Laurie Gries, assistant professor of communication at the University of Colorado Boulder, has won two awards for her 2015 book Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetorics.
The recognition comes from the Conference on College Composition and Communication—or CCCC—a constituent organization within the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).
Gries won the CCCC’s 2016 Advancement of Knowledge Award and the Research Impact Award. The first recognizes empirical studies that most advances the discipline of rhetoric and composition and writing studies. The second is for empirical studies that most advance the mission of the conference.
Gries, who also teaches in the CU-Boulder Program for Writing and Rhetoric, will be recognized on April 8 during the conference’s annual convention in Houston.
As Gries describes it, Still Life with Rhetoric explores what a new materialist approach to rhetorical study might entail and introduces a new digital research method called “iconographic tracking.”
Laurie Gries
She conduced a seven-year-long case study in which she tracked the circulation, transformation and “consequentiality of Shepard Fairey’s now-iconic Obama Hope image.”
On her web site, Gries states that she is invested in developing digital software and data-visualization strategies to support research in visual-rhetoric and circulation studies.
She is honing data-visualization strategies by working on a large project in which she is coding 1,000 pictures of Obama Hope and developing metadata that feed into a variety of interactive maps.
“My hope with all of this work is to offer a software program that will allow others to easily put iconographic tracking to work for their own research projects,” Gries states.
The Conference on College Composition and Communication, with more than 5,000 members and subscribers, supports and promotes the teaching and study of composition, rhetoric, and communication skills at the college level, both in undergraduate and graduate programs. College Composition and Communication is the group’s journal. For more information, visit http://www.ncte.org/cccc.
The National Council of Teachers of English, with 35,000 individual and institutional members worldwide, is dedicated to improving the teaching and learning of English and the language arts at all levels of education. For more information, visit http://www.ncte.org.
With the support of the Writing, Rhetoric, Information, Technology, and Ecology (W.R.I.T.E.) Lab and PWR, Gries is facilitating a two-day event on augmented reality. The event, Thursday and Friday, Feb. 25-26, is titled “Augmented Reality as Critical Media Practice and Inventive Pedagogy.” For more information, click here.
Feb. 23, 2016