In September and October, I made the most of a pre-tenure teaching leave and gave five separate talks. I’d like to thank New Valley Church, the Association for Business Communication, ACM SIGDOC, The Arizona Site Stewards Conference, and the Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication for welcoming me!
I began in September by giving a God and Social Media talk to the Men’s Group of New Valley Church. I’m always honored when people ask me to talk about how social media (and technology more broadly) affect people’s souls and what people can do to use social media healthily. Thank you to New Valley Church for this opportunity!
“The Effects of Multimodal Elements on Success in Kickstarter Crowdfunding Campaigns” was my next presentation, at the online conference of the Association for Business Communication. This study presented findings from a paper of the same name (co-authored with Carolin Fleischmann) that was just published at the Journal of Business and Technical Communication. Given that the article was supported by a 2018 C.R. Anderson Grant from ABC, I felt very pleased to be presenting the final data at the funding conference.
Jumping on a plane shortly after my online talk, I headed to Boston for ACM SIGDOC. There I spoke on “A Data Visualization Tool for Reassessing Interdisciplinary Citation for Design of Communication,” which covered a project supported by a 2019 SIGDOC Career Advancement Research Grant. (It was a big week for discharging grant responsibilities.) My master’s advisor (Hi, Derek!) commented after the talk that, “You’re a long way from ‘I like music and writing.’” Indeed, my scope of work has grown and changed. It was an honor to present on a grant and to hear a kind word from a mentor. (You can find the tool that project created at this GitHub.) I also greatly enjoyed visiting the Old North Church while I was there.
My students in Spring 2022 worked with the Arizona Site Stewards Program Foundation to develop a social media plan. As a result, the Site Stewards invited me to speak at their annual conference about the project. I was treated to a very engaged and thoughtful audience that wanted to know many details about how the Site Stewards could and could not (as well as should and should not) engage with the public on social media. Many thanks to the Site Stewards for asking a non-expert in the field of historic preservation to contribute to their conference!
Finally, I rounded out the list with a short talk at CPTSC in Colorado Springs: “Digital Ethics: Career-readiness and Humanities Working Together.” This talk focused on the unusual and unexpectedly helpful structure of my Digital Ethics in Internet Governance and Policy course. I had a great time discussing this and other programmatic concerns with my colleagues, as well as seeing my great friend and collaborator Chris Krycho.
It was a whirlwind six weeks. Once again, great thanks to everyone who invited me to present on so many different aspects of my work!