The 2025 CRDM Symposium seeks to explore the many meanings of “digits” and how they intersect with communication, rhetoric, and digital media. The presentations of the symposium focus on the embodied significance of digits (fingers, hands) in communication, the role of numerical data and statistics in shaping rhetoric, and the power of code in shaping digital communication and media platforms.

Keynote Speech, “’Designed for masochists’: How OWO’s Haptic Gaming Shirt Encodes, Enacts, and Spectacularizes Digitized Touch” 

David Parisi is the Dibner Family Chair in the History and Philosophy of Technology and Science and Associate Professor in the Department of Technology, Culture, and Society at New York University (NYU). His research investigates the past, present, and future of touching with digital technologies.

Book Talk, “The Fingerprints of a Digital Collection”

Paul Fyfe is an associate professor of English at NC State University and director of the graduate certificate in digital humanities. His latest book, Digital Victorians (Stanford UP, 2024), offers an alternative genealogy of digital humanities rooted in nineteenth-century media cultures. He is currently co-PI on NC State’s NEH-funded Center for AI in Society and Ethics (CASE) and is working with an international team on using multimodal AI on nineteenth-century illustrated newspapers.

Critical Making Session

Fernanda Duarte is a Digital Media researcher and maker interested in sociotechnical issues of emerging technologies and ways to appropriate and subvert their functional uses. Duarte is primarily interested in understanding ways of becoming, of making, and of knowing through and with media technologies. She adopts a materialistic lens to Communication to investigate critical, creative, and subversive meaning-making practices, forms of knowledge, and subjectification.

CRDM Candidate Panel, “DJs, Processes, Games, and Threads”

Maurika Smutherman is a PhD candidate in CRDM and serves as the graduate extension assistant for the NCSU Libraries’ Digital Media Lab. Her research focuses on intersections between materiality, critical making, technology, and Black feminist thought to situate Black women’s and girls’ technical expertise as central to the history of human creativity and technological innovation.

T. R. Merchant-Knudsen is a PhD candidate in CRDM, and they are an adjunct instructor at Wake Technical Community College. Their interests in film and media studies are on intermedia sensory experiences and scholarship, formalist analysis, animation, film histories, and ambience within spectacular media environments.

John J. Fennimore is an award-winning writer, scholar, and PhD candidate in CRDM. He is intrigued by the commercial aspects of video games, the psychology of players, the infrastructure of virtual worlds, and the power dynamic between players and video game corporations.

Bee Rinaldi is a PhD candidate in CRDM. Their focus is on esoteric interactions between computational processes and modalities of composition. They are particularly interested in queer applications in natural language processing and studies of meaning-making through computational interpretative lenses to expand the queer possibilities of rhetoric in human and more-than-human applications.

Closing Speech, “Angels in the Architecture: Insect Biology and Artistic Practice” 

Helen J Burgess is a Professor of English. She received her BA(Hons) and MA(Dist.) in English Language and Literature from Victoria University of Wellington, in New Zealand, and her Ph.D. in English from West Virginia University. She has previously taught at Washington State University-Vancouver and UMBC. Her research areas include digital rhetorics, electronic literature, critical making and text/textiles.