Entropics of Discourse: An Interview with Collin Brooke
An interview with Collin Brooke, the featured speaker at the DWRL's 2015 Speaker Series event. Dr. Brooke talks about Kenneth Burke's master tropes, connections between rhetoric and network studies, and the concept of entropy. Dr. Brooke will be hosting a workshop on rhetoric and networks at the 2015 Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute in Madison, Wisconsin.
Every year, the DWRL holds a Speaker Series event, inviting scholars from across the country to present research that sits at the intersections of rhetoric, writing, and digital technology. In past years, the lab has hosted Cynthia Selfe, Victor Vitanza, DJ Spooky, Jody Shipka, Cynthia Haynes, and Gregory Ulmer. In 2015, we had the pleasure of hosting Dr. Collin Brooke, associate professor of rhetoric and writing at Syracuse University. Dr. Brooke also serves as the Director of Electronic Resources for the Rhetoric Society of America and is the author of the book Lingua Fracta: Towards a Rhetoric of New Media.
His talk at the DWRL was entitled "Entropics of Discourse: Post/human Rhetorics Amidst the Networks." In that talk, part of an in-progress book project, he traced connections between the so-called "master tropes," network studies, and the concept of entropy. Video coverage of that talk is available on the DWRL's YouTube channel. For this interview, the lab's Eric Detweiler sat down with Dr. Brooke to discuss these concepts and connections, as well as about the particular challenges of choosing the medium or media in which digital rhetorical work gets published.
In addition to his larger projects, Dr. Brooke is also the curator of Rhetsy, a weekly collection of "rhetorical miscellany" that you can subscribe to here.
This interview is also available via LibSyn and the iTunes store. Check back soon for an interview with Dr. Jody Shipka, the lab's 2014 speaker.