Expositions and Exhibitions: Chicago’s Involvement with Early Healthcare Technology for Premature Infants

The project “Expositions and Exhibitions: Chicago’s Involvement with Early Healthcare Technology for Premature Infants” draws upon the Newberry Library’s collections to better understand Chicago’s relationship with neonatology, infants, and the use of technology as showcased during the Columbian Exposition (1893), the Baby Tent Exhibition (1911), the Century of Progress (1933-34), and other relevant events. As a Newberry Library scholar-in-residence for 2020-2021, this research will contribute to work for a larger book project exploring healthcare technologies in critical care hospital contexts.

Grotesque Protests: Bodily Fluids, Social Media, and Activist Rhetorics

Based on “Grotesque Protests in Social Media as Embodied, Political Rhetoric” (Bivens & Cole, 2018), this collaborative book project examines how social media enables embodied, political protests in the United States and throughout the world. By analyzing political protests that use various body fluids (2012-2021), we argue these embodied, political protests are grotesque and used to recast power relations. In the process, these protestors provide rhetorical counter-strategies to populist discourse, which mirror other historical attempts to do much of the same.

Locating Technical and Professional Communication at Two-Year Institutions

Commenced in August 2018, “Locating Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) at Two-Year Institutions” identified TPC courses, certificates, concentrations, degrees, emphases, and programs from 1,235 public and private not-for-profit two-year institutions. Generously funded by a 2018 Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication (CPTSC) research grant, the research team included Timothy J. Elliott (DePaul University), Gustav Karl Henrik Wiberg (Harold Washington College, University of Bern, Switzerland, and Nordic Electrochemistry ApS), and two undergraduate student research assistants, Yocelyn and Qahir.

The project’s findings are reported in two research articles: “Locating Technical and Professional Communication at Two-Year Institutions” (2020)” and “Updating Information about Technical and Professional Communication at Two-Year Colleges” (2020). The project continues as the research team plans to work to make all 15,000 data points openly accessible for other scholars to use.

Improving the Design of Visual Risk Communication through a Content Analysis of a Crowdsourced Public Health App’s Existing User Comments

Candice A. Welhausen and I were awarded a 2019 Association of Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Special Interest Group on the Design of Communication (SIGDOC) career advancement research grant for our research using a hybid method of open card sorting and affinity diagramming to analyze the content of 600 existing PulsePoint Respond iOs review comments. The project included two undergraduate student research assistants, Yocelyn and Qahir.

The projects findings are reported in “mHealth Apps and Usability: Using User-Generated Content to to Explore Users’ Experiences with a Civilian First Responder App” (forthcoming in Technical Communication) and will be presented at the Society for Technical Communication (STC) virtual Summit in 2021 in a session, “mHealth Apps and Usability: Using User-Generated Content to Explore Users’ Experiences.”

Other notable aspects of the project can be found in the following articles

• “Amplified Precarity in Emergency Response mHealth Apps: Rhetorical Agency in Interface Rhetoric” (forthcoming in the Rhetoric of Health and Medicine),
• “Using a Hybrid Card Sorting-Affinity Diagramming Method to Design Cognitively Scaffolded Learning for Undergraduate Student Researchers and Address Two-Year College Research Opportunity Inequities” (forthcoming in Communication Design Quarterly), and
• “Pivoting Toward Rhetorical Ethics by Sharing and Using Existing Data to Reduce Data Waste: An Ethical Research Practice for the Rhetoric of Health and Medicine” (2020).

Healthcare Application (App)

Based in my aural/sonic research in critical care hospital contexts and currently in preliminary discovery and development, the healthcare app (NICU4U) will be marketed to hospital administrators and unit educators. Specifically, the healthcare app will be a clearinghouse and storehouse of information for friends and family of patients in intensive care units.

last update 04/2021