Prompt:

Draft and publish a blog post in response to the topical reading you were assigned in your group. Your blog post should help your groupmates make sense of the reading (a short summary of the text) and offer a sense of how the text will help your group focus their research and move forward.

Research Topic: Analyzing Rhetorical Velocity in Social Media

Digital Literacy and the Making of Meaning by Komysha Hassan pg. 674

In the introduction of Komysha Hassan article she starts off by saying school’s library search pages resembles other online portals like Google. As a first-year student at the University of Central Florida, majoring in political science/pre-law, Hassan did extensive research on her university’s library search page between theoretical framing and rhetorical analysis. She compares each with her autoethnographic (cultural study, or one’s own experience and interaction with the world).

Komysha results found that schools library search page is first off-putting or unfamiliar which leads students to go to Google or another search engine that is more familiar.  

Hassan goes on with telling that libraries are coming to the digitize world. Print media can no longer stand alone so experts say that authorships are taking place in the digital world. The difference from having a digital realm and a physical librarian your information is processed through a mediator which becomes an important part of the results. Digital formats rely entirely on user input because a library search does not collect information to build a profile like other search engines use.

Currently everyone must have digital literacy we cannot choose not to acquire the skill because of how important the skill is. The way we utilize it are factors that also determine what we make of information received through that medium.

With-in each search provider, all have determined an algorithm. Keith Grant-Davie experiments between user and textual environment. His rhetorical situation has four constituents, exigence, rhetor, audience, and constraints.  

Hassan talks a little bit about Deborah Brandt’s piece, “Sponsors of Literacy.” In Brandt’s work, she thought it was useful interpreting those background influences on the creation of meaning.

Rhetorical analysis – researcher critically examining a certain text, disassembling its cohesive parts and determining how ad why certain actions of speech or visual argument were made. Ask the UCF research librarian questions. Which is helpful in broadening the research perspective to encompass a professional viewpoint of using the libraries search function. She talked about the design of UCF search page and how it effected it.

In conclusion the UCF design did affect the way she interacted with the portal. She found that quality over quantity in the digital space is essence. The format of the UCF search page reflects a certain digital tradition in which the traditional library does not belong.

Hassan believes that the digital world is not something to fear but rather embrace.