Professors Phoebe Zerwick and Zak Lancaster to present research at ACC Smithsonian Creativity and Innovation Festival

Along with other Wake Forest faculty and researchers, professors Phoebe Zerwick and Zak Lancaster will give presentations at the first ACCelerate: ACC Smithsonian Creativity and Innovation Festival, held at the National Museum of American History in Washington D.C. October 13-15. 

Presented by Virginia Tech and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, the ACCelerate Festival is a three-day celebration of creative exploration and research at the nexus of science, engineering, arts, and design. Visitors to the festival will interact with leading innovators from ACC universities and engage with new interdisciplinary technologies that draw upon art, science, and humanities to address global challenges.

Click the presentation titles below to learn more about each one.

Multimedia exhibition The Story of My Life follows the lives of six intellectually and developmentally disabled adults and tells their stories through photography, written and spoken word, and various visual art forms. These richly layered narratives bear witness to the lives of the remarkable men and women, residents of Group Homes of Forsyth, who helped create them. The project is a collaboration among Wake Forest University professor Phoebe Zerwick, photographer Christine Rucker, journalist Michelle Johnson, faculty at the Sawtooth School, and the six adults featured in the exhibit, who worked individually with artists and the media that spoke to them. The Wake Forest University Humanities Institute provided support for the project as part of a larger effort to bring humanities projects to public audiences and to support university and community partnerships in the humanities. Researchers: Phoebe Zerwick, JoAnne Vernon, Christine Rucker, Greg Silvernail, James Lowdermilk, John Linville, Cecelia Henry, Karen Lash, and Ghree Lockard. [/su_spoiler]

Data mining has traditionally remained outside humanistic inquiry, and therefore most research on student writing in U.S. English departments has relied on small-scale qualitative approaches and introspective judgments. In this multi-year project, student-researchers and faculty-mentors used concordancing software to tease out patterns of language use in nearly 20,000 student essays. These patterns, impossible to detect in traditional “close reading,” are the linguistic footprints of writers’ strategies and tacit beliefs about academic argumentation. Our comparison-based examinations have pinpointed differences between expert and student writing, novice and advanced student writing, and domestic student and Chinese international student writing. The presentation compiles this work by presenting three key findings in a print poster and auto-running PowerPoint accompanied by two student researchers. In so doing, the presentation turns the otherwise tacit linguistic footprints of student writing into discoverable and representable trends. Researchers: Zak Lancaster, Maddie Mosley, and Keru Luo. [/su_spoiler]

You can read more about the ACCelerate Festival and presentations by other Wake Forest faculty on Wake Forest News.