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Finn: Hello and welcome to the Carolina PITcast. This is Finn Mcconaghy. 
Today we have Daniel Anderson, who is the director of the Carolina Digital 
Humanities, as well as the Director of the Digital Innovation Lab at the 
University of North Carolina. He studies digital rhetoric, teaching with 
technology, and alternative approaches to scholarship.
Welcome, Dan. 
Dan: Thank you, Finn. I'm really happy to be here. 
Finn: Yeah, we're glad to have you. So I kind of wanna break down a lot of 
these aspects in your bio. Obviously you do a lot here. And as somebody that's 
involved in the Digital Innovation Lab, the PIT Journal, I was really interested 
in this part that is digital rhetoric.
So explain to me what digital rhetoric is to you and what sort of work you're 
doing with that. 
Dan: Yeah, rhetoric is the study of how people communicate and digital is just 
what happens when we fold computers into that. I've been doing this since the 
nineties and there's always been something new.
The worldwide web came online in the nineties and then, iMovie and 
multimedia comes along. So a lot of it is comfortable, similar things. So when 
you think about communication, there's an audience and a speaker and you have 
a purpose and there's traditional ways of using rhetoric to, to communicate and 
get a message across.
And those hold true, but then they also shift when you start to think about, how 
do I do that with video or, like this, with a podcast, what's, what's different? 
Finn: Yeah. 
Dan: So you get that traditional rhetoric, but you know, new modes folded on 
top of it. 
Finn: Yeah. I thought it was really interesting. I did some research and I pulled 
a quote from your website.
It says, "How we think shifts when composing with a screen. Words, join 
moving images, sounds, and the windows of the desktop, the performances link 
the writer with the computer and the network. And if you could talk to that, just 
sort of how rhetoric evolves when it's on a digital format. 
Dan: Absolutely.
So in addition to maybe using images and sound in addition to words, those are 
the materials that you're using, what shifts is the tools as well. So if I'm just 
doing verbal rhetoric, I could almost do that in my mind thinking about 
language. Or I could talk with someone or I could write it down with a pencil.
When I start to move on to the computer screen, then I'm using a piece of 
software and the screen itself, even the computer interfaces. A tool that 
mediates the kind of writing that you do. So what I'm arguing is that when you 
move to a computer screen, everything is shifted because I'm clicking on things, 
there's layers of material that I'm looking at, and that is different than if I were 
writing a linear string of words on a sheet of papers.
Finn: Right, right. What about the shift in audience too? Obviously with the 
internet it's a lot more accessible, and I see that you've done a lot of research on 
social media specifically too. 
Dan: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the nice things about this is the 
democratization that can happen when you move to digital spaces.
Prior to these developments, you had to have a publisher, a lot of infrastructure 
to get your word out. And now you really just need the phone that's in your 
pocket. 
And so you can reach a lot of people. I think that changed things a little bit, but 
also maybe didn't in some ways, like just because there's now a million people 
you could reach with your Instagram posting.
Finn: Changes what sort of credibility you need, I feel like, or how many like 
hoops you have to jump through. 
Dan: Yeah, totally. And I guess I'm starting to become a little bit more skeptical 
of some of the initial claims about how the internet was going to really be 
revolutionary and an un alloyed good.
I think the more you recognize, so it's really easy to post something on 
Instagram. And I can post a slideshow that says, here's three tips for starting 
college, or something like that. But somebody probably already posted that or 
something like that. Very similar. So how many, how many more postings do 
we need with kind of the same information recycled and I think you're starting 
to get a kind of flattening of information online that's just the same stuff, just 
circ- it's more about circulation as much as like the one-on-one messaging or 
the, you know, deliberate connecting of an idea sometimes. 
Finn: It's almost like an oversaturation. Yeah. Yeah. I see also that here in your 
bio, it talks about alternative approaches to scholarship, and so I feel like that is 
just natural with social media, with this digital form of rhetoric. What sort of 
research have you done into that, and what have you found to be most 
successful?
Dan: Yeah, quite a bit. This goes to conversations that might be happening up a 
level in academia. So among faculty, among scholars, researchers, particularly 
in the humanities, which you know, and anyone can talk about this, and we do 
talk about this at all levels, but it's what constitutes knowledge?
How do you create new knowledge? How do you share knowledge? And the 
thing about academia is the behaviors are pretty ossified, like they're doing 
academics the same way they were doing it 20 years ago or 30 years ago. Even 
though the internet has come along, and this in many ways applies more to say, 
well, now it probably applies to science as well humanities, you publish in an 
academic journal. There's a model that you follow, and that's sort of the 
currency of academic work. So my thinking is that that can become rigid. And if 
we're all about being open-minded and finding new ways of developing 
knowledge and discovering knowledge, if we're using the exact same method 
the whole time over and over, we might be shutting ourselves down for 
something.
So yeah, that's where if you use media, let's say I'm gonna use the material of 
sound, what could I do in an academic essay? Using sound that's different than 
if I were just using words. And that goes to not just using my recorded voice, 
which is sound, and that has a different materiality than if I take in words with 
my eyes.
So there's a little bit of a difference there. But if I'm using sound, I could put the 
sound of a train horn. Or a baby crying or a cow mooing, right? Or something 
like that. Is there a way in which that conveys information differently than even 
words that were recorded through my voice? Yeah. So I would argue yes, like 
when a baby cries.
There's something emotional that uses the register of pathos, that I'm gonna feel 
something and I'll get an understanding. This is distress or there- and I'll even 
get a persuasive message. I need to get up and do this thing. It's not the same as 
if I put together three paragraphs about how to intervene when a child is in 
distress. I would be almost immersed in that emotional sound that was coming. 
And that would be my takeaway. So that's just like an extreme version of the 
argument that if we're just gonna write with words, maybe we're leaving some 
stuff off the table. And what happens if we move in these other pieces? Does 
that create alternatives? 
Finn: Yeah. What do you think would be the evolution of this? Do you think 
that VR could be really helpful with that too, or? Just to add to the visual side, 
then you also have sounds too.
Dan: Yeah, yeah. Like this conversation that we're having here I think is a nice 
evolution because it has more of a back and forth too.
Another overlap here has to do with time and distance, so typical academic 
article. It gets captured and put on paper and then somebody reads it somewhere 
else, right? They might email you later and say, I have a question about this, but 
if you can have a more kind of immediate multivocal kind of scholarship, what 
would that look like? 
Academics do that all the time when they have a conference, right? So they 
might have a panel and people would argue back and forth. That seems like a 
nice development. So something like that. VR, I'm not a hundred percent sure, 
but I could definitely see how the idea of being immersed if I'm trying to get 
someone to feel something as well as think something, then putting them into an 
environment or a space.
It seems like it could have some good possibilities. 
Finn: Yeah. Okay. So to touch on that conference, sort of the dialogue between, 
or an evolving dialogue that's happening as these ideas are coming or you're 
coming up with them, I see also that you wrote that now at this time, you feel 
scholarship can be repetitive and also combative.
So I guess, what sort of approaches can you take? To make sure that it's not 
combative when you have some sort of discourse. 
Dan: Yeah. I think it's actually easier when we're next to each other at a table 
than when we're doing this on paper to some distant kind of interlocutor. And a 
lot of this I still trace to the rigidity of academic approaches in many ways, so, 
and it goes to genres. 
The ways that genres work is they accomplish certain kinds of work. And if you 
take a typical academic article, at least in say, literary studies, the humanities 
history, they tend to start by putting on the table what someone else has said. 
Here's the argument of X, or here's what the field has thought for the last 20 
years.
And then they bring in the counter argument, this is why that's wrong, or here's 
where X missed the point, all of that, and so there's this sort of headbutting. 
That takes place intellectually in a lot of academic prose where people are in 
competition. It's a, a competition of ideas.
I'm not opposed to the competition of ideas, but I think alongside that, we could 
have other approaches. And so if you say- one time I wrote an article that used 
no buts, no howevers, no althoughs, like all of these conjunctions and phrases 
that are the equivalent of saying, "That's not right. Here's what's right," and I 
just use "and." 
So someone puts an idea on the table, it's the improv prompt where they just say 
"yes and." If someone puts an idea on the table, what you do is you accept it and 
you extend it. You don't accept an every wild idea. If something is problematic, 
then you say, no, I, I can't accept that.
But otherwise, instead of immediately trying to win an argument, see how you 
can build on what someone has said, and that's a different way of writing, but 
comes across pretty cool. 
Finn: Okay, so I, I'm gonna shift topics a little bit. I also see that you've done a 
lot of research and publishing on wellness, and so I wanted to see why you find 
that so important and what you've discovered in your journey? 
Dan: Yeah. I was reading some of these wellness books, this linked up with the 
pandemic, so there was a lot of mental health struggles and people trying to 
figure out how are we gonna support people in this challenging time. And this is 
basic rhetorical work, when you start reading, if you're in an English department 
or what have you, you have a pencil in your hand and you're marking stuff up 
and you're trying to read on top of or beneath what the words are saying. And I 
just started to notice all of this figurative language that jumped out at me.
And some of 'em are really obvious, like the people will say wellness is a 
journey. And so, I started to just mark that and the more you mark it, you 
recognize some patterns. So what does it mean that wellness is a journey? You 
start to realize that journeys have a destination. So what does that mean?
When people say, I have to set a goal, and sometimes they set too big of a goal, 
all of the literature will tell you, take some small steps. So make some little 
habits and build on them and you'll get where you need to go. So that journey 
metaphor actually is really apt for trying to give people good advice.
Then I noticed another thing was like most of the writers occupy this kind of 
guide role. So mythologies will tell you most of the journeys, the protagonist 
eventually meets some character, some mentor, some old man with a cane or a 
witch in the woods or something that is- gives them the wisdom that they need.
So it turns out the way that the writers produce these books follows that model, 
and they often say, oh, here's a little secret. So there's sometimes like a little 
talisman or a secret in the book eventually becomes this sort of talisman that's 
gonna allow you to take the wisdom of the guide and move along.
So that's just one example of why I found it rhetorically interesting, the way that 
these books work. 
Other ones are a little bit less expected, so there's a lot of battle imagery. You 
wouldn't really think of that because you think if people are giving advice about 
wellness or talking about wellness, it would be focusing on positivity, but 
they're always talking about defense mechanisms, strategies, tactics, and it turns 
out that, you know, wellness is a journey, but it's also a battle in some ways. So 
you get attuned to these ways that people are talking and you get a kind of 
different understanding of how people are teaching wellness or writing about 
wellness.
The real trick, I think is eventually to see if you can translate that into some 
paradigms or tactics that might help people feel better, do better, have more 
wellness. I'm not a hundred percent sure. It gets really cliche to say, "Think of 
wellness as a journey." Everybody's already got that one on the table.
But are there some things that maybe you could adjust in the way you use your 
own language or the way you, you are using verbal thinking to build on some of 
these insights. 
Finn: Do you think that this like heroic monomyth almost then of this journey 
that you're following and you're almost following, like the hero's journey is 
helpful then for wellness and then also to think the battle imagery then is like a 
call to arms to better your own health and wellbeing or?
Dan: Yeah. You know, I think awareness of how these things work would be 
helpful for people in many ways. So like sometimes the journey metaphor could 
definitely be a challenge. If someone says it's really easy, just get your map in 
place and take the steps, and it's not really easy. If someone uses that journey in 
a different way and says, it's okay, you might have a detour or a setback, but 
that's okay. You're making progress if you zoom out or something like that. So, 
you know, it's, I think, how you deploy it. 
Yeah. In some ways, and there's a lot of these, there's the one that shows up a 
lot that also speaks to intellectual work and how we explain things is "rewiring." 
So people are always talking about brain activity related to wellness and how is, 
how can we maybe change the way we're thinking in some ways? And they use 
this kind of computer metaphor of you can upload a new software for your 
thinking, or you're gonna rewire your brain as if there's soldering irons and all 
of that. 
But it's a useful shortcut because it's essentially telling you you're not stuck. 
You can make some change. And the rewiring helps you recognize, oh, I could 
do that. Of course, what they really mean is you have to practice some different 
habits or change the way you're thinking or talking or something like that. 
And it's interesting 'cause the scientists will use all of these concepts as well. So 
when they're writing for a public audience, they'll switch to this metaphorical 
language, and even in their science writing, they'll use metaphorical language 
quite a bit. 
Finn: Yeah, yeah. Okay. That's really interesting. I think that being able to 
recognize. Sort of the rhetoric that you're reading and be able to analyze all this 
is really important.
And I wanted to talk about the 105 Writing Program, just because I feel like 
that's where you earn or gain that, that foundation, that foundational learning 
and that rewiring, if you wanna call it. 
Dan: That makes sense. 
Finn: How did that come about? I know that you were founder of that and have 
directed that for a while, so just walk me through that process. 
Dan: Sure. Yeah. You know, English 105 has been on campus since campus 
started, really, it's a couple hundred years old. First year writing, and every 
university has a first year writing program. I've been doing the directing of it for 
the last four years. You know, I have enough rhetorical training that I 
understand the mission of what they're doing in English 105.
I, I enjoy doing that. One of the really nice things about it is it's a very 
successful program and it gives first year students what they need to be 
successful in college for the long run 'cause it not only teaches about writing 
rhetoric and communication, but there's a really strong research component.
So by the time you finish English 105, you should be pretty well prepared to do 
written communicative work in college and also know a lot more about 
research. So it's a great way of launching into your university activity. The other 
part about it is you're learning how to learn in some ways as you come to 
college.
And because it's got this kind of workshop environment with peers, and it's a 
small class and there's a lot, there's room for you to make mistakes and recover 
and figure things out. It's a really helpful class for just your overall attitude and 
posture as you move into the university as well.
So I really enjoyed working with that program because it's such a valuable class, 
I think it adds a lot of value. It's a required class so students are... it's sometimes 
hit or miss. It's a, a mixed bag when you have to take a class. But I hope that it 
adds good value. 
Finn: Yeah. Where do you think it's headed in the next few years? Just with... 
maybe some sort of alternative scholarship. 
Dan: About 10 years ago, maybe even 12 or 15, we added a multimedia 
component to the class. So the class does have a bunch of outcomes that it tries 
to meet, and one of them is a oral communication outcome. So like this 
conversation that we're having right now, right?
In most English 105 courses, you give a speech or you do a podcast or 
something like that and you create a digital project. So I think we're doing well 
at keeping up with where composition is in the world right now. So, you know, 
you need to be able to work in a digital space and you need to be able to be a 
good communicator, both written and spoken.
So it's in a really good spot doing all of that work already. We're figuring out 
how AI can compliment that rather than undercut that. So that's a big project 
we're working on is figuring out how to support AI integration in a way that 
furthers intellectual activity rather than undermines it. So we're working on that.
There's always a lot of kind of operational aspects because it's a big program, 
so, staffing and making sure there's all the outcomes are being met as you have 
a large scale operation. That's a sort of management challenge there. 
Finn: Okay. And then what about the conference that we worked on?
Dan: Yeah. 
Finn: What, where does that sort of play a role in it? 
Dan: Yeah. The PIT conference is linked up with English 105 courses. Not 
every English 105 participates in this, but there's always a cohort of, hopefully, 
usually about six or eight sections of English 105. And one of the things that is 
a tenet behind English 105 is that writing, it's not always, but in universities and 
in most social situations, writing is a kind of public act. So you don't write just 
to put it away in a drawer. You're writing because you're trying to make change 
in the world. You're trying to join some kind of conversation or entity. There's a 
an outcome for the writing that usually is linked with public activity. 
So what these courses do is really leans into that. Not only is it going to the 20 
other people in this classroom, but we're gonna bring six or eight sections 
together and then we're gonna have a public conference. So you'll present your 
work at this conference, your research, you'll get feedback on it. All of the 
things that really make writing stronger. You're invested in it, people are giving 
you ideas about it, and so that's how these courses are developed. 
The students in those classes, they work on a research project and then they do 
their public speaking about their project at this large public conference, and then 
they take that feedback that they get and they turn that project into an article and 
they submit that to the PIT Journal, which is a public venue for their polished 
writing that other students might read or anyone in the world really could read. 
That's just an online journal, but it gives them a chance to really make that more 
authentic. This idea that I'm not just writing for myself I'm writing to do 
something in the world to join a research community, and that's what these 
classes do.
Finn: Okay. Well, I wanna ask or dive deeper into this PIT or People, Ideas, 
and Things program. Could you give me a layout of what is under this umbrella, 
how you came up with it, all that? 
Dan: Yeah, absolutely. So the People Ideas and Things, there's a little bit of 
theoretical underpinnings to that because there's a theory that's been around for 
about 15 or 20 years called Actor Network Theory, and it falls into a category of 
posthumanism.
So you can think of the humanities as a big bucket of how you organize the 
world, and it would put people in the middle, we're looking at what humans 
create, their art, their interactions, those kinds of things. And over time people 
started to recognize that that's not actually a really accurate view of how the 
world works.
People are really important, but you know, when the weather comes, we could 
be completely overwhelmed by nature, a virus, some other organism. Animals 
are really valuable. So people got this kind of corrective mindset of saying we 
might've been on the wrong track by saying people are the center of everything 
for a long time.
And people weren't actually saying that exactly, but the paradigm was 
humanists, humanity, people is like this central idea. And so this notion of 
posthumanism comes along and says, let's correct that a little bit. Let's add some 
understanding of the way that the material world influences what we do.
Objects, things are really important and even ideas are not exact- exactly 
people, there's this some kind of strange philosophical entity called the concept 
of freedom or the concept of independence or connection. So people, ideas, and 
things is a more complex kind of contemporary, nuanced way of understanding 
how intellectual activity works or how it's situated.
So that goes there, but it also is a nice acronym that overlaps with the Pit on 
campus. So the Pit on campus is this central hub where everyone could come 
together and that's this nice idea of the public space where this happens as well. 
So that's more inclusive. 
Finn: It's more about the relationships between all of these things and I don't 
know powers sort of.
Dan: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And so, when you teach now, how do you write, 
you don't just say there's a speaker and there's an audience that would be this, 
like, two people as the center of the whole equation. You say there's this 
context, this material thing that's influencing it, and there's events that are 
playing out and those are shaping what's happening.
So you have a much more kind of networked idea of how writing takes place 
and how you do research and all of that. So that's happening underneath this PIT 
model. 
And then the program itself started out as just a publishing venture. We decided 
why don't we take articles that students are writing in English 105 anyway, and 
we'll turn them into a journal. We'll have an undergraduate journal linked to the 
writing program. And a lot of writing programs have that. It's a really nice 
venue because it ups the stakes. It really gives you a more authentic investment 
in what you're doing if you're sending it out for publication. 
We started that when the concept of crowdsourcing was really big, which was 
about 2010. There were a lot of books being written about crowdsourcing and 
people were like figuring out was this a whole new paradigm for how work 
works as well? And that's connected to the internet. So you know, as the internet 
took off, a lot of people started to use that space to solve problems. 
So even companies would say, we're having trouble figuring out how to get the 
last bit of toothpaste out of the toothpaste tube. And they would post it on some 
bulletin board and amateur scientists or something would come in and ... All the 
package designers had tried everything and couldn't figure it out and in some 
electro chemist came in and said, no problem, we just change the ions to be 
charged this way and then we charge these other ones negatively and it'll come 
out by itself. 
So you get somebody who's adjacent but distant. And they have a different idea. 
That goes to the alt scholarship thing too, if you're talking to the exact same 
people all the time. You are gonna miss out on some ideas. 
So that was a big part of it, is this notion that there's wisdom in crowds. And so 
that translates into having writers and students and people participating in the 
journal activity actually making decisions about what gets published and rather 
than a top down model of here's an editor that's saying, this is what we're gonna 
put in the journal. Maybe a bunch of this activity can be bubbling up a little bit 
more.
Finn: Yeah. And even the behind the scenes is, it's very interactive with, of 
course the podcast as well with a conference. It all builds on top of each other. 
And then even in the editing process too, I worked for a school newspaper, but 
with the PIT Journal it's very different. It's more in the hands of the person 
writing themselves, and the editors, instead of giving them strict things to cut or 
add, almost guiding them through a process because you want that genuine, like 
what they, why they created this writing, and then what they're writing from, 
like their experience.
You don't always have that same perspective, and so you want to help guide 
them into the path that then sort of fits into this. And the, the fit is very broad 
too. 'cause it's all people ideas and things, you know? 
Dan: Yeah. Yeah. I really like how you're putting that, Finn, because it makes 
me recognize one other aspect of this is that the instructional paradigm behind, 
say teaching writing. 
Teaching English 105 is not disconnected from the operational paradigm of the 
PIT Journal. And how you edit it, it's almost like an extension of teaching. 
Teaching happens in this writing class. And in that you don't stamp on 
someone's idea. You help them bring their idea out and figure out what do they 
need to get where they're trying to go. And then that teaching sounds like it's 
happening as well when people are working with authors in the journal as well.
Finn: Right. Yeah, it's, it, teaching is always happening. It's just that in this way 
it's more genuine, almost more creativity based. So I- you were talking about 
crowdsourcing and this idea that putting a question out to a crowd and receiving 
an answer, because people are from all these different backgrounds, they're able 
to work on it...this sounds similar almost to artificial intelligence, and so I 
wanted to I know that the PIT has been working a lot with AI and seeing how it 
can help, how it can harm. I wanted to pick your brain on artificial intelligence, 
where you see the PIT going with this, where you see writing going with this. 
Dan: Yeah. Yeah. I do think it's impressive that the AI tools have been able to 
bring together so many texts, like they're trained on, on a whole bunch of ideas 
and writing that people have done.
There's a ton of ethical and intellectual property questions associated with that, 
but we could put those to the side for now and just say they've been able to 
bring together a whole bunch of texts, which is impressive. And then figure out 
how to use math and computation to make sense and in some ways it is 
crowdsourcing if they take the most probable outcomes that are gonna show up 
when you bring together these massive, scaled amounts of text, that's what the 
crowd would organize in some ways.
So yeah, I could see that. The challenge there is there's so much that happens. 
Before any of that takes place, and you need to have that activity keep 
happening after the tool is built. So that goes back to writing. And what is the 
value of writing or what is the value of language if the value of language is just 
to put together the perfect combination of words that's gonna make somebody 
click on your Instagram posting or something like that. Then a very efficient 
scan of what's been effective before, and using math and probability to make 
those words could do that job. But writing and thinking are like intimately 
connected. 
And so if you don't have all of that knowledge already, how are you gonna get 
that knowledge without using words to think through the concepts.
This is the concern that most writing instructors have with AI. If you just press 
submit and get something which you're not actually thinking about it. And if 
you haven't already developed literacy ahead of time then you're gonna get short 
circuited. You can get the output from the AI, but you need to al- you already 
need to know what that output would be. If the AI is saving you labor on 
something that you could already achieve, then no problem. But you need to be 
able to achieve that before you go for the labor saving piece as well. And so 
that's the danger. 
And it's not gonna be that we decide we're not gonna replace thinking with AI 
or we are gonna replace thinking with AI. Where we need to go is where those 
compliment each other and our thinking takes place in concert with AI -
Finn: And becomes more efficient maybe. 
Dan: Yeah, absolutely. We can add efficiencies and like I always use this 
example, if you are writing your citations in your paper and you accidentally got 
them in APA format and the editor says, I need them in Chicago style, you 
could have a computer just change where the punctuation goes and all of that no 
problem. Especially if you understand why those styles are in place and you 
understand it, then get the computer to do that. That makes really good sense. 
But if you're trying to figure out how do these three stories that I just read relate 
to each other?
Writing about them is one of the ways you're gonna process that and get the 
ideas organized. It slows down your thinking when you write. Yeah, because 
when you're just thinking, everything's just a jumble. When you write, you can't 
think as fast as you can write. So you're- you're, like, pausing.
Finn: You're choosing what to use specifically. 
Dan: Yeah, totally. Yeah. And you're organizing too as you're writing, so you, 
we have to have those mental processes going on one way or another. We could 
probably build an AI that does that, that prompts you and says, take three ideas. 
Chew on them. Come back to me in five minutes. Like you could do that, but 
the efficiency short circuit is not gonna take us there properly. 
Finn: Right. That doesn't make life easier. Yeah. Yeah. So what sort of work 
have you guys been doing with ai? I know that there's a whole AI side to the 
PIT at least.
Dan: The AI work that we've been doing has been linked to English 105. A lot 
of it, as much as to the PIT and some- one way to understand it is to go back in 
time to like 2022 November when ChatGPT came out. And the initial concerns 
were very much like policing- type concerns, like somebody could cheat, 
somebody can easily plagiarize.
Another initial concern was biases and misinformation. So these texts are all, 
the training of these tools is all on a certain set of texts, and those texts have 
some biases in them. The way that AI functions is it wants to provide you a 
response, even if it doesn't know the answer. So it's gonna invent information if 
it doesn't have the information.
So a lot of the initial concerns were, we have to watch out for that. Let's put 
some boundaries up, or let's give people some warnings and red flags. So we 
started building out modules. We got a grant from the School of Data Science 
and Society. And we worked with the university librarians and developed an AI 
literacy initiative.
And a couple of our first tools were along these lines like, how do you avoid 
plagiarizing? How do you spot bias? And all of that. And that was like 
necessary work. On top of that, we started to go to the next stage, which is... 
how do we make sure this doesn't replace our thinking?
How do we compliment intellectual activity with AI? And so we started to build 
out training and modules about things like prompting, if you just take a response 
from a prompt and paste it into your paper, you're not really thinking through. 
So if you get a response from a prompt, and then you evaluate it, and you bring 
your own background knowledge to it, and you say, what are the strengths and 
weaknesses of this prompt? What is it missing? Let me go back and prompt it 
again and say, it looks like you're missing this. I need you to give me something 
a little bit different. And you have a back and forth, a dialectic, with the AI tool.
Then you're thinking. Because you're evaluating what it's giving you, you're 
revising it and you have a meta awareness of what it's giving you. So we started 
building out that kind of training and support for instructors so they can- some 
of 'em just wanna make sure nobody's plagiarizing, but eventually we're gonna 
wanna be sure that we know how to use these tools to think. 
And so that's- we've built modules, and they can go into a Canvas website, and 
people can download them into their class and kind of just a lot of support 
materials for people doing English- English 105. 
Finn: That's fascinating stuff. 
Dan: Yeah. And on the PIT side, we've been using the labor saving stuff right? 
For some of the podcasting. So a lot of people have just been thinking of AI as 
ChatGPT, but there's a ton of other AI tools and after we finish this recording, 
you'll probably put it into the AI cleanup thing and wherever I say, "um," or, 
"ah," except for those two times, because those were deliberate. Um and ahs, it 
sh- it'll actually, if it's not smart enough, it'll clean those ones out too, maybe. So 
that'll create a problem, but the tool can fix stuff. 
And if I'm speaking too quietly in one segment, you used to have to by hand go 
into your audio editor and look at the spikes and, like, clean all that up. But the 
computer's really good at doing that stuff. 
Finn: Yeah. Makes my life easier. 
Dan: Yeah, for sure. Definitely. 
Finn: I guess just to conclude, what sorts of resources and opportunities can 
these listeners check out if they're interested in exploring more of your stuff, 
PIT journal stuff, PIT cast, cetera, cetera. 
Dan: Totally. The PIT Journal, it's just pitjournal.unc.edu, And then PITcast is 
pitcasts.unc.edu. So you can go to those sites. 
The podcasting is really great. We've been doing that for the last couple years 
and I enjoy that a lot. And those are on Spotify as well, so people can track 
those down. If you're on campus, I would go to our Heel Life page. It's People, 
Ideas, and Things. If you search on Heel Life or People, Ideas, and Things, 
you'll find our organization and you can join it. If you join the organization, 
then you'll get the contacts and if you wanna become an editor for the journal, 
you can start to join the group.
And I, I would really encourage people to do that. I think that takes it to the next 
level. You can go consume some of the stuff that we're doing, but if you 
participate, you're gonna- it's gonna be a whole different experience. If you have 
time and energy and wanna do something a little co-curricular.
If you love writing, if you're interested in communication, then, join this group 
that's working on that stuff in a professional way, and then that's gonna just 
compliment what you're doing in class. 
Finn: Awesome. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this, and thank 
you everybody who's listening to this right now. 
Dan: Awesome, thank you, Finn. I really appreciate it. 
Finn: Thank you so much.