Final Project

Hello everyone,
Please remember that this is a work in progress, but I am anxious to show you the project I have dedicated so much time to this semester. I can post a more through explanation of my methodologies next week, but here is the link and a basic description:

Composing Genealogies: A Family Tree of Composition/Rhetoric

Composition is a relatively new field that emerged from Darthmouth in the 1960's, gained momentum through the open-admissions era at CUNY in the 1970's, and has come to be a legitimate specialization of doctoral studies through the work of dedicated scholars such as David Bartholomae, James Britton, Janet Emig, Sondra Perl, Peter Elbow, and Gerlad Graff. Perhaps it is because the field is so new that many of the foundational scholars studied, worked, collaborated, and presented together through their academic lives, and continue to do so today. Such systems of affiliation and influence are often invisible, and become more so as time goes on. How many compositionists know that Linda Flower, John Brereton, and David Bartholomae were in the same graduate program together? How many panels at CCCC came together because their members studied together, or (even harder to detect) because their members' faculty advisors studied in the same programs and under the same mentors? Such data are not tracked, or easily accessible – or, rather, have not been, until now.

This project is an interactive archive that works to collect, organize, and visualize the history of collaboration in composition and rhetoric. Inspired by similar projects in other fields, such as Neurotree.org and Phylo.net, this project – the Writing Studies Tree – visually displays the academic "ancestors," "descendents," and "siblings" of the members of our field. In addition to standard single-line relationships such as dissertation-chair/PhD-candidate, or coauthor/collaborator, the Writing Studies Tree allows for multiple "parents" of each figure in the tree, including the often-formative relationship of WPA/writing-program-instructor. The Writing Studies Tree is an open-access platform that invites users to contribute by inputting information on their own mentor-student relationships, or by researching relevant relationships they feel are significant in order to create a more robust archive. In fact I am working with six graduate students here at the GC to collect the initial data, and we will be holding a "workshop" at the CCCC's where we will invite participants to enter their own data.

Ideally, through continued collaboration and exposure, this resource will continue to grow in relevance and interest over time. Users of the tree can thus (re)discover common background among key figures in the field; add to the tree new figures or information, including themselves; and – perhaps most importantly – become more aware of the historical influences and confluences that have shaped their own training and development in Writing Studies. This makes the tree especially valuable to graduate students and others entering the field, who often desire an entry-point to the modern history of composition and rhetoric; but, equally important, the tree will allow current and future scholars to (re)discover figures and programs whose influence on our richly textured field exists outside of the publication record.

Here is the site (in beta):
writingstudiestree.org