Logging On

Cheryl Ball, Editor

IN THIS ISSUE

We are pleased to offer you 14 webtexts in this open issue!

In the Topoi section, we present Daniel Anderson's scholarly poem "I'm a Map, I'm a Green Tree" in which he riffs on "the nature of metaphors, models of knowledge and culture, posthuman syntheses of people and machines, the recurring tensions in composition studies between the written and the multimodal."

This piece holds distinction for Kairos as being the first (and only?) submission ever peer-reviewed in a public, open forum. Thanks to C&W hosts, Dave Blakesley and Samantha Blackmon; Town Hall coordinator and moderator, Michael Salvo; and Daniel, the ever-experimental-author for agreeing to let us perform this live, peer-to-peer review process during the opening Town Hall session. Thanks also to those panelists who doubled as editorial reviewers—Joyce Walker, Jim Kalmbach, Carl Whithaus—as well as those in the audience (particularly Alex Reid, Cynthia Selfe, Dickie Selfe, and others) who were willing to share their positive and constructive thoughts on both this 10-minute-played-only-once video and the process of critique we used. As an editor experimenting with a new way of reviewing (thanks to urging from Kathleen Fitzpatrick's new book, for more on which you can read my review in this issue), I was thrilled that people were willing to give both the text and the process serious consideration, and were just as willing to point out the flaws in the system. For instance, I don't think I'm the only one who finally recognized the importance of the lesson that M. Remi Yergeau and others have been trying to teach us for years: We cannot make accessibility an afterthought. It has got to be part of the review process. Thanks to insights such as these, we're working to strengthen our review and publication processes even more.

In the Inventio section, we present bonnie kyburz's webtext, "Notes on 'Notes on a Film'," in which kyburz addresses some of the editorial and design choices she made and responded to in her previous Kairos publication, "Notes on a Film."

In Praxis, Drew Kopp and Sharon McKenzie Stevens provide a new look at "Re-articulating the Mission and Work of Writing Programs with Digital Video," in which they present several videos that exemplify how they changed opinions about the writing programs on their campuses through use of digital video.

In the PraxisWiki, Jessica Rivait writes about "Course Management Systems as Ongoing Classroom Memory," where she reflects on ANGEL (Michigan State's CMS) as a living archive.

The Reviews section in this issue is *FULL*, with nine reviews including a microreview by Cheri Toledo on Web Conferencing Tools and a review webtext of four books on digital scholarship by yours truly. In addition, we have smart reviews by a multitude of authors that cover Brooke's Lingua Fracta, Kimme Hea's collection Going Wireless, Worsham and Olson's Plugged In,Baron's A Better Pencil, Wark's Gamer Theory, Kress's Multimodality: A Semiotic Approach, and Hariman and Lucaites' No Caption Needed. It's an exciting Reviews section, and an exciting issue, to say the least!

 

NEWS & AWARDS

At the Computers & Writing conference this past May, we were pleased to announce this year's winners of the following Kairos awards:

Best Webtext: Susan H. Delagrange for "Wunderkammer, Cornell, and the Visual Canon of Arrangement"

John Lovas Memorial Weblog: (Tie) Digital Writing and Research Lab, University of Texas at Austin: "Viz. Visual Rhetoric, Visual Culture, Pedagogy" and George H. Williams, Jason B. Jones, and Julie Meloni, Eds., "ProfHacker."

Kairos/Bedford-St. Martins Awards for Graduate Students/Adjuncts:

  • Doug Walls (Research)
  • Genevieve Critel (Teaching)
  • Jeff Bacha (Service)

 

In other news, Kairos was awarded an NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant, worth $50,000, so that we can build the new back-end and editorial systems we've been talking about (and desperately wishing for!) for years. The project will pay for a programmer (Steven Potts) to build plug-ins to the open-source, editorial content management system Open Journal Systems, so that OJS can handle digital media scholarship in its pre-established workflow. The plug-ins will be open- source as well, so that other online journals can more easily publish scholarly multimedia.

Douglas Eyman and Kathie Gossett were instrumental in co-authoring the grant with me, especially fleshing out the conceptual and technical parts. Many others have been involved in large and small ways in our getting this funding, and I am truly grateful to each of you. This is a big move forward for the journal! I'm sure we'll be reporting details of the project as the year progresses. One thing for sure -- we'll be asking readers to help us test the system next summer, once we get some of the plug-ins off the ground. So stay tuned!

 

STAFF CHANGES

The Kairos staff includes some of the busiest people in the field! Which is why it's always sad, but not surprising, when someone needs to step down to focus on other projects. Over the summer, we said goodbye to Praxis Co-Editor, Alex Reid, who begins his WPA work in full at Buffalo this fall. Alex brought his unique theoretical perspective to his editorial work with Praxis, helping the journal grow that section in the last three years. We will miss having him on staff. To fill that co-editorship, we are happy to have Christine Tulley, from the University of Findlay. Christine's experience working on C&C Online and directing her college's teaching-excellence center makes her a great addition to the Praxis section. She joins Andréa Davis as co-editor, and they are off to a rollicking start, including calling for new positions — PraxisWiki Editor and PraxisWiki Assistant Editors — who can focus on increasing the use and usefulness of the wiki section. In addition to co-editor changes, we have also said goodbye to some great assistant editors: Jeremy Tirell from the Praxis section and Robin Murphy from Topoi. The Assistant Editors are the unsung heroes of Kairos, doing the lion's share of work for which their names rarely appear. The editors of these sections cannot express their appreciation enough and know that when AEs move on, it's to do even bigger and better things!

Finally, we are sad to lose Erin Karper as Communications Co-Editor. She and I were both hired to work on Kairos during 2001, which in recent years meant we held the honor of being the "oldest" staff members next to Doug. During her decade's work as Communications Editor, Erin has been the support system for Kairos's public face. She made sure we had flyers, email and blog announcements, and any other promotional materials ready at the right place and time (kairos, to be sure!), including printing and mailing items to CCCC and C&W even when she couldn't be there herself. Erin has been selfless in her work, perhaps best represented by her agreeing to take on the responsibility of coordinating all the Kairos awards in the last few years—no small feat given that the journal has five annual awards requiring coordination of publicity, submissions, and judging. Erin did it all, including printing the certificates, making sure we had the checks, and writing the wonderful blurbs Doug and I read to announce the winners during the C&W banquet. She will be sorely missed!