Jim Porter was a featured speaker at the 20th Penn State University Conference on Rhetoric and Composition in State College, PA, on July 8-10, 2007. The conference theme was "Rhetoric and Technologies." Porter's paper, entitled "Recovering Delivery for Digital Rhetoric," focused on how the rhetorical canon of delivery can be re-theorized and re-applied in the service of digital writing.

http://www.outreach.psu.edu/C&I/rhetoric/default-104.htm

Stacey Pigg, WIDE graduate student research assistant, also presented at the Penn State Conference. Pigg's talk, "Check Yes or No: Ebonics, Survey Memes, and Viral Subjectivity in the New Blogosphere," described how bloggers using one online blog hosting site constructed themselves as subjects either by using the term "Ebonics" in response to an online survey, or by responding to an online survey question that contained the word "Ebonics." Paying attention to this strange confluence of writing form and content led her to consider not only how particular kinds of attitudes toward Ebonics develop and circulate online, but also how particular kinds of cultures form when this individual act happens repeatedly.