Note: This course is not open for pre-registration. Authorization codes will be given after the first class meeting to a limited number of students. Since the course content overlaps substantially with the previously offered "Digital Storytelling Practicum," students who have already completed that course will not be eligible to register in this one.

Digital rhetoric is a newly emerging field within the study of digital humanities. As an innovative methodology developed primarily from the discipline of writing and composition studies, digital rhetoric reflects on and participates in the intersection of traditional rhetoric and digital media technologies. As rhetoric can be largely defined as the art of persuasion, “digital rhetoric” signifies the application of classical theories of persuasion into the digital realm. In a seminal article, Zappen (2005) clarifies the scope of digital rhetoric as “how traditional rhetorical strategies of persuasion function and how they are being reconfigured in digital spaces” (319). In the most comprehensive scholarly monograph on the subject to date, Eyman (2015) defines digital rhetoric as “the application of rhetorical theory (as analytic method or heuristic for production) to digital texts and performances” (13).

This course aims to integrate the theory and practice of digital rhetoric through the production of digital projects that feature a variety of rhetorical strategies (logos, pathos, ethos) and modes (text, voice, image, video). Students will read and reflect on theories of classical and digital rhetoric, and aim to put those theories into real-world practice.

In the first half of the course, students will read, discuss, and engage with classical theories of rhetoric from Aristotle to Kenneth Burke, along with the latest developments in digital rhetoric, with the goal of understanding how rhetorical strategies function differently across diverse forms of media, such as written texts, blogs, podcasts, and videos. Students will engage critically with digital rhetoric as a concept and familiarize themselves with the critical analysis of selected literary and digital texts.

In the second half, the course will focus on producing a digital rhetoric project to put theory into practice. This module will cover multimodal forms of presentation, including narrative rhetoric, visual rhetoric and the rhetoric of sound. Students will reflect on the effectiveness of different rhetorical strategies in digital production.