About Me
I’m a PhD candidate in rhetoric and composition at the University of South Florida. That means I study things like effective communication, writing, new media, and teaching. I’ve worn a lot of hats at USF, including these:
- Teaching first-year composition (FYC), technical writing, professional writing, and expository writing
- Managing the FYC site at USF and performing other tasks as a graduate student member of the FYC staff
- Studying various subdisciplines in the field of rhetoric and composition, including especially new media composition, the rhetoric of sound, intellectual property, fan culture, and composition pedagogy.
Beyond those interests, I garden, cook, eat, listen to videogame soundtracks, play music, read science fiction, watch Lost, learn from the wise people in my community, and relish marriage.
About This Site
This is a space for me to blog on academic topics I’ve been thinking about lately and share some of my work and personality as it spans across different media (pictures, sounds, texts, videos).
Transmedia storytelling refers to a story told over a variety of media–like, for instance, when fans of the TV show Lost spent the summer of 2006 interacting with The Lost Experience as told through TV commercials, voice mail, e-mail, various websites, billboards, and chocolate bars. The complete story was only found when all the disparate parts were brought together by audiences.
Any person’s web presence is similar, in that he has added a new medium to the various ways he already tells the story of his life. I already know people (and am known by them) through both face-to-face interactions and online interactions (through e-mail, on Facebook or Twitter, in online course settings, and so on). This site is a new hub for some of those transmedia parts of me–those ways that I represent myself across different mediums.
I also get a kick out of the assonance of the phrase transmedia me, all the lovely ee sounds butted up together. And it’s playfully hard to pin down, I think: is this site a collection of the parts of “me” that are “transmedial,” or is it more imperative, asking readers to perform an act of transmediation (remix?) upon me? “Transmedia me, ye scurvy dogs!”
