Logging On
Cheryl Ball, Editor
We have a tight, rich selection of webtexts for you in this issue, featuring an Inventio-based CoverWeb in which three authors describe their process of authoring and editing a journal issue and a long-form multimedia scholarly text for digital publication. In "Making Comics as Scholarship: A Reflection on Digital Humanities Quarterly (9)4," Anastasia Salter, Roger Whitson, and Jason Helms discuss Salter and Whitson's 2015 special issue on comics, including the stumbles and successes they had. Helms' briefly describes his own revision process for his article-as-comic in that issue. Next, Helms goes into more process-based detail describing his authoring and revision process for his award-winning, book-length project, Rhizcomics, published with Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative, in Making Rhizcomics. Both of these pieces, juxtaposed, offer insight into the obstacles and challenges in publishing digital scholarship, some of which publishers, authors, and editors still have to overcome.
Helms begins to outline some of the practices he used in Rhizcomics, as an example of an individual author's methods to hurdle these obstacles. The problem of doing this work as an author is that you're working individually (many times) and aren't often privy to the work and needs of editors and publishers. To bring those two groups together, I am excited to report that this topic will be the focus of a Triangle SCI working group in October 2018. That group consists of publishers and editors (who are also authors) known for working with digital media projects and publications, myself included, who will tackle the topic of creating digital scholarship that is Findable, Citable, Usable, Sustainable: A Checklist for Rigorous Digital Publishing. One of the aims of this checklist is to bring together current best practices in digital publishing, one focus of which is accessibility (which relates to all of the topics—findability, citability, usability, and sustainabilty—above).
Digital rhetoricians are, perhaps next to librarians, some of the most skilled at tackling accessibility issues in digital publishing, which is not to say that both of those groups don't have a lot more to learn from each other and additional research. But we are lucky, following last issue's interview with Sean Zdenek on captioning studies, to have Zdenek himself authoring a webtext in this issue on "Designing Captions: Disruptive Experiments with Typography, Color, Icons, and Effects." This piece is a great addition to the scholarship on disability studies and multimodality.
In the PraxisWiki section, Jenae Druckman Cohn's work is featured in "User Testing Student ePortfolios: An Activity for Peer Reviewing Showcase ePortfolios and Raising Audience Awareness." We are really happy with the way PraxisWiki has taken shape over the last 10 years, since that section began, running both short and longer webtexts that don't necessarily need the interface design and interactivity of pieces appearing in the Praxis section. The PraxisWiki has its own editorial board that provides open peer reviews to in-progress pieces, and we encourage more authors to submit and engage in this mentoring process for the section, which also features rolling publication dates (i.e., we publish pwiki pieces when they're ready and then wrap them into the next available issue). If you're interested, please contact the Pwiki section editors, Kristi McDuffie and Matthew Vetter, whose contact information is listed on the Submissions page.
Also in this issue, we have four reviews—and we owe a big shout-out to our Reviews Editors Elizabeth Fleitz and Chris Andrews for their fine work helping authors, who are often first-time scholarly authors, through the revision process on these webtexts! The reviews here showcase a breadth of media and methods for reviewing a text—something the section editors have been diligently working on for the last several years. For instance, Addison James's review of "Creative Writing Pedagogies for the Twenty-First Century" includes video interviews of regionally based creative writers to his Kentucky home juxtaposed against concepts from the creative writing pedagogies book. And Kairos staffer Dan Martin reviews a website called "Songwriters on Process" by Ben Opipari. We welcome and encourage unusual reviews in both design and content alongside our staple reviews of books and other important scholarship in fields related to rhetoric, technology, and pedagogy. Along those lines, we have two additional reviews in this issue: Justin H. Cook and Elizabeth Jendrzey's "Review of Digital Death: Mortality and Beyond in the Online Age" that draws on the macabre to add spirit (ha, get it?) to our digital afterlives as told in this book, and Matt Homer's "Review of Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up."
Thank you to all the authors and editors who worked on this issue—we can't be the premier scholarly journal in digital rhetoric without YOU. So if you have a webtext idea, feel free to send us an email query. We can route it to the appropriate editors if you aren't sure where to send it. We like hearing from potential authors; it's almost better than coffee and gives our heart a little jump.
To wrap this Logging On column up, I've been meaning to say to all the diligent readers out there who read these intro columns that I know they've been rather short lately, as I've not been expounding on publishing-related topics that excite me or give me ire. I'm been knee-deep in getting Vega ready for the world, which included switching jobs this last year, and so I needed to make these columns a little shorter to focus on that. But, Vega is almost ready!! You may even be able to download it for free by the time you read my next column. So thank you for your patience. I promise it will be worth it!
Finally, several folks on the Kairos staff and editorial board have been involved in KairosCamp these last two years, and I owe ALL of them a big thank you!!! We hosted three KairosCamps in a single month this past summer, which really put the test on our travel and teaching capabilities. It has been a great time, and we are so honored to have so many great scholars attend the authors' camp over the two years—some of whom have gone on to win research grants, NEH grants, and fellowships to continue work they began or polished at KairosCamp! We were also grateful to the two dozen editors and publishers from libraries and university presses who attended the two editor camps, in Minneapolis and San Francisco. While the KairosCamp staff is sad we didn't get our NEH grant renewed to host these workshops for free for another two years, we plan to take 2019 off from the author camps and regroup to host them again in Detroit starting in 2020! We will offer the editor camps on an as-desired basis, so let me know if you're interested in those. Again, a BIG THANK YOU to everyone involved in making these camps a reality! We thoroughly enjoyed them and are excited about what might happen next!
