Logging On: Introducing Stasis
Douglas Eyman, Senior Editor
With the release of our twentieth anniversary issue, I am pleased to announce a new Kairos project: Stasis. Stasis will serve as an archive of useful documents and media that have lost their original hosts or institutional homes, or that are in danger of being lost. As digital scholars, we have often encountered cases where citations to online works migrate or even simply vanish over time: we believe that some of these works are important enough to preserve and make available for future use. Coupled with our commitment to building increasingly accessible platforms for digital publication (and encouraging authors and designers to follow best practices in creating digital texts), we want to reinforce the important work of preservation and archiving for digital work—and also provide reminder that accessibility must include access in terms of availability and in terms of usability.
As we add new items to Stasis, we'll provide metadata and assign a DOI (a document object identifier, which provides a more permanent address than a standard Uniform Resource Locator). Criteria for inclusion are based on two key factors: our ability to secure copyright or a license to archive the work, and its relevance to our mission. In terms of "fit," we will be looking for work that addresses the intersections of rhetoric, technology, and pedagogy, with particular emphasis on works that have been (or could potentially be) of use to scholars in Computers and Writing and Digital Rhetoric. We hope that this project will be complementary to repositories and archives in writing studies, such as rhetoric.io and the e-server. We welcome queries about materials that we should consider hosting, whether those are your own works or orphaned works that are no longer available in other venues. Queries may be sent to kairos.stasis@gmail.com.
Our first entries include an archive of Collin Brooke's weekly newsletter, Rhetsy, a copy of Thomas Kinney's comprehensive compilation of definitions of rhetoric, A Book of Quotations on Rhetoric, and an annotated bibliography of scholarship on tenure and promotion considerations for born-digital scholarship, edited by Cheryl Ball, Carrie Lamanna, Craig Saper, and Michael Day. Each of these resources has clear and particular value for the Kairos community, but had no permanent home. It is my hope that in each of our future issues, we will be able to select a number of new items to highlight and draw attention to—but for that to happen, we will be relying upon our readers to alert us to worthy candidates for the archive, or to volunteer their own work if it needs a new home.
Although Stasis is a part of Kairos, works that are archived in this section are not considered publications of the journal; however, our acceptance of works into the archive do indicate that they have successfully passed an editorial review process and that we feel that the work has value for our community. I welcome nominations for new entries at any time, and I hope that we can build a robust and useful resource through the next twenty years of publication.
-DE
