Hi this is Annette Vee. I am responding to the program visibility path in the edited
collection Radiant Figures: Visual Rhetorics In Everyday Administrative Contexts which is
edited by Rachel Gramer, Logan Bearden, and Derek Mueller. So first I want to thank the editors
for inviting me to respond to this. This was a wonderful creative exercise, thinking visually
thinking audio. I was encouraged by the editors to respond in a creative way and so here you have my
response. So one of the things I love about this collection the four pieces that I read for it
through the program visibility path is that it addresses something our field has long discussed
and that is everyday writing what it is and what it can do. But more than that the pieces here
gesture towards things that writing can't do alone and how graphical representation
can augment the everyday writing that we do particularly as writing program administrators.
So as I said I was encouraged to be creative in this so you have an audio
file here but the other thing that I did was make a map in response to thinking about the
the four pieces that I read here. This is my map of program visibility
in Radiant Figures. We have green spaces of contributions and we also have the dragon governed
spaces of cautions that I will introduce at the end of this. So to begin there are some advantages
of graphical figures that are expressed in these pieces and they are namely as I saw them ways that
graphical figures can have stakeholders represent themselves. This is in Pantelides et al.
They're also generative tools for thinking. So Bearden and Martins both made these arguments.
They're ways of communicating our programs to others. Pantelides et al. made this argument as well
as I think the other ones. And they're ways of finding common ground among our stakeholders.
Lawrence Jose made this argument. And what they're all saying--I think--is that design can do some of
the things that we already know that writing can do although it does it a little bit differently.
So I admire in the collection the attention to everyday writing and administration. Surely this
is an understudied area of what we do although of course there have been some things published
on it. But I want to caution too that we also use text right we email, in particular, all day long.
Text is still really central to the work that we do in administration so we have to hold on
to that of course but the attention to everyday graphics and what they can contribute and what
they can help us do is new and fascinating in this particular edited collection. So after reading the
pieces some other things that I thought about in addition to the contributions that I just named
are Johanna Drucker's work in graphical communication in particular
her work in Graphesis and Diagrammatic Writing. There's a long history of graphical work being
used not only for expression but for thought from Aristotle to the Enlightenment, etc.,
and the application to administration may seem prosaic, but it suggests that administration is
also intellectual work which also recalls for me Gary Olson's edited collection
Rhetoric and Composition as Intellectual Work from 2002 and that is that we cannot simply be about
practice when we do administration. Theorizing what we do is important for doing our work well.
So one of the things that that we need to do in this theory is you know if we are doing
text all the time and also we're asked to do design,
Jose makes the argument the design is absolutely part of administrative work, and I'd push that
suggestion a little bit too to say that experience or training and design may be necessary for future
administrators. So here we see on my map a bunch of mountains which are challenges
for us to climb over and conquer and this is the learning of design that Lawrence Jose
argues. But of course let's keep in mind that there are things that design can't do,
too. It's not a panacea for getting support from deans or colleagues. It doesn't substitute for
good administration or personal contact, and it can't make cases by itself. And this is the same
as with writing. We also can't rely on writing to do those things and as Martins cautions by
way of Latour, we can't delegate everything to the technology of design or the technology of writing.
We still need to take responsibility for getting people on board, listening to stakeholders, etc.
So here's a big caution that I have and that is the map is not the territory.
I'll bring in a few literary references to illustrate that. So first of all
Lewis Carroll. This is a piece published in 1893 where he talks about a one-to-one map.
And at the end in this dialogue Mein Herr says, " It has never been spread out, yet," said Mein
Herr: "the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country and shut out the sunlight!
So now we use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well." So this
I read as a writing program administrator as a kind of caution that if we try to fully represent
all of the things that we do it actually doesn't do the important intellectual work of distilling
the important figures, the important things. Here's another literary caution from Borges,
and I'll read this whole one. "...In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection
that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City and the map of the Empire,
the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied
and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire and which
coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of
Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some
Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters.
In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by
Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography."
So this with a little tongue-in-cheek response I would say is another caution to us as writing
program administrators, and that is, the aspirations that we have to represent our
programs in particular for future generations is something that we should temper sometimes
and think about the labor involved in it and think about what's actually useful
to pass on to our stakeholders and people who come after us. So for all this, again,
the reminder is the map is not the territory and neither is my map of course the territory
of the pieces that I'm responding to here. Writing can't capture everything and figures can't capture
everything. This is simply an admission that administrative work is complex, multifaceted,
and human. If we were to walk around with a full map of our territories in our pocket, we would be
carrying an even heavier load than we already do as WPAs, which leads me to another caution here.
While I agree that some design knowledge and production is critical to any writer, including
WPAs, we need to be careful about the piling on of further work and raising the bar yet again.
This is a little bit what I think of as the literacy problem: If everything is a
central literacy, how do we prioritize these things? There's a lot to learn as a writing
program administrator and design is one of those wonderful things that we could learn.
The other issues that I see here on the map represented close to the dragon, in addition
to the labor issues that I'm concerned about, the kind of conceptual problem that the map is
not the territory, and the idea that figures don't substitute for human work, is accessibility, which
was not addressed to the four pieces. But something for us that's important to keep in mind text is
handled quite well for accessibility in many ways and some images and figures are not well handled.
So off in the waters here you can see Borges and Carroll but also my own anxiety. So my response
here is perhaps a personal response as someone recently taking on administration I struggle with
the raised bar of what I'm expected to do from students, colleagues, deans, etc. So the result is
this is my desk as it currently is at the end of the term with all of the different figures and
emails and analog and digital kinds of things that I have to respond to regularly.
And speaking of a final note on the consideration of means here: I thought about Prezi, about an
audio only file, about doing this an entirely digital way, and then I was compelled by the
handwritten notes on my desk for things that I needed to complete for the day, and also for my
personal life the fact that my kids draw ideas out all the time and I watch them but I rarely do it
myself. But the fact that it's analog is still key a time to step away from the computer and this is
something that I would say too is useful for us to consider both in graphical representation of
our own programs and our own work but also how we might represent them digitally or analog. Diagrams
can be also analog, and analog and digital means of representation can also be ways of thinking.
So thank you so much for the opportunity to respond to this to take a break from my messy
desk and think about the ways that we represent our programs visually and graphically. Here's
a list of the references that I made in this presentation. Thank you so much for listening.