Tools, Technologies, Inquiry

    After exploring the different tools and technologies listed on the assignment sheet, we determined that we would compile a bibliography using Zotero. We think that Zotero would be very useful for a larger, more focused project, because the program includes multiple kinds of documents (PDFs, websites), and the documents can be tagged according to the user’s interest. We don’t necessarily see Zotero as a technology that would invite certain inquiries (or prohibit certain inquiries for that matter) – the tool just seems to be more focused on making connections and patterns by amassing texts and musings/annotations on those texts.  

     What follows here is an assessment of the limitations and affordances of the different tools we explored during this assignment. Archive Grid would allow one to see, for example, secondary materials written about Francis Bacon (there are no primary, manuscript materials from him); however, the site does host primary materials. The INPHO project’s ontology, however, allows a user to examine the complex relationships among terms and thinkers, which would help us answer the question from Tuesday regarding the relationship between rhetoric and inquiry – INPHO seems pretty well-suited to help us see the link between those concepts and to trace them across texts. We found it much more helpful. On MONK, if a user knew of a particular researcher who had compiled bibliographic material on that site, then one could peruse that material to see the connections that have already been made (problematic because there seems to be no logical organization to the untrained user). Internet of Encyclopedia of Philosophy allows you to search rhetoricians/philosophers, topics/periods. However, instead of searching the primary texts, the user is directed to a description of the text. A search for terms is hosted through Google (linking to different spaces). We searched for rhetoric, and the search brought us to different spaces, but not to the texts. On the whole, it seems suited to aligning thinkers and terms.

     We would like to be able to trace, for example, shifts in terminologies and understandings. Specifically, when did eloquence become known as style? Being able to search a genealogy of terms would be both useful and effective in tracing our terms. Dates and figures associated with this shift would help the user notice paradigm shifts and open up new ways of understanding the rhetorical tradition through those terms. Some of the tools show clear groupings of people, which represents an intellectual network specific to time and place and specific ways of thinking about the connections that should be made across the rhetorical tradition. We think this could either be prescriptive or helpful, so it is something that we should be aware of.

Molly and Logan 

Rhetorical Historiography using Zotero

Josh Eskew
Martha McKay Canter
Dr. Graban
Digital Project #3

For our Digital Project #3, Josh and I were interested in the functionality of Zotero, so we downloaded it and began exploring. Within minutes we had begun gathering a bibliography of some of the authors we have read in our class.

Zotero is a tool that is useful to build a bibliography of a trace, or guide someone through a trace concept. Using this, it is easy to impose a structure of a text which quickly renders apparent some organizational structure. For example, we searched "Peter Ramus" on JSTOR through the FSU proxy and received 13 pertinent documents within seconds.

It is obvious that Zotero makes the standard activities of research much easier and accessible, but it also opens new pathways for analysis. Assume we took made a digital library of our traces and the texts from these courses. We could use tags within Zotero to notate different concepts and where they appear, and then we could run a search or create a library with its own structure based on the passages that we have tagged. We could also use tags to create cross-references, and so we can explore the relationships between different texts and different concepts much more readily.

Moreover, this tool is incredibly useful for graduate students who are building reading lists for prelim exams, or for dissertation research, or for that matter, for any research project. For that matter, this tool allows us to create separate folder for any variety of research projects without having to worry about storing it on our drives or locating it. Searching with Zotero is fast, word/concept specific, and simple. A search of the small library we created in a few minutes of the term "logic" produced a short bibliographic list of sources. By collecting texts for specific research projects allows the user to run a quick search across the texts collected.

There seems to be a scaffolding benefit, too. For a project on St. Valentine, for example, a wide collection of texts could be quickly accessed running an initial search of the words, “St. Valentine;” from there secondary and tertiary tags or terms searches would allow the user to swiftly narrow the term for research. What is the benefit of this, then, compared with a pre-existing database? It seems that the answer to that is that Zotero stores your collection of sources for you, not unlike a collected annotated bibliography. But it’s personal, and tailored, and taggable, and organizable in user specific ways.

Explorations of Zotero - Archival and Organization

Overview and Step One 

We looked at a number of the resources, such the Archive Grid, Zotero, and the Monk Project.

Archive Grid: We could map and locate physical archives, search by topic, and get links to the appropriate archive websites with contact information.

Zotero: Keeps track and downloads information from resources found online. Captures and collects bibliographic information and places it into user-created folders.

Monk Project: Helps identify patterns in texts, complementary to Word Hoard and pulls from The Nora Project and various databases.

The Center for History and New Media was also an interesting collection of various open-access resources available online. It had a broad listing of resources for different historical periods/categories.

Exploring Zotero 

For the second part of the assignment, Christine and I chose to work within Zotero to build a bibliography for our course. We spent a fair amount of time simply getting the program to work, but immediately began to see its utility. We learned that, based on the source, it’s going to catalogue resources in a different way (Google Books versus PDF versus Database listing) and the information will differ depending upon the kind of database accessed. We also learned that in working with the tool we can add our own information if it is not present, create notes detailing our thoughts, and tag entries for specific purposes, further enhancing the organizational utility of the program.  However, some obstacles involve where and how you access resources. We began by working off campus and, as such, were not able to collect the same kind of data by adding sources from Zotero. Even when signing in remotely, there were still some issues in getting the program to successfully archive and store PDF original documents on the individual computer. One needs to be careful about how one adds documents and whether the correct proxies are set up for user access to protected content.

I feel that Zotero could help in broad concept tracing if we were to use tags associated with different rhetorical terms. It might allow a larger purview of sources from which we could draw connections between texts that might not otherwise be readily visible. But because of the user-nature of inputting tags, it could be less useful at the beginning of research, in that the user wouldn’t necessarily be able to comprehensively tag the text. Tags can also help organize a list of search terms used to acquire the sources input into the bibliography. Essentially the cross-searching abilities—finding keywords in the content of all documents stored in your library—mean that you can easily find patterns across texts. In twenty minutes I don’t believe we can actually fully appreciate the full utility of this text.

I feel that this resource could be incredibly helpful for tracing concepts across specific individual texts, pointing to where connections might exist. Because this is a tool for organizing sources, it’s a frame for understanding whatever you’re looking at, while allowing you to see the way that your sources overlap. Once you build a library, you could search agency and all texts that have that term should appear. So it could be seen as searching history through similarity.

- Christine Maddox Martorana

- Bret Zawilski

On Campbell and Inquiry (and Other Things ...)

Hello, Everyone:

As promised, I report today's discussion questions here, in case they can be useful as you work through your trace of Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric.

1. Reflect on the table of contents: What do you notice? Where does emphasis appear to be in the treatise? How is it organized, and what can that organization tell you about the “new rhetoric”
2. What is the audience’s role in making knowledge, and how informed do you think Campbell thinks the audience is or needs to be?
3. In what way do Campbell’s attitudes toward hearers affect (disrupt or complicate or destabilize) efforts to see rhetoric as inquiry?
4. Suppose we want to present Campbell as a reformer or innovator—where do we have a case for this claim?
5. How does Campbell approach the oral and written? To what extent does he focus on one to the harm or detriment of the other?

At this point in your tracing -- and because this is an extremely rich text in all of your trace concepts -- be prepared to have your first sense of your trace "terms" shaken up, or disrupted slightly. Feel free to rely on the questions on your heuristic and on finding new ways to answer them in this text.

Looking forward to your findings,

-Dr. Graban