Rhetorical Machines

Rhetorical Machines PDF Author: John Jones
Publisher: University Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817359540
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
A landmark volume that explores the interconnected nature of technologies and rhetorical practice Rhetorical Machines addresses new approaches to studying computational processes within the growing field of digital rhetoric. While computational code is often seen as value-neutral and mechanical, this volume explores the underlying, and often unexamined, modes of persuasion this code engages. In so doing, it argues that computation is in fact rife with the values of those who create it and thus has powerful ethical and moral implications. From Socrates’s critique of writing in Plato’s Phaedrus to emerging new media and internet culture, the scholars assembled here provide insight into how computation and rhetoric work together to produce social and cultural effects. This multidisciplinary volume features contributions from scholar-practitioners across the fields of rhetoric, computer science, and writing studies. It is divided into four main sections: “Emergent Machines” examines how technologies and algorithms are framed and entangled in rhetorical processes, “Operational Codes” explores how computational processes are used to achieve rhetorical ends, “Ethical Decisions and Moral Protocols” considers the ethical implications involved in designing software and that software’s impact on computational culture, and the final section includes two scholars’ responses to the preceding chapters. Three of the sections are prefaced by brief conversations with chatbots (autonomous computational agents) addressing some of the primary questions raised in each section. At the heart of these essays is a call for emerging and established scholars in a vast array of fields to reach interdisciplinary understandings of human-machine interactions. This innovative work will be valuable to scholars and students in a variety of disciplines, including but not limited to rhetoric, computer science, writing studies, and the digital humanities.

Influential Machines

Influential Machines PDF Author: Miles C. Coleman
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 164336460X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 112

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Book Description
A new framework for understanding how algorithms influence Web applications offer us conclusions about science. Twitter bots generate art. Machine-learning systems satirize politicians. We live in an era where a substantial share of our private and public communication is machinic. Modern computing machines cannot yet speak for themselves—although the capacities of AI are rapidly expanding—but they generate rhetorical energies as they give advice, entertain, and proffer insight, speaking to human concerns in more-than-human ways and guiding human action. In Influential Machines Miles C. Coleman looks beyond human communication to interrogate the ways in which the machines and algorithms in our lives make meaning and the implications of their special modes of communication. Using the varied examples of an anti-vax "vaccine calculator," two Twitterbots, and the computational performances of virtual assistants, Coleman asks what machines mean to us as social agents and whether humans are the appropriate reference for designing machine communication. Coleman goes beyond the front and back ends of computing to describe the "deep end" of computing, a site of ambient rhetoric that is essential for understanding how machines move in today's digital world.

The Gallery of Memory

The Gallery of Memory PDF Author: Lina Bolzoni
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9780802043306
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
This book takes as its starting point a striking paradox: that the antique tradition of the art of memory -- created by an oral culture -- reached its moment of greatest diffusion during an age that saw the birth of the printed book.

The Routledge Handbook of Digital Writing and Rhetoric

The Routledge Handbook of Digital Writing and Rhetoric PDF Author: Jonathan Alexander
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315518473
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 965

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Book Description
This handbook brings together scholars from around the globe who here contribute to our understanding of how digital rhetoric is changing the landscape of writing. Increasingly, all of us must navigate networks of information, compose not just with computers but an array of mobile devices, increase our technological literacy, and understand the changing dynamics of authoring, writing, reading, and publishing in a world of rich and complex texts. Given such changes, and given the diverse ways in which younger generations of college students are writing, communicating, and designing texts in multimediated, electronic environments, we need to consider how the very act of writing itself is undergoing potentially fundamental changes. These changes are being addressed increasingly by the emerging field of digital rhetoric, a field that attempts to understand the rhetorical possibilities and affordances of writing, broadly defined, in a wide array of digital environments. Of interest to both researchers and students, this volume provides insights about the fields of rhetoric, writing, composition, digital media, literature, and multimodal studies.

Rhetorical Speculations

Rhetorical Speculations PDF Author: Scott Sundvall
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
ISBN: 1607328313
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
The future of writing studies is fundamentally tied to advancing technological development—writing cannot be done without a technology and different technologies mediate writing differently. In Rhetorical Speculations, contributors engage with emerging technologies of composition through “speculative modeling” as a strategy for anticipatory, futural thinking for rhetoric and writing studies. Rhetoric and writing studies often engages technological shifts reactively, after the production and reception of rhetoric and writing has changed. This collection allows rhetoric and writing scholars to explore modes of critical speculation into the transformative effect of emerging technologies, particularly as a means to speculate on future shifts in the intellectual, pedagogical, and institutional frameworks of the field. In doing so, the project repositions rhetoric and writing scholars as proprietors of our technological future to come rather than as secondary receivers, critics, and adjusters of the technological present. Major and emerging voices in the field offer a range of styles that include pragmatic, technical, and philosophical approaches to the issue of speculative rhetoric, exploring what new media/writing studies could be—theoretically, pedagogically, and institutionally—as future technologies begin to impinge on the work of writing. Rhetorical Speculations is at the cutting edge of the subject of futures thinking and will have broad appeal to scholars of rhetoric, literacy, futures studies, and material and popular culture. Contributors: Bahareh Brittany Alaei, Sarah J. Arroyo, Kristine L. Blair, Geoffrey V. Carter, Sid Dobrin, Kristie S. Fleckenstein, Steve Holmes, Kyle Jensen, Halcyon Lawrence, Alexander Monea, Sean Morey, Alex Reid, Jeff Rice, Gregory L. Ulmer, Anna Worm

Fifty Years of Rhetoric Society Quarterly

Fifty Years of Rhetoric Society Quarterly PDF Author: Joshua Gunn
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351611380
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Fifty Years of Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Selected Readings, 1968-2018 celebrates the semicentennial of Rhetoric Society Quarterly, bringing together the most influential essays included in the journal over the past fifty years. Assessed by members of the Rhetoric Society of America, this collection provides advanced undergraduate and graduate students with a balanced perspective on rhetorical theory and practice from scholars in both communication studies and rhetoric and writing studies. The volume covers a range of themes, from the history of rhetorical studies, writing and speaking pedagogy, and feminism, to the work of Kenneth Burke, the rhetoric of science, and rhetorical agency.

Rhetorical Delivery and Digital Technologies

Rhetorical Delivery and Digital Technologies PDF Author: Sean Morey
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317407091
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
This book theorizes digital logics and applications for the rhetorical canon of delivery. Digital writing technologies invite a re-evaluation about what delivery can offer to rhetorical studies and writing practices. Sean Morey argues that what delivery provides is access to the unspeakable, unconscious elements of rhetoric, not primarily through emotion or feeling as is usually offered by previous studies, but affect, a domain of sensation implicit in the (overlooked) original Greek term for delivery, hypokrisis. Moreover, the primary means for delivering affect is both the logic and technology of a network, construed as modern, digital networks, but also networks of associations between humans and nonhuman objects. Casting delivery in this light offers new rhetorical trajectories that promote its incorporation into digital networked-bodies. Given its provocative and broad reframing of delivery, this book provides original, robust ways to understand rhetorical delivery not only through a lens of digital writing technologies, but all historical means of enacting delivery, offering implications that will ultimately affect how scholars of rhetoric will come to view not only the other canons of rhetoric, but rhetoric as a whole.

Ambient Rhetoric

Ambient Rhetoric PDF Author: Thomas J. Rickert
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 0822978695
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
In Ambient Rhetoric, Thomas Rickert seeks to dissolve the boundaries of the rhetorical tradition and its basic dichotomy of subject and object. With the advent of new technologies, new media, and the dispersion of human agency through external information sources, rhetoric can no longer remain tied to the autonomy of human will and cognition as the sole determinants in the discursive act. Rickert develops the concept of ambience in order to engage all of the elements that comprise the ecologies in which we exist. Culling from Martin Heidegger's hermeneutical phenomenology in Being and Time, Rickert finds the basis for ambience in Heidegger's assertion that humans do not exist in a vacuum; there is a constant and fluid relation to the material, informational, and emotional spaces in which they dwell. Hence, humans are not the exclusive actors in the rhetorical equation; agency can be found in innumerable things, objects, and spaces. As Rickert asserts, it is only after we become attuned to these influences that rhetoric can make a first step toward sufficiency. Rickert also recalls the foundational Greek philosophical concepts of kairos (time), chora (space/place), and periechon (surroundings) and cites their repurposing by modern and postmodern thinkers as "informational scaffolding" for how we reason, feel, and act. He discusses contemporary theory in cognitive science, rhetoric, and object-oriented philosophy to expand his argument for the essentiality of ambience to the field of rhetoric. Rickert then examines works of ambient music that incorporate natural and artificial sound, spaces, and technologies, finding them to be exemplary of a more fully resonant and experiential media. In his preface, Rickert compares ambience to the fermenting of wine—how its distinctive flavor can be traced to innumerable factors, including sun, soil, water, region, and grape variety. The environment and company with whom it's consumed further enhance the taste experience. And so it should be with rhetoric—to be considered among all of its influences. As Rickert demonstrates, the larger world that we inhabit (and that inhabits us) must be fully embraced if we are to advance as beings and rhetors within it.

Inside the Teaching Machine

Inside the Teaching Machine PDF Author: Catherine Chaput
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817316094
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
Inside the Teaching Machine argues that the U.S. public research university has always been a vital component of the capitalist political economy. Advocates of higher education have long contended that universities should operate above the crude material negotiations of economics and politics. Such arguments often ignore the historical reality that the American university system emerged through, and in service to, a capitalist political economy.

Ethical Programs

Ethical Programs PDF Author: James J. Brown
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472900080
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
Living in a networked world means never really getting to decide in any thoroughgoing way who or what enters your “space” (your laptop, your iPhone, your thermostat . . . your home). With this as a basic frame-of-reference, James J. Brown’s Ethical Programs examines and explores the rhetorical potential and problems of a hospitality ethos suited to a new era of hosts and guests. Brown reads a range of computational strategies and actors including the general principles underwriting the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), which determines how packets of information can travel through the internet, to the Obama election campaign’s use of the power of protocols to reach voters, harvest their data, incentivize and, ultimately, shape their participation in the campaign. In demonstrating the kind of rhetorical spaces networked software establishes and the access it permits, prevents, and molds, Brown makes a major contribution to the emergent discourse of software studies as a major component of efforts in broad fields including media studies, rhetorical studies, and cultural studies.