My newest article, “Digitally Mapping the Buddhist Holy Land: Intercultural Communication, Religious History, and Networked Rhetoric,” is currently available in the latest issue of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization. In the article, Derek Maher and I explain our approach to developing digital intercultural research projects that include students.
Why Do We Need Digital Intercultural Methods?
As we explain in the article, digital intercultural methods–methods that combine digital humanities, intercultural, and rhetorical approaches–allow for new types of scholarly interaction. First, the digital humanities is a loosely-bound area of study that involves developing new forms of humanistic inquiry via digital technologies. Intercultural communication is an area devoted to studying encounters between members of two or more cultures. And networked rhetoric, a newer area of study, involves studying the rhetorical impacts of technological and social networks. When combined, these three lenses provide a powerful toolkit for mapping the Buddhist holy land through scholarship that is translated into modes of digital delivery.
What Does Our Approach Look Like?
In the article, we spell out an approach we call “tracing cultural impacts” that enables technical communicators, students, and scholars from a variety of disciplines, as well as lay participants in professional and scholarly discourses, to:
- trace the cultural impacts between human and nonhuman actors within networks
- help emphasize certain network configurations over others, such as by designing communication deliverables that meet the needs of specific actors, by translating the needs of particular actors into terms that make sense for other actors, and by keeping a watchful eye on the overall change and development of a specific network’s configuration.
We then demonstrate this methodology through an examination of a project to digitally map the Buddhist holy land. The project examined involves a longstanding study abroad program in which students travel to India to study the holy land in-depth and to document its history and culture. The next step of that project, currently underway, is the development of a website that showcases multimedia resources on the holy land for scholars, students, and pilgrims.
Get the Full Article
http://www.rpcg.org/index.php?journal=rpcg&page=article&op=view&path%5B%5D=155
Cite The Article (APA)
Maher, D. & Getto, G. (2016). Digitally mapping the Buddhist holy land: Intercultural communication, religious history, and networked rhetoric. Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization, 9, 78-99.