Creating digital literary community
By Naomi Silver
The Gayle Morris Sweetland Center for Writing, the University of Michigan Press and MPublishing are pleased to announce the launch of the Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative (DRC).
The Collaborative has two dimensions: it is a book series that will publish born-digital and digitally enhanced texts focused on the intersections between technologies and communications (teaching, writing, reading) and the social, aesthetic, and political contexts where these occur; it is also a community web space by and for scholars and teachers working in computers and writing and digital rhetoric. U-M colleagues are warmly encouraged to participate.
Part of a campus effort to foster leadership on digital scholarship both locally and nationally — and building on the successes of the Computers and Writing Conference hosted by Sweetland in May 2011 and the HASTAC conference in December 2011, co-organized by Sweetland, the UM Press, and MPublishing, alongside the Humanities Institute — the web space includes a curated blog, resources, and a wik
The first blog posts are part of a themed conversation on the topic “What does digital rhetoric mean to me?” The resources section of the DRC website is a place to ask questions, post a syllabus or book list, test new theories, or share ideas about new technologies and software, along with other issues important to scholars and teachers in digital rhetoric. The wiki houses entries on key persons, institutions and organizations, concepts, and texts, developed by the digital rhetoric community.
An annual prize of $5,000 for the best book published in the DRC Book Series will be offered. The DRC Board, whose members are drawn nationally from faculty with expertise in the area and include UM Assistant Professor of English Melanie Yergeau, will make the selection along with DRC Directors Anne Ruggles Gere and Naomi Silver, both with the Sweetland Center for Writing, and UM Press Editor-in-Chief Tom Dwyer.
To see the Collaborative in action — and to contribute, publish, and participate — visit http://www.DigitalRhetoricCollaborative.org.
For additional information, contact DigitalRhetoricCollaborative@umich.edu
