first efforts

Visualizing politics

This fall I'm designing a new undergrad course called Communication and Visual Politics. During my lunch break today I was googling about for ideas when I came across this. It's a site created by graphic designers that uses your responses to images to "calculate" your political leanings. Here's what they say about their goals:

Visual Ideology is an effort to raise awareness to the use of images in messaging. Given the choice, what images would the general public associate with specific ideas or words? How can one image be more meaningful than another similar image? This project asks viewers to make decisions as to images that best represent their visual definition of political terms or ideas. During this process it is hoped that viewers will begin to develop a better understanding of how visual imagery can influence meaning.

When you launch the site it gives you a series of keywords and asks you to pick the images that you think are the most related to those keywords. Ultimately its calculations are more about political party than "ideology," and some of the images are a bit outdated (think 2004 presidential election). But the concept is intriguing and might be good for students, especially if you combined it with some Lakoff-type stuff about the role of metaphor in politics.

Academic time

I skipped my morning run and got to the office at 7:30 this morning. Then I did six hours of work that, upon completion of said work, got me ready to "start" the day. In other words, I just spent half of today getting prepared for...today.

Needless to say, this does not bode well for tomorrow.

Cool by proxy

Dear Neighbors of the Little Yellow House on Green Street,

I know you noticed that adorable little black and white Mini Cooper parked in my driveway all weekend. And I know what you were thinking: Holy smokes, when did NeighborProfessorChick get so cool? Could she of the shabby clothes and rusting green Toyota really have turned overnight into the kind of HipGal who would own an awesome car like that?

And I also know that when said awesome car disappears, having been retrieved by its owner, the HipGal friend who found herself in need of my driveway space this weekend, your confused world will right itself again: We knew it wasn't hers! She is so.not.cool.enough for that car.

Hallway encounters bring historical gifts

I ran into my emeritus colleague Joe Wenzel the other day. When I mentioned that this week in my seminar we were reading several essays from the early years of the speech communication field, his eyes brightened. "Remember that phrase attributed to Winans, that a 'speech is not an essay standing on its hind legs'?" Yep, I said, I did. "Well, I may have something for you," he said. "Let me rummage around and get back to you."

Yesterday I got an envelope from Joe. The envelope contained five letters written by James A. Winans, one of the founders of the field of speech communication, to Richard Murphy, then a professor at Illinois. Most of them date to 1953-54.

Apparently Murphy was trying to determine where exactly Winans had first said the speech/essay thing. Winans, initially, wasn't sure himself. In a letter dated Sept. 25, 1953, he writes, "I hope it is mine. I know I used it; but how can one know? Does one ever know where his expressions come from. Or his ideas?" He then goes on to elaborate a bit about what he meant:

The expression you ask about seems just a little joke and I wasn't quite sure it was a good figger. But I was trying to say something striking against the notion some have that you can write a nice essay, stand up and say it and have a speech. ... a speech has to have some qualities not too common in literature. Clearness; that is clearness for the hearers. ... A speech should appeal to the interests of the hearers, and to their motives; and, in general, have directness in matter as well as in delivery. All this you know, but I am just trying to get at my own idea. Or what I think was my idea. Maybe it was the expression of a feeling and not based on analysis. ... Now where I uttered those tricky words, I do not know.

Eventually it appears that Murphy was able to track down the citation, a lead article by Winans in the April 1923 issue of The English Journal called "Aims and Standards in Public Speaking Work." According to Murphy's notes (also in the envelope from Joe), what Winans actually said was this:

I deny that there is any place for the new hybrid called oral composition. Speeches may be read, spoken from memory, or extemporized; even essays and papers may be read on occasion. But where in the world is there a place for a thing neither speech nor essay, but a composition standing on its hind legs?

One of the letters also contains a marvelous description from Winans explaining why the national convention ain't what it used to be, but I'll save that for November when we're all thinking about our 2007 national convention.

After Murphy died, Wenzel was given the letters for safekeeping. And now I guess Wenzel's given them to me for safekeeping. If so, it's a pleasure to take on that job. 

How to Dismantle an Academic Department

This week one of the optional readings for my seminar was Tom Benson's "The Cornell School of Rhetoric: Idiom and Institution" (Comm Quarterly, 2003). Rereading it over the weekend, I realized that I should have made it required. Benson offers a detailed history of one of the most influential graduate programs of the field's early decades (the other being this one, of course); in doing so, he contextualizes in a very material way a lot of the issues we're discussing during the first few weeks of the course. The appendix he includes is itself worth the price of admission; it reproduces Cornell's graduate reading list in rhetoric and public address, circa 1958 (can you say British public address?).

What really made me wish I'd required it, though, is that Benson examines at length the institutional events surrounding the closure of Cornell's program in rhetoric and public address in the mid-sixties. His discussion serves as a powerful object lesson for communication/rhetoric folks who still find ourselves having to justify not only what we do but where we do it. In the essay Benson reproduces substantial portions of a document called the "Elledge memo," produced by the ad hoc committee appointed at Cornell to decide the fate of its speech program. Benson writes, "To step into the thirteen-page Elledge memo even after all these years induces, for a rhetorician from the speech tradition, an experience of vertigo, impotence, shame, and resentment." Indeed, pretty much every argument that can be made against the study of rhetoric and public address in speech communication departments is made in this memo. One in particular is quite striking. After admitting that rhetoric has "always been near the center of education," the committee concluded, "It can be argued that modern rhetoric is either too large or too small to be considered by itself as a subject for courses or research."

Whoa. Gives the field's recent interests in "sizing up rhetoric" a decidedly material twist, doesn't it? Apparently it doesn't matter whether you like your rhetoric big or small, cuz we'll never be just right.

Benson suggests in the article that an analysis of the memo might make for a good doctoral exam question or, even better, an "interesting item" for "a department chair search." Indeed -- a great inoculation exercise in preparation for doing battle with institutional efforts to write off/write out rhetoric.

Happy Labor Day

Women's Auxiliary Typographic Union float

New York City Labor Day Parade, 1909

(George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress)

Study in yellow

Allerton Park, Monticello, Illinois