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Jim Brown isn't a regular sophist. He's a cool sophist.

Arguments about software aren't merely discursive. They're participatory, from software, to discourse, to experience.

I use the to/from prepositions here, but it's more complex than that. We need new prepositions for digital rhetoric work.

Perhaps, then, we should search for patterns among rhetorical ecologies.

Generalizing is dangerous too, though. For instance, freshman-level rhetoric and writing exists as part of a generalized compulsory curriculum at almost every US institution. In turn, we, as teachers of rhetoric, have had very little need to justify (or even disclose) our methods, let alone situate them in terms of the content of what we're (supposed to be) teaching. Put another way, if we're such great persuaders, then why is the course compulsory? Shouldn't we be able to persuade people, including our students, of the values of rhetoric?

Rhetoric is what rhetoric do. See previous chapter re: Brown's methods bolstering his argument.

Are artifacts generative in this sense BECAUSE of hospitable networks? Or have rhetorical artifacts always been generative in this sense? Perhaps a better question is: In what specific ways do hospitable networks afford agency to artifacts?

Return to this chapter to unpack Brown's argument--that "rhetorical analysis has always been machinic." Use it as a jumping off point.

This right here is why I get to do the work that I do. Ethical Programs adds a significant value to the field in that fundamental pathways between digital methods and the rhetorical tradition have been forged by Brown and others from the previous "generation" of digital rhetoric scholars. In turn, future scholars can cite this and texts like it to circumvent a bunch of close reading work so that they may focus their attention on the (future?) possibilities that these ties enact for rhetoric.

Another argument for why the "digital" methods part of DH work cannot be seen as supplementary to traditional humanist methods.

The benefit of exploiting glitch

Does this deployment of topoi depend on a shift in what stasis means? More specifically, must we read "definition" as "data" in order for this deployment to take place?

Rhetoric 101: Never take a rhetor at face value.

Right here. Jim Brown. Nailed it.

Rhetorical production is what secures funding for the sciences and/or corporate marketing interests. That is, in some ways, the sciences and industry have been doing rhetoric "better" than rhetoric. This idea of rhetorical production is key to making our research replicable enough to identify the patterns Brooke advocates.

Patterning demands replication--at both the theoretical and practical levels.

Scholars have been "tagging" narratives with "metadata" for centuries. The metadata of individual narrative interpretations is precisely what enables humanities scholars to "do research." In fact, this type of "metadata" is likely responsible (at least in part) for institutionalized disciplinary identities.

To me, this seems to foreground the rhetorical canon of invention in that with networked hospitality, arrangement, delivery, style, and memory are all kind of interchangeable and flow into one another in that they are all effects of the rhetor's invention.

This line of thinking also underpins arguments for why the "digital" part of DH work is (or should be) merely supplementary to traditional humanist methods. If Brown is saying that we need to toggle, then the "digital" part of DH work cannot and should not be considered to be merely supplementary to humanist methods.

Close reading doesn't go away under Brown's idea of ethical programs.

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Hospitable databases may, in fact, precondition narratives. Pretend with me for a moment. When we think about narratives, there is no single narrative that exists as "empirical" proof of the existence of God. However, when we think about database, the sheer number of "God" narratives that exist are a type of empirical "proof" of God's existence.

According to Derrida, presence, truth, and meaning are EFFECTS of writing, not the other way around (SEC). They are fictional operations (by structure); they are not found in nature. Thus, Brown addresses something that may be an effect of language more generally. Is hospitality space likewise an effect of language?

We might also call this an ethics of effects. If I claim to be a brain surgeon and proceed to dig into someone's skull, my persuasive effects would manifest much differently than Essjay's did in the context of MediaWiki.

Or it's at least constituted differently.

I'm not even sure we need to specify "digital" rhetors here. It seems like inventing ethos has always been one task of rhetoric. Still, the point stands in terms of Brown's example in this chapter.

How is this permanence different from the (perceived) permanence of print? Anonymity? Dispersed agency?

This multidimensionality distinguishes Brown's argument from the OOO camp. It is important to note, however, that the hierarchies Brown mentions here are carefully bound by a very specific context (MediaWiki) and are neither generalizable nor universal.

These tags are necessarily limiting to the "possibility" Brown mentions in the previous chapter. That is, a focus on "accuracy," for instance, precludes entries that exemplify "inaccuracy." Inaccuracy might also teach us something (or produce knowledge) at the computational procedure level.

For example, Google Scholar aggregates researchers' search terms/citation practices, and orders search results based on the number of times a work has been cited. Thus, ideologically, the algorithm of Google Scholar is coded such that the most frequently cited resources "snowball," gaining more citations than a network with a free(er) scale.

Though I might favor the preservation of this distinction in terms of maintaining the term "exploit" (a transitive verb) as one that references a finished act (like a "case study" or a "version history"), which differs slightly from the term "exploitation" (n.) which connotes ongoing activity.

Yet, on another level, these spaces operate autonomously, seemingly independent from their programs.

Perhaps, then, just as the activity of glitch exploitation conditions what is possible in networked spaces, the activity of systematic theorization similarly conditions what is possible for rhetoric.

This is a key point that deserves attention, since many researchers in the humanities cite this very fear. On the one hand, Brown skillfully offers a rebuttal for a (rather common) disciplinary trepidation; on the other hand, however, he takes great care to preserve (or at least not undermine) the ethical concerns of "traditional" humanities education and research. In other words, Brown adopts a sort of "access without ownership" approach to these sites of possibility. That is, users don't necessarily need to view the activity of glitch exploitation as an activity that is bound by ethics because, while it is arguable that users SHOULDN'T exploit glitches, what is not arguable is that users CAN exploit glitches. Thus, Brown's terms shift the focus from a probability (what is likely to happen?) to a possibility (what might happen if we follow this trail?). As such, much like Netflix allows users to have access to the entire series of 30 Rock without ever owning the series of 30 Rock per se, Brown theorizes that glitch allows users access to sites of possibility without encumbering users with ownership of the "weaker" argument (or code) that constitutes the glitch. Thus, Brown's own rhetorical methods (delivery?) are reflexive and work to bolster his claim.

This argument reminds me of the early sophists, like Protagoras, who understood--and perhaps exploited--the "weaker argument" in order to make a the "stronger" one. Here, the activity of exploiting a glitch serves as an activity of potential--the potential to transform bits of "weak" code into sites of invention and genesis.

Street Fighter is a video game that is known specifically for its glitches. For regular players of the game, glitch is normalized as a regular part of play. For example, the Street Fighter wiki returns 30 results for the search term "glitch." The difference, however, is introduced through ways in which individuals discuss the activity of exploiting such glitches. This Street Fighter discussion thread reveals some contention among users as to whether or not exploiting glitches in the game constitutes "cheating." Significantly, in this paragraph, Brown models a method for talking about glitch in a way that diffuses assumptions of dishonesty. See Boyle "Glitch"

This may be due, in part, to the flexibility of these digital programs. In other words, just as Netflix algorithms get really good at providing recommendations over time, political campaigns might also reap the benefits of this customizability.

Perhaps this is similar to the ways in which trolling allows for rhetorical action on social media.

We might say, then, that despite the fact that they are authored similarly (to prompt rhetorical effects), procedural rhetoric differs from a rhetorical artifact in that procedural rhetoric allows for the dynamism of a multiplicity of interactors to become part of the text's rhetoric. That is, with procedural rhetoric, the reader co-authors the function of the text.

Thinking about "the procedures that invite or discourage interaction" seems to be the goal of rhetoric, historically. Classical rhetors like Plato, Isocrates, and Quintilian were concerned with these procedures, too. Perhaps, then, digital rhetoric, which I take to be inclusive of procedural rhetoric, has to do as much with rhetorical methods as it does with technology.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/persuasive-games

Bogost argues that videogames, thanks to their basic representational mode of procedurality (rule-based representations and interactions), open a new domain for persuasion; they realize a new form of rhetoric. Bogost calls this new form "procedural rhetoric," a type of rhetoric tied to the core affordances of computers: running processes and executing rule-based symbolic manipulation.