A Feeling for the Data Set

February 9, 2026 / Derek Mueller

⏳ Approximate reading time: 5 mins

For the last week or so I have been collaging together small pieces readying for a guest presentation and workshop in Virginia Tech’s ENGL6364: Research Design in Rhetoric and Writing tomorrow afternoon, a presentation and workshop I’m calling “A Feeling for the Data Set.” I taught the class in 2020 and 2022, so I have a feel for it, and now—the 2024 & 2026 rounds—it is being taught by my friend and (former, in the sense that I no longer work at VT) colleague, Dr. Shakil Rabbi. The class is reading an old friend, Network Sense; my prompt for the visit is to talk about how to create a data visualization from a large, unwieldy data set.

*A Feeling for the Organism*, Evelyn Fox Keller, 1983.

As moving would have it most of my books and materials are in boxes in Ann Arbor at the moment, so I had to approach this a little bit differently and work only with what I had on these few small shelves at home. Thus, the setup sent me back to Evelyn Fox Keller’s book, A Feeling for the Organism (1983), a biography of 1983 Nobel prize winning geneticist Barbara McClintock, whose research on maize led her to insights about “jumping genes,” or gene transposition—the abruptive events that cause genetic mutations. With the purpose of contextualizing the lag in the reception of McClintock’s work, Keller wrote that her prose was alleged by some to be “difficult to follow” (10). Keller continues, “When she made these ideas public in 1951, in 1953, and again in 1956, in spite of the fact that she had long since established her reputation as an impeccable investigator, few listened, and fewer understood. She was described as ‘obscure,’ even ‘mad'” (10).

I won’t have time on Tuesday evening to go into McClintock’s ingenious research nor into Keller’s brilliant and accessible account on McClintock’s life and career. I will mention it briefly at the beginning, nevertheless, because it has provided me with what I consider an engaging, intuitive analog in the “A Feeling for” precept. Later in the book, in Chapter 12, “A Feeling for the Organism,” Keller wrote, “Over and over again, [McClintock] tells us one must have the time to look, the patience to ‘hear what the material has to say to you,’ the openness to ‘let it come to you.’ Above all, one must have a ‘feeling for the organism'” (198). The time, the patience, the openness, a feeling. Tuck this mantra away on a sticky note and you’d be surprised, as I have been, that it maps as research wisdom again and again, for me, in my own work, and for offering guidance and support to graduate students.

The way I remember it, A Feeling for the Organism first came up in CCR720: Interdisciplinary Influences on Composition and Rhetoric: The Making of Meaning, a class I took with Louise Phelps at Syracuse in Spring 2005. The class compiled with an endless, robust reading list, some of which was focused on “the making of meaning,” and much of which was peripheral, circulated in weekly optional sets of PDFs and in in-class discussions about cognitive psychology, distributed cognition, models of mind, comprehension, memory and forgetting, and more. I must have picked up Keller’s book and read it leafingly-flittingly. And then more recently, a couple of years ago, I picked it up again and read it more carefully after I heard the story that A.’s mom was at Cold Spring Harbor on the day McClintock, who was also working there, learned of the Nobel prize, about how they walked together to the building’s entrance that morning, congratulatory small talk, about how McClintock said it was occasion to have cupcakes at the cafeteria later in the day. “A Feeling for” has become more sticky, a more appealing premise, as I have aged into a career and with each successive research experience.

My picking up and extending “A Feeling for” is also meant to respond to what I have noticed at times an implicit argument that data analysis, data visualization, and big data fascination are appealing because they are, with the heave-ho of computing might, expeditious. Dromological determinism, we might call it, owing to Virilio. This attitude supposes that if you just feed enough interview transcripts or whatever into the software, it will do the “feeling for” part in a jiff and the researcher will have assertion-worthy baseline evidence upon which to build a dissertation, a book, a career, etc. This is akin to a party popper enthusiasm for generative AI, implying that you can dump the data in, wiggle your nose, and ta-da! To contrast this counterpart to “a feeling for” would amount to “a shortcut for,” and its byproduct is more of the mythology that your life will improve because of all of the time you have gained back.

Not everything has held on much less held together through the collaging. For instance, I spent some time looking at the Nobel Prize website and at the photo gallery, McClintock’s prize lecture, and the short banquet speech. The banquet speech is especially badass for McClintock’s suggestion that being so long ignored might be construed by some as painful and disappointing, it was, for her, rewarding to be left alone with her work and to have so much time to get to know (and name) each corn plant. She said,

“Subsequently, several maize geneticists did recognize and explore the nature of this phenomenon, and they must have felt the same exclusions. New techniques made it possible to realize that the phenomenon was universal, but this was many years later. In the interim I was not invited to give lectures or seminars, except on rare occasions, or to serve on committees or panels, or to perform other scientists’ duties. Instead of causing personal difficulties, this long interval proved to be a delight. It allowed complete freedom to continue investigations without interruption, and for the pure joy they provided.”

Following this framing gesture, which amounts to a few minutes on a book recommendation underscored with why “A Feeling for,” I plan to say a little bit about immersing with the data, which for me in the context of Network Sense and before that the dissertation was stacks and stacks of CCC PDFs, followed by the importance of making visuals, being invested in the imagetext problem, and learning from the dataviz examples modeled by others. Next, a few remarks on CCC Online Archive, on those early graphs, on fretting much later about extending the dataset from 20 to 25 years, and then on word watching and turn-spotting, which will segue to the applied part of the session, where everyone will in effect make a simple cluster map of keywords in their research, then attempt to resolve which of the terms are rising, falling, or flat, and which corpora would be appropriate for corroborating the guesses.

Collectanea 27.25 Atrophy-Monarchs-Garage

July 4, 2025 / 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, Wellesley¹). (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 studies², 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

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.

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

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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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.

Try This

January 5, 2022 / Derek Mueller

⏳ Approximate reading time: < 1 min

Figure 1. *Try This: Research Methods for Writers* book cover.

Quick entry—it’s late and kale sweet potato soup is bubbling. And I’m still in the late stages of moving, turning in keys and parking passes at the old place this afternoon, scooping expired field mice from the attic of the new place, fetching groceries, hooking up laundry machines, chopping onions, and so on. But a project several years in the works dropped yesterday at https://wac.colostate.edu/books/practice/try/: Try This: Research Methods for Writers, a textbook we hope sees uptake in rhetoric and writing classes. I could say A LOT about this book’s development. Once it was in the hands of Mike Palmquist and the editorial team at WAC Clearinghouse, its shape and timing were never clearer or crisper. I didn’t realize it, but I read today that this book is the 150th free, open access publication of the nearly 25 years WAC Clearinghouse has been operating. So it’s an honor and a wonder and a credit to so many that this book is circulating now, as it is. [N.b., not a ninety, but hope to get back to a few more of those soon, like tomorrowsoon, or the nextdaysoon.]

Memoranda from Lulls

January 2, 2022 / Derek Mueller

⏳ Approximate reading time: < 1 min

A few anterior questions for research design: Who—individual, department or program, college, institution, field—needs to research? Why? Do research designs do more than install (strict or suggestive and flexible) rails for procedural fidelity? How much of what shows up later in a methods section is accountable to planning versus zig-zagged execution? Method’s slow way-twining of ‘above’ (meta-) and ‘along’ (-hodos) cannot at every resting beat be comparably discernible. Are research memos, then, only ever generated from a resting beat, casting a perchance motley-at-best crumbtrail?

Note on Contentment; Note on Fire

April 19, 2020 / Derek Mueller

⏳ Approximate reading time: 2 mins

I’ve held for what months or longer this excerpt from Ram Dass, posted at Revoked some time before they shed space suit for some alternative astral way of being around. On contentment as method:

In yoga, one of the methods is called ‘contentment’. That’s not a goal, that’s a method.

I can be content this moment, and the next moment I’m moving toward something else. When I am here I am content, when I am here I am content, when I am here I am content. So even though you are going to change something the next minute, that doesn’t mean you change it out of discontent. It changes because it changes.

That is the basis that you do everything in yoga.
“Words of Wisdom,” Ram Dass, Revoked, August 14, 2019

Contentment as method. Contentment as above-path, quagmire hovercraft; in yoga, yes, I can find this. The good enoughness of a pose right now. The satisfieciency of this, here-now, floor and mat, gravity and breath. With contentment as method, for work (research, teaching, administrating), for non-work and all that it entails, there is in this relief from straining and striving. Go sit on a shelf, goals. Agency is fatiguing and sometimes needs quieted. Contentment says enough, have an exhale and a pause, surrender to the entropy, have a break from so much reaching.

I am teaching a research design class this semester. And too, of course, we’ve been visited by a pandemic, which has meant IRB suspensions, workaround-thinking, making do, resignation to changes that are out of our hands. We shift online. We Zoom. We grant flexibilities such that everyone can to the extent possible adapt and adjust. Lives are different from waking until sleeping again. Yoga intersperses, walking yoga, reading yoga, cooking yoga, Netflixing yoga, and relationship (the most difficult of yogas). And, too, research goes on–wondering and inquiry that sometimes involves others and sometimes involves only writing, processing, sorting things out. I’ve been thinking a lot about the friction (that edge, almost touching) between career and contentment, between inquiry and contentment, between rhetoric (as compositional, making, striving for change) and contentment. About motive(s).

Contentment as method (in yoga) risks hinting at passivity. In one way of approaching this (perhaps too difficult, perhaps needlessly difficult) pose, motive lapses, disperses. Contentment seems to abandon motive, doesn’t it? I’m not interested in sketching an argument with Ram Dass; no jousting at evacuated space suits. Where’d they go? But I am wondering about that something-more, the fire whose heat is felt in yoga as in motive as in inquiry. Contentment, too, draws on some kind of spark that is not exclusively passive. I have enough, yes, and I am enough, yes. This here-now is enough, yes. And then some–always a paradox. Even so, wonder and inquire, reach and breathe.

Contentment as method, it’s qualitatively helpful. But fire as method, too, grasps at something important about how that change happens. Not another definition of agency (we are reading about agentic shift this week, fittingly). Not necessarily fire as raging with destructive force. But a striker strip, a spark, heat and flame and combustion, immolation as method. Fire as method. What does your research turn to ash? What does your research raise up from the embers? Fire as above-path, quagmire hovercraft; in yoga, yes, I can find this. And sometimes in research. The potential and ever-rising heat of a pose right now, in spite of being human.

Marking the Semester’s Enough

April 16, 2018 / Derek Mueller

⏳ Approximate reading time: 3 minsI’ve asked students to write a semester-capping reflection in-class, today marking the end of the Winter 2018 semester at EMU and, with it, the final session of WRTG121: Composition II: Researching the Public Experience. The prompt occasions a letter noting takeaways in terms of attitudes and habits relating to writing, command of language, and grasp of research processes, although it’s a stacked ask insofar as its privileging ground and anchorage qua affirmations of footing, solidity, presumptions of growth that value lodging over dislodging, mooring over unmooring. Another way: might just as well be asking about attitude-habit upheavals, a churn of language, ungrasp of research processes. Whatever of the teaching-learning paradoxes, here are a few of the takeaways for me:

Our curriculum moves swiftly from establishing researchable questions and attempting, with the aid of systematic note-keeping, a brief proposal and cursory lit review, next to carrying out a microstudy documented with research memos that adheres to an appropriate research method, and finally to a pair of presentational moves, one in-class (elevator pitch to peers with careful consideration of slidecraft), one at the Celebration of Student Writing. Much of the semester felt to me to be balanced and right-paced, although at the end, two presentational gestures left one (the CSW) lagging secondarily a bit, without enough time to develop it fully.
That said, the curriculum remains promising in that there surfaced (for most?) a more obvious and followable connection among an evolving researchable question (or series of questions), sources gathered and annotated in association with the question, the enactment of methods chosen as ways of following rigorously the question out into the world, and the variations on presenterly circulation that care for translation of a nuanced research process into something shareable. Obvious and followable: this, according to students who informally related not having especially much experience with being guided to undertake research writing this way.
Our program’s bundle, Understanding Rhetoric and EasyWriter, primes this approach, introducing key ideas and standing readily by as consultatory resources for reminders and support, though at moments this reminding and support isn’t quite enough due to my assumptions about everyone’s remembering these materials as backdrop. I forget to say, use these books in this way (even after reading selections or pitching and modeling usefulnesses at the semester’s outset). Thus, the consultatory function of these books, this semester, seemed to fade, seemed to follow a declining use-trend, when I’d imagined an increase, expansion, uptick.
In future semesters, when teaching a class like this one, I may try to do more to poll students before the semester begins, to think together and ahead about thematic orientations. We ventured into environmental justice this semester, but I’m not convinced that the explicit and direct attention we devoted to EJ at the outset sustained as the semester wore on. It felt to me like the most prominent concerns of EJ quieted as our efforts shifted to more tightly tailored research projects; with this is that inevitable tension between the general and the acute, between the frame and the pixel.
Early-semester one on one conferences continue to be tone-setting for interpersonal rapport that builds as a semester goes. This practice is reasonably enculturated in the FYWP at EMU, carried out section for section for section, but it’s a practice I’d like to extend with focal intention to other classes I teach, doing more with these scheduled conversations while also thinking about how to keep them student-led and only in minor ways repetitive.

That is it. Enough for forty minutes of in-class writing. Enough to say the semester that was, was. Enough to mark even lightly a few of the details I’ll carry for a while hereforward.

As Sabbaticals End

May 1, 2016 / Derek Mueller

⏳ Approximate reading time: 4 minsI return to campus tomorrow, May 2, following a research leave that relieved me teaching and service responsibilities at EMU during Winter 2016. The four month leave allowed me to put the finishing touches on a collaborative monograph and to get the other book I have contracted with the WAC Clearinghouse #writing series substantially closer to a full draft. At the start of the sabbatical, the introduction and first chapter were already sent off, in the editor’s hands (these amount to 57 ms. pages). Over the past four months, I submitted three more chapters, which amounts to 129 ms. pages. I still have some work to do on Chapter Five, which I plan to send by the end of May, and Chapter Six, which I’ll turn over by the end of June. With that, a full draft of the monograph and then on to other things. I just turned off my email autoreply, and I’ll be in Pray-Harrold 613M tomorrow for most of the day, doling out numerous emails related to scheduling for this year’s first-year writing sections. Before the leave officially officially concludes, I wanted to capture a few impressions about the sabbatical, its accomplishments, and its occasional struggles.

Winter 2016 was only the second semester in 18 years that I didn’t teach a class. And the summer ahead, which is filled with administrative responsibilities, will be only the second summer in 16 years that I won’t be teaching a class. These patterns crept up on me; as I counted them and as I write them here, it seems like too much. I understand better than ever before the risks of burnout (or call it boredom, disinterest, complacency, checking out, whatever), and I have realized this winter how precariously close I have been to shrugging off many of the priorities I held when I started began down this career path during doctoral work.
As this was my first sabbatical, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect about work rhythms. The nearest I’ve come to having this kind of time to devote entirely to scholarship was all the way back in 2008 when I was working on the dissertation. A sabbatical takes some getting used to, and I suspect this is especially true when the leave is taken from a quasi-administrative post, such as directing a first-year writing program. The interim director and associate director did a fine job, as far as I can tell, but the hand off involved a fair amount of leading communication, pointers to where various documents were stored, how to handle everyday operations, and so on. Likewise, as the return from sabbatical approaches, there has been in uptick in email, requests for scheduling various things for the first half of May. I’m not sure I was especially well prepared for the fuzziness of transitioning onto sabbatical and back off again, particularly as relates to this administrative work. And the lessons about how to transition on and off more gracefully, although they are fresh with me now, probably won’t be especially helpful when my next sabbatical comes around.
I’m reasonably pleased with my productivity on sabbatical. I didn’t travel much–only a couple of out of town trips, primarily for conferences and an invited talk and workshop. I asked around, and some colleagues said things like, “don’t expect to get anything done during the first month” and “remember to rest.” These were helpful reminders, and now looking back, I suppose I could have worked harder and gotten more done, but I am more or less still on track with the timeline for the book, and I don’t at all have the sense that I squandered huge chunks of time.
Sabbaticals are isolating and on some days very strange. This much free time? I worked out. I read a few books that don’t have anything to do with my writing. I shitted around. Watched TV. Cooked. Dabbled at home improvement stuff. I regard most of this as run of the mill and routine–nothing here I would describe as radically transformative. The bouts of isolation got me thinking a lot more about social balance, about how much of my social world is constituted by work interactions, conversations with colleagues who are also friends. But sabbaticals are socially bizarre in that people want to leave you alone and respect your time, which is at the same time, of course, estranging from familiar routines and conversations that can prove supportive or generative. At one point I considered trying to convene some kind of writer’s group, but after talking to another colleague who was sabbaticalling at the same time as me, I decided better of it. No need to attempt to be a social leader at the same time my purest focus should be on the book’s development.
I can’t say yet whether I am fully restored, recharged, rested, and ready for what’s ahead. I jump back into the directorship of the first-year writing program, and while I was away there were a handful of institutional changes that make my return cautious insofar as I can’t quite tell how some of these questions will settle out (most of them relate to labor; who teaches composition as well as how composition sections are weighted for equivalencies). I thought long and hard beforehand about extending the sabbatical for four months through September 1, the start of Fall 2016, and while I could have chosen this alternative, by returning early I am able to earn additional pay in the summer months and continue as director.

Now having listed these few notes, they re-read to me as banalities, though not as too banal to post, if only so I can return to them in a few years when I put in for another research leave. And I think I will. That is, I know people who swear they don’t want or need a sabbatical, but as I have been reflecting on this time for the past ten days or so (the reprieve window of repatriation and conserving effortfully to make the most of what remained), I regard this time as invaluable to my well-being, to my research and scholarship, and to my sense of reinvigorated responsibility as a tenured professor. It surprises me a little bit that I am both excited to return to campus and that I got as much done as I did. I suppose that in itself is as much conviction as anyone can have about a sabbatical’s worth.

CCCC Vendor Booklists

April 29, 2016 / Derek Mueller

⏳ Approximate reading time: < 1 minIt’s only a partial list–titles from Pittsburgh, Southern Illinois, and Parlor–collected into a PDF after gathering them at the most recent CCCC book exhibit. Got me thinking about how it would be nice to have such lists compiled and aggregable, year after year, a kind of time series list amenable to isolating years or small clusters of years just for noticing what was circulating at the time. I’d picked them up in the first place because we have a tiny sliver of funding for supplying rhetoric and composition/writing studies focused books to Halle Library on campus, but when I mentioned this to a colleague, she asked for the complied PDF, too, because it carries over readily to placing more direct requests to libraries for end-of-budget-year acquisitions.

2016 CCCC Vendor Booklists by DerekMueller

Must Begin with I

February 18, 2014 / Derek Mueller / 2 Comments

⏳ Approximate reading time: 2 mins

Along with several other colleagues in my department, I was invited late last fall to be posterized as a faculty researcher at EMU. It’s part of a banner campaign devised to connect campus and Ypsilanti, and to make abstract-seeming faculty more real-seeming, I guess. And it is an honor to be invited. Humbling, really. Like others, I had a couple of photos taken in late November. The email arrived yesterday asking us to choose the best one. I let D., Is., and Ph. weigh in; two-thirds of them agreed on #122. I think I look slouchy, tired, and over-stressed (i.e., like a first-year WPA!) in most of them and so didn’t quibble with the rec. #122 it is.

Next comes the harder part: along with formalizing a preference for a photo, we’re supposed to send in a one-liner–five words or less and must begin with ‘I’–that will function as a public research profile. Officially, it’s called an “integrated power statement”–but I’ll think of it as a bumper sticker-sized CV.

I’ll be the first to admit that my 4.5 years at EMU in research terms has been spasmodic at best–due in large part to a constantly challenging orchestration of service responsibilities, institutional and departmental dynamics, and herky-jerky, stop-start bursts of writing with more change of speed and more spills than bad Olympic figure skating. Whoosh! Whoa! Oh sure, I get it: that’s the nature of this work in many places.

But how does such a pattern of activity translate into four or five words of banner material? And what’s a more appropriate gesture–something with a university-ambivalent public in mind, something true to the specifics of a research agenda, or something attuned to undergraduates, prospective students, and their families? Fun to think about from a university outreach standpoint, but not especially helpful for settling on the best four or five-word string.

Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

I create clouds, graphs, and maps.
I visualize discourse networks.
I trace disciplinary networks.
I make scholarly networks visible.
I make rhetorical connections visible.
I map scholarly networks.
I practice digital rhetorics.
I strengthen weaker arguments.
I write in code and light.

I’m open to other suggestions and will wait for a few days before sending in my power statement. Comment away if you’re so inclined. Give me a better five words, starting with I. I’d considered tipping the statement toward directing first-year writing, but I have yet to root that work in what I think of as my research (so much heft in getting some Venns to overlap, you know?), so the power statements would be things like, “I fight the textbook-industrial complex” (five words?) or “I dream of budget” or “I large-scale assess.” Nothing especially powerful or integrated or researcherly in these statements. Of course, maybe if I come up with something really catching, really, really inspiring, they’ll invite me to be on another poster in a few years, just about the time I get the hang of more research oriented WPAing.

I-Search and Quantified Self

June 4, 2010 / Derek Mueller

⏳ Approximate reading time: 2 minsI am 70-percent committed to a plan for ENGL326: Research Writing this fall revolving around research networks. I’ve been reading over the syllabus and materials Geof Carter generously shared with me from a similar class he taught at SVSU recently. The basic idea here is to begin with a key (or keyless, as circumstances warrant) scholarly article in a given field of study (i.e., the student’s declared major, probably) and then trace linkages from the article to/through the various places (inc. schools of thought), times, affinities (inspirational sources, pedigree/halo re: terminal degree), and semantic fields (inc. contested terms) out of which it was written. We will probably adopt a workshop model, maybe use CMap Tools for representing these research yarns, develop reading and research logs in something semi-private, such as Penzu, and, if things go well, lay some groundwork for a relatively focused going over of what entails “research” in their respective areas while also doing a lot of reading and writing, including some sort of an update or response to the first article. We could even write those in Etherpad for the way it lets us present a document’s evolution as video (video which invites a layer of commentary and reflection, as I imagine it possibly working out). If this sounds like June thinking for a class that starts in September, well, it is. Anyway, what good is early summer if not for breezily mulling things over?

Now, had I to begin again, I might create a different version of Research Writing tied in with the Quantified Self stuff. Monday’s entry on Seth Roberts’ work reminded me about this. Here is a small slice of Roberts’ article abstract, which is posted on The QS blog:

My subject-matter knowledge and methodological skills (e.g., in data analysis) improved the distribution from which I sampled (i.e., increased the average amount of progress per sample). Self-experimentation allowed me to sample from it much more often than conventional research. Another reason my self-experimentation was unusually effective is that, unlike professional science, it resembled the exploration of our ancestors, including foragers, hobbyists, and artisans.

Although the QS projects are rooted in quantification, they are not exactly bound to traditional science or notions of experimentation and measurement for public good. Instead, they assume a useful blend between quantitative tracking and personal knowledge. I don’t have in mind a QS-based research writing class concerned so much with “optimal living” or with diet and exercise, although I guess there’s no good reasons these things should be excluded from possibilities. I’m thinking more along the lines of Quantified Self meets McLuhan’s media inventories meets Macrorie’s I-Search. The class would inquire into data tracking, narrating spreadsheets, rhetorics/design of data visualization, and the epistemological bases of the sciences, while it “grabs hold of the word ‘authority’ and shakes it to find out what it means” (Macrorie, “Preface”). Again, just thinking aloud, June thinking for a class that, depending upon how things turn out this fall, starts in September 2011 or 2012.

Earth Wide Moth

Tag: research

A Feeling for the Data Set

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