Virtue-Centered Rhetoric

So, this was a bit heavy for reading at 9am on a Monday, but nevertheless, I understand the point of this reading. Ding's style in this piece was (or what my understanding is) what our next paper is supposed to have the tone of. It is about the different methods of comparative rhetoric as Confucius defined it as the cross-cultural study of rhetorical traditions as they exist or have existed in different societies around the world.

The overall layout of the piece began by giving a historical context for virtue-centered rhetoric, and how Ding plans to achieve the goals set by Liu and Mao by examining non-Western rhetorical text and within that text's historical, political, and cultural context. Ding's first methods include conducing a piece-by-piece analyses of each important text and author and then put them together into a larger picture.

The pieces that he seemed to focus on the most was the Analects from Confucius, which was a span of writing collected and recorded over 230 years after his death. 20 of these years encompasses all but the last 20 years of during the first political unity of China by Emperor Qing. His analyses were both by computer and hand-tagged keyword extraction, analyzing a handful of words and how often they occurred, their distribution, and the word meaning to isolate the word from its surrounding context and to analyze it in that context. Overall, Ding found that Confucius's main ideology was that only through virtue can a rule ensure the effectiveness of his orders and that his nation will follow suit.

Confucius’s Virtue-Centered Rhetoric – Huiling Ding

This reading was really interesting to me. I’ve always heard about Confucius, but I never really knew who he was or why he’s so well known. This reading cleared all that up for me. I also found this helpful in terms of layout, since I paid more attention to how this analysis was structured. I got a tip from Samantha about not only paying attention to the content of the articles we’re reading, but also analyzing the structure, and it really does help (thanks Sam)!

Ding starts by talking about comparative rhetoric; defining it and giving a bit of background information on it. Several paragraphs later he begins discussing Confucius. Before going into Confucius’s theories, he gives a bit of background on Confucius’s life and how he developed the ideas he had. After we have the background information and contextual information about his life, Ding moves into how he is going to analyze the work, the Analects. This seemed a bit familiar to me, since this is our next paper – the methods section. After saying how he’s going to analyze the work, Ding analyzes it. He breaks up the work into specific sections, in this case specific words to help narrow down the scope. This helps, since with my topic, Pinterest is a very large social platform, and I need to narrow it down somehow. From here, Ding moves into the conclusion.

Someone once told me when you write a paper, give a speech, or present something, the structure is simple. “Tell them what you’re going to tell them; tell them; tell them what you told them.” This seemed familiar to me in Ding’s paper, and it makes much more sense now that I’m older and actually moving into writing academic works that require repetition to convey denser ideas. Going back to Ding’s analysis, there were several strategies and quotes that I really liked, and think I might use for my own analysis of Pinterest, when the time comes.

First, I like how he mentions that he had to read the text several times through holistic reading. Since Pinterest isn’t a text so much as a platform, I’m going to spend a lot of time on the site, immersing myself to its ways and really perusing through the boards and what’s pinned to them to get a good working understanding of the culture within Pinterest. Second, an approach I really found fascinating was when Ding mentioned that he went through the text to count the words, but he also used a software to take the first ten to fifteen words before and after the use of the phrase and put them together. This, I think, is a very interesting approach. Third, he uses the words as a major foundation for his analysis. He takes a few words, like “ren”, and really does an in-depth analysis of the word itself, and then relates it back to the Analects and Confucius through its meaning. That, I think, is really cool.

Throughout the paper, Ding mentions things like, “After defining…ren, I returned to…”, and “My analysis…” This helps to reorient the reader and guide them through the paper, and I like that. It’s almost as though his audience is people (or scholars) new to the concepts. Additionally, Ding gave a lot of contextual information to increase understanding. This is especially important to my paper, since Pinterest is growing, it still doesn’t have everyone on it, and many people still don’t know what it is or understand it. He also ties all claims to research, which I know you should do, but I haven’t seen it done quite as well as it was done here. It gives me something to look up to when I write my paper, though it’s a completely different topic.

Ding also does a lot of summarizing at the end of the paper, which is good, because there are a lot of ideas and concepts presented in this paper that could easily be forgotten due to over-information, had Ding not carefully thrown in summaries. Overall this reading really helped increase my understanding of both a methodology section and an in-depth analysis.

paper 3: basis/foundation for the paper/RC

How we accomplish a rhetorical criticism?

 What goes into an argument about a Rhetorical Approach/Method?

-purpose: justification of how you plan to study the artifact you are studying/justifying a form of interpretation

 Research Question Audience-
 Context of what you are studying: -broad to narrow -define: historical/temporal/background of discussion -program locale -perspective of critic (to identifies the audience, link content/metaphor to audience)

In-depth Definition of different method/approach


How text and context are tied Text: how do we define it as an artifact -author/creator: -history -platform -interface -parameters-specifically what you are studying -justification of text as significant 
Studies prior have led us to need to study the text in this way

 Reference/Work Cited -approaches to studying a similar locale -

A plan of action for yourself; how you plan to collect information when you are doing your analysis

An education, because studying your artifact may be very different from the ways you normally study

Pool Links

Some before:
http://digarch.lib.mtu.edu/showbib.aspx?bib_id=718265#
http://digarch.lib.mtu.edu/showbib.aspx?bib_id=632761#


Some after:
http://digarch.lib.mtu.edu/showbib.aspx?bib_id=718264#

Zemmels

This reading was basically the history of rhetoric. While I still don’t think of the internet as old (because it is getting up there and years and that means I’m growing up and lalalala…I shouldn’t write these blog posts so late at night). But everything has a history to look through, and so I think this reading is important.

I think Zemmels had a good point when he said that the internet is fragmented and dispersed. And I had never really thought about it before, but I do feel that it has a large effect on its rhetoric; from the discourse, the audience, to the authors.

Once again I’m reading about how rhetoric has had to change for the technological age so it can better address the discourse that comes from an online space. But I wonder if this is such a big surprise? I mean I have a feeling that this is not the first time rhetoric has had to evolve for a new type of artifact. What about the first time they came out with magazines? Or when movies and then tv was first established? I have a feeling that rhetoric had to change for all of this so I’m not sure why the authors I have read seem almost surprised that this has happened. It’s going to happen again, I’m sure.

I like the sound of this rhizome model. “A system of relationships without a center” sounds like a pretty cool way of describing the internet. This also gets at the idea that the internet can be fragmented; these relationships come together on some level, but on other levels they are

Zemmels

I think this piece is a 21 page paper on exactly what this class is about. I was honestly a bit confused about the whole depiction of rhetorical criticism and how it relates to the digital sphere, but this paper made me step back and look at the big picture of what this class is about. It is very important for us to be able to rhetorically analyze the digital world that we use so that we can accurately depict what can or can not be trusted in the ways that it interacts with audiences.

Unfortunately, the audience does not usually feel the same way about this. To the untrained user, according to Zemmels, they typically do not care. The indeterminacy of authorship is a challenge to rhetorical analysis, but the audience sometimes believes that in an internet environment, it is not needed and sometimes poses a challenge. When an author of something remains anonymous, they are more likely to express their true feelings on a subject instead of worrying about their appearance in the public eye. Also, in the world of the internet, it is so easy for users to cut and paste any text that they see, so the authors credibility gets lost in the process anyway.

I couldn't agree more with the section on media in the digital sphere. Douglas Kellner believed that the nation is so corrupted with conservative ideologies, that the internet is a way for people to be exposed to different viewpoints and they would then be able to make more informed decisions about government and society. With traditional print media, sometimes people live in areas where every public viewpoint is conservative. I notice this a lot with my hometown. Because it is a farming community, the newspaper is a weekly-run depiction of republican viewpoints from the 1920s. The number of articles about football and hunting has probably tripled any other normal newspaper. But with the internet, my community can [hope to be] more democratic in their thinking.

An Archaeology of Rhetorical Criticism and Internet Communication – Zemmels

This reading was interesting to read after Barbara Warnick’s piece because it referenced many things she said in her article. I find that very cool because I have the background information prior to reading this article. This one started off by introducing the umbrella term “Internet studies” (1). I like this distinction, because it acknowledges that there are so many areas of study on the internet today. The article also mentions Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) right away. This was also cool to read, because from my studies in the past and what I am interested in for the future, I am interested in the subject of HCI and usability. So I like that that was mentioned.

This article said, “New Media is more narrowly defined here as aural and visual media production, distribution, and consumption” (2). This was a good distinction to me, though it still seems a bit broad. I understand this to mean any sort of imagery online, including its distribution and consumption. This ties in very well with my research topic (Pinterest) because it’s based on imagery and how it gets distributed, so I may have to remember this source for a future paper!

Another thing that stood out to me was that “scholarly research in this area is still relatively new and no universally accepted terms, definitions, theories or methodologies have emerged” (4). This is really cool to read because I personally love that my university offers courses that enable us as students to really get in the field and do our own research and findings, as opposed to just reading about what others have done and leaving it at that. I also find it interesting because it means (to me at least) that I chose the right area of study because this stuff is crazy interesting!

This article, like many before it, also talks about the identity of the user. I find this area of study really interesting, and the fact that it’s mentioned in nearly every academic article we read really highlights its importance. This article says that users “often switch genders”, which lead them to “become the authors not only of the text, but of themselves, constructing new selves through social interaction” (9). This helps to create an ethos (or distract from it) when a user is reading text online. Following Warnick’s article, this leads me again to question the importance of credibility and traditional notions of authorship.