Tracing Techne

This dissertation presents a novel approach to tracing the history of techne in 1990s through a data feminist curation methodology that selects, models, visualizes, and analyzes a selection of 1990s journals in Rhetoric and Composition. This dissertation arises from an interest with invention arising out of the 1990s to historicize creative pedagogies and theories of composing that were influenced by the discipline's own historiographic uptake of the social turn to contextualize theory, pedagogy, and rhetorical history. I turn to techne for its theorizing of rhetorical invention in deriving value in the process of making with language and the utility of things made with language and point to the difficulty of tracing techne through traditional database research tools and historiographic methodologies. Out of this historical moment, this dissertation asks: What can a keyword examination of techne in 1990s rhetoric and composition scholarship reveal about its historical placements in the field? What are the principal ways in which histories of techne are linked to (or have been delinked from) histories of creativity, imagination, invention, and text technologies? What material or residual aspects of techne should historiographers trace in order to best explore the constellations of techne in published scholarship? How can a data curation methodology assist with the emergence of this trace? I propose a feminist data curation as a methodology that brings together data feminism and rhetorical historiography to trace the impressions of techne within a corpus made of nine rhetoric and composition journals from the 1990s. This project provides a methodology for using big data methods in Rhetoric and Composition scholarship in data curation, and enriches digital humanities work in the discipline. Out of this corpus, I use data curation to generate and analyze topics models of the corpus and snapshots of the corpus to identify and contextualize impressions of techne which emerge. To assist with locating impressions of techne within the scholarship, I use Kelly Pender's five composition definitions of techne, topic modeling, and visualizations to trace impressions of techne within the scholarship of the decade. Visualizations help to contextualize and argue for relationships and trend in the generated topic models for the impressions of techne. Using data curation to trace techne, I found that impressions of the techne can be found throughout the decade and embedded within and alongside a number of other contexts. I then create a provisional historiographic trace of techne using data to support a re-historicization of the concept as emerging form 1990s scholarship. I further the history of techne through these provisional tracings of the concept through the selection of scholarship in the 1990s and propose avenues for enriching the history of techne. I also suggest that this history enriches theories of invention that inform current theory and pedagogies for composition.