Doing Transnational Circulation Studies in a Digital Age

Thanks to all who helped make this event a success!

RCGC member Jasmine Lee live-tweeted the proceedings. Click here to see a summary.


Monday, February 27, 2017

Humanities Gateway 1010

2:00pm-3:30pm

In this multimedia presentation, Laurie Gries (CU Boulder) will explore both the promises and the complexities of doing transnational research in a digital age. With an interest in visual rhetoric, new media, and the digital humanities, Gries has spent the last eight years tracing a single image around the world and developing digital research strategies to support such research. She has also helped develop an area of rhetorical study called circulation studies—the study of rhetoric and writing in motion. Drawing on this experience, Gries will introduce what she calls iconographic tracking—a digital research method for tracing the circulation, transformation, and consequentiality of new media images. She will specifically explore how digital visualization techniques can support transnational visual research by showcasing her recent efforts to code 1000 pictures from around the world and to develop 8 different data visualizations to map out a single image’s global circulation, global activities, and rhetorical transformation. In addition to discussing the affordances of iconographic tracking for circulation studies and mobility studies at large, she will discuss how such approach can be adapted for other rhetorical and transnational investigations. Audience members can expect to walk away with fresh ideas for taking their research global in a digital age.

Laurie Gries (PhD, Syracuse University) is an assistant professor with a joint appointment in the Program for Writing and Rhetoric and the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is author of Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetorics (2015), which won the 2016 Advancement of Knowledge Award and the 2016 Research Impact Award issued by CCCC. She is also co-editor of a forthcoming collection titled Circulation, Rhetoric, and Writing (Utah State UP) and most recently the author of “Mapping Obama Hope: A Data Visualization Project for Visual Rhetorics” (Kairos, January 2017). In addition to teaching and researching at CU Boulder, Gries acts a managing editor for the online journal, enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture.

Presented by the Rhet/Comp Grad Collective.

Sponsored by the Composition Program, the Campus Writing Coordinator, Humanities Commons, and the Department of English.


Information for attendees:

To RSVP, click here. The event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.

The event will take place on the UCI campus in room 1010 of the Humanities Gateway (HG) building. Click here to see HG on an interactive map of the UCI campus.

Attendees are advised to park at the Mesa Parking Structure. An all-day permit costs $10. All vehicles are required to display a valid permit at all times. Permit dispensers, located throughout the structure, accept major credit cards and cash. Click here to see a map of the easiest walking route from the Mesa structure to HG.


To talk about this event on social media, use the hashtag #GriesUCI.



Poster photo credit: ptwo, via Flickr.

Banner photo credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studios.