Research

COMMUNICATION - WRITING - TECHNOLOGY

Emerging writing technologies have shifted how and where writing happens. My work examines both the technological and the rhetorical affects of such changes. Using augmented reality, 3D printing, GIS mapping, and physical computing, I explore how new writing technologies can help articulate hidden histories, advocate for social change, or mobilize information. To learn more about how I research, make, and critically engage with emerging technologies, click on my projects and publications below.

COMMUNICATING CHANGE

Race, Space, and Equality

Augmenting Atlanta is an augmented reality walking tour and advocacy project that examines the history of race and mobility in Atlanta, Georgia. The tour analyzes the Atlanta Beltline project, a plan to connect 45 neighborhoods through a network of public parks, multi-use trails, and new transit. However, Atlanta has a long history of urban redevelopment, often encumbered by racist policies, economic inequality, and special interest construction that divide the city. Building on Michel De Certeau’s theories of space and place and Jeff Rice’s networks of Digital Detroit, Augmenting Atlanta critiques the Beltline discourse, advocates for racial equality, and uses AR to participate in the evolving mobility of the historic city. This project is currently being revised for submission to Enculturation: a journal of rhetoric, writing, and culture. To learn more about development in the Atlanta area, visit the Atlanta Beltline website.

Protest as Public Pedagogy

In May 1968, over 11 million people marched through Paris pasting posters and spraying Marxist graffiti to protest unfair labor conditions and capitalist ideology. I argue these images instigated people to move and wrote a script in the streets directing resistance. Using posters and graffiti from May 1968, Mobilizing P(AR)IS maps the circulation of texts on the streets and crafts a walkable AR route that reunites the spread of images with the spread of people and protest. Built with images from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the AR tour creates an actionable archive that emplaces the protest back into the very streets that created the movement. This project unites the physical space of Paris and the digital tools of mobile technologies to augment space, initiate movements, and visualize history.

Environmental Advocacy and Education

EcoTour is a mobile, augmented reality app that connects the history of Paynes Prairie State Park to current environmental issues. Using an interactive map, visitors can scan signs within the park to access multimedia AR overlays - audio-visual media related to the park's history, wildlife, indigenous peoples, climate change, and environmental threats. EcoTour helps visitors visualize the complex relationships between the park's natural environment and human development. Built as part of an upper division writing course, EcoTour created an opportunity for students to research, design, and create public media that promotes environmental education. By encouraging the community to engage with the Park in this way, we hope to provide not only awareness of the damage being done to our ecosystem or the erasure of local histories, but to foster change by enacting a sustainable and emplaced critique. Visit ecotourapp.com to learn more.

Advocacy through Augmented Reality

Museums across the globe are using augmented reality technolgies to help visitors connect with exhibits and learn more about art. Working with the Harn Museum of Art in Gainesville, Florida, I led a group of local scholars and created a collaborative AR takeover tour. The event offered an experiental learning workshop and discussed art, public humanities, and emerging technologies. Participants interviewed artists, curators, and fellow scholars and built AR overlays emphasizing the value of digital humanities and critical public discourse. The tour, "Augmenting the Harn," addresses issues such as technofeminisms, social advocacy, public pedagogy, racial bias in tech, and UX/UI theory.

DIGITAL MATERIAL MAKING

Accessibility and Digital Material Making

Making Hope and 3D Printing Change draws on critical making, visual rhetoric, and disability studies to explore more accessible methods for studying digital images. 3D printing creates a different way of experiencing images through touch. Using Shepard Fairey's Obama Hope and 3D technologies, this project remakes visual images into tactile lithophanes that reformat color and wave lengths to create hands-on experiences of visual data. Ultimately, I argue that sensory approaches can prioritize difference to reframe how scholars discuss disability and create new methods for doing visual study. Making Hope is forthcomming in the Doing Digital Visual Studies collection edited by Laurie Gries and Aaron Beveridge.

Sensory Tech and Embodied Media

For the past five years, I have taught Arduino workshops that help participants build basic electronic devices with sensory technology. Arduinos use an open source, command line interface and work across digital and physical platforms to read inputs (a light on a photocell or a finger on a joystick) and produce an output (sound from a sensor or starting a motor). Participants learn to combine digital code with analog sensors to create an electronic effect. My workshops have used light, sound, and motion to create pseudo-theremins, animatronics, photocell light receptors, and programmable music boxes. For more information visit the Arduino Page at the University of Florida.

Tactile Technologies and Accessible Learning

Partnering with University of Colorado, Boulder, I create tactile books for children with visual disabilities. The books use 3D technologies to design raised scenes and braile plates that readers can touch, read, and experience. Each page or set of items is printed with durable, PLA printing plastic and features shapes that help readers understand the story. Tactile book projects were part of a 2018 Girls Technology Camp and a 2019 Advanced Exposition course taught at the University of Florida. The tactile books we created include The Very Hungry Caterpiller, The Giving Tree, Goodnight Moon, The Lorax, The Ugly Duckling,If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, and Rainbow Fish .

Teaching Technology as Advocacy

I also teach workshops and pop-up events focused on crafting with technology - projects that unite wired tech with sewing, paper crafts, or woven materials. Each project stitches together diverse materials to demonstrate simple scientific concepts (like electricity, magnetic fields, or color blocking) and engage different types of technical literacy. With each workshop I discuss how technologies can promote diverse forms of communication and public advocacy for issues such as Women in STEM, technofeminism, accessibility, multilingual writing and making, and sustainability.

COMMUNITY

INITIATIVES

Trace Innovation Initiative

Ecocriticism, Writing Studies, Digital Media

The Trace innovation Initiative is a research endeavor developed and maintained by the University of Florida’s Department of English. Trace works at the intersection of writing studies, digital media studies, and ecocriticism. Providing an interdisciplinary forum for scholars, we focus on the ethical and material impact of media. Trace acts as a hub for several distinct projects including an online journal, Sequentials, Augmented Reality Criticisms (ARCs), and MassMine data mining software.

I currently serve as editor for the Trace Journal and Co-Coordinator for ARCs. For more information, please visit the trace site at https://trace.english.ufl.edu/about/

Girls Technology Camp

Education, Equality, and Gender

Each summer, the University of Florida hosts a Girls Technology Camp for middle school girls. The camp promotes science and tech and offers a forum for middle schoolers to work with new technologies such as coding, 3D printing, augmented reality, wearable interfaces, and circuitry. Camp activities emphasize the important and often overlooked role of women in the history of science and technology - and encourage women to participate in stem learning. Over the past five years, I have helped design and teach the week long interactive camp.

Digital Humanities Workshop Series

Experiential Learning and Community Education

Across the campus and community, I lead digital humanities and writing workshops to help people tinker with technologies and writing tools. The workshops explore how making is writing and how new forms of sensory, material, and mobile writing can change communication practices.

Workshops have covered such topics as podcasting, augmented reality, decolonizing data studies, making as writing, social justice in digital communities, composing with Arduinos, wearable tech and crafting communication, environmental rhetoric, embodied media, and 3D printing. Each workshop creates opportunities to extend learning beyond the classroom and collaborate with students and members of the community.

Tactile Technologies

SHANNON BUTTS

RESEARCH

COMMUNICATING CHANGE

Augmenting Atlanta

Mobilizing Paris

EcoTour

Interactive Art

DIGITAL MATERIAL MAKING

Making Hope and 3D Printing Change

Arduino Interface

3D Tactile Books

Crafting with Technology

COMMUNITY

INITIATIVES