Ashley Rose Kelly

Risk, Regulation, and Rhetorical Boundaries: Claims and Challenges Surrounding a Purported Nuclear Renaissance

This study examines the efforts of individuals and advocacy groups seeking to influence a state utilities commissions decisions regarding a large corporate merger and a nuclear power construction project. Such local engagements have wider significance as the nuclear industry attempts to expand its role in the global energy economy. Utilizing participatory field work and analysis of public documents, we extend the concept of rhetorical boundary work by examining two challenges faced by opponents of the merger and the nuclear project. First, the utilities commissions regulatory mandate is limited to economic risks rather than environmental, health, and safety risks. Second, expert authority is consistently privileged over local, vernacular arguments. We explore the rhetorical negotiation of these boundaries and the effects produced.

Merging Duke Energy and Progress Energy: Online Public Discourse, Post-Fukushima Reactions, and the Absence of Environmental Communication

This article examines online discourse in 2011 surrounding the proposed Duke Energy and Progress Energy merger in the Carolinas. It explores how issues pertaining to the merger, including constructing new nuclear plants, are discussed in media coverage and by citizens using social media. Overall, we find that the merger discourse focuses on economic concerns rather than the environmental concerns we had anticipated. However, post-Fukushima discourse appears to have become more inclusive of environmental concerns. We conclude that environmental discussions and efforts are likely to be globally informed andlocally situated, discussing the implications for environmental communication research exploring online discourses, specifically through social media. Future research must address how to locate and delineate constellations of locally situated discourse to provide a clearer picture of environmentally focused social media communication.

Toward an ontology of rhetorical figures

Our paper describes the Rhetorical Figure Ontology Project, a multidisciplinary research project that is presently working towards the development of a comprehensive database of rhetorical figures, an associated wiki, and, ultimately, an ontology of rhetorical figures. The database and wiki project provide the dataset and space for the conceptual development, respectively, to create an ontology. We define an ontology as a formalized taxonomy or system of classification of concepts and associated descriptions of said concepts. Here we provide an overview of the present state of the project and a discussion of the development of ontological descriptions of rhetorical figures. This work is a joint venture between Dr. Randy Allen Harris (English) and Dr. Chrysanne DiMarco (Computer Science, and English) at the University of Waterloo, Canada.

Solar scramble: an educational children's game for collaborative multi-touch digital tabletops

Our experience report describes the design and development of an educational game for interactive, multi-touch tabletop displays. The game has been designed for children aged 5-10 on the SMART Tabletop platform. This experience report describes the process, design and development of our application and the implications we have drawn from this work in the design of educational technologies for interactive multi-touch tabletops. To investigate the effectiveness of our design, and to identify potential issues in deploying our software, we conducted participant interviews. Based on our design and development process, as well as our participant feedback, we have identified several key issues regarding the development of educational software for K-5 aged (5-10 years old) children on digital tabletops. This research was conducted at the University of Waterloo jointly by the Collaborative Systems Laboratory and the Critical Media Lab.

A humanistic approach to the study of social media: combining social network analysis & case study research

Humanistic research into social media is presently diverse in approach, but rich in theoretical underpinnings. It is unsurprising that there is some difficulty in translating often text-based approaches to multi-media rich, rapidly-evolving social networking environments. We explore theoretical issues for studying social media with respect to one popular research methodology: case study research (CSR). Here we examine the challenges that social media pose to CSR in the humanities and then advance an approach using social network analysis (SNA) to assist in selecting case studies. This approach, we argue, improves selection of case studies by considering the network structures of social media.

Rhetorical models for computational systems: an interdisciplinary approach to reusable, tailorable medical information

This paper aims to bring rhetorical scholarship to the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and further its inclusion in health communication studies. Much work in NLP relies upon statical machine learning techniques, which, while valuable, are still limited in their abilities. Rhetorical theory, the study of suasions, offers a new paradigm for NLP research and development. In this pilot study, we use rhetorical theory as an analytic approach to modeling discourse patterns in a highly tailor corpus of texts. Along with our findings, we argue that rhetorical theory and analysis can further the creation of both tailored documentation and computationally-generated texts.

Instructional Design for Online Learning Environments and the Problem of Collaboration in the Cloud

To investigate how college students understand and use cloud technology for collaborative writing, the authors studied two asynchronous online courses, on science communication and on technical communication. Students worked on a group assignment (3–4 per group) using Google Docs and individually reflected on their experience writing collaboratively. This article explores leadership and how it interacts with team knowledge making and the collaborative writing process. Guidelines are outlined for instructors interested in adopting collaborative, cloud-based assignments, and the tension between providing clear instructional guidance for student teams and allowing teams to embrace the ambiguity and messiness of virtual collaboration are discussed.

Postscript: Futures for Genre Studies

Each chapter in the book has advanced different key issues for genre theory. Increasingly interdisciplinary, genre theory promises to be an important critical theory for exploring new media environments. The rhetorical, linguistic, and semiotic grounding of many of these perspectives offers a fresh import to new media studies by way of their consideration of situated and rhetorical language, discourse, and argument. This short postscript brings together the chapters’ contributions to chart future avenues for genre research.