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Chris A. Lindgren

Chris A. Lindgren, Assistant Professor

A white male with  a beard and glasses, wears a plaid shirt and a blue blazer
Chris A. Lindgren, Assistant Professor

Department of English
207 Shanks Hall 
181 Turner Street NW 
Blacksburg, VA 24061
lindgren@vt.edu

Chris Lindgren (he/him) studies computer coding and data-driven work as social and cultural forms of communication riddled with rhetorical decisions and deliberations. His research develops critical thinking and approaches to coding and computation, data, and accessible web content strategies. Lately, he has been developing a critical methodology for technical communicators and data practitioners to understand the rhetoric of their quantitative data work.

He is also a partner on The Rematriation Project, which is an Native Alaskan community-led project to create a community-created digital archive. On this project, he has been developing a "cultural humility" framework to guide researchers when working with Indigenous communities, creating a tool for Native Alaskan communities to decide the best archival software for their needs, and designing a curriculum for their self-determined data literacies and archival practices.

Some of his past research has studied how capitalistic rhetoric has impacted calls for coding as the new mass literacy of our time. Overall, his research, teaching, and community-outreach projects take up a design justice approach to digital communication.

  • Technical and professional communication
  • Critical code studies
  • Critical data studies
  • Coding literacy
  • Visual rhetoric
  • Data processing, analysis, and visualization
  • Web content design and strategy
  • Ph.D. in Rhetoric, Scientific, & Technical Communication, University of Minnesota – Twin-Cities
  • M.A. in Composition Studies, North Dakota State University
  • B.A. in English, North Dakota State University
  • Chair of the CCCC SIG on the Writing and Rhetoric of Code
  • Web Manager and Executive Committee Member on the ACM SIG on the Design of Communication

Journal Articles

Book Chapters

  • Kevin Brooks and Chris A. Lindgren. (2015). Responding to the coding crisis: From 'Code Year' to computational literacy. In L. C. Lewis, (Ed.), Strategic Discourse: The Politics of (New) Literacy Crises. Salt Lake City, UT: Computers and Composition Digital Press. Available at http://ccdigitalpress.org/strategic/index.html
  • Kevin Brooks, Chris A. Lindgren, and Matthew Warner. (2015). Tackling a fundamental problem: Using digital labs to build a smarter computing culture. In B. Hart-Davidson & J. Ridolfo, (Eds.), Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
  • Byron Hawk, Chris A. Lindgren, & Andrew Mara. (2015). Utopian laptop initiatives: From technological deism to object-oriented rhetoric. In Sidney Dobrin, (Ed.). Writing Posthumanism, Posthuman Writing. Anderson, SC: Parlor Press.
  • (2020). Name That Twitter Community!: A Python module for humanities researchers. Reviews in DH, 1(2). Available at DOI 10.21428/3e88f64f.1302b7aa.
    • Over 155,000 downloads since August 2019
    • Over 3,000 average downloads per month
  • (2020). askcomm. [Python module]. Zenodo.org [Open Science platform]. Available at DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.8137267.
    • Over 8,000 downloads since November 2020
    • 247 average downloads per month
  • (2020). evekeys. [Python module]. Zenodo.org [Open Science platform]. Available at DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.8137283.
    • Over 6,800 downloads since July 2020
    • 185 average downloads per month
  • (2020). urlcounter. [Python module]. Zenodo.org [Open Science platform]. Available at DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.8137277.
    • Over 5,600 downloads since June 2020
    • 148 average downloads per month

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