John Logie

• PhD in English, Rhetoric Concentration, Pennsylvania State University
• Professor (Full) at University of Minnesota

Roland Barthes's "The Death of the Author" is a foundational text for scholars who are addressing questions of authorship and textual ownership in English studies and its neighboring disciplines. Barthes's essay is typically presented without significant attention to the circumstances and context surrounding its initial English publication in 1967...

Social question and answer (Q&A) Web sites field a remarkable variety of questions: while one user seeks highly technical information, another looks to start a social exchange. Prior work in the field has adopted informal taxonomies of question types as a mechanism for interpreting user behavior and community outcomes. In this work, we contribute a...

Peers, Pirates, and Persuasion: Rhetoric in the Peer-to-Peer Debates investigates the role of rhetoric in shaping public perceptions about a novel technology: peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. While broadband Internet services now allow speedy transfers of complex media files, Americans face real uncertainty about whether peer-to-peer file sharin...

Participants in the United States' ongoing debates over peer-to-peer transfers of potentially copyrighted files have regularly trafficked in the rhetoric of warfare. While it is easy to understand how copyright holders would view peer-to-peer file transfers as a kind of attack, the rhetorical turn toward the discourse of military conflict has radia...

Quintilian is known primarily as an advocate of a pedagogical system grounded in imitation. But in Book XII of the Institutio Oratoria, Quintilian states that he has left the work of his predecessors behind and, further, that he is offering an original contribution to the rhetorical tradition. Quintilian's claims of originality and proprietary inte...

This paper builds upon several recent research efforts that have explored the nature and qualities of questions asked on these social Q&A sites by offering a focused examination of answers posted to three of the most popular Q&A sites. Specifically, this paper examines sets of answers responding to specific types of questions and explores the degre...

11 rumblings from the copyleft.

Yoko Ono is unusual in that she is a site of considerable activity in three distinct spaces where the term “remix” is in common use. This paper reviews her activity in these distinct remix spaces and examines the spaces for identifiable variations in the term’s resonances and meaning. First, the “here” of academia reflects academic conversations ab...

On January 18, 2012, many websites blocked, obscured, or interrupted their core content to protest legislation then pending in the U.S. Congress. Today, those two pieces of legislation (SOPA and PIPA) are no longer under consideration. This form of protest action, while sometimes described as “unprecedented” . . . is not. Two antecedents are the Bl...

Social question and answer (Q&A) sites receive tens of thousands of questions each day, producing a mix of archival information, asker satisfaction, and, sometimes, frustration. This paper builds upon several recent research efforts that have explored the nature and qualities of questions asked on these social Q&A sites by offering a focused examin...

The first of the enumerated goals in the Intellectual Property Committee of CCCC's mission statement reads as follows: "keep the CCCC and NCTE memberships informed about intellectual property developments, through reports in the CCCC newsletter and in other NCTE and CCCC forums." To this end, the Intellectual Property Committee is, with this public...

As we begin to explore the possibilities and potentialities of Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), it is critical that we understand the historical experiences that inform our students’ interactions with virtual spaces. For students nowattending universities the technology that first drewthem to virtual spaces often was Napster, the first peer-to...

This article supplements recent scholarship on Kenneth Burke’s notorious speech at the 1935 American Writers’ Congress by comparing Burke’s experiences and recollections of the Congress with those of his rough contemporary, Richard Wright. Both men later presented vivid accounts of this event as the point at which they recognized their own pronounc...

This chapter posits a widening gap between workplace writing practices and traditional composition pedagogies. In particular, this chapter suggests that traditional composition pedagogies persist in foregrounding solitary, proprietary authors as model composers, despite the limited applicability of these models. The fields of technical and professi...

Close readings of passages addressing “books” and “authors” in 20th Century renditions of Plato's dialogues reveal highly variable translations. These translations track along with the rise and fall of literary! critical movements celebrating and critiquing the figure of the author, and respond to the increasingly dominant understanding of the Fift...

This paper analyzes a recent Internet‐based protest action in terms of its historical and rhetorical antecedents. Throughout the mid‐1990s, the GeoCities company offered visitors a “deed”; to a small portion of electronic storage space, so long as these virtual “homesteaders”; maintained and improved these parcels of cyberspace‐based “property.”; T...

Increasingly, students and instructors within composition classrooms are using electronic media for the circulation, appropriation, and alteration of texts and images. Because these practices could, in a worst-case scenario, lead to significant penalties under current copyright laws, this article provides an introduction to intellectual property la...