Mothers and Daughters of Invention - Amy Eades

From Outcasts to In-The-Know: Giving Women Credit Where Credit is Due

This chapter focuses on the scholarship and innovation of intellectual property put forth by women throughout the history of digital invention. The chapter dissects the feminist discourse of intellectual property that was spurred on by the research and writing of Autumn Stanley, Katherine Durack, and other female scholars. Each of the scholars of rhetoric and composition and technical communication focus on the different assumptions made about women and how to do away with those assumptions. In particular, Stanley’s book, Mothers and Daughters of Invention (1995), led to the framing of a new feminist critique of women’s relationship to technology and the development. The time and effort and research put forth by these scholars in the previous decades, begs for the women of our time to do a similar analysis and comparison of the impact of women in digital invention today. While I was in the midst of my analysis, I remembered a website that has been a great resource for building my résumé and career during my senior year of college. This website, Levo League, is “a growing community of professional women seeking advice, inspiration, and the tools needed to succeed”. Levo League has a vision of a future of equality for women in industry and to create a community of young professionals. Levo League uses their great and accessible website, Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to share articles about career advice, skills, news, lifestyle, and fashion. I believe it’s safe to say that, while there will always be some kind of learning curve when it comes to technology, women have found their place among the top digital innovators and scholars.

Experience, Embodiment, Excess -Haley Brown

Multimedia[ted] [E]visceration was a multi-media installation designed specifically for presentation at the Seventh Thomas R. Watson Conference in Rhetoric and Composition. The installation invited participants to enter into a semi-dark room, upon the walls of which were projected images of texts and bodies. The texts rotated followed by these questions: Where is my body? Where are my desires? How can I imagine my body? -Haley Brown

Not Your Mother's Argument -Haley Brown

We will not settle for any others. We will not excuse, justify, or explain ourselves any longer. We will point to the bibliographies and suggest that people read the arguments that have already been made. We will not continue to make our mothers’ arguments. Here is when we decide to no longer make our mother's arguments with our future daughters.

-Haley Brown

Urban Community

In Media, Learning, and Sites of Possibility, they investigated the multiple meanings, functions, and pedagogical values that media culture has on the identity work of young people. From studies on social and pedagogical practices of African American females’ use of photography to studies that examine digital storytelling , their edited collection illuminated a current concern in critical literacy research generally and in media studies particularly.

-Haley Brown

No Theory But For Practice Theory Description by Hailey

 Theory Description of No Theory But for Practice
Hailey

Kailee Snyder: Student, Blogger, Nerd and Hacker

Hello! My name is Kailee Snyder and I am a student, blogger, nerd and hacker. I decided to take this class because I love learning about theory and I wanted to learn how literary theory fits into the world of blogging and other newer forms of composing. The blog that I started for this class and the one that I still post on today is titled Dare to Dream Infinitely. In this blog I talk about all things Harry Potter, form literary theory, to crafts, to fashion, and everything in between. 

For this class project I talked about three chapters and their theories. The first chapter was Where Ya At? Composing Identity Through Hyperlocal Narratives. I wrote a summary about the chapter as well as an example of the theory in practice on other class blogs. 

The second chapter I wrote about was Mr. Secrets: Multimodality’s Complex Invitation to Remake Text, Meaning, and Audience. For this chapter I looked at a web site that satisfies the need for a culturally relevant example and my need to be nerdy.

The final chapter I worked on was No Theory But For Practice: Born, Multimedia, & the Avant-Garde.  In this example reinforced my nerdy-ness and again used one of my favorite sites as an example of mixed media in the new age of composition. 

Thank you so much for sharing in our learning!

-Kailee Snyder

Rowling and Her Multi Modal Idea

In the chapter Mr. Secrets: Multimodality’s Complex Invitation to Remake Text, Meaning, and Audience Tony O’Keefe talks about how mixing medias provides the composer of the work some “allowances” that they would otherwise be lacking. He also mentions how deciding to compose a work in a multimodal way can also require a level of collaboration and sacrifice in terms of the vision of the work. 

The website I picked as an example for this theory is Pottermore. When Rowling set out to create this interactive web space she did not have all the skills needed to put it together. So she had to bring in web designers, artists, musicians, sound designers, etc. in order to bring her dream to life. With this huge level of collaboration it is safe to guess that some of her original visions for this project were lost or modified in the process. But it is equally easy to assume that the people working with her added to her ideas and made things that she loved. 

She was, with the help of other and the platform on which she composed, able to create an interactive experience for her readers that was complex and engaging in a way that the movies, books, or videogames were. Rowling was given allowances in terms of what her site was capable of and she was required to let go of her creative control in order to get it done.

This example is a more popular and less personal example of what multimodality can give to an idea’s richness. It also serves as a model for what is possible and it is beautiful while it does so. 

-Kailee Snyder