Articles & Chapters by Daniel Hocutt
The 39th ACM International Conference on Design of Communication, 2021
This paper reports on a preliminary comparative study of Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant voice ... more This paper reports on a preliminary comparative study of Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant voice assistants (VA) that explores the origins of answers provided on each platform in an attempt to determine the extent that these origins influence responses. Questions were selected from Text Recognition (TREC) 2017 Live Question Answering (QA) Track Data, a collection of pre-assessed questions that are part of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) TREC QA track. Responses were collected as voice memos and screen captures, then analyzed to determine the origins of each answer or set of answers provided. Results indicate that the origins of answers are different search engines, and that algorithm-centered processes in each voice assistant result in vast differences in answers to questions. Because the online search results provided as answers by voice assistants are influenced by content and structured data, technical communicators and UX practitioners can help ensure that voice assistants are able to provide accurate, complete, and ethical responses to users’ questions.
Algorithms function as information brokers that manage, control, and direct the content that plat... more Algorithms function as information brokers that manage, control, and direct the content that platform users can search and access; in doing so, they exert rhetorical influence by determining what information matters and is available to researchers, and by providing that information across the many interfaces of the platform
Rhetorical agency in online search is not a straightforward proposition, emanating from either us... more Rhetorical agency in online search is not a straightforward proposition, emanating from either users or algorithms. Rather, agency emerges from assemblages that form and disassemble throughout the search session. Specific entities that coalesce into such assemblages include users,
This technical report addresses questions raised by technical communication scholars concerning w... more This technical report addresses questions raised by technical communication scholars concerning who or what may have rhetorical agency in technology tools used to organize and manage information. One such tool is Google Analytics, a self-contained third-party system that technical communicators deploy by adding tracking code to web pages. Data collected through Google's algorithms are processed and presented through the Analytics reporting tool. Customizable reports are managed by the Analytics account administrator and shared with web developers, designers, and writers to assess rhetorical value, defined as whether the page reached its audience and achieved its communicative purpose. The data are also frequently shared with administrators, supervisors, and data technicians to demonstrate ongoing value of website work and technical communicator labor. Report data, in the form of metrics and customizable visual interfaces, not only visualize the rhetorical value of web pages, but also represent Google's rhetorical agency as designer and presenter of metrics. The paper encourages technical communicators to do symbolic-analytic work to contextualize and remediate report data in their organizations. It reframes Analytics reports as "network exchanges" in which responses, not resolution, are the goal of the Analytics report's rhetorical work. In this way, Google Analytics reports generate responses, rather than results, where technical communicators become part of the rhetorical network exchange and articulate Analytics data for stakeholders seeking website user and visit metrics.
Integration of Cloud Technologies in Digitally Networked Classrooms and Learning Communities.
When first-year composition students use Google Apps for Education (GAFE) like Google Docs and Go... more When first-year composition students use Google Apps for Education (GAFE) like Google Docs and Google Drive for file sharing and collaborative composing, new opportunities emerge to enact composition’s social activity, to remediate traditional composing products like drafts and peer reviews, to redefine the roles of students and teachers, and to expand the learning, teaching, and composing environment beyond traditional definitions of a classroom. Through primary qualitative research, the authors found that students engaged with GAFE and the composing process in new and transformative ways, creating Networked Knowledge Communities (NKCs). This chapter theorizes a composition pedagogy that takes advantage of the affordances of a tool like GAFE to encourage teachers to develop practices and assessments that take full advantage of pervasive collaborative composing using cloud-based tools.
Using results from an original survey instrument, this study examined student perceptions of how ... more Using results from an original survey instrument, this study examined student perceptions of how useful Google Apps for Education (GAFE) was in students' learning of core concepts in a first-year college composition course, how difficult or easy it was for students to interact with GAFE, and how students ranked specific affordances of the technology in terms of its usability and usefulness. Students found GAFE relatively easy to use and appreciated its collaborative affordances. The researchers concluded that GAFE is a useful tool to meet learning objectives in the college composition classroom.
This paper is forthcoming in a Parlor Press Edited Collection: _Global Communication in the Class... more This paper is forthcoming in a Parlor Press Edited Collection: _Global Communication in the Classroom: Pedagogical Applications Connecting the Global and Local_.
Twenty-first century literacy encourages education stakeholders to consider the global nature and implications of composing practices in a digitally networked world. Yet even when mediated through the affordances of a global technology like Google Drive, composition remains tied to local considerations and constraints. As students compose collaboratively in the global network, they and their teachers navigate a complex local network of institutional policy, transparency expectations, trust, surveillance, and composing practices. This chapter describes the process and results of using Google Drive in locally situated composition classes and provides a heuristic to guide local adoption of this global technology.
Conference Papers & Presentations by Daniel Hocutt
Work-in-progress one-page summary for review and discussion. Proposes a method for measuring and ... more Work-in-progress one-page summary for review and discussion. Proposes a method for measuring and reporting on the rhetorical influence of digital algorithms encountered in online activity.
Tricksters appear in many creation and transformation myths, inhabiting boundary spaces and cross... more Tricksters appear in many creation and transformation myths, inhabiting boundary spaces and crossing where they are not always welcome. They usher in transformative change, sometimes in creativity and sometimes appropriating the detritus of change. Descendents of mythological tricksters are identified in Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath’s Tale (Swinford, 2010), Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Evans, 2010), and Morrison’s Tar Baby (Billingsly-Brown, 1999). In contemporary culture, Hyde (1998) locates trickster activity in the groundbreaking work of exceptional artists, and Bassil-Morozow (2012) locates the trickster principle in film. Recent scholars find trickster characters in teachers (Garrison, 2009), breakfast cereal mascots (Green, 2007), blues artists (Smith, 2005), and the figure of the Latino (DeGuzmán, 2001).
This paper proposes that contemporary tricksters remain active in popular culture, serving as boundary objects that generate both transformative tension (Popham, 2005) and integrative exigence (Wilson & Herndl, 2007). The paper focuses on an interdisciplinary class on the trickster that merges mythological trickster stories with multimedia interpretations and prepares students to theorize a contemporary trickster. The paper concludes that seeking trickster sign in popular culture makes students (and their instructor) keenly aware of the transformative, ever-present work of the trickster as cultural critic and agent of change.
Co-presented with Maury Brown, Germanna Community College
Google is fast becoming the “one rin... more Co-presented with Maury Brown, Germanna Community College
Google is fast becoming the “one ring to rule them all.” Google Apps for Education, used by many colleges and universities as default email and shared drive applications for their students, offers remarkable collaborative functions for the classroom. Students and teachers using Google Apps collaboratively in a first year writing class discover that learner, teacher, and text identities are unbound from tradition — and bound to Google. Join English PhD students Maury Brown from Germanna Community College and Daniel Hocutt from University of Richmond (remediated via WebEx and Google Drive) as they discuss recent experiences navigating these new bindings and remediating identities in their classrooms.
Reviews (Books & Conferences) by Daniel Hocutt
Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative
Review of 2017 Computers & Writing Graduate Research Network (GRN). 2017 C&W Reviews. Sweetland D... more Review of 2017 Computers & Writing Graduate Research Network (GRN). 2017 C&W Reviews. Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative. Retrieved from http://www.digitalrhetoriccollaborative.org
Hocutt, D. L. (2017). [Review of 2017 Computers & Writing session E9: Technologies – Digital tool... more Hocutt, D. L. (2017). [Review of 2017 Computers & Writing session E9: Technologies – Digital tools, FYC and ethical implications, LMS practical pointers]. 2017 C&W Reviews. Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative. Retrieved from http://www.digitalrhetoriccollaborative.org
Review of the book 'Communicating Mobility and Technology: A Material Rhetoric for Persuasive Tra... more Review of the book 'Communicating Mobility and Technology: A Material Rhetoric for Persuasive Transportation' by E. H. Pflugfelder, appearing in Communication Design Quarterly, 4(4), pp. 86-92.
Rather than approaching games as instrumental pedagogical tools, both presenters named and presen... more Rather than approaching games as instrumental pedagogical tools, both presenters named and presented games as complex cultural artifacts and experiences that require critical approaches for understanding and learning from them. The growing field of game studies is richer for the critical approaches applied, an approach that seeks to understand, use, and record what it means to play a digital game.
Ideas have power, and that power doesn’t always emerge during the sessions, but rather in the con... more Ideas have power, and that power doesn’t always emerge during the sessions, but rather in the conversations, insights, and networked collaboration of colleagues sitting down to dinner and drinks. The power of ideas can seem latent during the session, where the ideas are thrown up, down, and all around among the participants. It’s when discourse begins, when smaller conversations begin, when dialogues and trialogues begin, when we put into words the way ideas have affected us, that we find ourselves affected and moved by an idea.
As I read and discussed Rickert’s work with my peers and our instructors, I recognized in ambienc... more As I read and discussed Rickert’s work with my peers and our instructors, I recognized in ambience the beginnings of a way to see the world of rhetoric as the connected world—human and non-human, biological and nonbiological—to which I need to be attuned. I also recognized in my growing understanding of the networked world that ambient features connected well beyond anything I previously imagined or considered possible. Ambient rhetoric rocked my world.
What GRN offers is a quick, painless introduction for first time attendees to the Computers & Wri... more What GRN offers is a quick, painless introduction for first time attendees to the Computers & Writing community, which is already close-knit and warmly welcoming. It’s a rare opportunity to share works in progress and get useful, targeted, and considered feedback and mentoring from experienced scholars with decades of experience in the field of computers and writing.
From the conclusion: "'Implementing Responsive Design' is likely an opening salvo in designers’ o... more From the conclusion: "'Implementing Responsive Design' is likely an opening salvo in designers’ ongoing attempts to match user preferences with designs optimized for the devices users prefer to access online content. It’s a text whose value is seen in the range of interspersed designer voices successfully implementing responsive design strategies in their users’ — and their own —contexts."
Syllabi by Daniel Hocutt
Develops advanced reading, writing, and research techniques, using a variety of disciplinary appr... more Develops advanced reading, writing, and research techniques, using a variety of disciplinary approaches. Students will read a range of primary and scholarly texts related to the content of the course, synthesizing them in assignments of varying medium, length, and purpose. Students will locate, evaluate, and incorporate a wide range of research sources. Explicit writing instruction will be central to the course.
The Network Society
Networks surround and encompass us. We are nodes in social networks, drawing on professional and personal connections. We engage in networked electronic communications, wired and wireless. We exist in ecologies. We use political networks to get candidates elected, and we rely on financial and transportation networks to meet market demand. Through research and writing, we’ll seek to make explicit the role and function of networks in the 21st century.
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Articles & Chapters by Daniel Hocutt
Twenty-first century literacy encourages education stakeholders to consider the global nature and implications of composing practices in a digitally networked world. Yet even when mediated through the affordances of a global technology like Google Drive, composition remains tied to local considerations and constraints. As students compose collaboratively in the global network, they and their teachers navigate a complex local network of institutional policy, transparency expectations, trust, surveillance, and composing practices. This chapter describes the process and results of using Google Drive in locally situated composition classes and provides a heuristic to guide local adoption of this global technology.
Conference Papers & Presentations by Daniel Hocutt
This paper proposes that contemporary tricksters remain active in popular culture, serving as boundary objects that generate both transformative tension (Popham, 2005) and integrative exigence (Wilson & Herndl, 2007). The paper focuses on an interdisciplinary class on the trickster that merges mythological trickster stories with multimedia interpretations and prepares students to theorize a contemporary trickster. The paper concludes that seeking trickster sign in popular culture makes students (and their instructor) keenly aware of the transformative, ever-present work of the trickster as cultural critic and agent of change.
Google is fast becoming the “one ring to rule them all.” Google Apps for Education, used by many colleges and universities as default email and shared drive applications for their students, offers remarkable collaborative functions for the classroom. Students and teachers using Google Apps collaboratively in a first year writing class discover that learner, teacher, and text identities are unbound from tradition — and bound to Google. Join English PhD students Maury Brown from Germanna Community College and Daniel Hocutt from University of Richmond (remediated via WebEx and Google Drive) as they discuss recent experiences navigating these new bindings and remediating identities in their classrooms.
Reviews (Books & Conferences) by Daniel Hocutt
Syllabi by Daniel Hocutt
The Network Society
Networks surround and encompass us. We are nodes in social networks, drawing on professional and personal connections. We engage in networked electronic communications, wired and wireless. We exist in ecologies. We use political networks to get candidates elected, and we rely on financial and transportation networks to meet market demand. Through research and writing, we’ll seek to make explicit the role and function of networks in the 21st century.
Twenty-first century literacy encourages education stakeholders to consider the global nature and implications of composing practices in a digitally networked world. Yet even when mediated through the affordances of a global technology like Google Drive, composition remains tied to local considerations and constraints. As students compose collaboratively in the global network, they and their teachers navigate a complex local network of institutional policy, transparency expectations, trust, surveillance, and composing practices. This chapter describes the process and results of using Google Drive in locally situated composition classes and provides a heuristic to guide local adoption of this global technology.
This paper proposes that contemporary tricksters remain active in popular culture, serving as boundary objects that generate both transformative tension (Popham, 2005) and integrative exigence (Wilson & Herndl, 2007). The paper focuses on an interdisciplinary class on the trickster that merges mythological trickster stories with multimedia interpretations and prepares students to theorize a contemporary trickster. The paper concludes that seeking trickster sign in popular culture makes students (and their instructor) keenly aware of the transformative, ever-present work of the trickster as cultural critic and agent of change.
Google is fast becoming the “one ring to rule them all.” Google Apps for Education, used by many colleges and universities as default email and shared drive applications for their students, offers remarkable collaborative functions for the classroom. Students and teachers using Google Apps collaboratively in a first year writing class discover that learner, teacher, and text identities are unbound from tradition — and bound to Google. Join English PhD students Maury Brown from Germanna Community College and Daniel Hocutt from University of Richmond (remediated via WebEx and Google Drive) as they discuss recent experiences navigating these new bindings and remediating identities in their classrooms.
The Network Society
Networks surround and encompass us. We are nodes in social networks, drawing on professional and personal connections. We engage in networked electronic communications, wired and wireless. We exist in ecologies. We use political networks to get candidates elected, and we rely on financial and transportation networks to meet market demand. Through research and writing, we’ll seek to make explicit the role and function of networks in the 21st century.
Rationale: Graduate study engages students in research toward producing knowledge and extending the limits of what is known. Appropriate research methods that meet ethical standards, professional guidelines, and disciplinary conventions enable students to conduct research that is valid, reliable, and replicable. This class focuses on research methods in the humanities and social sciences, with a specific focus on the potential opportunities and drawbacks of overlapping methods across fields and disciplines. The course seeks to prepare graduate students to engage in both semester-length and longer-term research projects toward completing their degrees.
This collection focuses on the use of educational technologies in teaching composition at the secondary level, supporting both teaching practice and learning experiences. These technologies offer teachers the ability to learn about and test effective practices, while also providing students the resources necessary to utilize current composition trends, skills, and facilities. Educational technologies as diverse as Instagram, Facebook Groups, Penzu, and Storybird provide instructors models for novel teaching practices and resources for lesson planning. The also provide students online tools for drafting and reflection along with frameworks and structures for helping students improve composition techniques.
The use of applicant tracking systems (ATS) in recruiting and hiring functions is widespread, especially among Fortune 500 companies, where a 2019 study by Jobscan found that 99% of Fortune 500 companies use ATS (Qu, 2019). An ATS is specialized “software used by companies to assist with human resources, recruitment, and hiring needs…. Primarily used to help hiring companies organize and navigate large numbers of applicants” (Shields, 2017). An ATS is typically purchased as “software as a service” (SaaS) and used throughout the hiring process. They are deeply integrated into HR functions through ATS extensions that help select and manage contingent workforces, such as shift management applications.
ATS functions as programmed platforms for collating, organizing, and selecting applicants. As platforms, they exert what Tarleton Gillespie calls “the politics of platforms” (2010), the power to “make decisions,” as Dustin Edwards and Bridget Gelms (2016) put it. And more troubling, platforms “often downplay, obfuscate, and/or black box those decisions” (Edwards & Gelms, 2016). ATS platforms exert influence on the way applications are entered and accepted, reviewed and filtered, and ultimately passed onward to hiring managers and selection committees. More specifically, ATS technologies are engaged in programmed and automated selection and sorting activities before human actors intervene in the hiring process.
This collection of corporate advertising artifacts brings together examples of ATS, from boutique to mainstream applications. It also includes relevant technologies that feed data into ATS, like AI-driven video interviewing programs and gamified aptitude assessments. Each application included in the collection influences hiring processes through programmed and automated procedures.