Abstract

Contemporary scholars in rhetoric studies and technical communication have theorized rhetorical agency as engaging human and nonhuman actors in online spaces. One such space, where the work of scholarship, teaching, and technical communication practice intersect, is online research. In online research interfaces, scholars and students alike conduct research; scholars teach and students learn the online research process toward contributing knowledge; and technical communicators design and test meaningful user experiences in these interfaces.

However, the field offers few comprehensive methodologies for studying the emergence of rhetorical agency in online search environments, where the activities of technologies, humans, corporations, and environments coalesce. As a result, technical communicators, who both study the meaning-making activities of technologies and seek to explain those activities through technology-mediated practices, lack methods that would enable them to test the validity of emerging theoretical frameworks for understanding rhetorical agency in online activities like research.

This study implements modified usability tests and collects technical browser data to identify and trace the emergence of rhetorical agency among human, technological, environmental, and ideological actors during online research activity initiated using an online library search interface. In an IRB-approved case study, the study synchronizes user and technological activities centered around the web browser. Through detailed analysis of usability testing recordings along with data collected in HTTP archive files, the study traces rhetorical agency to the millisecond as human, technological, environmental, and ideological activities converge in the research process.

The study reveals agency as emerging, shared among collective actors during online research. It provides the field accessible methods for tracing rhetorical agency in posthuman assemblages of human and nonhuman entities engaged in meaning-making activities. It concludes with the following implications:

1. Scholars should develop and test updated methodologies that address posthuman agency.
2. Rhetorical agency in online research should be re-examined for its assemblage and emergent qualities.
3. The “end user” of UX design should be recognized and treated as an assemblage.
4. The field should teach online search as a rhetorical activity.
5. Critical media literacies must widen their critique to include posthuman agency.

Dissertation full text from ODU Digital Commons

Research Questions

In my dissertation, I seek to trace rhetorical agency as it emerges in online research in response to three primary research questions:

1. To what extent can search algorithms, and the platforms, networks, and systems that support them, be considered rhetorical?
2. In the process of conducting research using online search engines, what is the rhetorical agent and how can its activity be traced?
3. What practical applications do the results of this study offer to researchers, teachers, programmers, and designers?

To answer these questions, I study in minute detail the online research activity of two participants using Bruno Latour’s (2005) actor-network theory as a methodological framework for structuring my mixed methods approach. I employ a modified usability test as the primary method for collecting qualitative and quantitative browsing data. During usability testing sessions, I activate participants’ Chrome browser Developer Tools to collect HTTP archive (HAR) files from browsing sessions. Additionally, I incorporate ethnographic field notes and reflection into the data collected. I use participants’ browsing session timelines, recorded and reported by usability testing software and HAR files, to triangulate qualitative and quantitative data. I present the results as two case studies.

These results demonstrate that rhetorical agency in online research emerges among interactivity of human, technological, environmental, and ideological actors as assemblage agents. Based on these results, I propose that free and accessible methods, similar to those used in the dissertation, can be shared with students and professionals in order to reveal ways that agency is shared, rather than wielded, by humans engaged in algorithm-centered digital activities like online research. This dissertation is a practical approach to posthuman theories of agency that seeks to unmask the black box of algorithmic processes central to daily experience.

Positioning My Research

I position my dissertation in the field of technical communication because it uses a rhetorical approach to trace agency in algorithm-mediated online experiences. I employ modified usability testing as a method for collecting data on the use of search technologies, then apply both user experience (UX) and search optimization (SEO) experience and skills to the testing results toward detailing, to the millisecond, the way agency emerges from assemblage agents in differential relations to one another. The dissertation enacts David N. Dobrin’s (1983/2004) maxim that “technical writing is writing that accommodates technology to the user” (p. 118) by describing and visualizing often-unseen technical and technological activity to readers. The dissertation’s new material and posthuman approaches to agency emerge from recent work in a variety of fields seeking to describe relations among human and nonhuman (often technological) entities, including N. Katherine Hayles’ (1999) application of posthuman and cyborgian approaches in literary analysis; Latour’s (2005) recognition of nonhuman entities as actants in social relations; Jane Bennett’s (2010) recognition of assemblage agency among human and nonhuman entities in political science; and Jim Brown’s (2015) application of Derrida’s Law of Hospitality to networks. In the field of technical communication, the dissertation’s approach to programmed, algorithmic influence aligns with recent work on rhetorical agency by Kevin Brock (2014), Brock and Dawn Shepherd (2016), Estee Beck (2015, 2016), Ian Bogost (2010), Steve Holmes (2016), Nathan Johnson (2012), Robert Johnson (1998), Andrew Mara and Byron Hawk (2010), Carolyn Miller (2007), and Cynthia and Richard Selfe (1994/2004).

The dissertation addresses the gap that exists between theoretical approaches to posthuman agency and operationalizing those theories. Using new material and posthuman approaches to agency as emergent among assemblage of human and nonhuman entities, the dissertation implements and shares methods for revealing assemblage agency as it emerges. This agency is captured as it emerges in the JSON file structure of HAR files; in the audio and video recording of screen activity during online search; in the ethnographic descriptions of testing conditions, participants, and technologies; in the ethnographic reflections on testing procedures and results; and in additional data collected from hardware and software during testing sessions. While the methods are sometimes rudimentary and introduce artificial constraints to the online research process, they are freely available, accessible to students, and relatively easy to use with some level of proficiency. As a result, the methods implemented and described in the dissertation are not merely useful to doctoral students like me completing their PhDs, but also provide accessible tools for researchers, teachers, and students alike to operationalize and test theoretical assumptions about interactions among human and nonhuman entities that result in rhetorical agency.

The genealogy of my dissertation’s methodological approach can be traced to postmodern attempts to escape what Richard Bernstein (1983) calls “Cartesian anxiety,” the tension of the binary between objectivist and subjectivist epistemologies. In a move reminiscent of Deweyan pragmatism, the dissertation seeks to escape this dualism with an ontological rather than epistemological approach to agency. In this dissertation, agency is the result of neither subjective human influence on objects nor objective influence on human subjects. Rather, agency emerges in differential relations among human and nonhuman entities without identifying either “subject” or “object” of agency. This approach reframes the rhetor as always already intertwined and assembled rather than distinctly human or distinctly nonhuman. The dissertation echos McLuhan’s claim that “the medium is the message” with an important addition: neither medium nor message can be construed in our posthuman era to be created by distinctly human or technological actors.

Dissertation Outline

My dissertation includes five chapters. The introduction presents the research questions in the shape of a problem I seek to address: that researchers who use and assign a trusted interface for research like a university library search interface are entering into largely unrecognized collaborative relations for knowledge research and building that have the potential to influence research results. The first chapter also introduces Johnson-Eilola and Selber’s (2013) four-phase heuristic to addressing problems in technical communication that I use as the dissertation’s structural framework (see Figure 1). This structure seeks to map the specific problem, then situate the problem within broader contexts. The structure then shifts toward application of mapping and situating in order to identify and understand the range of problem approaches available to address the problem. Finally, the framework shift to developing problem knowledge that can be applied in specific contexts.

Following the structure illustrated in Figure 1, chapter 1 identifies and maps the problem along two rhetorical aspects of online research: developing algorithm-understood query language for conducting online research, and selecting relevant resources from among algorithm-selected and sorted results to incorporate into research. Chapter 2 situates the problem of rhetorical agency in online research among its human, technological, environmental, and ideological contexts, then positions the problem in the field of technical communications. Chapter 3 describes the theoretical approaches and practical methods implemented to understand and study the problem. Chapter 4 seeks to better understand the problem approaches by describing the results of the case studies and describing the problem of methods applied to this particular problem. Finally, chapter 5 seeks to develop problem knowledge by applying the results of problem approaches to specific contexts, including scholarship, pedagogy, and commercial online search.

Addressing the Research Questions

My dissertation demonstrates that search algorithms in online research, along with the platforms, networks, and systems that support them, exert rhetorical influence during online research activity as assemblage agency that emerges in the interaction of human, technological, environmental, and ideological entities during research activity. Rhetorical agency in online research emerges among assemblage actors, both human and nonhuman, that coalesce around online research activity. This assemblage agency can be identified and traced through meticulous study of browser, researcher, network, environmental, and corporate activities captured in browser HAR files, online usability testing results, ethnographic observations and reflections, and network speed reports. Recognizing and tracing emergent assemblage agency in online research provides frameworks for explaining and illustrating posthuman agency and posthuman user experience to students, researchers, and designers. This posthuman approach may help scholars, students, programmers, and designers recognize that agency can best be understood as emerging among swarming assemblages of human and nonhuman actors coalescing around particular activities rather than isolated among binaries of human subjectivity and algorithmic objectivity.

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