2008 June archive at Six Years and Counting…

Manifestos! a special issue of Kairos

June 7th, 2008

citation
DeWitt, Scott Lloyd, & Ball, Cheryl E. (2008, May). Manifestos! [Special issue]. Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, 12(3). Retrieved May 15, 2008, from http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/12.3/.
abstract
This special issue of Kairos began at the Digital Media and Composition institute (DMAC 2007) at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. At the conclusion of the institute, we were coming off of an incredible twelve-day workshop with teachers and scholars who learned a long list of new technology, designed curricula for their writing programs at home, composed personal stories using a variety of media, and created complex, digitally born justifications for their administrators for the development of programs in multimodal composing. We were both struck by the passion of the institute’s participants and what their projects had to say about teaching, research, and their lives as academics. And we encouraged the participants—many of whose digital projects showed promise in scope to be scholarly webtexts—to submit their work to an online journal. Some said they would, but most said they weren’t ready, said they may never be ready, which we could see was not at all true. We were left, then, asking ourselves a number of questions:

Is there a scholarly space where authors can enact the ideas they are so immediately passionate about in ways that don’t take the shape of traditional scholarship—even with respect to the different traditions of scholarship in a journal like Kairos?
Is there a genre that would allow authors to enact these ideas but would not require the convention of scholarly composing that could potentially temper those immediate passions? And could this genre inspire the imagination while not imposing rules and forms of the genre on its composers?
How might we invite scholars, especially those new to composing with a variety of digital media, to put forth their ideas while, at the same time, not overwhelm them with the prospects of a full-blown research project?
Can we imagine a text, and ultimately, a forum for that text, that seeks sizeable response from its scholarly communities and has the ability to move an argument quickly to the forefront of a conversation?
How can we create a context that will allow writers to imagine succinct texts that can be accomplished in a short amount of time but that also provoke long, sustained thought from the community?

The Manifesto Issue is our answer to those questions. We did not set out, necessarily, to create an issue on manifestos. The idea came to us as we worked through those questions while also thinking carefully about what the Kairos readership might expect, what the journal itself was capable of publishing, and what scholars who might potentially compose for the issue might submit. We obviously struck a chord with the latter group. We initiated an open call to authors to compose manifestos using whatever media and form they deemed such a text needed. We did not propose what those arguments, ideas, or points should be. That was for authors to tell us; and they did.

table of contents

Logging On [Letter from the Guest Editors]
Scott Lloyd DeWitt and Cheryl Ball

This is Scholarship
Catherine C. Braun and Kenneth L. Gilbert

Old+Old+Old=New: A Copyright Manifesto for the Digital World
DigiRhet

From Gallery to Webtext
Curated by Virginia Kuhn and Victor Vitanza