For my final project in MITH 610: Intro to Digital Studies, I created a Twitter Bot. It now (as of May 16, 2019) tweets once a day. You can read all about it on my medium post, “#TeamRhetoric, Time, and In(ter)vention: Twitter Bots, Tactical Media.”

As @RhetoricTweeter spews out formulaic criticism, it pushes on an existing paradigm of intervention. The tweets try to seem like they intervene in some ongoing theoretical or conceptual conversation in rhetorical criticism or in academic literature more broadly. In this way, I hope it asks us to think about how the form of academic writing might encourage a specific interventional approach.

But at the same time, as its tweets develop, it may be an inventional resource. The strange pairing of expansions that may not otherwise be placed together (e.g. in a test case, the bot wrote: “In my next paper, I will use decolonial theory to claim that Hilary Clinton’s emails frustrated the public sphere. #TeamRhetoric”) may lead to interesting new critical ideas. It may encourage a way of playing with how rhetoric and criticism happens on twitter, whether directly with the bot or inspired by it.

Here are a few of my favorite tweets it made and responses to it.

Continue reading “Digital humanities: #TeamRhetoric Twitter Bot” →