Preparing a
amid noise, sometimes switching the cultural
Report
New Media Writing
“The poesis of the ordinary draws attention and
becomes habitual because things don’t just add up.
Something throws itself together and then floats past or
sticks for some reason.”
—Kathleen Stewart, “Weak Theory in an Unfinished
World”
Introduction
As you near the conclusion of your research, you
begin designing and writing your final report, which
should be a sophisticated and compelling
document composed to persuasively address
(and possibly redress) your chosen social issue.
It is important to note here that the expectations for
this document are exceptionally high. We devote
at least a month to drafting, designing, laying out
and revising this report. I fully expect this to be one
of the most challenging pieces of rhetoric and
writing you have so far produced here at SLU.
To that end, of course, I promise to provide the
tools, instruction, and scaffolding to insure your
success.
The Logbook, Again?
Just as we treated the logbook as an
augmentation of the issue survey, we can
approach the report as an augmentation of the
logbook. Or perhaps we can use terms we have
more recently run across: resonance and
transduction. Stefan Helmreich writes,
calibrated, and tuned to pick up signals
valuation of one for the other (turning noise
into signal, nonsense into sense). Listeners
become the sound engineers of their own
spatial-temporal experience. (165)
I'll be looking for reports that creatively and
professionally sensitize, calibrate, or otherwise
attune readers; to recall the language of Latour, I
am looking for reports that sensitize their
audiences. To do so requires of you the
“Resonance allows us to understand how energy development of a new set of compositional
must always be translated, through a relay of sensibilities and skills.
associations, in order for it to be received at a point
distant from its source” (163, emphasis added).
The challenge of the report is to transduce the
Assembly
The final part of this semester-long process is the
energy of your research (collected through
assembly of all the team reports into a compelling
primarily non-discursive means) into a written
and professional publication ready for public
report that strains against the seemingly static,
consumption. We will look at many models of/for
two-dimensionality of the page. This is the
this publication (e.g., Emergence Magazine, The
challenge of the report: not to accurately represent
Amazon Has Seen Out Future, The Sonoran
your subject matter, but to make a reader newly or
Desert: A Literary Field Guide). As the instructor, I
differently sensitive to your issue. Your report isn’t
will take on the role of editor-in-chief. Part of
a means of conveyance, but a mediation hoping
assembling the document entails collaboratively
to transduce a resonant difference.
composing introductory and transition text and
designing a shared style guide and layout. These
Production design decisions will also be made during the
Just as this class turned to digital media composing of individual reports so that design
technologies to augment (and so transform) how elements of those reports resonate with one
and what we are sensible to, this project has you another.
engage how digital production tools augment
how and what we are able to compose. Thus,
one of the components of this assignment is
learning and utilizing the capacities of document
design as they emerge in the context of your
research project, your goals for the report, and the
audience that takes up that report. Helmreich,
helpful here again, writes,
Resonance and transduction are both active,
ensuring that while the listening subject is
specifically situated, she is also filtered,
Rivers | ENGL 4010