Travel Writing in a Plague Year: A Digital Info Shift and the Highway 64 Project
Type of Presentation
Individual paper/presentation
Conference Strand
Outreach and Partnership
Target Audience
Higher Education
Second Target Audience
Other
community partners
Location
Session 2 Papers
Relevance
Adjusting their approach to digital tools, info literacy, and an altered rhetorical perspective was crucial as these students had to migrant from a primarily f2f analog project to a pandemic restricted remote activity.
Abstract
The pandemic has created a national shift in digital work and it has been a rocky transition in many arenas, such as education. Highway 64 is a national historic highway, and transects the state of NC from the mountain border with Tennessee, to the Atlantic Ocean on the Outer Banks. In the days before interstates such highways were the lifelines of communities, and typically went through the heart of downtowns and connected them to the rest of the state. Our mantra for this project is “From Murphy to Manteo,” the towns at the extreme ends of the highway in its course through NC, from west to east. This project has evolved from a class I teach, which I frame as a travel writing class, and describe as “the rhetoric of travel writing, “ involving “rhetorical anthropology.” In terms of culture, we focus on history and development of local communities along the highway, with a special focus on food as a facet of cultural identity. Students research and write about communities, people, food and culture of NC as it varies along the changing geographical regions of the state. But this project is also evolving as my work in Environmental Studies has me directing student/community client projects in NC, and finding a rising concern for the need to develop resiliency plans for adapting to climate change. When the pandemic hit, and lock downs ensued, I could no longer have the students traveling to these communities and interacting F2F. This presentation will discuss the shifts in digital info literacy we have had to make for this project.
Presentation Description
Pandemic restrictions severely impacted the ability of students in the Hwy 64 Project to travel and interact in our target NC communities. This presentation discusses how a travel writing project had to adjust to digital modes and created a need for rapid information literacy improvements.
Keywords
travel writing, rhetoric, digital tools, information literacy, Hwy 64
Publication Type and Release Option
Event
Recommended Citation
Strickland, Michael, "Travel Writing in a Plague Year: A Digital Info Shift and the Highway 64 Project" (2022). Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy. 27.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/gaintlit/2022/2022/27
Travel Writing in a Plague Year: A Digital Info Shift and the Highway 64 Project
Session 2 Papers
The pandemic has created a national shift in digital work and it has been a rocky transition in many arenas, such as education. Highway 64 is a national historic highway, and transects the state of NC from the mountain border with Tennessee, to the Atlantic Ocean on the Outer Banks. In the days before interstates such highways were the lifelines of communities, and typically went through the heart of downtowns and connected them to the rest of the state. Our mantra for this project is “From Murphy to Manteo,” the towns at the extreme ends of the highway in its course through NC, from west to east. This project has evolved from a class I teach, which I frame as a travel writing class, and describe as “the rhetoric of travel writing, “ involving “rhetorical anthropology.” In terms of culture, we focus on history and development of local communities along the highway, with a special focus on food as a facet of cultural identity. Students research and write about communities, people, food and culture of NC as it varies along the changing geographical regions of the state. But this project is also evolving as my work in Environmental Studies has me directing student/community client projects in NC, and finding a rising concern for the need to develop resiliency plans for adapting to climate change. When the pandemic hit, and lock downs ensued, I could no longer have the students traveling to these communities and interacting F2F. This presentation will discuss the shifts in digital info literacy we have had to make for this project.
