Long-time readers know that I wear many hats: rhetorician, composition specialist, early Brit lit expert, pop culture guru, etc. It’s been a problem, as I have mentioned in Too Far Afield?
I finally decided to explain the multiplicity of interests as my being an instructor of writing and reading, in all its many forms. But that doesn’t really completely cover what I do.
For instance, there is little that the average academic would recognize as new media experience in the traditional instruction of reading and writing. Yet, I have presented and assigned communicative works of art that are not necessarily paper and ink essays and yet present the same, similar, or even better information. That isn’t part of that identification either.
College Ready Writing author Dr. Lee Skallerup has been dealing with those same issues. And she has made a decision, a life-changing decision, an ENORMOUS decision, just last Thursday.
Dr. Skallerup has decided to become (even more than she already is) a digital humanities specialist. Such a thing might (will, I hope) subsume all the other work she does under one umbrella and allow her to be as diverse as she and her students need while remaining specialized in a sense that academics would recognize, even if it is in a field most of them do not understand.