Exploring Classical Rhetoric Led Me Into Old and New Interests.

I did expect to focus on creationist rhetoric when I started my PhD at Ohio University. However, I didn't know it would lead me to want to teach science writing and visual rhetoric focusing on scientific visuals.

My application essay for Ohio University rhetorically analyzes a creationist blog that Dr. Ann Gauger keeps. In her "Something borrowed, something new" blogpost, Dr. Gauger contends that human orphan genes undermine evolutionary theory. For my analysis, I do a Toulmin analysis of Gauger's warrants. I concluded the essay by applying what I learned in my analysis to having students analyze controversial discourse. In the end, I wanted student to understand opposing viewpoints.

However, I shifted my focus from creationist understanding of science to teaching and researching written and visual rhetoric in the sciences.

My interests in Data Visualization and key scholars in rhetoric of science now dovetail with classical (and digital) rhetoric.

The first time I saw this graph was on Timothy Morton's blog on hyperobjects. His blog was a reading from the New Materialism class I took from Albert Rouzie at Ohio University.

After looking on the web, I found that Goddard Institute for Space Studies (NASA) made this graph to represent temperature change for the last 120 years. I started connecting studying visual rhetoric in science to my own field. In May of 2018, I presented at Computers and Writing at George Mason University. I used this graph as an object I had the participants redraw to simplify it. I also had them caption their redrawings.

After they finished, they shared what they composed. Just as I noticed in the Creationist Museum placards all those years ago, the participants' explanations tended to explain something complex in very simple terms. I'm not saying the participants gave fallacious responses. I am saying that redrawing represented a type of oversimplification. Moreover, I based my ideas on data visualization on Elijah Meeks' blogs on data visualization and rhetorician of science Heather Graves work on the performativity of scientific visuals.

My work at Computers and Writing links to my future work I'll be presenting at 2019 C's on how scientific visuals perform. I am extending my research on Meeks and Graves' work to build a more rigorous visual rhetoric pedagogy for writing in the sciences. Part of my C's presentation will include talking about Douglas Eyman's update of the rhetorical canons and classical rhetoric in general for digital spaces.