Logging On - Fall 2024
doi:10.7940/M329.1.LOGGINGON.FARIS

Michael J. Faris, Editor

For those of you on the semester system, the fall 2024 semester is likely only days or weeks away as this issue goes live. It's been a busy summer for Kairos as we've finished up editing this issue, celebrated lives and accomplishments at Computers & Writing at Texas Christian University in June, hired new staff, and said goodbye to some staff members who have been Kairos for about a decade (or longer!).

Comings and Goings

Over the summer, three section editors departed the Kairos staff: Elkie Burnside, Topoi/Praxis/PraxisWiki Section Co-Editor, and Rich Shivener and Liz Chamberlain, Inventio Section Co-Editors. Elkie, Rich, and Liz have been working with Kairos for many years—some of them nearly or more than a decade!—and they've been wonderful contributors to the team. Kairos has been blessed by many excellent, excited, and enthusiastic volunteer staff members of the years (probably in the hundreds by now): Elkie, Rich, and Liz have brought enthusiasm and novelty to the journal, and we're going to miss their contributions, care, and leadership.

Also over the summer, we hired five new Assistant Editors: Callie Ingram, Luke Meyer, Elizabeth Novotny, Nicole O'Connell, and Cam Cavaliere. Also, Ashley Beardsley has been promoted to Disputatio Co-Editor. We're excited to see our volunteer team grow as the journal continues to shape digital rhetorical studies and writing pedagogy!

Computers & Writing 2024

The annual Computers & Writing conference at TCU in June was a wonderful event, thanks to co-hosts Wendi Sierra, Jason Helms, and Kit Snyder.

At the conference, Kairos announced our annual awards:

  • Sara E. West (Middle Tennessee University, nominated by Dr. Adam R. Pope) was awarded the 2024 Kairos Best Webtext Award for "Student Perceptions of Anonymous Applications," published in Kairos, issue 28.1. This award recognizes the best academic webtext published during the previous calendar year.
  • Eric J. York (Clarkson University, nominated by Michael Salvo) was awarded an Honorable Mention for the 2024 Kairos Best Webtext Award for "Deceptive by Design," published in Kairos, issue 27.2.
  • The Digital Rhetoric Privacy Collective (DRPC) was awarded the 2024 John Lovas Award, recognizing an outstanding online project devoted to academic pursuits. Congratulations to its advisory board members, Charles Woods (Texas A&M University–Commerce), Gavin P. Johnson (Texas A&M University–Commerce), Morgan Banville (Massachusetts Maritime Academy), Chen Chen (Utah State University), Cecelia Shelton (University of Maryland at College Park), and Noah Wason (SUNY Binghamton).
  • Dogukan B. Ozgen (University of California, Santa Barbara, nominated by Dr. Karen Lunsford) was awarded the 2024 Gail E. Hawisher & Cynthia L. Selfe Caring for the Future Award, which provides a scholarship for first-time, underrepresented scholars to travel to the Computers and Writing conference.
  • Kit Snyder (Texas Christian University, nominated by Drs. Jason Helms, Wendi Sierra, and Dan Williams) was awarded the 2024 Kairos Graduate Student and Contingent Faculty Award for Service, which recognizes activities that promote excellent computers and writing pedagogy, theory, and community building.
  • Will Chesher (Miami University, nominated by Tim Lockridge and Elizabeth Wardle) was awarded the 2024 Kairos Graduate Student and Contingent Faculty Award for Teaching, which recognizes the use of computers and writing pedagogies in their classroom-based practice to promote student learning.
  • Elena Kalodner-Martin (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Massachusetts Amherst) was awarded a 2025 Kairos Graduate Student and Contingent Faculty Award for Scholarship, which recognizes a pattern of excellent scholarship and/or the promise of future excellent scholarship.

Kairos is excited to continue to recognize and support novel work in the field; contributions to digital rhetoric and writing teaching, research, and service; and contingent faculty, graduate students, and new attendees to Computers & Writing. Most of these awards don't come with a cash prize (we're volunteer-based, after all!). However, the Hawisher & Selfe Caring for the Future Award does have monetary value: Kairos supports travel expenses, dorm lodging, and registration for first-time, underrepresented student attendees to the conference (usually one student, sometimes more than one). If you'd like to support the HSCF Scholarship, you can donate to our PayPal.

Speaking of Gail E. Hawisher, Amber Buck and Patrick Berry compiled a tribute video in her honor and shared it at the conference. Gail was a powerful, founding force in the field, and it was lovely to see folx share their fond memories of and experiences with Gail. I encourage you to watch the video. (A reminder that we published a Memorial to Gail in our last issue.)

The field also lost Bill Hart-Davidson suddenly this year, and there were many tributes to his memory at the conference. His wife Leslie was able to attend the conference, and during the open townhall on Thursday extolled attendees to "Give. When in Doubt, Give More." Kairos Senior Editors Doug Eyman and Cheryl E. Ball also announced at the conference that Kairos would be starting a mentoring award in Bill's honor.

One last note about C&W: Finally(!), Doug Eyman was awarded the "Troublemaker Award," officially titled the Technology Innovator Award, awarded by the College Composition and Communication (CCCC)’s Committee on Computers in Composition and Communication. Doug has been a troublemaker in the field since the mid-1990s, when I was just a punk high schooler dying his hair for the first time. (Yes, Doug, I'm calling you old 😄.) As an editor, scholar, and human, it's been an honor to learn so much from Doug over the last few years. Many kudos, Doug!

In This Issue

We have six exciting webtexts in this issue, ones that were exciting and fun to re-read as we copyedited and design-edited the issue. A huge shoutout to our amazing editing staff for the excellent work in soliciting webtexts, managing peer review, providing developmental feedback to authors, and copyediting and design-editing the issue.

Our issue "opens" (assuming you read in order, ha!) with a Topoi webtext by Joshua DiCaglio, Gwendolyn Inocencio, Jessie Cortez, Hannah Mailhos, and Connor Hearron, "Wikipedia as Editorial Microcosm: Stalled Wikipedia Articles and the Teaching of Applied Comprehensive Editing." DiCaglio and his student coauthors share important work on teaching editing of Wikipedia articles, with a focus on stalled articles—or those Wikipedia articles whose editing and updated have been stalled for a variety of reasons. This webtext is incredibly comprehensive, and it comes with a wealth of support materials for teachers interested in teaching Wikipedia editing in their editing courses.

In PraxisWiki, Sarah Riddick, in collaboration with her students, Stephanie Tam, Emily Stead, Nathaniel Shimkus, Drew Mulcare, Ngoga Julien Vainqueur Mugabo, Jorgo Gushi, Nathaniel Gamboa, Tian Yu Fan, Charles Dursin, and Ryan Crowley, offer "Responding to Cultural Crises Through Social Media Research and Student–Faculty Collaboration." Their webtext explores faculty and student collaboration in teaching social media rearch methodologies in a writing course. In "Transforming Writing Rubrics: Assessment and Reflection in Process-Based Courses," Elkie Burnside shares how she collaboratively developed assessment rubrics with emerging writers in a process-based writing course.

In the Interviews section, Erin Shaefer and Mark Chen offer "Care-Based Pedagogies During the Pandemic: Letters, Meditations, and Reflections," a Twine-based webtext that discusses the Shaefer's and Chen's experiences with care-based pedagogies during the COVID-19 pandemic. We also have two Reviews webtexts in this issue: Sarah Faye, Joe Schicke, and Jacob Weston provide an audio-essay review of The Hidden Inequities in Labor-Based Contract Grading by Ellen C. Carillo, and Trent Wintermeier offers a review of AVAnnotate, an annotation tool to help authors create exhibits of annotated audio artifacts.

The diversity of webtexts in this issue is a boon to the field, and I'll just focus on the design aspects and technological affordances here briefly: Two webtexts make use of wiki technologies for presenting their arguments (Burnside; Riddick et al.); one draws on a free, open-source HTML5 template to discuss editing a wiki (DiCaglio et al.); one is built through Twine (Shaefer & Chen); one uses videos to present a co-interview (Shaefer & Chen); two use audio essays (Faye et al. and Wintermeier, in different ways); and one provides annotations of its audio essays to exemplify the very technology he's reviewing (Wintermeier). It's invigorating to see such a variety of technologies and design approaches, and I'm looking forward to more innovation and diversity of designs and technologies in teh future.

Other Announcements

  • Kairos is excited to be embarking on a new round of hiring this fall. We're looking for new Inventio Co-Editors, and we encourage folx to apply!
  • Above, I mentioned that Doug has been a troublemaker for a long time. In fact, he published in the very first issue of Kairos! Someone else I want to recognize: Dr. Amy Hanson is retiring as a Senior Lecturer from Texas Tech, after 33 years teaching in the department as a graduate student and then faculty member. Amy was Chief Copy Editor of that first issue. I only learned about Amy's early contributions to the journal when Cheryl and Doug published "Kairos's Origin Story" last year. I asked Amy about it via email last year via email, and she wrote back, "Those were some amazing, crazy (sleepless) years!" As Amy's Department Chair for only 16 more days (when she officially retires), I wanted to acknowledge her early work for the journal. If it wasn't for Amy (and many others) giving up some sleep in 1996, Kairos wouldn't be the journal it is.
  • A reminder: You can donate to Kairos to support the Hawisher & Selfe Caring for the Future Award through our PayPal, or you can support the journal's other endeavors (server space costs, printing award certificates, etc.) by contributing to to our Patreon. We currently have four levels of Patreon support: You can support the journal for $2, $5, $10, or $20 a month. (Twenty bucks a month is like four lattes! Or two or three avocado toasts! AND you get a Kairos sticker, baseball cap, and latte mug for that level of support!)