Rhetorics of Science and Technology

This Impact Report identifies and summarises the diverse impacts, resulting from the £500m of UK funding of Science and Technology in 2013, using numerous quantitative metrics and short case study extracts.  It shows how the varied impacts of a national science and technology organization and its many funded programmes can be annually identified, captured, tracked, and summarised in a public document.

The report was produced for, and by, the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) -  the UK Research Council responsible for funding: (1) all UK astronomy, particle and nuclear physics research, (2) related UK science and technology facilities (e.g. as Harwell and Daresbury), (3) the UK contribution to international science (e.g. CERN, international telescopes and space missions), (4) innovation and business spin-off programmes, and (5) UK public engagement activities.

The Report was co-researched and co-authored by the STFC Impact Team, including myself while Impact Evaluation Manager in 2013, with Dr. Claire Dougan-McCallie (lead author/Head of Impact) and Jenny Beard, with additional input from senior managers, and many data and case study contributions from other key managers across STFC.

Varied key impacts are identified and reported including:

• Research amongst the best (by citation impact) in astronomy, nuclear and particle physics.
• Supported research of 226 Principal Investigators in 70 universities, led to 1,100 peer-reviewed papers in 2012.
• Facilities (the Diamond Light Source, ISIS and CLF) were used in 2012/13 by over 4,200 unique users , in over 2,400 experiments, producing over 1,000 papers in peer-reviewed journals.

• Technology from CERN benefited the UK economy by over £100 billion every year.
• Funding the development of the UK’s space, internet and computer animation industries, returned over £500 billion to the UK economy per annum.
• Funded Innovation Campuses hosted over 230 enterprises and supported over 5,000 jobs.
• UK industry won £43 million in contracts from the international subscriptions funded, and had accumulated a total of £150 million since 2005.

• Funded research inspired future generations to study STEM subjects, attracting 90% of UK undergraduates to study physics, funded 782 PhD students  and 16,800 student training days.
• Between 2009 to 2012 public engagement programmes engaged people on 58 million occasions, with 2 million people engaged in face-to-face activities in 2013 alone.

This article provides a brief overview of the history of glossaries, explores the rhetorical technique of formal definition as the prefrred method of writing glossary entries, and explains the guidelines for writing glossary definitions provided in technical writing textbooks. Professional guidelines for writing glossaries and terminology lists are compared. The heightened importance of well-written glossary definitions for controlling word usage, localization, and translation of user documentation is explained.

La pratica della citazione come enunciazione ripetente di un enunciato altrui da parte di un locutore sembra avere avuto, tra le altre, una funzione persuasiva nella costruzione del discorso retorico (cf. Quint. Inst. 1, 8, 10). Il presente articolo analizza le modalità enunciative delle citazioni esplicite del testo omerico nel corpus zoologico di Aristotele. Lo studio condotto mostra come la citazione omerica sia molto spesso inserita in un gioco plurale di istanze enunciative in cui l’uso del testo omerico ha di volta in volta funzioni pragmatiche diverse che acquisiscono senso proprio in virtù
dell’attribuzione della citazione omerica ad altri non meglio identificati enunciatori.

Building from recent attempts in the humanities and social sciences to conceive of creative, entangled ways of doing interdisciplinary work, I turn to Braidotti's 'nomadic ontology' to (re)vision the human body without a brain. Her exploration of the body as a 'threshold of transformations' is put into conversation with Deleuze's comments on neurobiology to consider what a brainless body might do, or undo, in neuroscientific practice. I ground discussion in a case study, detailing the practices of brain decoding or 'mind reading,' re-interpreting Rose's account. Therein, I argue that the technical-social configurations of brain decoding are unlikely to usher in a radically new ontology, as Rose suggests. To better match Rose's vision and align with new ontologies in cultural theory, I argue that neuroscience must become nomadic and embrace a body without a brain. I then conclude with six recommendations towards a nomadic neuroscience.

In recent years, humanists and social scientists have shown increasing interest in human-animal relations – to the point where many now speak of an ‘animal turn’ in the humanities and social sciences. Across history, psychology, anthropology, literature, sociology, philosophy, and law, an interdisciplinary field of human-animal studies has been forming. Certain common themes run through this diverse field, not least the reproduction of human-animal difference, and the conditions and the implications thereof.

Despite the long history of language use as a marker of such difference, the academic quest to investigate the boundary between human and nonhuman has, somewhat surprisingly, not taken root within rhetorical studies – at least not until now. For this edited volume, we therefore call for chapters that investigate the place of nonhuman animals in the purview of rhetorical theory; what it would mean to communicate beyond the human community; how rhetoric reveals our ‘brute roots.’ In other words, this book invites contributions which enlighten us about likely or possible implications of the animal turn within rhetorical studies. Would such a turn imply, for instance, that rhetoric needs a nonanthropocentric reconfiguration? The question, perhaps, is this: What difference would it make to the discipline if we assumed that nonhuman forms of communication were as interesting as human ones?

These three early "technological poems" each have a unique history, which I will touch on elsewhere, but here they were published together in one of the first online journals, Postmodern Culture (Vol 1: No 3), and may still be available at: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/27306.  Recently they have been written about--a fact I accidentally discovered through the wonders of the Internet, #8 at: file://localhost/Users/stevenkatz/Desktop/My%20Documents%202/Web%20Press/The%20Indian%20Review%20of%20World%20Literature%20in%20English%20-%20January,%202013.html. 

All three poems were begun (and as you will see to some extent situated) in the early to late 1980s, when I was a doctoral student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

I wrote this love song to a computer circa 1982. It was published in  _The Greenfield Review_ 13 (Summer/Fall 1985): 149-50, but first printed in the The RPI Review [Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute] 5 (March 1985): 4, which is the version scanned here.

Please note: because the scan is of an older manuscript, it will not show up when you go to the next page; but if you click the Download button on the right, you will see that the poem is there, and you will be able to read or download it.  Sorry for the inconvenience; I wanted to preserve the old text in which this technological poem first appeared.

Rhetorical scholarship has for decades relied solely on culture to explain persuasive behavior. While this focus allows for deep explorations of historical circumstance, it neglects the powerful effects of biology on rhetorical behavior – how our bodies and brains help shape and constrain rhetorical acts. Not only is the cultural model incomplete, but it tacitly endorses the fallacy of human exceptionalism. By introducing evolutionary biology into the study of rhetoric, this book serves as a model of a biocultural paradigm. Being mindful of biological and cultural influences allows for a deeper view of rhetoric, one that is aware of the ubiquity of persuasive behavior in nature. Human and nonhuman animals, and even some plants, persuade to survive - to live, love, and cooperate. That this broad spectrum of rhetorical behavior exists in the animal world demonstrates how much we can learn from evolutionary biology. By incorporating scholarship on animal signaling into the study of rhetoric, the author explores how communication has evolved, and how numerous different species of animals employ similar persuasive tactics in order to overcome similar problems. This cross-species study of rhetoric allows us to trace the origins of our own persuasive behaviors, providing us with a deeper history of rhetoric that transcends the written and the televised, and reveals the artifacts of our communicative past.

A handbook on 'Language and Science' immediately invites at least three questions: first, why bring two subjects together that are commonly assumed to be separate, if not opposed to each other? Second, given the enormity of both subjects, which intersections will be featured, and which left out? And third, whose language(s) are we talking about exactly, and whose science(s)? As to the first question: language is not what most of us think of when we think of the sciences and scientific practice. We think of laboratories, or of mathematics. But the closer we look, the more language turns out to be imbricated in scientific practice. The study of this intimate relationship began, in the Western tradition at least, in the Middle Ages with the work of philosophers such as Roger Bacon and Ramon Llull, who inherited (or stole) from their Arabic colleagues the pivotal notion of a divine language whose expression constituted reality. 1 This line of thought reached its first peak of intensity in the mid-seventeenth century, with the Royal Society's 'plain language' programme, represented at its extreme by John Wilkins's quest to create a 'universal character', a special language for the conduct of natural philosophy that would smelt away the impurities, imprecisions, and confusions of existing human languages and yield direct, unalloyed expressions of nature. 2 Its second peak of intensity arrived in the early to mid-twentieth century, with philosophers of language such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, and literary theorists such as Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan, who sought to restore the opacity of language. So doing, they aimed to call into question the presumed transparency of positivist approaches to the making and communicating of natural knowledge. Language, then, was considered to be a component of all things, to have creative power, and to be a social performance of the exercise of power. We can still see the competing strands of these programmes weaving through our current approach to the question of language and science-and even through this handbook, as some of the scholars collected here use empirical methods to try to get a 'clearer' picture of what is going on with scientific practice; while others working in the new-materialist tradition strive to blur the boundaries between words and things, maths and language, nature and culture. What all of these scholars share, however, is a commitment to approaching the sciences as intensely human-and humanistic-activities that are no less reliable or vital for their entanglement with everyday practices of meaning-making and community-making.

The significance and popularity of the cluster and industrial district concepts claim for a deeper reflection. The analysis of one of the European Commission’s (EC) policy documents shows inconsistencies that do not impede the formulation of normative statements. That way we answer the question of why and how cluster ideas have substituted industrial district principles and the consequences derived from that phenomenon.

This paper examines Johann Ulrich Bilguer’s 1761 dissertation on the inutility of amputation practices, examining reasons for its influence despite its nonconformance to genre expectations. I argue that Bilguer’s narratives of patient suffering, his rhetorical likening of surgeons to soldiers, and his attention to the horrific experiences of war surgeons all contribute to the dissertation’s wide impact. Ultimately, the dissertation offers an example of affective rhetorics employed during the Enlightenment, demonstrating how bodies and environments—those 'ambient rhetorics' made visible in a text—can contribute to an analysis of genre deviations and widen the scope of genre studies.

This essay explores the transformation of the textual economy of science from the academic mode that prevailed in the postwar period to an emerging model of post-academic science. A close reading of Robert K. Merton’s 1942 essay on the norms of science links the Mertonian norms to the patronage structure of U.S. science during the cold war. Following John Ziman’s term *post-academic science* to describe the emerging standard, I trace how the norms of industrial and academic science are being combined into new forms of collaboration and patronage, and how the academic understanding of science fails to describe emerging practices. In my conclusion, I examine some recent controversies in the public understanding of science and explore how a dialectical, post-academic model helps us understand the present crisis.

Since Thomas Kuhn’s revolutionary look at the social construction of science, research into the rhetorics of science has shown how science is a persuasive form of discourse, rarely as transparent and self-evident as is often understood. Rhetorical studies have taken this cue to examine how science is constructed through available means beyond mere logic. Arguably, the resurgence of creationist beliefs in political discourse has brought on a new impetus in science to persuade the “hearts and minds” of the American population, inspiring Neil deGrasse Tyson’s remaking of Carl Sagan’s 1980 documentary Cosmos. Using Rudolph Otto’s, The Idea of the Holy, this article will define religion as an ineffable experience that creates “creature-consciousness,” or a sense of awe and insufficiency towards something outside the self, while also producing a sense of identification or “oneness.” The ineffable experience is core to the public making of science, just as the ineffable experience plays a ...

1) “Posthumanistic”

2) “Divorce in the Cosmos: A Complaint”

These two poems were published in _Elohi Gadugi Journal: Narratives for a New World_. (Winter 2016). Copyright granted by the publisher back to the author.

Both of these poems present a far-distant future.

When Alan Gross published The Rhetoric of Science in 1990, he helped initiate a productive controversy concerning the place of rhetoric in science studies while arguing for the continued importance of the classical rhetorical tradition. However, in his 2006 revision, Starring the Text, Gross significantly draws back the classical emphasis while making more central the place of the American analytic philosophical tradition stemming from the foundational logical writings of W.V.O Quine. This essay interrogates this shift in Gross’s writings in order to find the working definition of rhetoric that threads throughout his work. This definition, I argue, turns out to be grounded more in Quine’s holistic theory of epistemology than in any sophistical or even Aristotelian conception of language as a vehicle for advocating judgment in times of deliberation and crisis. I argue that a return to the classical emphasis on situated practice can enrich the study of the rhetoric of science and build on the significant accomplishments of Gross’s work.

This article examines the illness/recovery narratives created through Facebook and shared in groups associated with the trauma of venous thrombolytic events (VTEs). Until recently, there was little public focus on VTE recovery; however, due to advances in medicine, patients who might have once died are now surviving, but there is limited literature about what surviving a VTE means for the individual. As a result, people look for others like themselves to help them adjust to this situation. In this context, Facebook affordances help extend traditional illness narratives between patient and healthcare provider from a private to semi-public or public space. Individuals participating in these groups transform not only themselves, but others, eliciting empathy, sharing experiences, and developing a platform upon which to critique healthcare practices.

A review of empirical data on involuntary affective responses to ‘rhetorical’ speech establishes the need to reexamine Jean-Jacques Rousseau's so-called ‘Weak Defense of Rhetoric,’ which considers rhetorical tropes to be dangerous because they seduce the body. Evaluating empirical findings also challenges Richard Lanham's ‘Strong Defense,’ which dismisses Rousseau and rejects any condemnation of ‘rhetorical speech’ in asserting that all utterances are already rhetorical insofar as they are contextual and selective. Ultimately, experimental psychology and neuroscience studies give good reason to adopt a new, Stronger Affective Defense of Rhetoric, one that prioritises the body and its degrees of affectability, embracing Rousseau's idea that democratic deliberation must be concerned with how the body is intimately and often automatically moved by rhetorical speech.

The Digital Humanities in the field of Rhetoric may emphasize quantitative approaches to text at the expense of a materialist analysis of environments and practice. Embracing a theoretical shift toward “New Materialisms,” however, refocuses scholarly attention on material interactions among humans and nonhumans. This chapter explores possibilities for Rhetoric of Science to develop Digital Humanities projects that journey beyond the semiotic turn and human-centric modes of analysis.

This article examines the 2008 World Health Organization/Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS controversy through original reports and media coverage. Analysis reveals that discourse rhetorically exonerates heterosexuals from HIV/AIDS while reifying homophobic and morally righteous ideology about HIV/AIDS and homosexuality. Discourses of “fraudulent science,” “heterosexual absence,” and reverse victimization destabilize meaning of HIV/AIDS and heterosexuality. “AIDS,” “heterosexuality,” and even victimhood and minority status were destabilized and resignified in a rhetoric that benefited from its status as science even as it rendered past science suspect as ideological.

Abstract

“Pentadic Leaves” is a ‘Burkean poem’ in five parts based on Kenneth Burke's “pentad,” of course, but the poem also employs in its imagery and very structure concepts and terminology from Burke’s other, earlier, and/or less well-known work.

This lyrical sequence was written for and delivered at the Kenneth Burke Society Conference at Saint Louis University on July 19, 2014, and subsequently published in a special issue of the _KB Journal_ 12: 2 (Spring 2017), which contains both a link to the video, as well as the printed poem published here for the first time.

Both links to the video and printed publication are within. *The video also contains the live introduction and overview of the poem not found in the printed text.*

"Article content is published under a Creative Commons license attached to each article."

Mirror neurons (MN) — or neurons said to be able to “mirror” the sensed environment — have been widely popularized and referenced across many academic fields. Yet, MNs have also been the subject of considerable debate in the neurosciences. Using a criterion based sampling method and a citation analysis, this paper examines the extent of engagement with the neuroscience literature about MNs, looking specifically at the frequency of “MN debate sources” within articles published in the JSTOR and Communication and Mass Media (CMMC) databases. After reporting the results, the paper reviews characteristic examples in context and, ultimately, shows that MN debates remain largely absent from peer-reviewed articles published in JSTOR and CMMC. However, the paper suggests that this happens for good reason and that MNs retain the potential for inventive animations even though debates have gone largely unrecognized.

This article examines how mirror neuron research from the neurosciences is incorporated by the field of Group Analysis and made to fit within the history and practices of the field. The approach taken is from Science and Technology Studies' discussion of “translation” across actor-networks. The article ends with the suggestion that a translation analysis indicates good reason for rhetoric and writing scholars to consider “multiple ontologies” and to understand neurodisciplinary work as invention.

This paper addresses two related difficulties in conducting effective evaluation: the problem of evaluating collaborative European research projects as such, and the problem of evaluating collaboration support for virtual organisations.  These problems are closely connected, because most EC-funded research projects involve international teams drawn from different partner companies and universities across several member states, and thus inevitably have to operate as a form of virtual organisation. The authors have undertaken evaluation tasks within two EC “Framework” projects, within the context of a broader research programme in collaborative systems evaluation, and the current paper seeks to draw some of the main lessons from these case studies with the purpose of showing different perspectives on evaluation issues and processes.

For decades, Aeneas the Tactician's Poliorcetica was considered to be among those ancient technical works whose apparent lack of stylistic ornamentation or emotional appeal was thought to deprive them of staking their claims to rhetoric and persuasion. More recent scholars, however, have begun to challenge this view. Following this lead, my aim in the present paper is twofold. The first is to explore, decode and analyse some of the main pillars upon which Aeneas' authorial strategy in the Poliorcetica is built. The second is to disassemble a select number of Aeneas' authorial structures and identify how they work. It will be argued that behind the composition of this treatise stands an author who displays serious interest in infusing his text with strong literary, didactic and communicative elements. In shining further light on the formal aspects of the Poliorcetica, my ultimate aim is to urge more strongly the need to reconsider and re-evaluate the rhetorical background of Greek and Roman technical prose.

In today's world one of the most common diseases are heart disease which its mortality and disability is high. Therefore, heart disease is one of the biggest health problems in the world. Since the diagnosis of heart disease in people is very important, a method should be used in the right diagnosis of heart diseases that have the least errors in heart disease diagnosis. For this reason, in this paper, Probabilistic Neural Networks (PNNs) for the diagnosis of heart disease from a dataset that includes 303 samples from different patients is used. In this paper, we have implemented PNN in the MATLAB environment. As well as, the efficiency criteria in this paper is to maximize accuracy of heart disease diagnosis in the process of training and testing. According to the Cleveland dataset which contains 303 samples, we found that the accuracy of training and test accuracy are 87% and 75% respectively.

This book explores how human population genetics has emerged as a means of imagining and enacting belonging in contemporary society. Venla Oikkonen approaches population genetics as an evolving set of technological, material, narrative and affective practices, arguing that these practices are engaged in multiple forms of belonging that are often mutually contradictory. Considering scientific, popular and fictional texts, with several carefully selected case studies spanning three decades, the author traces shifts in the affective, material and gendered preconditions of population genetic visions of belonging. Topics encompass the debate about Mitochondrial Eve, ancient human DNA, temporality and nostalgia, commercial genetic ancestry tests, and tensions between continental and national genetic inheritance. The book will be of particular interest to scholars and students of science and technology studies, cultural studies, sociology, and gender studies.

Because of various and/or possible copyright infringements, right now this is a list of publications (much like a cv). In what I hope is the near future (relative to whatever present you are in), I will bookmark these so they may be accessed more easily using your institutions' library access. I apologize for the inconvenience.  Also see Poems of Science and Technology; Poems of Rhetoric.

This article pilots a study in statistical genre analysis, a mixed-method approach for (a) identifying conventional responses as a statistical distribution within a big data set and (b) assessing which deviations from the conventional might be more effective for changes in audience, purpose, or context. The study assesses pharmaceutical sponsor presentations at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) drug advisory committee meetings. Preliminary findings indicate the need for changes to FDA conflict-of-interest policies.