• Campers

    Jennifer Sano-Franchini

    I am a third-year PhD student in Rhetoric & Writing; Graduate Teaching Assistant in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, & American Cultures; and Graduate Fellow with the Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative at Michigan State University. I am interested in theories of time, Asian American rhetoric, and the intersection of cultural and digital rhetorics.

    My Posts

    Facilitating a Rhetoric of Collaboration: A Resource for Learning/Teaching Research

    Tuesday, April 19th, 2011 | Jennifer Sano-Franchini

    I’ve been browsing through people’s posts so far and I’m particularly interested in those that deal with online archives for teaching and research (for example, this and this), as I think they relate closely to the project described below.

    I’m currently working on a web-based project of thematically-organized collections of link sources pertaining to contemporary cultural issues. The purpose of this site is to serve as a learning and teaching resource for college-level writing students and instructors. Moreover, it aims to facilitate a more collaborative understanding of how writing, research, and knowledge-making happens through an interface that enables user-contributed links as well as user participation across institutional and geographical boundaries; through this project, users will be encouraged to freely draw from others’ work, work together to build bodies of knowledge, and add to larger ongoing conversations pertinent to those bodies of knowledge.

    This project draws on the layout of Wikipedia in that its content will be driven primarily by user-contribution of links to news articles, scholarly articles, blogs, and other online media, which will be arranged by individual pages pertaining to specific topics, to which users can follow, or subscribe. Unlike Wikipedia, however, the site will not include a narrative accompanying the citations; the primary resource that this website will provide will be the links to sources aggregated around specific issues, encouraging students and other users to formulate their own narratives from the media sources provided. In this help site way, individual pages will put links to articles, blogs, and other kinds of pieces of a larger conversation into dialogue with one another. I’m currently thinking to begin with the content domain of intellectual property, which might include pages on: history of intellectual property, copyright/copyleft, remix, read-write culture, plagiarism, fair use, torrent communities, piracy, authorship/ownership, design imitation in fashion, and intellectual property across cultures. I’m interested in talking through the kinks of this project, especially with others who are working on structurally similar things.

    I’ve also been seeing a bunch of articles lately discussing the difficulties/ethical implications of user-generated content, which I think could be interesting to address.