My reading list is busting at the seams, especially this summer as I work on independent projects, multiple collaborative projects, plan my internship class, and prepare for comprehensive exams. When the summer started, I was trying to read one piece of scholarship per day. To be honest, this plan worked for a while. I got through Rhetorica in Motion and a ton of surveillance rhetorics scholarship before my dedicated reading time became less and less and my furniture restoring time and baseball watching time became more and more.
But, I did (finally) find the time to dig into, “Turning Archives into Data: Archival Rhetorics and Digital Literacy in the Composition Classroom,” by Courtney Rivard in the June issue of College Composition & Communication. I was excited to read Rivard’s piece because I was interested in the ways archival rhetorics might connect—however tangentially—to my own projects, which focus on ethical digital identity co-construction. Plus, I worked for some time as the graduate assistant archivist for the Milner Archives and Special Collections at the University of Montevallo, so I have experience—and an interest—in archival work. I appreciate the purpose of Rivard’s article, which demonstrates how converting stories generated from archival material into data helps student develop digital literacies essential to navigating and intervening in the algorithmic and data infrastructures that now shape our understanding of the world, and agree with her assertion that metadata creation and data visualization may at first seem out of place in the composition classroom (Rivard, 2019). There are a multitude of reasons why Rivard is right concerning the lack of metadata creation and data visualization in writing classrooms, including the lack of the literacies needed on the part of the instructor to teach and teach with these concepts and digital tools, as well as the potential for a lack of student interest which impedes the classroom as a space where knowledge is made. How do we overcome these hurdles? By doing what Rivard does with the students enrolled in her course: choose projects that are localized and serve the community in some way. While metadata creation and data visualization have not found their way into my writing classroom through work with archival data, I am going to challenge myself to think of ways to include this methodology in my pedagogy. I would extend the critique of the lack of metadata creation and data visualization in the composition classroom to include a call for more workshops, institutes, conference panels and roundtables which focus on these concepts and the digital literacies needed to incorporate them in the writing classroom. Of particular note is Rivard’s inclusion of the aspect of racial tagging in archival practices, and her overall feminist historiographical perspective aptly handles the nuances of this important topic. Since these tags shape the knowledge of the material itself, it is important to consider how a story is being told, and by whom (Rivard 2019). This was, of course, particularly important for Rivard and her students working with the Life Histories Collection. This is an overwhelmingly interesting, relevant, and well-written peice by Rivard, and a piece that got me thinking about how archival rhetorics play into my own work with digital genealogical databases. There is a whole other blog post there. Maybe I will get around to that in early August.
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Charles WoodsPhD student focusing on Rhetoric, Composition, and Technical Communication at Illinois State University. Archives
October 2019
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