Amber Keen and Steve Holmes represent a vital current in 21st-century rhetoric: scholars who embrace digital tools while fiercely critiquing them. Together, they remind the field that an archive is never just a pile of old documents—it is a living rhetorical construction. For graduate students and researchers looking to build ethical digital archives or recover silenced voices, engaging with Keen and Holmes’s work is not optional; it is foundational.
Amber Keen, affiliated with Miami University of Ohio, focuses on feminist historiography and the recovery of women’s rhetorical work in non-traditional spaces (e.g., scrapbooks, community newsletters, early digital forums). Her research asks: How do we find and legitimize rhetoric that does not fit conventional academic genres? Keen’s work often employs digital tools to expand the archival record, using text-mining and social network analysis to reveal collaborations that were previously invisible. Her 2020 piece in Peitho demonstrates how digital facsimiles can recover the tactical rhetoric of 19th-century women’s clubs, arguing that the medium of recovery (digital versus physical) fundamentally alters what can be claimed about a historical rhetor’s agency. Amber Keen- Steve Holmes
| Aspect | Amber Keen | Steve Holmes | |--------|------------|--------------| | Primary focus | Feminist recovery, women’s non-traditional rhetoric | History of computing, materiality of digital texts | | Methodological innovation | Digital social network analysis for collaboration mapping | Procedural rhetoric applied to archival databases | | Core publication | “Scrapbooks as Algorithmic Rhetoric” (2020) | “The Codex of the Code” (2018) | | Shared concern | How access and interface shape historical argument | How access and interface shape historical argument | Amber Keen and Steve Holmes represent a vital