Tag: digital

Collectanea 27.25 Atrophy-Monarchs-Garage

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: 6 mins

Week of June 30, 2025

Cognitive Atrophy

“The integration of LLMs into learning environments presents a complex duality: while they enhance accessibility and personalization of education, they may inadvertently contribute to cognitive atrophy through excessive reliance on AI-driven solutions [3]. Prior research points out that there is a strong negative correlation between AI tool usage and critical thinking skills, with younger users exhibiting higher dependence on AI tools and consequently lower cognitive performance scores [3]” (10).

—Nataliya Kosmyna, Eugene Haptmann, Ye Tong Yuan, Jessica Situ, Zian-Hao Liao, Ashly Vivian Beresnitzky, Iris Braunstein, Pattie Maes (MIT, MassArt, Wellesley1Why don’t citation systems include institutional affiliations?). (2025). Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task (arXiv:2506.08872). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2506.08872 #cognition #debt #writing #LLMs #AI #frenzy #atrophy #performance #humanbrains #consequences

A prepublication version of the Kosmyna et al. article, “Your Brain on ChatGPT,” circulated a couple of weeks ago. At >200 pages, whew, it is long and ornately specialized at points. I’ve read enough of it to conclude a) it will, on the sunny side of review, be a landmark study, an important account leading to further research on the cognitive consequences of LLM over-reliance (notably, a developmental vortex fueled by enthusiastic, uncritical adoptions and battering-ram marketing efforts by boom or bust AI startups), b) the approach to writing essays at the center of the study is woefully reductive (i.e., timed for 20 minutes, AP-test-styled prompting without much context or purpose), c) the ability to quote one’s own essay shortly after writing it is a bizarre and not altogether persuasive indicator of cognitive performance, yet this was the greatest differentiator among the three participating groups (brain-only, search engine, and LLM), and d) there remains a vast gulf between cognitive neurosciences, rhetorical invention/eureka/epiphany studies2We don’t really have anything like Eureka Studies or Epiphany Studies; perhaps all of the Humanities should retool in this direction, renaming minors as Epiphany Studies, or, if you are at a tech/stem school, Epiphany Engineering. The curriculum would draw upon writing and rhetoric, philosophy, history, language and literature, and cognitive neuroscience, regarding learning as a so-called “open period,” of the sort that the neuroscientists studying psychedelics describe in reparative/therapeutic terms as a window for synaptic rerigging., and reading and writing research as it is valued in the humanities, much less in Rhetoric and Composition/Writing Studies.

Visual Portmanteau: Monarch Butterfly + Mandala

Figure 1. “Monarchdala.”

Mature, blooming milkweed at the back of the holler is aflutter, buzzing with pollinators, including a small kaleidoscope of Monarch butterflies. And lately I had been exploring in Procreate various brush and palette customizations, watching a few tutorials, learning how to make stamps. What followed were experimental, exploratory pieces, like this one, which uses drawing guides for mirrored quadrants, then bending and combining selected elements, adding color from a custom butterfly photograph palette, and inlayering a gradient backdrop for a fade of center-to-periphery brightness.

The Standard Way into the Sheepfold

“What is the good of research ?
What is worth doing ?
Shall we be allowed to do it ?
Who will do it ?
In answering the first question, I hold that by the scholarship which is the product of research the standing of our work in the academic world will be improved. It will make us orthodox. Research is the standard way into the sheepfold” (17).

~

“Now, is there any reason, in this age when every other branch of human knowledge is being ruthlessly pulled to pieces and tested why our branch should be passed over?” (18).

—James Winans (Cornell U). (1915). The need for research. The Quarterly Journal of Speech, 1(1), 17–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/00335631509360453. #branches #research #orthodoxy #sheepfold #speech #communication #disciplinarity

From the Mail Bag 📭

Sadly, there was no mail from readers this week.

G-l-o-r-i-a

Figure 2. Summer 2025’s first morning glory bloom.

5ives

CCCC Covers and a Poll

Five years, five program covers from past Conferences on College Composition and Communication. Why these? Albeit somewhat peripheral to my current research project, they’re quirky with their idiomatic, time-spanning expressions of then and now: the phrase “composition and communication” repeated 53 times from 1960; warpy, nested Cs from 1962; an optical illusion from 1974; seven missiles soaring from left to right in 1977; and an earth-sized pencil from 1983.

1960
1962
1974
1977
1983

Walking as Artistic Practice Syllabus

“This workshop is designed as a brief survey of some of the origins, theories, processes, and manifestations of walking as art. We will read, watch, and discuss perspectives on walking-based projects. Using this information as a springboard, we will complete walking exercises, and execute our own original walking projects.”

—Ellen Mueller (Arts Midwest). (2021). Walking as Artistic Practice. https://teaching.ellenmueller.com/walking/.

I have been meandering in wide arcs toward a plan for this fall’s pair of online-asynchronous sections of ENGL3844: Writing and Digital Media. The course description mentions digital writing within “the context of business, organizational, and political practices.” It also mentions production, devices, data visualizations, videos, web design, “and more.” Sample syllabi I have been able to track down tend to outline three major projects, usually something related to podcasting or sound editing, something related to data analysis and visualization, and something related to video. The official, CUSP-approved outcomes are keyed toward ethics (“ethical design strategies”) with three bullets emphasizing visual, video, and web. I haven’t taught this particular class before at Virginia Tech. The online-asynchronous format adds complications to the kinds of engagement and interaction one can reasonably expect, of course. But I have been thinking more about short-form exercises paired with an anthologics-styled (perhaps ABCDEary format) assortment. Self-introductory account of digital mecology/technologies of self; microthemes prompted with alternatingly terrestrial (food, walking, fieldwork) and digital (photo, sound, hypertext, map, 4D/time, etc.). Inflections of Ashley Holmes’ device-mediated environs (writing on location), inflections of Ellen Mueller’s walking courses reframed as writing on foot, Geoffrey Sirc’s seriality, throwback maps of the imagination (e.g., what goes on in that building I walk past every day?), and more. “And more” as the inventive indeterminacy better fitted with digital writing than anything else I am finding or can think of as of yet, seven weeks or so from the start of classes.

Waiting There for Me

Figure 3. In the garage.
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 sixth in this series from Week 27 of 2025, or the Week of June 30). 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

Buck moth larva, near posts at SW corner of the holler. #stinging #caterpillar #wonderhollow #rollcall
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Meal moth

Notes

  • 1
    Why don’t citation systems include institutional affiliations?
  • 2
    We don’t really have anything like Eureka Studies or Epiphany Studies; perhaps all of the Humanities should retool in this direction, renaming minors as Epiphany Studies, or, if you are at a tech/stem school, Epiphany Engineering. The curriculum would draw upon writing and rhetoric, philosophy, history, language and literature, and cognitive neuroscience, regarding learning as a so-called “open period,” of the sort that the neuroscientists studying psychedelics describe in reparative/therapeutic terms as a window for synaptic rerigging.

Digital Rhetorics: Simply Too Complicated a Phenomenon

/ Derek Mueller / 3 Comments

⏳ Approximate reading time: 3 mins

Cross-posted at the SDRC.

Digital rhetorics1 provide a vast suite of generating principles. These principles are difficult to collect into a simple model, much less to name, substantiate, and prioritize. Fortunately, difficulties like these are much of what motivates digital rhetorics scholarship (some of which was reviewed by others in previous entries), and they are also what I find both exciting and challenging about the field. Digital rhetorics often draw on reasonably well-traveled rhetorical theories (Aristotle’s appeals, Burke’s dramatisms, stases, etc.), but they also subject traditional concepts to renewal and reinvention. Collin Brooke’s Lingua Fracta comes to mind as a terrific example of this renewal for the ways it reconceives rhetoric’s five canons in light of new media, but also because it explicitly recognizes ongoing change as inevitable. Thus, it stands to reason that we must refrain from settling too comfortably into static definitions lest we appear monolithic in how we think about digital rhetorics, how we enact them. Where rhetorical principles–new, established, cultural, applied–converge with hypertext, blogging, SMS, sonic mixing, still image and video editing, and more (a comprehensive list remains forever out of reach), distinctive practices emerge, and with them come abundant opportunities and responsibilities for teaching and learning, for rhetorical education concerned with composing across screens. Underscoring circulation, participation, contingency, and immediacy, digital rhetorics shift, intensify, or subside with particular tools, materials, and media. So digital rhetorics, as I think of them, tend to follow a crosshatched pattern, a meshwork similar to the boat wakes Burke noticed in the WWII gallery photograph (see Spread 7): one set of threads responsive to rhetorics, the other responsive to new media, and among them multiple junctures due for exploration.

Yet, considering all that digital rhetorics make possible, the quick sketch above remains an incomplete response to the carnival call: “What does digital rhetoric mean to me?” Perhaps another approach can enter a bit more definitional richness into play. For this, I turn to Googlism.com. Googlism is a playful site (also rather like a para-site) that has been around for almost a decade. Basically, with search terms entered, it draws upon Google’s indexes to retrieve a list of equative phrases (e.g., [search term] is […]) related to one of four designated conditions: who, what, when, or where. A Googlism for the what of “digital rhetoric” yields this:

  1. digital rhetoric is characterized by many new genres
  2. digital rhetoric is similar to the classical rhetoric of ancient
  3. digital rhetoric is ?rhetoric? that is ?digital
  4. digital rhetoric is would you like a KML file to go with your fine map
  5. digital rhetoric is more of a disciplinary nebula than a field
  6. digital rhetoric is Jeff Rice’s Grammar <A> contending with English A, Grammar B while creating a curricular opening for Grammar PHP
  7. digital rhetoric is at once exciting and troublesome
  8. digital rhetoric is not such a new idea
  9. digital rhetoric is the sattelitization of a lost dog found with an embedded RFID chip
  10. digital rhetoric is capacious: the parlor as Tardis
  11. digital rhetoric is this concept of genres and media
  12. digital rhetoric is to me
  13. digital rhetoric is a Roland Barthes hologram annotating images of his mother and more in a Flickr set called “Almosts”
  14. digital rhetoric is less about technological devices and more about a process or
  15. digital rhetoric is Yancey’s “Composition in a New Key”
  16. digital rhetoric is that it has the potential to completely change or even slightly alter the purpose of discourse
  17. digital rhetoric is a bridging mechanism between digital consumers and producer
  18. digital rhetoric is worthy of greater attention by rhetoric and communication
  19. digital rhetoric is databasic literacy
  20. digital rhetoric is especially important now that so many citizens rely on official websites as sources of information
  21. digital rhetoric is simply too complicated a phenomenon to be able to figure out so swiftly
  22. digital rhetoric is unavailable designs available
  23. digital rhetoric is a course designed to engage online composition and push the edges of theory and practice
  24. digital rhetoric is objects by which I mean units by which I mean things by which I mean nonhumans
  25. digital rhetoric is wasted if those same students aren’t also able to see the relevance of digital rhetoric to their own lives once they leave
  26. digital rhetoric is appearing all the time from scholars in communication
  27. digital rhetoric is about writing ?clearly
  28. digital rhetoric is a book
  29. digital rhetoric is that it is inferior to extended argument
  30. digital rhetoric is especially important now that so many citizens rely on official websites as sources of information

The core list (21 of the items here) comes from “digital rhetoric is” strings appearing in various places on the web. But I’ve also embellished the list with a couple of add-ons of my own. Without cross-referencing Googlism.com, can you guess which ones they are? Which of the statements do you find most useful? Least useful? What “digital rhetoric is” statement would you add? Which one would you place at the top of this list? Why?

[1] I think it is fitting to assign the ‘s’, thus making digital rhetorics plural.

Weinberger’s Talk at Michigan

/ Derek Mueller

⏳ Approximate reading time: 2 mins

Earlier this month, I disregarded office-hour responsibilities (“Will return by 4:30 p.m -DM”) on a Monday afternoon and went over to Ann Arbor for David Weinberger’s talk, “”Too Big to Know: How the Internet Affects What and How We Know,” based on his soon-to-be-released book of a similar title.

It’s worth a look; the talk hits several important notes, particularly in light of the information studies slice of ENGL505, a rhetoric of science and technology class I’m teaching right now. In 505, we finished reading Brown and Duguid’s The Social Life of Information earlier this week, and although several aspects of the book are dated, that datedness is largely a function of print’s fixity. I know this isn’t big news, but because Weinberger’s talk works with a related set of issues, their pairing (for my thinking as much as for the class) has been worthwhile.

A couple of quick side notes:

  • Brown’s introduction of Weinberger is a nice illustration of differences between Information Studies and C&W or PTC. That “invent” is cast in the shadows of technological determinism is, well, curious. Or, it’s what happens when rhetoric has gone missing. I had to turn to an authoritative decision-maker to verify my sense that invent still has some mojo.
  • I like Weinberger’s account of the history of facts, and while I understand that facts are useful for argument, their solidity and their restfulness touch off other problems for argument.
  • I left Weinberger’s talk largely satisfied with his characterization of the moment we are in and the shifting epistemological sands digital circulation has stirred. But, if the paper paradigm has really met its match, why should Too Big To Know be printed at all? An obvious answer is that book will produce substantially more revenue than the blog where bits and pieces of the book draft surfaced. Yet, it seems like this cuts against the grain of the talk. I will, of course, withdraw this question if Kindle copies of TBTK outsell paper copies.

While Supplies Last

/ Derek Mueller / 2 Comments

⏳ Approximate reading time: < 1 min

From The Long Now blog, an entry today about the end of typewriter manufacturing. What will it be next? VCRs? Film cameras?

I never got much use out of the typewriter as a writing machine. I used them to fill out forms in that dimly lit pre-PDF-dawn when fax machines were hot. I used typewriter impersonators (compact dot matrix word processors, essentially), although I can’t think of a single document whose production depended on it such that it couldn’t by then have been more sleekly crafted on a computer. I read Click, Clack, Moo to Is. twenty or thirty times when she was younger, so that’s something. But this isn’t the sort of discontinuation that I would think gives anyone much pause, except perhaps to wonder which commonplace technologies of today will surrender to obsolescence in the next 25 years.

Nevermind.

Missing: Cultural Criticism

/ Derek Mueller

⏳ Approximate reading time: 2 mins

Alan Liu’s MLA 2011 paper, “Where is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?” arrived this morning in Google Reader. Basically, Liu introduces the 4Humanities advocacy initiative and then argues that a lack of cultural criticism in digital humanities may thwart the growth of this emerging field. Making data and making things out of data may not matter if, when deploying these things, digital humanists have not been able to demonstrate their value.

This inquiring into the status and location of specific, identifiable ingredients, e.g., “cultural criticism,” does seem like a common enough quest when we are confronted with something new and in-becoming as is the case for digital humanities. Up for discussion, though, is whether “cultural criticism” ought to be one of the building blocks in this new domain and what, exactly, is at stake should digital humanists neglect critique. Liu positions as rivals “close reading” and “distant reading,” and while I have questions about this matchup (i.e., equivalency) in the context of Moretti’s work, Liu ends up suggesting an improved, harmonious, cultural-critical blend. Distant readings (e.g., abstractions, models, visualizations) need to be cycled back through a critical apparatus, or people will not find relevance in them. Liu puts it this way: “To be an equal partner–rather than, again, just a servant–at the table, digital humanists will need to find ways to show that thinking critically about metadata, for instance, scales into thinking critically about the power, finance, and other governance protocols of the world.” A cynical reading of this argument finds the presumed nuturalness of critical thinking and hermeneutics in the humanities overstated, and, likewise, it appears to minimize (or altogether overlook) the heuretic-inventive edge of distant reading.

Still, for traditional-minded humanities scholars given to digital treatments of rare and special texts, this makes a certain sense. These methods and insights related to them should scale into other domains. But will their value go missing if that scaling–a scaling of “cultural criticism,” at that–is not fully realized (a rhetorical challenge, indeed)? Keeping in reach the advocacy motives of 4Humanities, the talk also hearkens to broader concerns about the dwindling cultural status of the humanities in general. If humanists’ digital expertise is not valued in other domains because those folks are capable of data-mining, coding, etc., then, in one scenario, what awaits is the continuation of a value-it-how-you-will interpretive enterprise. Much is at stake in how the digital humanities goes, in other words. We can expect its failures and successes to have residual bearing on the humanities more traditionally understood. This thinking is a degree removed from Liu’s central assertion. I think it’s as likely the case that digital humanities, for its investment in computation, is not as much at risk as the non-digital humanities. If the digital humanities are going to be preservation-minded, in other words, perhaps they should be as much concerned with the heuretic and inventive aspects of their work as they are with the critical and hermeneutic aspects.

Unplanned Meanderings

/ Derek Mueller / 2 Comments

⏳ Approximate reading time: 2 mins

Steven Johnson’s “The Glass Box And The Commonplace Book” renews questions about what happens when e-readers unexpectedly suffocate text behind no-copy/no-paste barriers. Safe-guarding text against circulation is not new, of course, but Johnson offers a timely reminder of the ways this glass box logic is noxious, lying dormant, going unnoticed until it is revived in this or that text-walling application. There’s much to think through in his entry (which is a transcript of a talk Johnson offered at Columbia University), much in the way of commonplace books, motivated filtering, and how it is homophily bias takes hold differently online than in “real-world civic space.”

§ § §

Each rereading of the commonplace book becomes a new kind of revelation. You see the evolutionary paths of all your past hunches: the ones that turned out to be red herrings; the ones that turned out to be too obvious to write; even the ones that turned into entire books. But each encounter holds the promise that some long-forgotten hunch will connect in a new way with some emerging obsession. The beauty of Locke’s scheme was that it provided just enough order to find snippets when you were looking for them, but at the same time it allowed the main body of the commonplace book to have its own unruly, unplanned meanderings. (para. 5)

“But each encounter holds the promise that some long-forgotten hunch will connect in a new way with some emerging obsession.” Here is a line that succinctly captures for me how blogging has always functioned a little bit differently than the kind of “being digital” I experience in Facebook or Twitter. Long-forgotten hunches and emerging obsessions are not so much a function of friendship, sociality, or phatic affirmation as they are a distributed, often faint, read-write memory–a recollection of being (or having been) on the verge of something mind-changing.

New Forms of Connectivity

/ Derek Mueller / 2 Comments

⏳ Approximate reading time: 2 mins

I just glanced Gerald Graff’s IHE column, “It’s Time to End ‘Courseocentrism’,” which urges greater transparency in the designing and teaching of classes and greater cross-curricular coordination, especially in the humanities. Humanities courses, Graff suggests, confound students with jumbled messages (fwiw, this rings of Fulkerson’s concerns with philosophical confusion in composition programs created by all of the mixing, borrowing, and blending). Graff would have us unmix the messages, prefer coherence, and even out the scenes of teaching.

But how?

That’s the part that doesn’t seem to me to get enough pixels in this column. Graff embraces “amazing new forms of connectivity” as one kind of solution, but connection doesn’t by natural progression bring about coherence. Also, connection demands a degree of participation: faculty ought to be putting their syllabi online. (I don’t mean for this to be a slight, but I couldn’t find any of Graff’s syllabi on the WWW). Courseocentrism–any kind of -centrism that neglects to take an interest in what is happening elsewhere–is akin to negligent specialization, perhaps a byproduct of it. There are many ways to complicate courseocentric tendencies at a programmatic level, provided teachers are willing (or made) to do so. In fact, as I prepared to teach this semester, I was impressed to find that the Writing Program had collected more than 250 syllabi and made them available online (albeit as static, unsearchable PDFs). I looked at no fewer than ten of them as I prepared my syllabus, just to develop a sense of what others had done. I ended up doing something slightly different (a courseocentric gesture?); I didn’t adapt anyone’s stuff, in other words, but this was possible because the syllabi were published online. Who doesn’t relish being able to glance syllabi for smart, engaging courses taught at all levels, whether at their own institutions or elsewhere?

In a roundabout, courseolliptical way, this brings me to my larger point (and unavoidable concern): When will the MLA develop a robust relational database for the systematic archivization of syllabi? Why not provide a platform for indexing (pre-coordinate and folksonomic), storing, and interrelating course syllabi (and materials, assignments for that matter)? Looking for a course on contemporary rhetoric? The platform would return a few by direct search and also suggest near-misses, following a “feeling lucky” algorithm. I understand that such a database is something that’s been on several people’s wish lists (and it’s also been technically possible) for some time. No telling whether it would narrow curricular gaps or level out the disjointedness in any curriculum, but it would be a start toward a more systematic use of “new forms of connectivity” to address chronic “courseocentrism.”

Digital Canvass

/ Derek Mueller / 2 Comments

⏳ Approximate reading time: 2 mins

Colors

Purple Dino

Is. has been asking lately–passionately–to paint. In
fact, "paint" is one of those five-alarm words around the house: we know that
saying it will tip Is. into such intense determination that, once it is said,
there is no getting out of some sort of painting. D. will happily set out
the water colors for her on the kitchen table (at breakfast this morning, Is.
pointed to lingering brush marks on the wall and proudly claimed it: "Baby
paint!" But she is almost as content with the graphics tablet and
digital canvass. I can
map the tablet to the exact size of the blank canvass on the interface and
assist her (by mouse) with choosing colors–all a far better match with my own
material preferences when it comes to painting. Whatever else can be said
of it, Is. is picking up on subtle distinctions between colors (i.e. dark red
and what she calls "yellow-white," although I’m still not always sure what this
latter one is). And, on any given day, she gets enough of the water colors
and enough of the graphics tablet to refer to them both as "painting" (a word
you must not mutter in our company unless you want to alter the course of our
lives for an hour).

Above, the first is just some futzing around with colors.
The second looks to me like the end of the purple dinosaurs or the smoke monster
from Lost knocking Mr. Echo onto his back.

Writing Feverlets*

/ Derek Mueller

⏳ Approximate reading time: 4 mins

Curious about her critique of Derrida’s Archive Fever, I picked up a
copy of Carolyn Steedman’s Dust: The Archive and Cultural History from
Bird Library, recalling it from another patron who had checked it out (v. sorry
about that). I deal briefly with AF in Chapter Three. Steedman
makes the point that AF is less about archives than about Derrida’s
concern for the slippage of origins (a theme in his other work) and the
inseparability of psychoanalysis from Freud (and also Judaism). She
writes, "The Foreword [to AF] carried the main argument, about Freud’s
Jewish-ness, and the contribution of Jewish thought to the idea of the archive,
via psycho-analysis" (7). Basically, Steedman is suspicious of Derrida’s
characterization of the fever (as a frenzied pursuit of origins which do not
properly exist). She complains that the concept of the fever is degraded in
translation from Mal d’Archive, and then she enthusiastically claims the
sickness Derrida mocks: "Archive fever, indeed? I can tell you all about
Archive Fever!" (17). Dust undertakes this "all about-ness" at fever’s pitch;
Steedman, all the while, works to correct (or tune, at the very least) Derrida’s
glancing consideration of the archive left behind in his treatment of other
concerns (psychoanalysis, Freud, and so on).

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