"Almost any time you go outside and look up at the sky, you can see clouds."
Tomie de Paola
The Cloud Book, 1975

Clouds, Graphs, and Maps: Distant Reading and Disciplinary Imagination

Taking Franco Moretti's data-mining and visualization work in Graphs, Maps, Trees as its guiding impetus, this project argues for and enacts a related set of methods in application to College Composition and Communication, a leading journal in the field of rhetoric and composition. With chapters organized around concepts of clouds (viz., tagging practices, metadata, and circulation), graphs (viz., historicism, quantification, and patterns), and maps (viz., geolocative indicators, relationships, and cartography), this project elaborates a theory of distant reading suited to disciplinary imagination, knowledge, and understanding. Additionally, matters of abstraction, visual modeling, graphesis (Drucker), mobilization (Latour), relays (Ulmer), network sense, and attitudes toward distance and visuality the humanities (Virilio) coalesce throughout, grounding this work and buttressing its key propositions.

Prospectus (PDF, 117kb)

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