A Sense of Belonging in the Archive and the Remote Classroom

By Danielle Gilman Is it possible to feel a sense of belonging to a place you’ve never been? I grappled with this question quite often last summer as I prepared to teach three sections of my “Archival Narratives” course to a cohort of students who had, by and large, never… Continue reading

Why So Toxic? Teaching Feminist Ethnographic Methods in the Composition Classroom

By Shane Snyder Introduction: A Glaring Omission  Two months into my Fall 2020 composition course, “Possibility Spaces and Rhetoric in Video Games,” I realized something was wrong. Within sixteen weeks, I had scheduled only one lesson on the LGBTQ+ video game narratives Gone Home and Dys4ia, two discussions about predatory corporate capitalism and environmental destruction in The McDonald’s Videogame, and one week on violence and nationalism in Undertale. Most… Continue reading

Students, not Consumers: Rethinking Our Assignment Sheet Design, part 2

By Jill Fennell and Jeffrey Howard (Continued from Part 1) Technical Communication and Information Design Techniques in Assignment Design Extant scholarship on technical communication, information design, and user experience design (UX) provides many ideas that instructors can implement to enhance the effectiveness and expand the purpose and usability of assignment… Continue reading

Students, not Consumers: Rethinking Our Assignment Sheet Design, part 1

By Jill Fennell and Jeffrey Howard “We build the corral as we reinvent the horse.” ~ Stephen Dunn, “A Little Essay on Form” Introduction In his “Little Essay on Form,” noted writer Stephen Dunn argues that even when writers work within the constraints of generic conventions, they also can reshape… Continue reading

7 Brittain Fellows Reflect on Antiracist Pedagogy

A memorial mural for reonna Taylor, Trayvon Martin, George Floyd.

In response to the protests for racial justice during the summer of 2020, we here at TECHStyle discussed steps we could take to promote antiracism and antiracist pedagogy in higher education. As we noted in our call for submissions from August, “Black people have experienced systemic racism for as long as… Continue reading

Transdisciplinary Collaboration: An Interview with a Computer Science Junior Design Team, Part III

Introduction   The Infinite Woman is an interactive poetry platform that computationally performs contemporary poetic techniques of remix and erasure. As a feminist critique and artistic intervention, it remixes excerpts from Edison Marshall’s novel The Infinite Woman (1950) and Simone de Beauvoir’s book The Second Sex (1949). An n-gram algorithm… Continue reading

Feminist Computational Poetics and Experimental User Interface Design: An Interview with a Computer Science Junior Design Team, Part II

Introduction   The Infinite Woman is an interactive poetry platform that computationally performs contemporary poetic techniques of remix and erasure. As a feminist critique and artistic intervention, it remixes excerpts from Edison Marshall’s novel The Infinite Woman (1950) and Simone de Beauvoir’s book The Second Sex (1949). An n-gram algorithm… Continue reading

Creative Coding: An Interview with a Computer Science Junior Design Team, Part I

Introduction The Infinite Woman is an interactive poetry platform that computationally performs contemporary poetic techniques of remix and erasure. As a feminist critique and artistic intervention, it remixes excerpts from Edison Marshall’s novel The Infinite Woman (1950) and Simone de Beauvoir’s book The Second Sex (1949). An n-gram algorithm procedurally… Continue reading

TECHStyle 2020-21 Call for Proposals: #BLM & Teaching During a Pandemic

Black Lives Matter protest

The editors of TECHStyle (TS) invite multimodal articles and reflections from teachers and scholars during the 2020-21 academic year. TS is one of the public wings of the Writing and Communication Program (WCP) and exists to provide a public humanities platform for scholars and their thoughts on academic research and… Continue reading

What Do You See?—Making Podcasts About Visual Art

Making podcasts about visual art presents a challenging multimodal question: How can a podcast, an entirely oral medium, account for all of the complexity, subtly, and abstraction in a painting or sculpture, an entirely visual medium? Producing a podcast about a single piece of visual art—this was my students’ task—would… Continue reading

Archives as Instructional Environments at Georgia Tech and Emory University

Teaching with Primary Sources at Georgia Tech and Emory University: An Introduction Teaching with primary sources is central to my pedagogy as an instructor at Georgia Tech, where I’m a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow, and Emory, where I’ve taught as Visiting Faculty in the Creative Writing Program. I’m fortunate… Continue reading

The Office Hour: MetaPod

In this episode of the Office Hour, Tobias Wilson-Bates and Jonathan Shelley discuss their experiences of integrating podcasting inside and outside of the classroom. Has the revolutionary energy of podcasts dissipated with the influx of corporate projects like Mark Zuckerberg’s Tech & Society Podcast? Or do they still serve unique… Continue reading

Taking Twitter Higher, Further, Faster: Leading the #Womenonpanels Event

In our current moment, when many of us think of Twitter, we think of it as a space of broadcasting, unproductive argument, or even, for some, of violence. In comics fandom, Twitter has been the primary space of Comicsgate, a hate group against the diversification and what they term politicization,… Continue reading

On Conferences in Academia and the Tech Industry

On stage at the Container Power Hour session at the 2018 AWS re:Invent conference. The session agenda is projected on a screen to the left; the session presenters are seated on stage to the right.

This is the third part in a series on the intersections of technical communication in the tech industry and the academy. Read the series introduction here. For me, January 2019 was bookended with conferences. I started the month (and year) with a trip to Chicago for the 2019 Modern Language… Continue reading

The Office Hour, “Fixing the Academic Conference”

Is the academic conference an important place for sharing and developing knowledge or an increasingly boring relic of a bygone era? Given the cost of attending, the increasingly precarious market for academic jobs, and the psychic toll graduate school takes on early scholars, these questions are more important than ever. In… Continue reading

16 Brittain Fellows Write About the Archives They Love

Archives, research libraries, and special collections are the crucial spaces where study begins. While public and school libraries hold a space in the popular imagination as a catalyzing site of intellectual curiosity—as seen in the recent piece “12 Authors Write about the Libraries They Love” in The New York Times—archives are… Continue reading

Things To Do in Wivenhoe; Or, So Going Around “The Basketball Diaries”: A New York School Travelogue

“Wake up high up / frame bent & turned on,” begins Ted Berrigan’s iconic “Things to Do in New York (City),” a lyric list poem that shows Berrigan moving through the literary landscape of the city in timeless style. Berrigan was fond of this genre, also writing poems like “Things… Continue reading

Teaching in All Seasons: Poetics, Ideal Tendencies, and Food Literacy

SUMMER   “Once I remember looking into the freezer can the next morning and finding the leftover ice cream had all returned to milk. It was like the disappearance of Cinderella’s new clothes.” (Lewis 53) Midway through my Spring composition course, “Food Literacy of Atlanta,” my students and I had… Continue reading

Flash Readings, Episode 6: “Colson Whitehead Will Break You, Too”

In Flash Reading 6, Brittain Fellow Matt Dischinger analyzes a scene from the South Carolina chapter of The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead’s prize-winning novel set in the antebellum United States. In this scene, the protagonist, named Cora, gives the “evil eye” to a former charge, Maisie, who doesn’t recognize her in costume as a… Continue reading

Flash Readings, Episode 5: “The Moment John Roberts’s Words Cease to Matter”

In Flash Reading 5, former Brittain Fellow Ruthie Yow (2015-17) takes Chief Justice John Roberts to task for his majority opinion in the landmark Supreme Court case of 2007, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1. According to Yow, the Court’s decision indexes “the impoverished state of integration strategies” in public… Continue reading

The Office Hour, Chapter 24: “Realpolitik”

In this episode, Toby draws on the knowledge (and German-language skills) of former Brittain Fellow Ian Afflerbach (2016-17), currently Assistant Professor of American Literature at the University of North Georgia, to discuss the concept of “realpolitik.” Does it have any relevance to the current political situation, as media commentators tend to… Continue reading

Flash Readings, Episode 4: “When I Talk to Siri”

Neon Varsity Diner sign with Flash Readings logo

In the fourth Flash Reading, Brittain Fellow Halcyon Lawrence talks about why her Samsung phone won’t take her where she wants to go. This time she wants to find legendary Atlanta diner The Varsity, but Galaxy “has no specific answers” for her. Lawrence, who specializes in speech intelligibility and accent bias in… Continue reading

The Office Hour, Chapter 21: “Britt History III (The Past)”

Part three of our series on the history of the Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellowship (the finale of The Office Hour‘s first season), finds Toby and I talking to Lisa Yaszek, Professor and outgoing Associate Chair of the School of Literature, Media, and Communication; co-editor of Sisters of Tomorrow: The First Women… Continue reading

The Office Hour, Chapter 18: “Britt History 1 (The Future)”

Toby takes over the podcast this week, in the first installment of a three-part series in which we address the past, present, and future of the Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellowship. In this episode, he interviews Brittain Fellow Halcyon Lawrence about her background and research in information design and experiences… Continue reading

The Office Hour, Chapter 17: “The New Yorker”

This week on the podcast, Toby and I talk about The New Yorker magazine––which I happen to be teaching an English 1102 course about this semester. Along the way, Toby shares a cartoon by Tom Toro and reads from “Sadness Lamp F.A.Q.” by Sarah Hutto (both of which can be found in the March 13,… Continue reading