Kevin BrockUniversity of South Carolina | USC · Department of English Language and Literature
Kevin Brock
Ph.D. in Communication, Rhetoric, & Digital Media, North Carolina State University
About
10
Publications
2,234
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59
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
Kevin Brock currently works in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of South Carolina. Kevin researches and teaches courses on digital rhetoric, composition, composition pedagogy, technical communication, and professional writing.
Additional affiliations
August 2019 - present
August 2013 - August 2019
August 2004 - May 2013
Education
August 2009 - May 2013
Publications
Publications (10)
Procedure, when discussed in regards to rhetoric, and to “digital rhetoric” in particular, is framed overwhelmingly in regards to game play (and to video games most frequently). We argue that this view needs to be expanded if scholars of rhetoric are to realize how complex human-computer rhetor systems function in diverse contexts. Such systems do...
Every code text is informed by stylistic decisions that impact how the text is interpreted and understood. While software developers have long discussed concerns of style in regards to writing code, scholars of computation would benefit from a rhetorical approach to style, an approach that links style to substance and sees style as situated and aud...
In this article, I question rhetoric’s preference for the heuristic by reexamining one of the oldest and most fundamental tools available to a rhetor: the enthymeme. The enthymeme, while serving as the basis for heuristic invention, also works at the local level as a rhetorically oriented algorithmic procedure through which a rhetor determines the...
Winner of the 2017 Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative Book Prize Software developers work rhetorically to make meaning through the code they write. In some ways, writing code is like any other form of communication; in others, it proves to be new, exciting, and unique. In Rhetorical Code Studies , Kevin Brock explores how software code serves...
In this webtext, we explore how Magic and other complex analog systems operate rhetorically as activity networks. First, we perform brief analyses of Magic’s rules, player archetypes, and common play styles in order to examine how the game’s protocological mechanisms and surrounding play culture have developed over the last 25 years. Second, we eng...
[[[Full article: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0047281617726278]]]
We examine the rhetorical activity employed within software development communities in code texts. For technical communicators, the rhetoricity of code is crucial for the development of more effective code and documentation. When we understand that code is a collect...
The increasing prominence and variety of open source software (OSS) threaten to upset conventional approaches to software development and marketing. While a tremendous amount of scholarship has been published on the differences between proprietary and OSS development, little has been discussed regarding the effect of rhetorical appeals used to prom...
The increasing prominence and variety of open source software (OSS) threaten to upset conventional approaches to software development and marketing. While a tremendous amount of scholarship has been published on the differences between proprietary and OSS development, little has been discussed regarding the effect of rhetorical appeals used to prom...
In this article, we hope to accomplish two primary goals. First, we mean to provide some context for a transition from exploring the available means of persuasion to exploring of the available means of composing. We do this by tracing the historical roots of “available means,” accompanied, we hope, with a number of different resonances: first, with...
Scholars of, or interested in, rhetoric have an opportunity to build upon the emerging body of work from the fields of software studies and critical code studies in order to explore the potential for meaning-making made possible through code and its expression(s). Over the last decade, rhetoric has significantly expanded to incorporate image, sound...
Projects
Project (1)
In my first book project, Rhetorical Code Studies (University of Michigan Press, 2019), I argue that critical attention to the meaningful work performed by software developers in and around the code texts they compose can help us understand more fully and clearly how code operates rhetorically for a variety of purposes. Building on scholarship in digital rhetoric, software studies, and technical communication, I examine a variety of rhetorical qualities present in code and relevant discourse (e.g., emails and forum posts) to demonstrate how software developers, both amateur and professional, communicate not only procedural rules but also stylistic preferences, implicit and explicit arguments for how development of a given program should continue or change, and individual or organizational values. These examinations serve inquiry into, and hold significant implications for, digital communication, multimodal composition, and the cultural analysis of software and its creation.
