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Digital Media and Composition Visiting Scholar Talk
Cheryl Ball (Illinois State University)
February 1, 2008
Noon-1:30 (Denney 311) "Finding a Job in Rhetoric and Composition Thinking Ahead and Thinking Smart," an informal lunch with RCL graduate students and faculty
During this informal conversation, Professor Ball will focus on successful tactics and strategies for seeking jobs in the broadly related arenas of rhetoric, composition, and literacy, as well as in the more focused field of digital media studies
3:30-5:00 pm (Denney 311) Formal talk, "What's the point of new media?: Evaluating transitional, digital scholarship
In this presentation, Professor Ball will address the recent MLA Task Force report, Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion (2006), which acknowledges an increasing need for thoughtful new strategies of evaluating digital scholarship in departments of English.
Professor Ball will look at a contemporary heuristic (Warner, 2007) for reading and evaluating "new media texts" (those texts that represent a transition between traditional print-like webtexts and texts that use multimodal elements to enact and convey meaning).
This talk will especially relevant for colleagues who might be involved in reading and evaluating new media texts during tenure and promotion cases. The presentation will be exploratory--just like the new media texts that it investigates--and discussion from the audience will be encouraged.
Biography: Professor Ball teaches and researches new media texts from efferent and aesthetic perspectives and across a range of theoretical frameworks. She's published in Computers and Composition, Composition Studies, and Convergence. It is her goal to only publish in journals that start with the letter C. However, sponsored by the letter K, she co-edits, Kairos: Rhetoric, Technology, Pedagogy.
