A proposal?

title: Six Decades, Six Ways

one sentence description:
This panel uses past CCCC programs to provide six interactive visualizations and representations for considering the history and concerns of the CCCC conference.

Session Description (5000 characters max, spaces included):
Our panel is focused around two questions: What have we learned from major waves made by rhetoricians and compositionists in the past 60 years? and How might we think about pasts and futures in light of what various technologies (both new and not-so-new) enable us to see and do?

Those who attend this panel will interact with six different visualizations and representations of past CCCCs programs. Not a traditional panel, this is rather a set of overlapping installations people can visit in any order, talking with the presenters about what one can learn from looking at CCCC's program history from different (technologized) perspectives.

The first set of installations is titled, "Zooming in and Out: Alternative Views of the CCCC." This presenter uses tools developed by researchers in information visualization (a subfield of computer science for visually representing non-physical data) to create interactive views of information generated in and around the CCCC. This presenter shows how the titles and abstracts of 2009 presentations can be variously combined to discern key themes and preoccupations that cut across speakers and sessions, presenting potential new ways of experiencing the conference itself. Zooming out to view the CCCC’s sixty year history, this presenter offers a visualization that situates this conference historically and geographically. This visualization will display an interactive timeline that maps the cities in which the CCCC has been held in the past 60 years. Along with the location, other information for each year (such as conference/keynote theme, number of conference attendees, cost of a hotel room, number of students enrolled in post-secondary schools) provides visual understanding of the development of this conference over the past six decades.

The second presentation is titled "Sixty Belief Systems, Sixty Dreams, Sixty Maps" and consists of two short videos. Using the sort of "distant reading" recommended in the writings of Franco Moretti, this presenter draws on textual analysis of the presentation titles of the previous 59 years of CCCC programs to visualize, animatedly, the patterns that make the overlapping beliefs, hopes, and frustrations of the profession; the second video performs the same visualizations for the 2009 program.