Launched by the Digital Writing and Research Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, TheJUMP will feature students’ work and promote discussion on the rhetorical decisions made in the creative process.

No longer are the best multimedia works from our undergraduates doomed to fade to oblivion, doomed to be lost forever in digital storage, filed under the archival category of “class-projects-never-to-be-heard-from-again.” They can now find scholarly home at TheJUMP, which will showcase the digital and rhetorical talents our students develop in courses across disciplines, from coast to coast, and which will give rise to a discursive community committed to examining and exploring the potentialities for multimedia rhetoric in the digital age.

The first issue will be published in March, and TheJUMP is currently accepting digital video projects for the second issue. This is a great chance for students to share their work with a larger audience and see what others are doing with multimedia. To get involved, make a submission and join the discussion.

You can view the Flickr slideshow and purchase prints at Retrofuturs.

• How might the idea of new literacies be expanded through examinations of specific literacy practices with particular tools or technologies like social networking, digital games, and multimodal design?
• How can new perspectives, practices, and theories — such as feminism, Queer, and gaming — provide additional insights around the congruencies and tensions between literacies and digital technologies across contexts?

DCE is looking for submissions from scholars, researchers, and practitioners working in areas such as literacy and education, gaming, new media, sociocultural studies of technologies, literary theory and technology, fan studies, adolescents and digital media, and media and identity. Submissions from research groups working in projects like video games research, digital storytelling, and mobile learning are encouraged.

The deadline for manuscript submission is March 1, 2010. For more information about the journal or the submission process, visit the DCE website.

Today I want to share five resources for digital rhetoric and writing that are collaborative and interactive. These resources are rooted in academia, but are very accessible to anyone with an interest in rhetoric as applied to a variety of areas such as education, creative writing, new media, and technical communication.

Kairosnews: A Weblog for Discussing Rhetoric, Technology and Pedagogy

Kairosnews is a discussion community for educators interested in how rhetoric, technology, and pedagogy intersect. The community was developed for rhetoricians to publicly discuss topics such as blogging, intellectual property, and copyright that relate to academia and composition studies.

Computers and Composition Online: The Blog

Computers and Composition Online is the online companion journal to Computers and Composition: An International Journal. The blog is an online resource for scholars and teachers interested in the impact of new and emerging media upon the teaching of language and literacy, and offers features, announcements, and community resources to promote exchange of the latest and best work in the field.

Digital Culture & Education

Digital Culture & Education (DCE) is an international, peer-reviewed online journal for those interested in digital culture and education. DCE looks at the impact of digital culture on identity, education, art, society, culture, and narrative within social, political, economic, cultural, and historical contexts.

The Blogora: Rhetoric Society of America

The Blogora connects rhetoric, rhetorical methods and theories, and rhetoricians with public life. It is an initiative of the Rhetoric Society of America and is hosted by the Computer Writing and Research Lab, part of the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at The University of Texas at Austin.

Digital Humanities Now

Digital Humanities Now is a real-time publication generated from Twitter feeds of scholars that follow the journal on Twitter at @dhnow. These tweets are then processed through Twittertim.es to show articles, blogs, projects, tools, collections, and announcements that are relevant to and open to discussion by the digital humanities community.

I am always thrilled to learn about new resources, so if there is one (or several) that you use for learning about and engaging in digital rhetoric and writing, please share in the comments.

The Futures of Digital Studies 2010 conference is currently accepting submissions. The deadline for both paper and artwork submissions is Tuesday, December 20, 2009.

Paper submissions are encouraged on the topics of (but not limited to): human-computer interaction; writing digital art; immersive digital environments; connecting academic institutions via digital approaches; digital theory; and the work and culture produced in digital environments.

Submissions for artworks that engage or address digital media or other technologies are also being accepted. Submissions may feature images, sounds, film, sculpture, networks, code, games, and other works that explore the hybrid intersections between digital and analogue forms.

Futures of Digital Studies 2010
University of Florida
February 25-27, 2010

The conferences will address the challenges of integrating new technology into writing classroom, as well as how writing technologies have pushed the boundaries of composition in virtual worlds.

C&W invites presentations that address or are based on the following:

• Social Media and Writing
• Gaming
• Virtual Worlds
• Emerging Writing Technologies
• Technologies and Literacies
• Digital Rhetorics and Texts
• New Media

Check out the call for proposals for more information about proposal topics. The deadline for submission is Friday, October 23, 2009 by midnight EST. Registration for the conferences will open in early January.

“Virtual Worlds” @ Purdue
Online Conference: April 15-May 13, 2010*
Onsite Conference: May 20-23, 2010
Purdue University
West Lafayette, IN

* Please note: For the online conference, people will be able to share and comment on work from April 15 to May 5, 2010. The “live” events for the online conference will begin May 6 and run for a week.

The growing volume of infringing content on YouTube has made it a major target for DMCA takedown notices. Unfortunately, the content producers that are flooding the site with takedowns are rarely taking adequate steps to ensure the validity of their claims and are indiscriminately targeting videos that fall within the boundaries of fair use.

Professor Lessig has spent most of his career focusing on the law and technology as it relates to copyright, and has already protested the takedown notice, citing fair use for the audio clips used in the presentation.

Lessig is strongly committed to educating the public, lawmakers, and the content industry about the importance of protecting fair use from DMCA abuses, so it seems likely that he will take advantage of Warner’s mistake to raise awareness of the issue. The fact that the notice was issued at all serves as yet another reminder of how easily the barrage of poorly considered DMCA takedowns can hit innocent bystanders.

This is yet another example of why professional writers need to be aware of and consider fair use, copyright, and other issues of authorship when writing for the web or when gathering clips for remix writing.

Professional writing professor Martine Rife recently testified before the Library of Congress US Copyright Office to argue in favor of expanding the DMCA to include professional writing students and their teachers, as well as any and all non-commercial use.

To learn more about the hearings and the DMCA, check out Martine’s blog, Radical Transparency, for a list of resources and links. You can also follow the process as Lessig fights the takedown notice on his blog or Twitter.

Lessig is a professor at Stanford Law School, and has spent most of his career focusing on the law and technology as it relates to copyright.  He is also the author of Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy.

Be sure to check out Martine Courant Rife’s guest post on copyright and digital writing.

It’s a very smart look at the way technology changes the way we talk, read, write, and learn. It looks like Kansas State is doing some very interesting work in digital ethnography. I’m looking forward to learning more about the program they have and the work their students are doing.

I watched the McCain speech on TV and yes, I was really bothered by the green screen behind him. And the blue screen.  Of course, those in the live audience could see that it was not a green screen, but an image of what we now know as Walter Reed Middle School. Pundits have speculated that the campaign meant to show a photo of Walter Reed Army Medical Center – either way, I want to know why no one thought about how the background would look to the TV audience and more importantly, what it had to do with McCain’s speech.

The McCain camp was quoted as saying that “it’s [the Walter Reed Middle School image] simply a generic photo, like others used and it had no specific meaning.” I hope that the PR person running the campaign doesn’t really believe that because it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of our cultural communication.

Images ALWAYS have specific meaning. That’s what they do. To brush off a photo used in the biggest speech of his campaign as “generic” is incomprehensible to me. These background images should have been carefully chosen to support McCain’s message. We live in a visual culture. You can’t slap something up on a 52×30-foot screen during a nationally-televised speech and not think about what message the image conveys.

Thoughts?