Mapping Project

This project asks students to map a campus space or issue at SLU. Mapping here means the purposeful selection,
arrangement, and presentation of information in a usable format for a specific audience. A student’s map should help
a user (of which they are one) understand and navigate a pressing issue (e.g., racial equity) or space (e.g.,
classroom environment) in and/or around SLU. This project positions the creative and constructive work of
persuasion as important and necessary to our movement in the world. Mapping here is not to be understood as the
passive mirroring of “reality,” but the active cultivation of meaning and matter. In concert with a primary theme of this
course, mapping of this sort productively engages rhetorical practice in requiring students to frame and define both
their audience and their object in specific ways in planning and composing their map. Maps can be static (e.g.,
infographics) or dynamic (e.g., audio tours). No matter the medium, effective persuasion isn’t simply made to fit an
existing location, but rather emerges from within a location—as medium—that is itself moving, changing, evolving.
This project stresses document design and primary research in the form of observations, interviews, and surveys.

Design Plan
Flesh out the details for each of the following areas (1,500 words), which address the question of method:

• Subject to be analyzed (can be a location, a theme, an issue)

• Importance of this map (i.e., make a case for why is it important or necessary to create this map at this
moment?)
• Technologies to be used in making the map (e.g., word processor, Photoshop, video camera, microphone)
• Features of the map. Specify the kinds of pictures, text, or video you will feature. This section should be fairly
fleshed out. What will the map look like, sound like, feel like?
• Purpose of the map (i.e., what effect do you hope to achieve? What impact do you want your map to have on
an audience?)
• Who is the specific and concrete audience for this map (i.e., freshman smart phone users, vegan foodies,
disabled undergraduates)?
• What research do you need to conduct to produce this map (interviews, observations, taste tests, focus
groups, historical survey)?

Postmortem
Answer the following questions adopted from Jody Shipka’s Toward a Composition Made Whole (1,500 words):

• What, specifically, is this map trying to accomplish—above and beyond satisfying the basic requirements
outlined in the task description? In other words, what work does, or might, this piece do? For whom? In what
contexts?
• What specific rhetorical, material, methodological, and technological choices did you make in service of
accomplishing the goal(s) articulated above? Catalog, as well, choices that you might not have consciously
made, those that were made for you when you opted to work with certain genres, materials, and
technologies.
• Why did you end up pursuing this plan as opposed to the others you came up with? How did the various
choices listed above allow you to accomplish things that other sets or combinations of choices would not
have?
• Who and what played a role in accomplishing these goals?
• More specifically, how did the subject matter shape the map?

Nathaniel A. Rivers I English 3850 I Persuasive Writing