think (esp. while out to sea with the diss).
2-5 participants: Um, it’s late July.  What are you, on vacation?
0-1 participant: Witness spikes in traffic at E.W.M.

In?

Kopelson, Karen. “Sp(l)itting
Images; or, Back to the Future of (Rhetoric and?) Composition.” CCC 59.4
(2008): 750-780. [Carnival]

New Echo, New Narcissus

/ Derek Mueller

Kopelson writes,

Yet, as composition studies is distinct in its penchant for ‘borrowing,’
we are also, in my opinion, unrivaled in our proclivity for
self-examination. I am not arguing that this is an unimportant
activity, but only that the costs are indeed high when self-scrutiny comes
at the expense of taking up other critical concerns and of making other,
more innovative and far-reaching forms of knowledge (775).

This appears in the final section of the essay, the part titled "Conclusion:
Banishing Echo and Narcissus." Here, Kopelson takes exception with the
field’s self-reflexivity, the growing heap of self-interested and self-absorbed
assessments of where we are or where we are heading. There is an
unidentified villain here, and I wondered as I read whether Kopelson has any
favorite ‘misses’, accounts that get it terribly wrong or that are built up on
marsh-lands of mushy data.

Reading this section and the quotation above in particular, I had the
sense that Kopelson wasn’t as interested in "banishing" Echo and Narcissus
as in giving them overhauls, in renewing them, even in teaching them how to
resonate and reflect less recklessly. In other words, what is
wrong with many self-reflexive disciplinary accounts (or "discipliniographies"
to lift and bend a term Maureen Daly Goggin introduces in Authoring a
Discipline) is that they succumb to a localist impulse. That
is, they un-self-conciously extrapolate from local experience and anecdotal
evidence onto the field at large, projecting some local knowledge onto the
expansive abstraction that is the discipline (however we imagine it to be).
The localist impulse can take many different shapes; often it is akin to reading
patterns through the course of an individual career (i.e., "in my thirty years
at Whatsittoyou U.") or by cherry-picking from an exceedingly thin selection of
data (titles of conference presentations or tables of contents for teacher
training manuals). We all do this to some extent–making sense of the field at
large through our local, immediate experiences, but it is dangerous to arrive at
conclusions about the field (or world) at-large solely by examining one’s own
neighborhood.

What I’m getting at is that I don’t have any beef with the disciplinary
practice of self-examination. Perhaps there are more than a handful of
fields in the academy that would benefit from more of it. I hold history (the calling of others who’ve navigated this canyon) and
reflection in high regard (perhaps not to the ill-fated extremes of Echo and
Narcissus). Resonanceresonanceresonance and reflection are valuable, especially for newcomers,
for the "new converts" Kopelson mentions. But they will not be successful–or
very useful–until they get beyond that localist impulse, until they involve
earnest field-wide data collections and collaboratively built databases. I
don’t know how well this matches with Kopelson’s "innovative and far-reaching
forms of knowledge," but it is increasingly where my own interests lie.
If those far-reaching forms of knowledge included disciplinary data (even simple
stuff, like how many programs offer undergraduate writing majors), they could
generate insights about disciplinarity. In the meantime those full-view
insights will continue to elude us as long as we leap from local knowledge to
widespread pattern, without addressing sufficiently the intermediary scales.

Kopelson, Karen. “Sp(l)itting
Images; or, Back to the Future of (Rhetoric and?) Composition.” CCC 59.4
(2008): 750-780. [Carnival]

Spitting Images

/ Derek Mueller

A passing tribute to having wrapped up Dan Roam’s
The Back of the Napkin last
night, I figured why not throw down a few images in the spirit of keeping things
carnivalesque. Roam is a marker-carrying whiteboarder whose core premise is that
we spark insights into complex problems by treating them to a simplified and
illustrated version. I doubt that I have played strictly by the heuristics
he introduces in the book; nevertheless, I do find some of the stark
oversimplifications in these first four images helpful for thinking through some
of what Kopelson sets up in the article.

Continue reading →

Daly-Goggin, Authoring A Discipline.

/ Derek Mueller

Daly-Goggin, Maureen. Authoring A Discipline: Scholarly Journals and the
Post-World War II Emergence of Rhetoric and Composition. Mahwah, N.J.:
Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000.

Searchable text available in Google Book Search.

Continue reading →

Clouds, Graphs, Maps

/ Derek Mueller

A couple of days ago Mike posted notes on
my

CCCC talk from late last month, and I was reminded that I’m at least ten days
past due on the video
I said I would
produce following the conference.

I recorded the talk to an mp3 yesterday afternoon and went to
campus last night where I planned to use iMovie to sync the audio with jpegs of
the slides. Because the slideshow includes text, I needed to get the
resolution right, but, well, it started to get late. I started to get impatient.
I was able to output a reasonably readable mp4 file, but for whatever reason, I couldn’t get
Google Video or
Daily Motion to encode it.
Finally Jumpcut accepted the file, so it’s
available below the fold (even if much of it suffers from jaggies). The original mp4 is available for download
here.

Continue reading →