Rethinking the Theme Park at Halloween Horror Nights
October 28, 2016 While I’ve lived here in Florida for a few years, and been an annual passholder at Disney since before I came to Orlando, I haven’t spent as much time at Universal Studios. Every year I’m impressed by the advertising campaign that accompanies the arrival of Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights (“hosted”...
Literacy Narratives and the Need to Make Yourself Vulnerable
October 25, 2016 In the beginning of this semester, I asked my students to write a short reflection on how they learned to read and write. The assignment was an abbreviated version of what we traditionally call a literacy narrative in the field of writing and rhetoric. Literacy narratives are popular assignments in...
Student-led Inquiry Project Becomes Expanded Research Project
September 28, 2016 Congratulations to Texts & Technology students Brandy Dieterle and Landon Berry on the publication of their article in Computers in Composition on the Writing Center Digital Workspace they designed for our University Writing Center. Brandy previously worked as a peer tutor in the University Writing Center and teaches composition for...
From Student to Colleague: T&T Milestone Series Tackles Professional Socialization
September 23, 2016 The work we do as undergraduate and master’s students tends to prepare us with invaluable foundations in a field of knowledge and skills in interpretation and writing, but the structure of those degrees tends to insulate us from a broader understanding of the university as an institution or academia as...
Welcome to Texts & Technology, Our Spaceship Earth
September 21, 2016 As I was riding Spaceship Earth at Epcot a few weeks ago, I had a light bulb moment: Spaceship Earth is a representation of human relationships with technology, as it is meant to be, but it can also be a symbol for the discipline of Texts & Technology. If you...
On Competition, Teamwork, and Finding Your Scholarly Voice: Valuing the Desks around You
August 02, 2016 My high school basketball coach once told me, “A rising tide lifts all ships.” I think he just wanted to motivate me to box-out more when the shots went up, but his point was that when we work unselfishly together toward goals, it benefits everyone. I never thought that basketball...
Historical Agricultural News Wins 2nd Place in NEH Data Challenge
July 28, 2016 Historical Agricultural News, a project by Amy Giroux, Marcy Galbreath, and Nathan Giroux, recently won second place in the NEH Chronicling America Historic Newspapers Data Challenge. Drs. Giroux and Galbreath are both 2014 graduates of UCF’s Texts and Technology doctoral program. The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announced six...
Candidacy Exams: Advice for Preparation and Motivation during the Summer Months
July 12, 2016 Ah, summer. That beautiful period that comes right after a taxing semester of meetings, courses, and complex critical theory. Depending on your situation, this might be a time of excitement as you have finally booked that dream vacation to Malaga, Spain (make sure you visit Gibraltar), or it could be...
Digital Humanities 2016 Conference
July 10, 2016 T&T student, Tricia Carlton, and T&T alum, Amy Giroux, traveled to Poland to attend the Digital Humanities 2016 Conference in Kraków. The theme of the conference was “Digital Identities: the Past and the Future.” Pictured is Tricia at her poster session. The conference was hosted by the Jagiellonian University and...
Stress and Success: Five Strategies for Self-Care
June 28, 2016 I started this post back in March. At the time, I was determined to write about the strategies I used in order to magically fit everything into my daily schedule. As a high school teacher, a mom of an almost 4-year old and full time grad student, I would often...
Who Tells Your Story? Historical Voices in Hamilton
May 03, 2016 Finals week always brings looming deadlines: projects and papers, revisions of a co-authored journal article, and grading final projects submitted by my undergraduate students. When I volunteered several months ago to write this blog post, I planned to write about some in-progress research on climate change communication. Like I’ve done...
From Ashes to Ashé: Carlton Successfully Defends Dissertation
April 26, 2016 Congratulations to Tricia Carlton who successfully defended her dissertation, From Ashes to Ashé: Memorializing Traumatic Events through Participatory Digital Archives. Pictured with Tricia are members of her dissertation committee (left to right): Dr. Bruce B. Janz, Dr. Barry Mauer, Dr. Jeffrey Bedwell (Psychology), and Dr. Mark Kamrath (Chair). Dr. Natalie...
Materiality, emoji, and WHY IS THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE SHOUTING AT ME?
April 22, 2016 I’d like to talk about the material nature of digital technologies, which is something that we often overlook…as long as those technologies are operating as we expect. Most of us use a variety of electronic devices- smartphones, tablets, computers- to transmit, receive, search for, comment on, and otherwise interact with...
UCF Graduate Research Forum Winner
April 06, 2016 Congratulations to Texts & Technology student, Jennifer Miller, who won First Place in the Fine Arts & Humanities category at UCF’s 2016 Graduate Research Forum. In addition to a cash award, Jennifer is off to compete in at the State-level research forum to be held in Gainesville at the end...
T&T Students Miller & Dieterle lead terrific interactive workshop
March 31, 2016 T&T students Jennifer Roth Miller and Brandy Dieterle led a terrific interactive workshop, From Strategic Objectives to Digtial Tools: Using Social Media for Activism, at the Department of Writing & Rhetoric’s Annual Symposium. They are pictured here with DWR’s Jacob Stewart who helped lead the workshop. T&T faculty Dr. Angela...
T&T Student Jardaneh Successfully Defends Dissertation
March 31, 2016 Congratulations to T&T student Kevin Jardaneh for successfully defending his dissertation,Building a Foundation for Goal-Attainment and Problem-Solving in Interdisciplinary Studies: Reimagining Web-Based Core Curriculum Through a Classical Lens, on March 31. Pictured from left to right are Dr. Stephen Fiore (Institute for Simulation & Training), Dr. Bruce Janz (Chair), Kevin,...
Bertolt Brecht’s Dramatic Structure
March 25, 2016 For Bertolt Brecht, the dramatic structure underlying any situation reflects the structure of social forces at work in society. Since Brecht was a Marxist living in an industrial capitalist nation, he understood these social forces as competing classes (although he also dealt with historical struggles, such as “science versus church,”...
Dining with the Cyborgs: Cotto Successfully Defends Dissertation
March 22, 2016 Congratulations to T&T student Maggie Cotto for successfully defending her dissertation, Dining with the Cyborgs: Disembodied Consumption and the Rhetoric of Food Media in the Digital Age, on March 22. Maggie is pictured here with members of her Dissertation Committee (L to R): Dr. Barry Mauer, Dr. J. Blake Scott,...
T&T Student Mitchell Successfully Defends Dissertation
March 14, 2016 Congratulations to T&T student Cynthia Mitchell for successfully defending her dissertation, ”Exploring Repurposing Across Contexts: How Adolescents’ New Literacies Practices Can Inform Understandings about Writing-Related Transfer.“ Cynthia’s dissertation explores how middle school students engage in new literacies practices and how they repurpose across contexts. With the use of screencast software...
Making Comics as Scholarship
February 26, 2016 **This post has been re-blogged from ProfHacker with permission of the author.** For the last few years, I’ve been collaborating with Roger Whitson on editing Comics as Scholarship, a special issue for Digital Humanities Quarterly. The open-access issue is now available and may be of interest to anyone experimenting with alternatives...