Robert Glenn Howard

I am Director of Digital Studies and Professor in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. I am also editor of the journal Western Folklore.

My research seeks to uncover the possibilities and limits of empowerment through everyday expression on the Internet by focusing on the intersection of individual human agency and participatory performance.


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Contact Information

Email: rgh@rghoward.com
Phone: (608) 262-2605
Fax: (608) 262-9953
Office: 6144 Vilas Hall
Mail: Robert Glenn Howard
University of Wisconsin -- Madison
Department of Communication Arts
821 University Avenue
Madison, Wisconsin 53706-1497

Spring 2012

CA 478: Rhetorical Analysis for Internet Discourse

Non-Current Courses
(For reference purposes only.)

CA 100d: Public Speaking in a Digital Age
CA 200: Introduction to Digital Communication
CA/RS 374: Rhetoric of Religion
CA/RS 374s: Rhetoric of Religion
   (Intensive Short Course)
CA 472: Rhetoric and Technology
CA/FLR 522: Digitally Documenting Everyday Communication
CA 570: Classical Rhetorical Theory
CA 478: Rhetorical Analysis for Internet Discourse
CA 610e: Ethnography and Internet Communities
CA 969: The Rhetorical Theory of Kenneth Burke
 CA 976: Ethnographic Methods for Rhetorical Analysis
FLR 560: Folklore in a Digital Age

 

 

Digital Jesus

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“The Vernacular Web of Participatory Media ”
(in Critical Studies in Media Communication , Volume 25, Number 5, December 2008: 490-513.)
 From wikis to blogs, new participatory forms of web-based communication are increasingly common ways for institutions and individuals to communicate. The content these forms produce incorporates elements of both institutional and non-institutional discourse. More than a syncretic pastiche, this content is the product of hybrid agencies made possible by these new forms. Terming this content ‘‘vernacular’’ acknowledges that this hybridity frustrates any reified conception of pure or authentic non-institutional discourse. At the same time, the theory of a ‘‘vernacular web’’ attends to the complex new transformational possibilities of participatory media seem to offer individuals.

“Electronic Hybridity: The Persistent Processes of the Vernacular Web”
(in Journal of American Folklore. Volume 121, Number 480, Spring 2008: 192-218.)
Through the example of a specific blog, this article locates a category of online discourse termed the “vernacular web.” Because the definitive trait of the vernacular is its distinction from the institutional, the vernacular web emerges in specific network locations as a communal invocation of alternate authority. Imagining those invocations as located communication processes, the concept of a vernacular web provides the theoretical language necessary for speaking about the complex hybridity that new communication technologies make possible.

(More Research . . . )