variations on a theme

Six Decades/Six Ways

One sentence description: Drawing on data collected from past CCCC programs, this panel provides participants with an opportunity to engage with six interactive visualizations or installations that, taken together, point to new 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 CCCC 60^th anniversary, members of this panel draw on six decades worth of conference proceedings in an attempt to better 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 panels/sessions, ours is comprised of six free-standing (self-guided?) 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 set of installations is titled, "Zooming in and Out: Alternative Views of the CCCC." Using tools developed by researchers in information visualization (a subfield of computer science for visually representing non-physical data), this presenter offers a series of 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.

The third presentation, consisting of a short video and a multi-object display, is titled “Revisiting Relevance, Remediating Rigor.” With the video component, 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) as she/he works 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.