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2 Emplaced Disciplinary Networks from Middle Altitude

Derek Mueller

Can a person visit a country yet never set foot upon it? Does an airplane journey across a territory entitle the traveler to claim that “he has been there”?

—William I. Fox, Aereality: On the World from Above

The following chapter advances contributions positioned methodologically as the most distant among the four approaches featured in this book. This portion of the broader study relies on low-touch research methods, such as data visualization and digital cartography, to gain initial perspective on matters of transnational interdependencies in writing studies. Generally, such methods are suited to gaining perspective on aggregate activity that would not otherwise be observable because the activity is scattered or dispersed unevenly or too broadly in space or time. Distant methods are applied extensively in other fields to bring to the surface non-obvious phenomena, and thus they may adapt well to disciplinary research questions about the continuing growth and maturation of writing studies. The as-distant-as-possible opening inquiry that follows surveys Canadian writing studies in two distinct but complementary senses: first, as a means of collecting responses to a uniform set of questions circulated among Canadian writing studies scholars (i.e., inviting responses to a survey) and second, as a systematic process of plotting scholarly activity as it occurs across a vast terrain (i.e., mapping both as attendant to physical geography and, figuratively, as concerns a varied epistemological landscape). Before delving into the chapter’s twin applications of surveying, however, a brief accounting for Canada’s physical geography is warranted because it establishes an orienting backdrop for understanding conditions underpinning the country’s still-evolving disciplinary geography. Following this geographic sketch and situating distant methods as an important first step for defining, or lending shape to, disciplinarity, the chapter turns in its second section to an annotated synopsis of results from a survey of 111 Canadian writing studies scholars, followed by a more refined, granular exploration of patterns in the career paths of the 55 respondents to the survey. That is, the third section of the chapter plots onto a series of three maps the geolocations of career activity as a way to investigate cross-border patterns and related mentorship networks. I refer to this definitional treatment involving maps and geolocations using the phrase indexical aereality because, while on the one hand its purpose is to seek out a unique perspective available from middle altitude (i.e., a high-flying bird’s-eye view), it is also among the limited number of cases in which disciplinary geographies have been plotted onto scalable, interactive digital maps. Indexical aereality approximates a fly-over logic, ways of thinly getting acquainted with basic qualities of disciplinary activity in Canada. Finally, based on the exploratory maps of career activity, the concluding portion of the study extends two different approaches taken with the career-path maps to theorize about value—as a model of disciplinary formation—in conceiving of a scholarly career as simultaneously emplaced and distributed. This final turn focuses on Dale Jacobs from the University of Windsor as its illustrative case while also demonstrating the significance of modest adjustments in scale for research that begins at the most distant, zoomed out perspective available.

Physical Geography, Disciplinary Terrain

Human and cultural geographers have since the 1970s theorized, studied, and demonstrated in case upon case the intricate relationship between physical and social geography (Harvey, 2001; Wood, 1992; Wood, 2010; Soja, 2011; MacEachren, 2004). Mindful of the well-documented intersections between space, place, and cultural activity, several accounts of Canadian writing studies provide context for the country’s disciplinary footprint, likewise acknowledging a linkage between the country’s massive, out-stretched landscape, the population centres and the universities they host, and the consequences of being separated by hundreds of kilometres from other scholars who identify disciplinarily (Graves & Graves, 2006; Coe, 1988). For example, Roger Graves’s (1993) account of composition in Canadian universities notes a total of 87 universities operating across the country; among 61 of the institutions surveyed in that study, more than three-quarters of them were located in the 6 eastern-most provinces (Ontario, Quebec, Newfoundland and Labrador, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia), a measurable Atlantic-coast-leaning that corresponds to the population distribution reflected in the 2011 census (Government of Canada, n.d.). Approximately 23 million of Canada’s 33.5 million people reside in these same provinces. Across all 10 provinces (i.e., territories notwithstanding), Canada’s population density (persons per square km) averages 8.8, whereas the population density in the United States was 33.8 as of 2010 (Mackun & Wilson, 2011). For the expansive Canadian landscape and the scholars who work there, modern telecommunications platforms have established relatively new means for connecting with colleagues at a distance, as the survey responses reflect later, though the point of this brief sketch is that Canada’s vast physical geography has bearing on disciplinary formation and the methodologies best for initial inquiries into such widely distributed activity. The inquiry that follows begins with distant methods because they provide an aperture adequate for initial inquiry into such an immense terrain.

Defining Disciplinary Activity: Essences, Differentiation, and Shape-Finding

Over the past two decades, traditional accounts of research by writing studies scholars have documented, and thereby lent visibility to, disciplinary activity in and across Canada. In “Shifting Tradition: Writing Research in Canada,” Jennifer Clary-Lemon (2009) retraces several such studies and characterizes one cluster of them as fitting with “scholarship of definition,” which “seeks to name and define a Canadian context of teaching, writing, and research” so as to “carve out a space uniquely [Canadian] in in a landscape dominated by American practices” (p. 99). According to Clary-Lemon’s review of numerous books and articles, these studies reflect distinct, varied circumferences, from highly localized characterizations of curricula, programs, and institutions (Turner & Kearns, 2002 and 2012; Graves & Graves, 2012) to comparably broad-based, encompassing narratives about regional or multi-institution activity, often around an issue such as writing across the curriculum and writing centres; professional writing, technical writing, and workplace writing; or genre studies. Scholarship of definition is, as Clary-Lemon explains, necessary for establishing ways of understanding distinctly Canadian factors affecting disciplinary emergence and maturation. And while the graphs and maps that follow qualify as scholarship of definition, I am interested in their operating differently than has been common in previous definitional scholarship. To put a finer point on this difference, consider definitional scholarship as dividing into three predominant pursuits: fixed essences, contrastive differentiation, and shape-finding.

Definition toward fixed essences seeks to settle what something is unto itself (e.g., Canadian writing studies is x); definition toward contrastive differentiation, which is likewise useful for apprehending disciplinary knowledge, marks out qualities by comparison (e.g., Canadian writing studies is x relative to writing studies elsewhere). The twin applications of surveying featured in this chapter, however, offer definition a third, more exploratory sense: definition toward shape-finding. My objective has been to create a series of graphs and maps that not only add to definitional scholarship but also complicate definition pursuant to essences or differentiation because disciplinary formation is continuing, yet-emerging. The shapes and patterns will continue to shift, change. The data visualizations and digital maps featured in this chapter offer telescopic perspectives on Canada-US writing studies interdependencies that stand in service of shape-finding, or inquiry that should continue to be revisited, updated, or inquired into yet again. As the design of this book and the broader study it conveys presumes, no one scale or method of inquiry is singularly adequate for grasping such a complex, distributed phenomena as a disciplinary network, much less even this modest slice of an emerging network that spans several decades, several thousand kilometres, and more than two countries. Inquiring into patterned activity at any one scale can tell us something that is not evident at any other scale. Through the deliberate alteration of scale, this opening segment of the project seeks to define Canadian-American writing studies interdependency from perspectives that are yet uncommon; it seeks to introduce a viewshed for graphical, distant, and aerial treatments of disciplinary activity that may contribute to a definition concerned less with fixed essences or contrastive differentiation than noticing time-sensitive patterns and emerging shapes.

Survey of Canadian Scholars

The study opened with an eleven-question survey designed to inquire into three general classes of information related to transnational interdependencies between Canada and the United States. Questions 1–4 addressed locations associated with professional activity. Questions 5–8 considered involvement with organizations, conferences, listservs, and publishing. And questions 9–10 provided limited-option responses on the geographic reach of publishing and self-identification. Lastly, the survey invited respondents to provide a CV as an attachment, if one was available. The survey’s design took into account Roger Graves’s (1994) study of the ways writing instruction is organized in Canadian universities, yet the overlap is limited, and as such we consider this instrument to feature an original, unique set of questions that have not been circulated in any other disciplinary survey to date.

SURVEY QUESTIONS

1. Where are you from?

City, Province or City, State

2. From what institutions did you obtain the following degrees (as applies)?

BA or BS

MA or MS

PhD

Other

Please specify degree.

3. Where do you currently live and how long have you been there?

City, Province or City, State; x years, x months

4. What is your current (or most recent) academic teaching, research, or administrative appointment?

Please include the name of the institution.

5. What professional organizations do you belong to?

List up to five.

6. What conferences do you attend most frequently?

7. What professional/disciplinary listservs do you subscribe to?

8. Which journals and presses (including both print and online) have you published in and do you consider the most amenable to your scholarship?

9. Please indicate the geographic circulation/reach of the journals and presses you identified in the previous question.

Primarily Canada

Primarily U.S.

North America

International

10. Do you see yourself primarily as a Canadian scholar, an American one, something in between, or something else?

Canadian scholar

American scholar

Something in between

Something else

Please briefly explain your response to question 10.

CV UPLOAD

11. Would you be willing to provide your CV? If so, please attach the document.

Our team distributed the survey to a list of scholars that the four of us compiled together—scholars who work at Canadian universities; who studied at both Canadian and American institutions; and who, based on scholarship, citations, or informal connections, we believed to identify professionally with writing studies, rhetoric and composition, or professional and technical communication. To begin, the original roster consisted of 112 scholars. We were unable to locate email addresses for 11 prospective respondents, and, working with the best collection of addresses available, 6 more emails were returned as undeliverable after we circulated the survey the first time. Four prospective respondents replied to ask that they be removed from the distribution list, citing disidentification with the disciplinary frame or apprehensions about the survey’s identifying respondents by name (see the maps in the following section). Thus, after smoothing the roster, 91 scholars were invited to complete the survey. Holding the survey open for approximately 10 weeks, from November 20 to December 18, 2013, and May 1 to June 12, 2014, we received 55 responses. The 60.44% response rate this survey received is markedly higher than the benchmark of between 20–30% typical for surveys initiated via email.

The following discussion of the survey responses proceeds from the last question to the first because the initial questions about locations associated with professional activity are directly applicable to the maps presented in the following section. Across the questions and responses, a portrait of the fifty-five scholars gradually becomes clearer, such that the responses confirm complex Canada-US interdependencies interwoven in myriad ways throughout professional, scholarly activity and identifications.

Questions 9–10: Geographic Reach of Publishing and Self-Identification

Question 9 inquired into the geographic reach of publishing activity. Nearly half of the respondents (25, or 45.5%) selected North America, and just over a quarter (15; 27.2%) answered International, which was the most encompassing among the four choices. Identifications primarily with Canada (5; 9.1%) and the US (8; 14.5%) were significantly fewer, which suggests a recognition that the circulation of scholarship exceeds national boundaries and that a clear majority of respondents think of their scholarship as operating more broadly than either Canada or the US, alone.

Figure 1. A horizontal bar graph presenting compiled survey responses for the geographic reach/circulation of journals and presses.

North America: 25 / 45.5%

International: 15 /27.2%

Primarily US: 8 / 14.5%

Primarily Canada: 5 / 9.1%

No answer: 2 / 3.6%

Question 10 asked about how participants regarded themselves, as a Canadian scholar, an American one, something in between, or something else. A close plurality of respondents selected Something in between (22; 40%) or Canadian (20; 36.6), with Something else (10; 18.8%) and American (2; 3.6%) receiving fewer selections. This indicates a mixed but balanced quality among the ways the respondents identify as emplaced scholars, and the tension elicited here shows up in other questions, too, which suggests a complex, transnational self-understanding among Canadian writing studies scholars.

Figure 2. A horizontal bar graph presenting compiled survey responses for identification as a Canadian scholar, an American one, something in between, or something else.

Something in between: 22 / 40%

Canadian: 20 / 36.6%

Something else: 10 / 18.8%

American: 2 / 3.6%

No answer: 1 / 1.8%

Questions 5–8: Involvement with Organizations, Conferences, Listservs, and Publishing

Question 5 invited open-ended answers about memberships in disciplinary organizations. Collectively, respondents referred to 67 organizations, with twelve receiving mention by at least four respondents:

Canadian Association for the Study of Discourse and Writing (CASDW): 25

National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE): 25

Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC): 21

Rhetoric Society of America (RSA): 12

Canadian Association for the Study of Language and Learning (CASLL): 10

Canadian Writing Centres Association (CWCA): 7

Canadian Society for the Study of Rhetoric (CSSR): 6

Modern Language Association (MLA): 6

Inkshed (also known as CASLL): 4

Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA): 4

Association of the Rhetoric of Science & Technology (ARST): 4

The National Communication Association (NCA): 4

In addition to those listed here, responses noted 55 more organizations. Twenty-three respondents (41.8%) listed organizations appearing only among the 12 shown above. Twenty-three more respondents (41.8%) mentioned either one or two organizations in addition to the ones listed above. Six respondents did not mention any organization among those listed. This points to a relatively high density in the open-ended responses; a locus of leading organizations, with 5 of the 12 (41.6%) based in Canada, recurred with high frequency in the responses. Notably, responses to this question also hint at a problem of anachronism in organizational naming practices related to the timespan of careers. Inkshed was rebranded as CASLL, and respondents identified the organization both ways, a likely indicator of both names resonating depending on one’s relationship to the organization and the timeframe corresponding to that relationship.

Question 6 attended to conferences, and answers included several acronyms appearing in question 5, as well, which is to be expected considering how common it is for scholarly organizations to sponsor annual conferences.

Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC): 24

Canadian Association for the Study of Discourse and Writing (CASDW): 20

Rhetoric Society of America (RSA): 10

Inkshed: 6

Canadian Congress: 5

Computers and Writing (CW): 4

International Writing Across the Curriculum Conference (IWAC): 3

Canadian Society for the Study of Rhetoric (CSSR): 3

Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE): 3

Association of the Rhetoric of Science & Technology (ARST): 3

Canadian Writing Centres Association (CWCA): 3

Beyond the 11 leading conferences, respondents noted 42 additional conferences, each receiving 1–2 references. Twenty-one respondents answered with conferences showing up entirely in the 11 listed here. Forty-eight responses had at least one reference to a conference in the top 11; seven respondents had none. Canada’s geographic expansiveness bears mentioning again in the context of this question considering that half of the top mention-getting conferences, CCCC, RSA, and Computers and Writing, have never been hosted in Canada.

Compared to organizations and conferences, the focus of question 7, listservs, has a far lower threshold for participation. Respondents noted 75 listservs, with the following 10 receiving three or more mentions:

CASDW-L: 23

CASLL-L: 13

WPA-L: 10

H-Rhetor: 8

CWCA: 7

WAC-L: 4

Techrhet: 4

CSSR: 4

ATTW: 3

wcenter (IWCA): 3

Similar to questions 5 and 6, 23 respondents referred to listservs appearing exclusively in the list above, whereas 28 respondents noted one or more listservs beyond those listed. Four respondents answered “none” or declined to answer. While one might speculate about the important function of electronic communication fostered by listservs to be an impactful presence in boosting a sense of connection among Canadian writing studies scholars, the survey does not substantiate this speculation. Responses support the conclusion that a clear majority of respondents subscribe to disciplinary listservs, many of which are affiliated with Canadian organizations, and yet one respondent’s noting parenthetically “I hardly read any of them” offers an important caveat, reminding us that subscribing to listservs does not necessarily equate to participating actively as a reader or writer. Nevertheless, although the conferences’ respondents mentioned are predominantly American, the prominence of listservs oriented toward Canada and Canadian organizations appears to be a distinctive counterpart for sustaining professional and disciplinary interactions across distances.

Question 8, on publishing activity, elicited the most varied set of responses because the question asked both about journals and presses, and about actual and prospective publishing activity. Total responses included 239 items. The coding schema sifted the responses into 97 unique journals, 27 unique presses, two newsletters, and one conference proceeding. The following lists indicate journals mentioned by at least three respondents and presses mentioned by at least two respondents.

Journals

College Composition and Communication (CCC): 16

Written Communication (WC): 13

Rhetoric Society Quarterly (RSQ): 7

College English (CE): 6

Journal of Business and Technical Communication (JBTC): 6

Canadian Journal for Studies in Discourse and Writing (CJSDW): 5

Rhetoric Review: 5

Technical Communication Quarterly (TCQ): 5

Composition Studies (CS): 4

Present Tense (PT): 4

Enculturation (ENCULT): 3

JAC (JAC): 3

Kairos: 3

Technostyle (now CJSDW): 3

Presses and Publishers

Parlor Press: 5

Inkshed: 4

Routledge: 4

WAC Clearinghouse: 3

Boynton Cook: 2

Lawrence Earlbaum: 2

NCTE Press: 2

Sage: 2

Taylor and Francis: 2

Utah State UP: 2

A distinctive American orientation in both lists further contextualizes the prevalence of North American identification with publishing activity from Question Nine. Each list includes just one Canada-based publishing venue, CJSDW/Technostyle among the journals, and Inkshed among the presses. Online journals (Present Tense and Kairos) reflect a receptiveness to contemporary delivery formats, and the comparably high number of mentions for Parlor Press, WAC Clearinghouse, and Inkshed indicates, as well, that open access publishing is as prevalent as proprietary and paper-based publishing. Present Tense, which was inaugurated in 2009 as an online journal for medium-form scholarship, is the newest of the journals and publishers mentioned.

Questions 1–4, 11: Locations associated with professional activity

The first three geography-oriented questions confirmed that over 70% of the respondents are from Canada, completed a BA or BS in Canada, an MA or MS in Canada, and live and work in Canada now. However, just 23 (41.8%) of the respondents completed a PhD in Canada; whereas 29 (52.7%) undertook doctoral studies in the United States. In an otherwise Canadian-oriented set of geographical identifiers, doctoral studies are the anomalous class, signaling cross-border activity through which a majority of Canadian writing studies scholars surveyed went to the United States for a PhD and returned to work in Canadian universities. Although this does not account for those who did not return in the future, or who might not, within this data-set, responses to this question offer a limited, distant report on patterned interdependency. The survey results provided sufficient warrant for exploring this cross-border pattern more carefully—a pursuit that will be focal in the following section.

Figure 3. An information graphic presenting compiled survey responses for the aggregate locations among respondents.

Table 1. Survey tabulation of the geographic locations among respondents as relate to where they are from, where they took up undergraduate and graduate programs of study, and where they are now.

Toponym Distribution
	CA	US	RU	AU	NZ	UK	N/A	% Canadian	n
FROM	44	9	0	1	1	0	0	80.0%	55
BA	42	10	1	2	0	0	0	76.4%	55
MA	41	12	0	1	0	0	1	74.5%	55
PHD	23	29	0	0	0	2	1	41.8%	55
NOW	46	8	0	0	0	1	0	83.6%	55

Finally, Question 11 invited respondents to include a curriculum vitae as an attachment. With CVs from 49 of the 55 respondents, more precise details became available, such as other locations where respondents had worked and the years in which they completed their PhDs. In a few cases, when attached CVs did not provide sufficient detail, supplemental queries on Google or in databases, such as ProQuest’s Dissertations & Theses Global, supplied further information to develop Figure 4, a block histogram showing the years in which respondents completed PhDs and whether the PhDs were from Canadian universities. While this figure provides yet another perspective on the data presented in Figure 3, it also acknowledges a reasonably balanced rate of participation from late career, middle career, and early career scholars.

Figure 4. Block histogram presenting compiled survey responses for the year of PhD completion. Doctorates completed at Canadian universities are annotated with a maple leaf in the upper right-hand corner of the rectangular block.

As a preliminary, distant instrument for inquiring into cross-border interdependencies in writing studies, the survey confirmed numerous instances of blending, hybridity, and transnational thinking on the part of participants. Yet the survey also primed new questions—harder questions, I would say—about the methods best suited to tracing transnational disciplinary interdependencies at the broadest, most encompassing scales. In addition to this survey, my initial explorations of how best to trace interdependency were keyed to geographic locations, on the affinities that coalesce and cascade from one location to the next along emplaced, distributed career pathways. In the following section, as a way to further consider patterned interdependency based on geographic locations identified in the survey results, a series of interactive, digital maps reaffirm with slightly more refined granularity the ways interdependency operates both in specific career paths and in the aggregate career paths of the 55 respondents.

From the survey’s specific place names to an encompassing North American viewshed for getting to know data indicative of interdependencies, the exploratory digital maps featured in this section contribute a distant, preliminary intervention in the broader study. Grouped as they are, the maps constitute an inquiry atlas, the points marked in them only after geocoding more than 300 locations referenced in the survey responses and curriculum vitae. Methodologically, we should think of this process as a pursuit of indexical aereality—the plotting of geographic coordinates onto map projections such that we can read the maps for otherwise non-obvious patterns and shapes. Indexical aereality names the process of translating a geolocative data-set and plotting it cartographically, so viewers can explore an emerging definition shape as one report on some disciplinary domain of activity. There have in recent years been similar efforts to map disciplinarily relevant, geographic data-sets, such as Jim Ridolfo’s rhetmap, which documents job ads by geographic location (n.d.); Christopher Thais and Tara Porter’s mapping of WAC/WID programs (2010); Jeremy Tirrell’s (2012) study of the geographical history of online journals, and maps by the Doctoral Consortium in Rhetoric and Composition (Phelps & Ackerman, 2010) and Master’s Consortium of Writing Studies Specialists (n.d.) to show membership locations. Yet, a full realization of disciplinary cartography is early in its development, and many geographies of writing have by-passed cartographic representations altogether, instead focusing on narrative and descriptive accounts.

The mapping process began with a simple line map developed using R, a programming language for visualizing statistical data. The detailed technical steps exceed the scope of this chapter, but the basic process required creating a file with the toponyms already geocoded, or assigned accurate latitude and longitude coordinates (geocoding is the translation of a place name into these numerical coordinates; I used the GPS Visualizer website and an API key from Bing Maps, which, in tandem, yielded a comma separated format that imported easily into other applications for sorting, analyzing, and plotting). The R console could process and overlay these geocoded data on a stock map projection from one of the available R libraries. The result from an early iteration of the project appears here.

Figure 5. A map projection of geolocative survey data rendered in R.

The rudimentary line map positions a marker where a scholar is currently located and adds radiating lines to all of the locations where that scholar has studied or worked. This approach to mapping career activity is synchronic (see Figure 6); the visual representation suggests the cumulative presence of every past position is bundled together, emanating from a locus situated in the here and now. I consider this a career footprint; it resembles a starburst or hub and spoke pattern. As a function of representing networks visually, it is understood to be a reductive, limited scope representation of merely one slice of professional activity, though it is nevertheless an invaluable way of grasping complex cross-border activity at the outset. In terms of interdependencies, this projection reflects numerous cross-border traversals. And yet the visual output from R was not quite satisficient (Simon, 1991). The map data in this early draft was neither satisfyingly navigable nor sufficiently selectable.

Figure 6. A simple visual model depicting synchronic career paths. The respondent’s current geographic location is positioned as a hub from which all other geolocations emanate as radial edges or links. The model’s logic was derived from R’s plotting schema.

Desiring better maps and a better platform for exploring these data and connections among them, the next iteration of the maps required learning about geoJSON, a coding specification suited to the challenge of plotting points and lines, which can then be easily imported and overlaid on a more dynamic and interactive map projection. GeoJSON turned out to be a more powerful and flexible alternative to R, but its role in the development of the maps was far more than technical. Exploring geoJSON introduced a second, slightly different logic for plotting career activity.

Figure 7. A simple visual model depicting diachronic career paths. The respondent’s from identification is designated beginning point, with subsequent geolocations plotted sequentially, ending with the respondents current location. The model’s logic was derived from the Mapbox plotting schema involving geoJSON.

Compared to the starburst or hub and spoke in the examples using R, the default presentation of geolocative series in the geoJSON template I adapted appeared like an angling line segment, or a daisy chain. The string of coordinates were entered and subsequently output linearly, which introduced as a counterpart model a different perspective on career activity that, although it still reflected cross-border traversals, showed careers to be more path-like and sequential. Though neither pattern is inherent or prefigured in the programming code, the pairing of R and geoJSON signaled two distinct logics for plotting career activity as relates to geographic coordinates: the synchronic, starburst pattern, and a diachronic, pathway pattern. The pairing of these two coding specifications, moreover, presented variations that changed up the cartographic representation of cross-border activity, but that also deepened the maps’ roles in rethinking cross-border influence in the context of mentorship as it has manifested for many of the scholars who responded to the survey.

Figure 8. Two logics for plotting career activity. Side by side, the synchronic and diachronic models set up as a pair of complementary heuristics for inquiring into the dual nature of career activity as simultaneously distributed and emplaced.

Thus, the experimental map making led to new, fortuitous questions for examining disciplinary activity at a distant scale: Which representation is most telling when tracing networks suggestive of transnational interdependencies?

With these two simple models in mind (and sight) for thinking about how careers unfold, temporally and spatially, I scrapped the flat maps rendered by R and developed two new maps from all of the geographic data collected in the survey using geoJSON only. Complete, interactive versions of both maps are available for reference online, and accessing them directly (via a web browser) is preferable because their interactive affordances offer much more to explore than do the two dimensional screen-based or off-print versions. The maps are online at http://lab.earthwidemoth.com/lines.html (permanent: http://bit.ly/2i2IyIdlines) and http://lab.earthwidemoth.com/path.html (permanent: http://bit.ly/2iUiWSjpath).

Figure 9. A screenshot of the interactive map available at http://lab.earthwidemoth.com/lines.html (permanent: http://bit.ly/2i2IyIdlines), which has been overlaid with geolocative survey data following the synchronic model.

Figure 10. A screenshot of the interactive map available at http://lab.earthwidemoth.com/path.html (permanent: http://bit.ly/2iUiWSjpath), which has been overlaid with geolocative survey data following the diachronic model.

At the default scale, both maps (one based on each career model) look like a skein of densely entangled lines, and although they corroborate the cross-hatching of Canadian-American career activity evident in the survey responses, the maps project data too thickly packed to process with visual ease at the default scale. However, there are a few features in the online versions of the maps that may aid users in making sense of each tightly packed viewport. With the plus symbol, it is possible to zoom in and thereby change the map’s scale. Users can mouseover a line and see the name of the scholar the line documents. Also, the layer selector on the left allows the singling out of smaller samples of data differentiated by stage of career. Lines with orange hues show career paths for survey respondents who completed a PhD before 1996. Red lines are for mid-career scholars. And green lines show the paths and footprints in the respective maps for doctoral students and junior faculty. In effect, although the colour-coding doesn’t provide complete relief from the map’s overcrowding, it does introduce a time series quality that allows us to look for distinct patterns for each group.

While these two exploratory maps figure significantly into the distant approaches attempted in this chapter, and while both provide compelling interactive reports on the aggregate place-to-place career activity of our survey respondents, the separation of diachronic representations from synchronic representations is too limiting, especially for investigating how such maps can at different scales and with a narrower selection of geographic locations tell us about other kinds of networks operating here, such as tacit mentorship networks that play a vital role in the discipline’s ability to reproduce itself. Mentorship networks are notoriously difficult to visualize because, even though mentoring relationships are common, their referential basis is extremely irregular and difficult to confirm. In fact, most disciplinary accounts of mentorship circulate as personal narratives and local accounts of key influences, sponsoring and inviting figures who welcomed a newcomer to the field (viz. Andrea Lunsford’s “The Nature of Composition Studies,” 1991). Mentorship oftentimes surfaces through specific geographic locations and the institutions at their coordinates, but these mentorship relays do not come across clearly enough in one map or the other because mentoring faculty operate from a synchronic position, having themselves already accumulated myriad, distributed affinities whereas students tend to operate more from a diachronic position, in the sense that they are stopping through programs before moving to another location. The point here is that a combination of the two visual models along with compound criteria for defining mentoring relationships offers a unique handle on these emplaced disciplinary networks that span across generations and distances.

To explore this more fully, I created one final map.

Clearing away many lines from the comprehensive maps, the final map combines the diachronic and synchronic models to focus on Dale Jacobs, Associate Professor at the University of Windsor, and eight respondents to the survey who he worked with when they were master’s students at Windsor between 2000 and 2013. Jacobs’s career footprint is represented by a pink line, consistent with his stage of career as coded in the previous maps. This map is accessible online at http://lab.earthwidemoth.com/network.html (permanent: http://bit.ly/2i14Oaqnetwork)

Figure 11. Screenshot of the interactive map available at http://lab.earthwidemoth.com/network.html (permanent: http://bit.ly/2i14Oaqnetwork), which has been overlaid with geolocative survey data focused specifically on Dale Jacobs and respondents he has mentored at the University of Windsor.

Notice how the synchronic model reflects that Jacobs in his current position is simultaneously influenced by radii connecting him with Edmonton, where he took his BA and MA, to the University of Nebraska, where he completed his PhD, to East Carolina University, where he held his first tenure-track appointment, and finally to the University of Windsor, where, over the past fifteen years, he has worked with ten MA students who have gone on to PhD programs in the US. Although the visualized links and nodes remain a shallow description of the influence that resonates for Jacobs with each of these moments in his career, representing his career path in this way underscores that academic careers accrete with layers of influence and experience, much of which amalgamates in direct relation to programs of study, employing institutions, and the people inhabiting each of these at coincident times. Returning to the map, the eight survey respondents (former students) Jacobs mentored appear with hues corresponding to the stages of their respective careers, so Jay Dolmage, Jacobs’s first student at Windsor is in red, and Julie Kiernan; Jared Grogan; Janine Morris; Greg Paziuk; and also Stephanie Hedge, Daniel Richards, and Josh Mehler—a recent cohort who Jacobs referred to as “The Rhetorical Three” when I interviewed him in early December of 2013—are cast here in green hues corresponding to their being categorized as early career scholars. The career paths of Jacobs’ former students adhere to the synchronic model, with each appearing to move from one location to another, stopping through Windsor in most cases, before moving yet again to a doctoral program in the United States.

The map sets up a distinctive way of understanding these nine scholars—Jacobs and eight former students—as belonging to a compound, cross-border mentorship network. The distant methods stop short of investigating this phenomenon as deeply as would be possible with other approaches. That is, there is much more to learn about the qualitative nature of these ties, the forms of interaction that cross distance and time sustain senses of connection and that operate as powerful, ongoing invitations to participate in the field as emerging scholars. Yet, based on what is knowable from the survey data and one interview with Jacobs, such a mentorship network might also serve as a model for scholars working in relative institutional isolation who seek to sponsor the disciplinary interests of master’s students and thereby welcome newcomers to the field, much in the same way Lunsford (1991) described in her definitional account of composition studies.

The most significant takeaway from the survey data and inquiry atlas presented in his chapter is the way that visualizing mentorship networks across Canada and the United States, but also more generally, gains much from the use of compound reference points, one set geographic, in this case, and the second set drawn from explicitly articulated mentoring relationships. Combining the synchronic hub-mentor—Jacobs—and the diachronic through-passing-mentees—Dolmage, Kiernan, Grogan, Morriss, Paziuk, Hedge, Richards, and Mehler—suggests how one type of transnational influence manifests—that there is a strengthened sense in which Jacobs’s influence has conducted along these lines—to Waterloo (Dolmage), Michigan State University (Kiernan), Wayne State University (Grogan), University of Cincinnati (Morriss), University of Windsor (Paziuk), SUNY-Potsdam (Hedge), Old Dominion (Richards), and Florida State University (Mehler). At another degree removed, we can begin to understand how the influences of Joy Ritchie, Kate Ronald, and Robert Brooke, professors at Nebraska who Dale Jacobs identified as mentors, are similarly implicated in and constitutive of this disciplinary network. Jacobs isn’t at Waterloo, and yet he is. He isn’t at Old Dominion, but he is. He isn’t at SUNY-Potsdam, Michigan State, Florida State, Wayne State, or Cincinnati, but he is. Digital cartography is useful for seeing the emerging definitional shape of this network—for grasping an image of Dale Jacobs as simultaneously emplaced and distributed. Distant methods, such as the two types of surveying enacted here, may prime a variety of related investigations into writing studies, rhetoric and composition, and professional and technical communication as hosting numerous comparable networks, many of them proving powerfully impactful for the continuing growth and maturation of the field. These emplaced, distributed disciplinary networks are comparable to the field’s invisible colleges (Crane, 1972), and yet far more work is due if we are going to begin conceiving of them in this way, increasing their visibility, and realizing more completely our agency both in bringing them about and participating in them.

There remains, of course, much more to explore in the three maps featured here. Such is the nature of an inquiry atlas—it is a pursuit designed to balance, on one hand, an indexical aereality in service of definitional shape-finding, and on the other, an open-ended and flexible resource useful for further exploration and for cross-referencing the gradually closer methodological approaches to disciplinary interdependence in the emphases on interviews, genre profiles, and cases presented in the following chapters.

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