“Las Vegas from a Distance: Visualizing CCCC 2013” is a project I completed following the 2013 Conference on College Composition and Communication in Las Vegas, NV. As part of an Emerging Pedagogies Research and Travel Grant from Pearson, I used various means of data visualization—word clouds, maps, graphs, charts, and tables—to re-present the program for CCCC program. Such means of visualization offer a way of engaging with the program, a document made up of hundreds of pages and thousands of listed presentations, in a more distant, aggregative manner. Though probably less useful for the session-by-session task of navigating an academic conference, the sorts of engagement opened up by these visualizations can offer a different way of considering patterns and movements in the field(s) and scholarship represented at CCCC 2013.
I created this project in Prezi, hoping the platform’s zooming and click-and-drag features would allow users opportunities to go off the grid of my prescribed order of presentation, looking for jumps and connections I might have missed. Because the presentation does include a large number of visuals, it may be necessary to allow some time for loading. If you’re interested in the discrete files for any of the included visuals, or in talking more about this project, please don’t hesitate to contact me. The project can be accessed here.