Scholarly Works, English

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https://hdl.handle.net/10919/24318

Research articles, presentations, and other scholarship

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Now showing 1 - 14 of 14

The Action-Adventure Heroine: Rediscovering an American Literary Character, 1697–1895 by Sandra Wilson Smith
Reed, Ashley (Project Muse, 2019)
Challenging the Digital Humanities: A Response to Jon Saklofske
Reed, Ashley (Liverpool University Press, 2016-04)
Channeling William Blake: A Response to Roger Whitson
Reed, Ashley (Liverpool University Press, 2016-04)
Craft and Care: The Maker Movement, Catherine Blake, and the Digital Humanities
Reed, Ashley (Liverpool University Press, 2016-04)
This article examines the popular Maker movement, the scholarly discourse of “critical making,” and the work of digital humanists through an analysis of the working relationship between William and Catherine Blake. It begins by examining the contemporary Maker movement, which claims to embrace William Blake as its “patron saint” even as it increasingly insists on the monetization of Makers’ creative labor. This pressure toward monetization—in which garage tinkerers become uncompensated R&D departments for large corporations—is accompanied by an emphatic gendering of Makers as male and productive rather than female and reproductive, erasing and effacing the care work that makes Making possible. Given the Maker movement’s appropriation of Blake as symbol, it is instructive to examine the collaborative creative processes of William and his wife Catherine, who facilitated Blake’s “making” at every stage, both as care worker and as laborer at the press. Recent scholarship on Catherine, however, falls into the same gendered binaries as discussions of the current Maker movement, a failing this essay remedies by proposing a model of Blakean ecology as a method for reimagining the Blakes’ lives. The essay concludes by examining Catherine’s presence and the role of care work in the William Blake Archive and calling for a critical digital humanities that foregrounds and rewards affective labor.
Digital humanities and the study and teaching of North American religions
Reed, Ashley (Wiley, 2016-12)
The digital humanities are a collection of methodologies with a long history in the disciplines of literature, linguistics, media studies, and pedagogy. These methodologies and the scholars who employ them have recently gained widespread attention among academics and observers of higher education. While the digital humanities have deep roots in the field of religious studies, most scholars of religion have been relatively slow to embrace digital methods for research and pedagogy. This essay provides an introduction to the cluster of research and teaching methods generally grouped under the term “digital humanities.” Digital humanists create digital archives, research collections, and exhibits; map and visualize information using online tools; and develop and apply computational methods of textual and visual analysis. This essay offers examples of scholarship and pedagogy on North American religions that use each of these methodologies, and concludes with a brief discussion of resources for learning about and becoming involved with digital humanities work.
Dressing up the author: Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace branding their masculine authorial identities through fashion
Greene, Justin R. (Intellect, 2020-10-01)
This article explores the use of clothes and other accessories as markers of masculine authorial identity. Fashion and literature are contentious partners, with literature attempting to keep a firm distance from the popular trappings of the fashion world. However, writers have historically used fashion to create their identities beyond the printed word. This can be seen in examples such as Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain and the ways clothing items have become associated with their personae as men of letters. Contemporary writers are no different, yet many continue to exude ambivalence towards clothing having any effect on their images in the literary sphere. Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace are two examples of writers who downplay fashion’s role in their public images. Franzen and Wallace establish their positions at the forefront of American literature not only with their fiction and non-fiction works but also in the ways they adorn their bodies and present them within visual media. Nevertheless, both Franzen and Wallace perform as specific types of masculine authors through their fashion choices. Ultimately, they use fashion to brand their authorial identities in accordance with their literary output. Franzen’s and Wallace’s willing participation in the stylization of their images to meet the masculine standards of authorial identity reveals the preva-lence of gendered stereotypes regarding how authors should be represented within popular culture.
Enshrining Gender in Monuments to Settler Whiteness: South Africa’s Voortrekker Monument and the United States’ This Is the Place Monument
Prescott, Cynthia; Rees, Nathan; Weaver-Hightower, Rebecca (MDPI, 2021-03-02)
This essay examines two monuments: the Voortrekker Monument in South Africa and the American This is the Place Monument in Utah. Similar in terms of construction and historical purpose, both employ gender as an important tool to legitimize the settler society each commemorates. Each was part of a similar project of cultural recuperation in the 1930s−1940s that chose as their object of commemoration the overland migration in covered wagons of a group of white settlers that felt oppressed by other white settlers, and therefore sought a new homeland. In a precarious cultural moment, descendants of these two white settler societies—the Dutch Voortrekkers of South Africa and Euro-American Mormons (Latter-day Saints or LDS) of Utah—undertook massive commemoration projects to memorialize their ancestors’ 1830s−1840s migrations into the interior, holding Afrikaners and Mormons up as the most worthy settler groups among each nation’s white population. This essay will argue that a close reading of these monuments reveals how each white settler group employed gendered depictions that were inflected by class and race in their claims to be the true heart of their respective settler societies, despite perceiving themselves as oppressed minorities.
Facts Upon Delivery: What Is Rhetorical About Visualized Models?
Lindgren, Chris A. (SAGE, 2020-09-15)
What expectations should professionals and the public place on visuals to communicate the uncertainties of complex phenomena? This article demonstrates how charts during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic articulated visual arguments yet also required extended communicative support upon their delivery. The author examines one well-circulated chart comparing COVID-19 case trends per country and highlights its rhetoric by contrasting its design decisions with those of other charts and reports created as the pandemic initially unfolded. To help nonexpert audiences, the author suggests that professional communicators and designers incorporate more contextual information about the data and notable design choices.
Heaven's Interpreters: Women Writers and Religious Agency in Nineteenth-Century America
Reed, Ashley (Cornell University Press, 2020-09-15)
In Heaven's Interpreters, Ashley Reed reveals how nineteenth-century American women writers transformed the public sphere by using the imaginative power of fiction to craft new models of religious identity and agency. Women writers of the antebellum period, Reed contends, embraced theological concepts to gain access to the literary sphere, challenging the notion that theological discourse was exclusively oppressive and served to deny women their own voice. Attending to modes of being and believing in works by Augusta Jane Evans, Harriet Jacobs, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Elizabeth Stoddard, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Susan Warner, Reed illuminates how these writers infused the secular space of fiction with religious ideas and debates, imagining new possibilities for women's individual agency and collective action.
“I Have No Disbelief”: Spiritualism and Secular Agency in Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons
Reed, Ashley (Project Muse, 2017)
This essay explores the imagery of Spiritualist religion that runs through Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons, arguing that the exercise of Spiritualist gifts including clairvoyance, trance-speaking, and spirit-traveling enables the Morgeson sisters to access multiple forms of cross-gender and cross-class agency. The Morgesons has long been read as a novel of secularization that records the decline of New England Calvinist orthodoxy in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. In fact The Morgesons depicts the secular situation in the antebellum period—characterized by increasing religious diversity and new religious modalities—and explores the multiple forms of female agency made available by a secular milieu. This essay reveals how critical regimes that prioritize liberal, secularized models of agency over discursive, secular models obscure the forms of circulating and collaborative agency at play in novels by Stoddard and other women writers.
“Lots of Prayer, Lots of Emotional Coaching, and Pray it Works out the Best”: Tuning in to Kids in a Rural Appalachian Community
Hernandez, Erika; Carmichael, Katie; Satterwhite, Emily M.; Yanuaria, Chelsea; Dunsmore, Julie (2020-07)
Rural Americans face barriers in access to services such as psychoeducation programs. The purpose of this study was to describe how participants in a rural Appalachian community, a geographic location that has been largely underrepresented in the literature, responded to a psychoeducation program about parents’ facilitation of children’s emotional competence. The Tuning in to Kids (TiK) parent education program focuses on improving parents’ awareness of children’s emotions, their ability to promote children’s developing emotional competence, and the strength of the parent– child bond. This work has shown beneficial effects in Australia, yet research is scarce regarding implementation in the United States, particularly with rural populations. The TiK program was delivered in 2 groups of 6 sessions each, with 2 participants in the first group and 7 participants in the second group. To analyze session transcripts, we employed discourse analysis methods from multiple disciplines, including thematic coding, linguistic analysis, and sociocultural analysis. Overall, our interdisciplinary analysis allowed us to draw conclusions about unique ways that both participants and the facilitator contributed to group success. Key results included the emergence of 4 major themes: participants’ questioning/adopting TiK methods, parental support across participants, facilitator’s leveling the hierarchy, and facilitator self-disclosure. Findings support the utility of an interdisciplinary approach to examining parent education in rural Appalachia, a population that is underrepresented in the literature. Further, our findings support parents’ openness to psychoeducation in this community, as well the effectiveness of the facilitator’s integration of locally-relevant content throughout the program.
Managing an Established Digital Humanities Project: Principles and Practices from the Twentieth Year of the William Blake Archive
Reed, Ashley (Alliance of Digital Humanities, 2014-04-01)
Scholars and practitioners of the digital humanities generally recognize the importance of solid project management and oversight. But coursework and publications related to DH project management tend to focus heavily on the difficulties of planning and launching a new project rather than the challenges of maintaining an established one. Meanwhile, online advice for would-be managers is couched in the language of “tips and tricks” or “steps for beginners”. Together these phenomena downplay the professional skills needed to successfully manage a project while suggesting that project management is necessary only in the beginning stages of an endeavor. They may even give the impression that scholarship in the digital humanities is inherently ephemeral. Through a case study of project management practices at the William Blake Archive, which began publishing electronic scholarly editions in 1996, this essay details the challenges and rewards of managing an established digital humanities project. Managers of mature projects may be called upon to oversee expansions in scope and mission, research and recommend new features and tools, grow or shrink the number of project staff, seek out alternate sources of support when early grants run out, maintain continuity as collaborators join and leave the project, and develop new workflows and procedures to reflect these and other changes.
Mapping Rhetorical Knowledge in Advanced Academic Writers: The Affordances of a Transactional Framework to Disciplinary Communication
Rabbi, Shakil (2020-07-01)
Research on written communication shows that rhetorical knowledge is a key domain of disciplinary writing expertise (Gere et. al. 2019). Much of the recent work in this area has focused on the social dimensions of learning this knowledge. This article builds on these conversations with a presentation of two “advanced academic writers” (Tardy, 2009) and interpreting how they conceptualize rhetorical knowledge through an understanding of academic communication as transaction and symbolic exchange (Britton & Pradl, 1982). I make a case for the value of a transactional framework for interpreting writers’ performance of genre situations. I also show that this framework can provide a “metagenre” (Carter, 2007), a way of doing writing in the discipline, and a “threshold concept” (Adler-Kassner & Wardle, 2015), a way of thinking about writing tasks that shapes writers’ experiences of and learning with them. The two case studies provide an argument for the efficacy of rhetorical knowledge in fostering disciplinary genres when it is framed as understanding situations of communication.
Writing With Data: A Study of Coding on a Data-Journalism Team
Lindgren, Chris A. (SAGE, 2020-11-11)
Coding has typically been understood as an engineering practice, where the meaning of code has discrete boundaries as a technology that does precisely what it says. Multidisciplinary code studies reframed this technological perspective by positing code as the latest form of writing, where code’s meaning is always partial and dependent on situational factors. Building out from this premise, this article theorizes coding as a form of writing with data through a qualitative case study of a web developer’s coding on a data-journalism team. I specifically theorize code as a form of intermediary writing to examine how his coding to process and analyze data sets involved the construction and negotiation of emergent problems throughout his coding tasks. Findings suggest how he integrated previous coding experience with an emerging sense of how code helped him write and revise the data. I conclude by considering the implications of these findings and discuss how writing and code studies could develop mutually informative approaches to coding as a situated and relational writing activity.

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