Jason Helms
Jason Helms
I'm Jason Helms, Associate Professor of English and Director of the Center for Digital Expression at TCU. I teach courses on the history of rhetoric, multimedia authoring, visual rhetoric, podcasting, gaming, comics, rhetoric and philosophy, and writing writ large. Just like my teaching, my research covers some broad ground, but my focus is on the interplay of rhetoric and technology. That focus sheds light on what might seem like disparate interests.
This site is divided into four sections: Research, Teaching, CV, and Links. You can access them on the menu above. After scrolling down to each section, you can then move side to side within that section. Use the arrow icons or, on a phone or tablet, simply swipe.
Jason Helms
Jason Helms
I'm Jason Helms, Associate Professor of English and Director of the Center for Digital Expression at TCU. I teach courses on the history of rhetoric, multimedia authoring, visual rhetoric, podcasting, gaming, comics, rhetoric and philosophy, and writing writ large. Just like my teaching, my research covers some broad ground, but my focus is on the interplay of rhetoric and technology. That focus sheds light on what might seem like disparate interests.
This site is divided into four sections: Research, Teaching, CV, and Links. You can access them on the menu above. After scrolling down to each section, you can then move side to side within that section. Use the arrow icons or, on a phone or tablet, simply swipe.
Research
Diagram of my research areas
Scholarship is both rhetorical and technological. We often forget this because of our instrumental assumptions about rhetoric and technology. It is the nature of rhetoric and technology to be forgotten. My scholarship examines the ways rhetoric and technology obscure their operations and effects through a shared myth of transparency. This through-line developed over a few years pursuing distinct questions linked by specific concerns about the intersections of rhetoric and technology. Throughout this process, I experimented with scholarly modes, creating video games, animations, and comics, culminating in my digital monograph.
I tell my students that rhetoric is the how of communication. Most other disciplines start with the what; rhetoric understands the ways the how can shape or even obscure the what. Technology operates the same way, often obscuring its effects through usability. This how links everything even as it obscures itself. I started with the how of scholarship, with the ways research questions are constrained by the delivery medium of the scholarship. My earlier articles in Kairos, Digital Humanities Quarterly, and Itineration perform their arguments explicitly through animation, drawings, and interactivity. The process of critical making and new media itself can often be exclusionary, and my methodology articles (one on the DHQ special issue and one on Rhizcomics itself) aim to break down some of those barriers. In my current book project, I’m similarly showing the ways rhetoric and technology overlap to uphold systems of marginalization.
My work has become more collaborative, more antiracist, more justice-oriented, and I expect that trend to continue over the next five to ten years. I’m part of a team of interdisciplinary scholars at TCU building a research center around video games. We’ve received several internal grants, culminating in a regional symposium on diversity in games. That symposium connected us with other scholars throughout DFW doing work around video games, who we will begin working with on national grant projects. I plan to focus more on critical making, to continue to expand our scholarly methods. I’ll be co-leading a workshop on critical making as scholarship at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute with Anastasia Salter next summer. Having attended DHSI before as a participant, I’ve found it to be an exciting intellectual center for interdisciplinary digital humanities work. I suspect my next few major projects will owe a great deal to the connections that opportunity creates.
Digital Monograph
Rhizcomics cover image.
Rhizcomics: Rhetoric, Technology, and New Media Composition.
Open Access digital monograph from the University of Michigan Press and Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative, February 24, 2017.
My digital monograph, Rhizcomics: Rhetoric, Technology, and New Media Composition, was published by Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative and the University of Michigan Press. Rhizcomics is a digital monograph that composes multimodal arguments about rhetoric and comics. The book presents comics as a rhetorically complex medium capable of nuanced scholarly arguments. Relying on animation, drawing, video, interactivity, and text, Rhizcomics investigates presymbolic rhetoricity across comics and other media.
Andrea Lunsford wrote that Rhizcomics “demonstrates how fundamentally our visual and aural environments are shifting, deepening, become more and more richly layered—and [Helms] does so in a startlingly nonlinear way. In doing so, he challenges all of us who teach (as well as read and write) to join him in exploring this new landscape, and not only in our teaching but in our research and scholarship as well . . . prepare to be changed by it.” Rhizcomics performs its arguments, creating an alienation effect that highlights the ways traditional scholarship obscures its operations. As Lunsford notes, this is challenging for readers—deliberately so. But it is also engaging enough to be accessible to nonacademics.
In her review, Anastasia Salter writes that Rhizcomics “is a reminder of the value both comics and multimodal work like Helms’s offer to extending not only the scholarly gaze but the methods of scholarship.” Rhizcomics traces the ways traditional methods restrict research and shows some of the possibilities for extending those methods. While I found that readers were excited about extending methods, they often didn’t know where to start. My methodology article, Making Rhizcomics, offers practical, specific insights into the process of making a digital monograph and will likely be more valuable long term than the monograph itself. Critical making can be liberatory but it can also be exclusive. My methodology articles make new media scholarship practical and accessible, so that others can find a way into these exclusionary spaces.
Articles
“Play Smarter Not Harder: Developing Your Scholarly Meta.”
Scholarly and Research Communication. Vol. 10, No. 3, 2019.
“Making Rhizcomics: Methodologies for Digital Monographs.”
Kairos, Vol. 23, No. 1, 2018.
“Potential Panels: Toward a Theory of Augmented Comics.”
All the World’s a Link: Perspectives on Augmented Reality across Art, Industry, and Academia. Editors: Sean Morey and John Tinnell. Parlor Press, 2017.
“Making Comics as Scholarship: A Reflection on the Process behind Digital Humanities Quarterly 9.4.”
Kairos, Vol. 23, No. 1, 2018. (third author)
“What If the Who Became the What: Bernard Stiegler Listens to Tommy.”
Part of a collection of multimodal scholarship on composition and pinball published in Itineration, February 2016. Republished in Hyperrhiz 22, 2020.
“Is This Article a Comic?”
Part of a special issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly on Comics as Scholarship. Vol. 9, No. 4, Fall 2015.
“Vorhandenheit.”
Interactive scholarship. Part of “MOMLA: from Panel to Gallery” published in Kairos, Vol. 17, No. 2, 2013.
“Helenistic Encomium.”
Kairos, Vol. 13, No. 2, Spring 2009.
“Miller's Tale.”
PRE/TEXT, Vol. 19, Nos. 1-4.
“The Task of the Name: A Reply to Carol Poster”
Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 41, No. 3, 2008.
Teaching
A photograph of a whiteboard with various rhetoricians and philosophers mapped out on it.
In this section you’ll find my teaching philosophy, sample syllabi, and some student work and interactions.