Six Decades / Six Ways

ONE SENTENCE DESCRIPTION:
Drawing on data collected from past CCCC programs, this panel engages participants with six interactive visualizations or installations that, taken together, point to potentials for re-searching, re-viewing and re-presenting the history and concerns of the CCCC conference.

SESSION DESCRIPTION (5000 characters max, spaces included):
In light of the CCCC's 60th anniversary, members of this panel draw on six decades of conference proceedings to understand what this rich assortment of data might reveal about where we, as a field, have been and where we are headed. Unlike more traditional conference essions, ours is comprised of six free-standing visualizations or remediations of data taken from past conference programs and proceedings. Taken together, these overlapping, interactive installations invite conference participants to experience CCCC’s program history from a variety of different (technologized) perspectives and to consider how various other technologies (both new and not-so-new) might be recruited and/or recombined in ways that allow us to imagine still others ways of re-presenting both our pasts and potentials.

The first presentation is titled "Zooming in and Out: Alternative Views of the CCCC." Using tools developed by researchers in information visualization, this presenter offers a series of interactive views of information generated in and around the CCCC. Zooming in on the 2009 conference, this presenter shows how the titles and abstracts of presentations can be variously viewed to discern key themes and preoccupations that cut across speakers and sessions. Zooming out to view the CCCC’s sixty-year history, this presenter offers a visualization that situates the 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 sixty years; along with the location, other information for each year (such as conference/keynote theme, number of conference sessions, cost of a hotel room) provides visual understanding of the development of this conference over the past six decades.

The second presentation is titled "Sixty Maps for Finding Directions" and consists of a video installation and an interactive computer-based text, both of which explore the sort of "distant reading" recommended in the writings of Franco Moretti. The video draws on textual analysis of the presentation and workshop titles of 60 years of CCCC programs to visualize, through animations, patterns built in the overlapping beliefs, hopes, and frustrations of the profession. The interactive text plays off the video by encouraging participants to sit for a while at a computer to remix, literally, those beliefs, hopes, and frustrations; in the process, participants reveal for themselves gaps and so potentials for new perspectives and new research.

The third presentation, consisting of a short video and a multi-object display, is titled “Revisiting Relevance, Remediating Rigor.” With the video, the presenter looks to a series of CCCC workshop reports published in CCC during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, and examines the different ways in which, and means through which, the relevancy versus rigor debate has been represented and responded to by conference participants. With the multi-object display, the presenter drawing on theories of mediated activity (Wertsch, Hutchins, Prior, Scollon, Latour) to document the various processes that we, the three panel presenters, employed as we collaborated on this session throughout its lifespan (i.e., from the drafting of the proposal through the composition of the six installations). The display works to juxtapose this (“our”) highly distributed process with representations of process drawn from past CCCC proceedings in hopes of inviting participant to rethink the look, sound, feel, distribution and purpose of composing narratives/process studies.