Tracing Networks

Paul Prior’s discussion of Tracing Process: How Texts Come Into Being picks up nicely from Charles Bazerman’s chapter on Intertextuality. Since no text is created or consumed in a self-contained bubble, then it can be deduced that the intertextual connections and pathways should be traceable and that there is much to learn from analyzing the steps in which texts are created (Bazerman, 2004, p. 84).

As in the practice of genealogical research, any human structure, expression, organization or communicated unit, has the potential to be traced from a parent text to its offspring and subsequent grand-children, or more commonly, traced backwards in time to its origins. Prior, and much of the earlier research he cites (Prior, 2004, p. 199), focuses on what could be termed traditional (written language) texts, yet the method of tracing continues to expand to myriad contexts, across myriad formats and technologies, for myriad motives.

Clay Spinuzzi traces genres in the corporate environment in his 2003 work, Tracing Genres through Organizations.

Three of our readings for this week concern the findings of our very own Liza Potts as she traces digital communications in times of disaster and in the changing climate of the digital music industry, in the hope of inspiring technical communicators and social media designers to make modifications which would either drastically improve communications during critical moments after a catastrophe (Potts, 2009a, 2009b), or work toward advocating toward agreeable, mutually beneficial relationships in the digital music industry (Potts, 2010, p. 300).

ODU colleague and Prezi master, Vincent Rhodes demonstrates his ability to trace comments in a Twitter stream during a conference presentation with unexpected results (Rhodes, 2010). Rhodes’ discussion and analysis of this event this event can be found in his presentation here.

The ramifications of tracing information are fascinating. Within the Worldwide Web of computer connections, tracing becomes much easier than in the more linear days of physical trips to libraries and musty, dark archives. One of the readings in Liza Potts’ Tracing Digital Culture course in the 2009 ODU Summer Doctoral Institute noted one particularly intriguing example of tracing information around the event of a stolen Sidekick (Guttman). The rhizomatic connections among global, interested parties helped a woman not only recover her Sidekick, but publicly humiliate the perpetrator. Read the fascinating story about how it was retrieved here.

An exciting outcome to be sure, but what if a party is wrongfully accused? What if your computer shows that you’ve visited a website that could potentially harm your social status? Damage can be done to a reputation just as quickly as a global show of support.

For other scholarly readings on Tracing Process, once again, I can’t recommend Rebecca Moore Howard’s gigantic bibliography of Rhetoric and Composition highly enough. Moore Howard cites no less than 146 entries pertaining to tracing, or rather Post-Process (including Prior’s article as well).

For more information on Actor Network Theory, try Bruno LaTour’s Reassembling the Social.

Works Cited

Bazerman, C. (2006). Intertextuality: How texts rely on other texts. What Writing Does and How it Does it. Bazerman, C. and P Prior. (Eds.), New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 83-96.

Guttman, E. The Stolen Sidekick Page. Last updated 9 Feb, 2007. Retrieved from http://evanwashere.com/StolenSidekick/

LaTour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social. New York: Oxford University Press.

Moore Howard, R. Post-process. Bibliography of Rhetoric and Composition. Retrieved from http://wrt-howard.syr.edu/Bibs/Process.htm

Potts, L. (2010). Consuming digital rights: mapping the artifacts of entertainment. Technical Communication, 57(3), 300-318.

Potts, L. (2009). Diagramming with actor network theory: a method for modeling holistic experience. Professional Communication Conference, IEEE International. 16-18 July 2008, 1-6. Retrieved from http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/mostRecentIssue.jsp?punumber=4603795

Potts, L. (2009). Using Actor Network Theory to trace and improve multimodal communication design. Technical Communication Quarterly, 18(3), 281-301.

Prior, P. (2004) Tracing process: how texts come into being. What Writing Does and How It Does It. Bazerman, C. and P Prior. (Eds.), New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.167-200.

Rhodes, V. (2010). Moderation or presentation? Using Twitter backchannel for more effective conference presentations. Computers and Writing Conference, West Lafayette, IN. 22 May, 2010. Presentation. Retrieved from http://www.digitalcrossrhodes.com/2010/05/moderation-or-presentation-using-twitter-backchannel-for-more-effective-conference-presentations/

Spinuzzi, C. (2003). Tracing Genres Through Organizations: A Sociocultural Approach to Information Design (Acting with Technology). Cambridge: MIT Press.