Laura Gurak gurakl@umn.edu
Laura J. Gurak is a nationally recognized scholar in rhetoric and
Internet studies. She is Professor and Department Head in Rhetoric at
the University of Minnesota, where she also co-directs the Internet
Studies Center and is one of six non-law faculty to hold the title of
Faculty Fellow in the Law School. Among her many publications, Gurak is
author of Cyberliteracy: Navigating the Internet with Awareness (Yale
2001) and Persuasion and Privacy in Cyberspace: The Online Protests over
Lotus MarketPlace and the Clipper Chip (Yale 1997), the latter of which
was the first book-length study to document the rhetorical dynamics of
online communication and protests. Her most recent project is a
scholarly book titled Writing Code: the Rhetoric of Software-Driven
Literacy. She is also active in funded research related to medical
information and the Internet, where she provides expertise in questions
of human subjects and research methods in doing Internet research.
Smiljana Antonijevic anto0082@umn.edu
Smiljana Antonijevic is a doctoral student in the Department of Rhetoric, University of Minnesota. She graduated from the School of Philosophy at the University of Belgrade, in her home country Serbia. Both her B.A. and M.A. theses focused on the issues of computer-mediated communication. Her research interests include online interaction, Internet usage in a state of war, virtual ethnography, and nonverbal communication in virtual environments. She published several articles and book chapters in the field of Internet studies.
Laurie A. Johnson john5719@umn.edu
Laurie A. Johnson holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English and Spanish Language and Literature from the University of Maryland and a Master of Arts Degree in English from the Pennsylvania State University. She is currently a PhD student in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of Minnesota. Her main research interests include peer-to-peer networks and intellectual property. She also has an interest in cognitive science, particularly social and distributed cognition. Laurie is currently working toward a dissertation on the changing definitions of ownership and intellectual property among users of peer-to-peer networks. Laurie has presented papers at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, the Penn State Conference on Rhetoric and Composition, the Association of Internet Researchers Conference, the Feminism(s) and Rhetoric(s) Conference, and the International Communications Association Conference. She has also been a blogger since November 2001.
Clancy Ratliff ratli008@umn.edu
Clancy Ratliff is a doctoral student in the Department of Rhetoric and
Scientific and Technical Communication at the University of Minnesota. She received her B.A. from the University of North Alabama and her M.A. from the University of Tennessee. Her research interests include weblogs, feminist rhetorics, feminist theory, and intellectual property, with particular emphasis on poststructuralist feminist analyses of political discourse on weblogs by mothers. The courses she teaches include Writing to Inform, Convince, and Persuade, Technical and Professional Writing, and Oral Presentations in Professional Settings. She is Co-Founder and Associate Editor of Kairosnews: A Weblog for Discussing Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, Feminist Rhetorics Field Editor of Rhetcomp.com, and Assistant Chair of the Campus-Wide IP Policies action group of CCCC-IP. Recently, she was awarded a scholarship to the Internet and Law Program sponsored by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard Law School.
Jessica Reyman reyma001@umn.edu
Jessica Reyman is a doctoral student in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of Minnesota. Her research interests include authorship and the rhetoric of intellectual property, particularly as it relates to the Internet. She also has an interest in legal studies, and has completed coursework in the University of Minnesota Law School. Past projects include an analysis the TEACH Act and other issues of copyright law as it relates to distance education. Currently, she is examining how the rhetoric of intellectual property law reveals gendered and politicized notions of individualized, proprietary, exclusionary models of ownership over intellectual and creative works. Jessica also teaches courses in Internet studies and technical communication, and has extensive experience with developing and teaching online courses. She is also Assistant Chair of the CCCC Intellectual Property Caucus.
Meredith Badger
Anita Blanchard
Anita Blanchard is assistant professor of Psychology at the University of North Carolina Charlotte. She has her PhD from Claremont Graduate University in Organizational Psychology. Her research interests include the development and function of virtual communities, particularly within organizations. Her past research has included the application of behavior setting theories to virtual communities, the effects of virtual community participation on face-to-face communities' social capital and the development and experience of a sense of community within virtual communities. Currently, she is examining how virtual communities become successful and the effects of participating in group email affects members' organizational commitment and affiliation. She is also interested in applied research methods issues within organizations and the Internet, particularly the epistemological implications of qualitative research (e.g., grounded theory, naturalistic research) and survey research methodologies. Address: Department of Psychology, UNC Charlotte, 9201 University City Blvd., Charlotte, NC 28223-0001. Phone 704.687.4847, FAX 704.687.3096, Email: alblanch@email.uncc.edu
Christine Boese
Christine Boese is a writer, builder of weblogs, and independent researcher at CNN Headline News since the modular screen redesign of 2001, initially specializing in on-screen texts and their role in media convergence and interactivity. Along the way, she found herself riding the headline ticker through major events in US history, including 9/11, the anthrax scare, and two wars. She currently writes scripts for air and freelances for CNN and the CNN.com web site. Formerly an assistant professor at Clemson University, she is still active in issues relating to Internet scholarship and electronic and feminist pedagogies, through writing, speaking, consulting, and contract work. She has a Ph.D. in rhetoric and communication from Rensselaer Polytechnic, where she completed the first native hypertext (no paper) dissertation there. She also has an MFA in creative writing (poetry) from the University of Arkansas and BA in journalism from the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire.
Kevin Brooks
Kevin Brooks is an associate professor in the department of English, North Dakota State University. His research interests have shifted in the past few years from the history of writing instruction to the future of writing instruction, with a particular interest in the ways in which genres are being remediated via new media. He maintains a site called TeachingBlog and has been published in JAC, Rhetoric Review, Composition Studies, Pedagogy, and other journals. He is beginning a project on reconsidering the relevance of Marshall McLuhan's work for teachers and scholars in rhetoric and composition.
Brian Carroll
Brian Carroll is an assistant professor of journalism at Berry College in Mt. Berry, Georgia,
specializing in print media and digital media. He earned his Ph.D. from
the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill in the School of Journalism &
Mass Communication in June 2003. In May 2003, Carroll was named the
School of Journalism & Mass Communication's outstanding Ph.D. student.
Carroll also is an adjunct professor at UNC and an e-business editor for
and consultant to the trade newspaper Furniture/Today, a
subsidiary of Reed Elsevier and the
furniture industry's leading trade publication. His research interests
include communication technology; law and policy; media convergence;
online community; the black press; and baseball. A member of the graduate
honors society, Alpha
Epsilon Lambda and the national honor society for journalism and mass
communication, Kappa Tau
Alpha, Carroll has won awards both for his teaching and for his
research. He has also been published in journals and anthologies,
including the Journal of Interactive Marketing; Convergence: The
Journal of Research into New Media Technologies; Baseball and
American Culture; and the Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and
American Culture.
Tyler Curtain
Tyler Curtain teaches queer theory and cultural studies in the Department of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He also is the director of the SITES Lab for New Media Theory. Curtain has authored numerous essays, including "Did Turing Dream of Electric Sheep," which is a chapter of his forthcoming book, Mistaken Evolution: Computers, the Post-Human, and other Anxious Objects of Biological and Cultural Reproduction. Curtain blogs about cultural and political-critical issues at http://www.bentkid.com/.
Jason Gallo
Jason Gallo is a Ph.D. student in the Media, Technology, and Society Program in the School of Communication at Northwestern University. His academic interests include surveillance, subcultures, the history of technology, and the increasing role of computer-mediated-communication in the political process. Jason is currently engaged in dissertation research on the U.S. government‚s role in promoting the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science. A native of Washington D.C., Jason received a B.A. from the Colorado College and a M.A. from Georgetown University and has worked for both the U.S. and German postal services.
Susan Herring
Susan Herring is Professor of Information Science and Linguistics at
Indiana University Bloomington and Editor-Elect of the Journal of
Computer-Mediated Communication. She holds a masters and a doctorate in
Linguistics from the University of California at Berkeley. One of the
first scholars to apply linguistic methods of analysis to
human-human communication on the Internet, she is also one of the
world's foremost experts on gender and computer-mediated
communication, a field she helped to create in the early 1990s. Her
current research focuses on the representation of women and men in
multimedia CMC systems, multilingualism on the Internet, and
collaborative authoring on the Web. She has directed the BROG project since its inception in
February 2003.
Steve Himmer
Steve Himmer is an MFA candidate in fiction and a writing instructor at Emerson College in Boston, and has a BA in anthropology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His thesis novel explores suburban tensions between built and natural environments, and the intersections of progress and ecological memory. He writes at www.onepotmeal.com.
Kylie Jarrett
Kylie Jarrett has recently completed her Ph.D. in the School of Communication, Information and New Media at the University of South Australia. Her thesis, entitled Windows™ Shopping: Deconstructing the empowered e-commerce consumer, explored the discourse of consumer empowerment associated with the e-commerce industry, specifically the portal website ninemsn. She is currently employed as a sessional academic staff member at the University of South Australia. She can be contacted at Kylie.Jarrett@unisa.edu.au.
Inna Kouper
Inna Kouper is a doctoral student in the School of Library and
Information Science, Indiana University Bloomington. Born in Moscow,
Russia, she graduated from the Moscow Institute of Economics and
Statistics with a bachelors degree in Information Systems in Economy in
1995, and earned a masters degree in sociology at the Institute of
Sociology, Moscow, in 2001. The topic of her thesis was "Hypertext as a
form of social knowledge organization." Her current scientific
interests lie broadly in the area of social informatics; specifically, she
is interested in computer-mediated communication, digital
narratives and social aspects of human-computer interaction. She has been
a member of the BROG project since
September 2003.
Graham Lampa
Graham J. Lampa resides in the Minneapolis/St. Paul metropolitan area
where he is pursuing a masters degree in public policy from the Hubert
H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of
Minnesota. Lampa received bachelors degrees in Global Studies (with
honors) and German from Hamline Universtiy, where he wrote Imagining
the Blogosphere. Following graduation, he studied political science as
a Fulbright fellow in Tübingen, Germany. Lampa is an avid writer,
photographer, and web designer with an interest in the intersection of
politics and new media. His personal website can be found at
http://grahamlampa.org.
Charles Lowe
Charles Lowe is editor and co-founder of Kairosnews, maintains a
personal weblog at cyberdash.com, and has been teaching with weblogs
since 2002. As an intellectual property advocate of open source software
and Creative Commons licensing of academic texts, he is currently
finishing his dissertation at Florida State University, 'The Future Is
Open' for Composition Studies: A New Intellectual Property Model in the
Digital Age, and he will be a continuing lecturer at Purdue University
beginning in the fall of 2004.
Carolyn Miller
Carolyn R. Miller is Professor of English at North Carolina State
University, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in rhetoric
and writing. She received her Ph.D. in Communication and Rhetoric from
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1980. She has published essays on
rhetorical theory, the rhetoric of science and technology, and technical
writing in journals such as Argumentation, College English, the Journal of
Business and Technical Communication, the Quarterly Journal of Speech,
Rhetorica, and Rhetoric Society Quarterly, as well as in several edited
volumes. At North Carolina State University, she has served as Director of
Professional Writing and as Director of the M.S. in Technical Communication;
she is a member of the university¹s Academy of Outstanding Teachers and in
1999 was named Alumni Distinguished Graduate Professor.
Torrill Mortenson
Dr. Torill Elvira Mortensen is an Associate Professor at Volda College, Norway. She teaches media theory and public information. Her research is concerned with the user experience with new media, mainly computer games and weblogs. In 2004 Torill Elvira Mortensen is part of the Game Studies team, in the steering committee of blogtalk 2.0, in a program board of communications in the Research Council of Norway and guest faculty at the Transart Institute in Austria. Those who are still curious about the work, life and research of Dr. Mortensen can follow her winding path through the world of a female scholar by reading her weblog thinking with my fingers.
Cindy Nichols
Cynthia Nichols grew up in California and is a graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop. She has taught creative writing and composition courses for many years in the upper plains, and has actively explored electronic resources for teaching since before the inception of the World Wide Web. She is also a new media poet-artist, experimenting with collusions of the verbal and visual, the critical and the creative. Her critical work has appeared online in Enculturation, and her poems have appeared in a variety of hardcopy journals, including Mid-American Review, Mississippi Review, Cimarron Review, and Kenyon Review. She currently keeps an experimental creative blog which acts as a notebook springboard to her other writing, and will be selectively integrated as a CD supplement into her current manuscript of poems.
Andrew O'Baoill
Andrew Ó Baoill is a doctoral student in the Institute of
Communications Research at the University of Illinois,
Urbana-Champaign, with an MA (Communications) from Dublin City
University, and a BSc (Mathematics) from the National University of
Ireland, Galway. Focusing primarily on participatory media and public
involvement in the political process he blogs at http://funferal.org.
Nicholas Packwood
Nicholas Packwood teaches in cultural studies and anthropology at Wilfrid Laurier University and courses in pre-Columbian archaeology at the University of Toronto. His dissertation, "Communicating objects: mapping inter-organizational relationships through the flow of material assemblages" is based on four years of field research in the United Kingdom with firms in civil engineering, construction, auto manufacturing and defense industries. Nicholas edited a commemorative issue of Space and Culture (Sage: London) on the life and work of Pierre Bourdieu as part of his ongoing interest in social space, power and virtuality. He publishes his blog "Ghost of a flea" as a daily meditation on pop culture, current events and the life and thought of Kylie Minogue.
Sybil Priebe
Sybil Priebe is currently a graduate student and teaching assistant at North Dakota State University. Her thesis research, to be completed May 2005, includes looking at weblogs as a catalyst for online communities. She is in the process of using a particular blog community, the BisonBlog, to research online writing and its significance for writing instruction. Sybil has been blogging on her teaching blog and a personal blog since the spring of 2002, and has been using weblogs in her composition courses as a tool and as a topic of conversation since the fall of 2002.
Trish Roberts-Miller
Frank Schaap
Frank Schaap received his MA in 2000 from the department of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. He is now working as a PhD student with the Amsterdam School of Communications Research at the University of Amsterdam on a research on the construction of gender and identity in various online environments. Theoretical interests include ethnography as a scientific practice, the articulations of technology and culture, while writing cascading style sheets is a more practical undertaking he enjoys. Frank Schaap is the author of The Words That Took Us There: Ethnography in a Virtual Reality (2002) and maintains a weblog at http://fragment.nl.
Lois Scheidt
Lois Ann Scheidt is a doctoral student specializing in
computer-mediated communication in the School of Library and
Information Science at Indiana University Bloomington. She holds a BS in
Theatre from Ball State University, an MPA in Human Resources and Labor
Management from Indiana University-Purdue University at
Indianapolis, and a Masters in Information Science from Indiana
University Bloomington. Her research focuses include adolescents in online
venues, Human-Computer Interaction, and human subjects issues and policies
relating to online research. She is a founding member of the BROG project.
Dawn Shepherd
Dawn Shepherd is a Master of Arts student in English concentrating in
Rhetoric and Composition at North Carolina State University and a graduate
assistant with the university's Campus Writing and Speaking Program. She
received her B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in
1993. Prior to returning to school she worked in the technology sector,
including serving as Partnership Manager for a dotcom and Director of
eBusiness for an IT consulting and Web design firm.
Carolyn Wei
Carolyn Wei is a doctoral student in the Department of Technical
Communication at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on how
diverse people interact with information and communication technologies such
as the Internet and mobile devices. In particular, she is interested in how
people start using these technologies and adapt them for their own cultures
and personal needs, such as to create virtual communities. Previous projects
have studied interactions within virtual communities such as distributed
work groups, instant messaging buddy groups, and blog networks. She is a
member of the Central Asia and Information and Communication Technologies
(CAICT) project and has studied computer and mobile phone use in Uzbekistan.
Currently she is researching use of the Internet by minority language
speakers. She can be contacted at cwei@u.washington.edu.
Kathleen Ethel Welch
Kathleen Ethel Welch is a nationally recognized scholar in rhetoric and writing studies. She is Samuel Roberts Noble Family Foundation Presidential Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma, where she teaches writing and rhetoric (including argument) from the first-year composition program to the Ph.D. program. She has directed or is directing thirteen M.A. theses and dissertations and has served on thirty-five graduate student general examination committees. At the undergraduate level, she began to teach technical writing formally in 2003; her service includes chairing the Board on Scientific and Professional Writing for the School of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma and serving as Technical Writing Evaluator for the M.S. in Professional Meteorology program. Her single-authored books are Electric Rhetoric (MIT Press, 1999) and The Contemporary Reception of Classical Rhetoric: Appropriations of Ancient Discourse (Erlbaum 1990; paperback 1991). She currently is completing a third single-authored book, Power Surge: Writing and Computers. She has begun work on a fourth single-authored book, The Sound of Argument. She has served or is serving on ten national and international scholarly boards and advisory panels.
Terra Williams
Terra Williams is a doctoral candidate in Rhetoric and Composition at
Florida State University where she has taught first-year writing online
and face-to-face -- in both traditional and computer classrooms. For the
past three years, she has helped to oversee the First-Year Writing program
at Florida State as an assistant to the Director of First-Year Writing.
She is on schedule to finish her dissertation, entitled, "Student
Discussion of Assigned Reading in Online First-Year Writing Courses" late
in the summer of 2004. Her research interests include distance learning,
use of weblogs in the teaching of composition, writing program
administration, and reading and writing in hypertext. Terra has recently
accepted an instructor position at Arizona State University, which begins
in the fall of 2004.
Elijah Wright
Elijah Wright is a doctoral student in the School of Library and
Information Science, Indiana University Bloomington. He holds a BA in
English from Tennessee Technological University and an MA in English
(Composition and Rhetoric) from Ohio University (2002). His research
focuses on the diffusion of information through computer-mediated
systems, social network analysis, and the history and philosophy of
science. He is a founding member of the BROG project.
