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Date/Time
Date(s) - April 3, 2018
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm

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Why Digital Writing Matters: Networking, Collaboration, Composing, and Copyright

C-ALT Lecture Tuesday, April 3rd at 2:00 location TBD

Abstract: Whether we call it texting, IMing, jotting a note, writing a letter, posting and email, blogging, making a video, building an electronic presentation, composing a memo, keeping a diary, or just pulling together a report, Americans are writing like never before.

Recent research suggests that writing in its many forms has become a daily practice for millions of Americans.  It may be the quintessential 21st century skill… (National Writing Project, recognizing the U.S. Senate-recognized “National Day on Writing,” October 20).

Writing matters. Writing matters profoundly. Moreover, digital writing maters.  In the presentation, I’ll present a set of arguments that demonstrate how digital writing matters and that raise matters of digital writing that require our attention-as writers, as researchers, as citizens, and as professionals.

I’ll take attendees to a range of different spaces that foster collaboration, call to question traditional authoring and publishing modes, and that reveal to us some of the prospects and complications of writing in and across digital spaces.  I’ll focus specifically on copyright dynamics and frame the networked, collaborative, digital writing in which we engage on a daily basis.

Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, photo by G.L. Kohuth

Dànielle Nicole DeVoss is a professor of Professional Writing and Director of the Graduate Programs in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures at Michigan State University.  Her research interests include digital-visual rhetorics; social and cultural entrepreneurship; innovation and creativity; and intellectual property issues in digital space.  Her work has most recently appeared in College English; Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy; Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture; and the Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric.  DeVoss co-edited (with Heidi McKee) Digital Writing Research: Technologies, Methodologies, and Ethical Issues (2007, Hampton Press), which won the 2007 Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award.  She also co-edited (with Heidi McKee and Dickie Selfe) Technological Ecologies and Sustainability (2009), the first digital press in the U.S with university press imprint.  The book is available at: http://ccdigitalpress.org/tes/.  Some of her other books include Because Digital Writing Matters (the National Writing Project, Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, and Troy Hicks, 2010); Digital Writing Assessment and Evaluation (with Heidi MeKee, 2013); Cultures of Copyright (with Martine Courant Rife, 2014); Type Matters: The Rhetoricity of Letterforms (with C.S. Wyatt, 2017).