Accessibility Tools

Reprogrammable Rhetoric: Supplemental design materials and programming scripts

This companion website for the edited collection Reprogrammable Rhetoric hosts supplemental instructional design materials and programming scripts that correspond to various chapters. Across its different articulations, “critical making” explores how theory and practice inform one another and, particularly, how digital and nondigital making practices have the potential to shape public attitudes, beliefs, and subjectivities. The editors of this collection (Michael J. Faris and Steve Holmes) explored the term “reprogramming” in the “Introduction” to the edited collection as a conceptual and material conduit for exploring critical making. To “reprogram” at once confirms the operation of a previously functioning program such as a cultural script, a wearable sensor, an identity performance, or a literal hardwired circuit like the image on the collection’s book cover. Reprogramming at once affirms that each of us creates and writes by learning that authorship is political and that by recontextualizing scripts, programs, ideas, hardware, games, paper circuit diagrams, makers of all backgrounds (humanities students, lay readers, academics, or anyone really) can learn how to seize the available means and mediums of persuasion.

In this spirit, many authors who contributed to Reprogrammable Rhetoric created tutorials, instructions, and programming scripts to help readers learn specific techniques (e.g., critical text mining) or technologies (e.g., the Raspberry Pi) described throughout the edited collection. While the authors certainly encourage readers to download and learn some of these technologies and techniques, they offer these resources to reinforce one primary goal of the edited collection: learning how to reprogram differently for a wide variety of ethical and political purposes and outcomes. Readers can and should use these companion website materials to launch new rhetorical activities, research paradigms, or activist initiatives specific to their own needs and concerns.

As a final note, the authors who contributed materials to this companion website have pledged to help maintain the functionality of any updatable programming scripts. While the editors have user tested the files on this website prior to the publication of this edited collection in the summer of 2022, we encourage any readers who find scripts or files that do not seem to work as indicated by the authors to reach out to the editors for assistance in receiving an updated script.

Chapter 2: “The Circulation of Touch: Very Simple Machines for Creating Tactile Textual Experiences” by David M. Sheridan
Chapter 4: “Critical Text Mining: Ethical Paradigms for Determining Emoji Frequency in #blacklivesmatter” by Kellie M. Gray and Steve Holmes
Chapter 6: “Big Data, Tiny Computers: Making Data-Driven Methods Accessible with a Raspberry Pi” by Aaron Beveridge and Nicholas Van Horn
Chapter 9: “Actionable Monuments: Making Critical Augmented Reality Activism” by Sean Morey and M.Bawar Khan
Chapter 14: “Crafting in the Classroom: Carpentry and Pedagogy in Rhetoric and Composition” by John Jones

 

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