Most of us associate mapping with cartography, but that's not always the case.

The words “hip” and “hipster” carry around a lot of baggage. Often, due to misconceptions, "hipster" is used as an insult meant to suggest some sort of failed or inauthentic attempt at being "hip." But what if that isn’t what “hip” is? What if “hip” isn’t some obsession with the fleeting but a more permanent state?

In the weeks and months leading up to the 2012 election, the University of Kentucky and the College of Arts and Sciences held events to help students become more engaged with the political process. One such event, as detailed in another article, was a collective viewing of the second of three Presidential debates this season.

Fall of 2012 was the perfect time to conduct a class about American electoral politics - so it was taken up as the topic for Currents, a class offered to incoming Freshmen. The course explores the 2012 election from a variety of academic perspectives - including, but not limited to, philosophy, economics, history, and, of course, political science. In this podcast, five Currents students shared their experiences with the class. 

WRD is offering a unique course in October. A&S 100-006, Composing with Visuals, focuses on the visual aspect of digital communication skills. Rachel Elliott, who is the instructor for the course, talks about the ways students will create visuals to explore identities, tell stories, and interpret information, and present findings via photography, film, and infographics. The course begins in mid-October 2012.

For more information about the course, or to enroll, please contact your advisor.

The Division of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Media is excited to welcome professor Brian McNely to its faculty!

Professor McNely joins us this fall studying how people work and interact. He researches professional writing in digital environments, tracing the writing that people do in order to find out how they get things done, how they make meaning from the work they do, and how they share that meaning with others.

Written texts, YouTube videos, podcasts - these are all means of communicating ideas to others. Craig Crowder is a graduate student in the Department of English and teaches Composition & Communication classes, WRD 110 & 111. In this podcast, Crowder discusses ways to engage students via multimedia projects, and his research, which examines social movement rhetoric in a society that uses multiple modes of communication.

WRD 111 is the second course in the composition & communication sequence at UK. In this class, students compose written, spoken, and multimedia arguments about public issues. In this podcast, one group on their WRD 111 experience at the end of the semester. Students Bailey Ubellacker, Jenny Wu, Daniel Moreland, Jake Persky, and Cameron Sallee talk about what they enjoyed the most and what skills they will take away from this challenging course. 

In Wordcast #3, WRD 110 students Tyler Davenport and Elizabeth Kunnecke discuss the role Twitter plays in their reading and writing habits. Tyler and Elizabeth took their WRD 110 in the A&S Wired program, where all students use iPads in their courses. Yet, as they talk about in this brief interview, social media like Twitter can be useful for thinking about writing in lots of different ways.