Hannah Ringler

Hannah Ringler is a rhetorician in the Humanities department at Illinois Tech. Her primary research interests are two-fold:

1) Hermeneutics in computational textual analysis. Ringler's educational background is in rhetoric, and she ultimately aims to bring the interpretive expertise of the humanities to the computational expertise of computer science to make better sense of complicated language models. In short, she is fascinated by what technological fields have done with language processing, and asking how we might use these methods productively to better understand and teach language.

2) Teaching communication skills to STEM students. Ringler has taught writing and communication for many years, and has developed a particular love of teaching STEM students to write in their disciplines. She special interests in computer science writing, graduate students, first-generation students, disabilities, and academic writing.

Hannah Ringler also is the director of the Communication Across the Curriculum program at Illinois Tech. In this role, she is responsible for overseeing and assessing communication curriculum across campus, supporting instructors and departments in developing communication curriculum, and ensuring all students develop important disciplinary communication skills by graduation.

Education

Ph.​D.​, Carnegie Mellon University, Rhetoric
M.​A.​, Carnegie Mellon University, Rhetoric
B.​A.​, Texas A&M University, English

Research Interests

Rhetoric, digital humanities, computational text analysis, hermeneutics, and writing in the disciplines

Professional Affiliations & Memberships

National Council of Teachers of English, Association for Computers and the Humanities, Council of Writing Program Administrators

Publications

Ringler, Hannah (2024). “Computation and hermeneutics: Why we still need interpretation to be (computational) humanists”. In: Computational Humanities. Ed. by Jessica Marie Johnson, David Mimno, and Lauren Tilton. Debates in the Digital Humanities Series. University of Minnesota Press. Chap. 1, pp. 3–17.

Ringler, Hannah (2023). “Review of Writing STEAM: Composition, STEM, and a New Humanities, edited by Vivian Kao & Julia E. Kiernan”. In: The WAC Journal. url: https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/journal/vol33/ringler.pdf.

Ringler, Hannah (2021). “‘We can’t read it all’: Theorizing a hermeneutics for large-scale data in the humanities with a case study in stylometry”. In: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 37 (4), pp. 1157–1171. url: https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqab100.

Muller, Stefan K. and Hannah Ringler (2020). “A Rhetorical Framework for Programming Language Evaluation”. In: Proceedings of the 2020 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software. Onward! 2020. Association for Computing Machinery: Virtual, USA, pp. 187–194. url: https://doi.org/10.1145/3426428.3426927.

Ringler, Hannah, Beata Beigman Klebanov, and David Kaufer (2018). “Placing writing tasks in local and global contexts: The case of argumentative writing”. In: Journal of Writing Analytics 2, pp. 34–77. url: https://doi.org/10.37514/JWA-J.2018.2.1.03.

Projects

My current research projects include the following:

Theorizing how to interpret computational models, especially of textual corpora (and in the process, figuring out what “interpret” can mean!)

Better understanding differences and norms across disciplinary writing, particularly in computer science

Reconsidering how to teach students communication skills in the age of generative AI

Teaching writing and communication skills effectively to technically-oriented students (i.e., at a tech university)

Teaching oral presentation skills to students with speech-related disabilities and anxieties

Supporting faculty across the university in teaching communication in their disciplines

Expertise

Rhetoric, digital humanities, computational text analysis, hermeneutics, and writing in the disciplines