Manifestos! a special issue of Kairos
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
- Sarah Arroyo: Hands & Writing: A Digital Sample
- Geoffrey Carter: PlatesPleatsPetals
- Byron Hawk: Rhetoric of Revolution (Open Hand/Closed Fist Remix)
- Virginia Kuhn: The Components of Scholarly Multimedia
- Bonnie Kyburz: bones
- Robert Leston: Into the After.word with Victor Vitanza
- Timothy Richardson: Bereshith
- Victor Vitanza: Writing the Tic
Literature and Digital Illumination
Lis Lindeman and Gregory O. Smith
An Inconvenient Rhetorical Truth: A Rhetorical Warming of the Public Sphere
Ted Remington
Urban Literacy Center Manifesto
Spencer Schaffner
The Lo-Fi Manifesto
Karl Stolley
Words are the Ultimate Abstraction: Towards Using Scott McCloud for Teaching Visual Rhetoric
Robert Watkins
accompanying materials
- Call for Webtexts
- Peer-Review Heuristic
C&W 2008 Presentation: New Media Scholarly Heuristics
citation
Ball, Cheryl E. (2008, May 23). New media scholarship: Taxonomies, heuristics, and strategies to connect (?) authors, editors, departments, and tenure committees. Computers and Writing, Athens, GA.
abstract
Panel Title: New Media Scholarship Stakeholders: Departmental, Editorial, and Authorial Issues
Although increasing numbers of faculty are creating scholarship for online venues, the Report of the MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion indicates that most departments claimed to have no idea how to evaluate digital scholarship. The task force does not distinguish, however, between “print-like” scholarship that appears online and new media scholarship that utilizes modes besides typed words to make its argument. It should be straightforward enough to read print-like scholarship online and, in turn, help tenure and promotion committees read and value it. But how do we read and help tenure and promotion committees read and value — and how do journals help authors revise — new media scholarship that has no print analogue? These are the questions that this panel will explore.
Speaker 2 [Cheryl] will draw on Allison Warner’s (2007) heuristic for assessing the scholarly value of traditional webtexts that fall between print-like and multimedia-rich, digital scholarship. Warner intentionally leaves room for other scholars to explore the ways that such a heuristic might be applicable (or flexible) for texts that incorporate multimedia elements, such as new media scholarship. The purpose of this presentation is to posit additional heuristics — and the complications of adding more heuristics–for emerging new media scholarly conventions that can be of use to tenure and promotion stakeholders.
co-presenters
- Catherine Braun, The Ohio State University-Marion
- Virginia Kuhn, Institute for Multimedia Literacy at the University of Southern California
attendance
30ish people?
accompanying materials
C&W 2008 PowerPoint presentation with presenters notes
presentations, research | Comment (0)RNF 2008: Tips on Digital Scholarship
abstract
This is a talk I gave with Kris Blair (her portion is excised from the attachment, but I’m sending it to her) at the Research Network Forum 2008, during CCCC in New Orleans. We spoke to about, oh, 100+ people about publishing digital scholarship. I’ll write more on this later and include the handouts I distributed. Just trying to throw the talk portion online quickly now.
accompanying materials
presentations, research | Comment (0)awards: Summer Faculty Professional Development Fellowship
Great news, which I will post/edit more into later. This is a summer fellowship to work on my digital tenure portfolio, which I will use to propose to the college/university for use in my actual tenure case. Rock on, ISU, for supporting innovative professional development.
accompanying material:
grants, research | Comment (0)CCCC 2008: “Peer Review in Digital Scholarship”
citation
Ball, Cheryl E. (2008, April 3). Scholarly peer-review in new media. Conference on College Composition and Communication, New Orleans, LA.
abstract
The MLA Report on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion (2006) renews the legitimacy gap between refereed print articles and refereed electronic articles, indicating that, “print articles count […] in 97.9% of departments, as compared with 46.8% for articles in electronic form.” The report notes, however, that electronic forms often don’t take into consideration new media forms of scholarship, such as the “innovative webtexts” published by several online journals in composition and rhetoric, and which James English (2005) wrote in the Journal of Scholarship Publishing as being an inconsequential form of scholarship. As the MLA Report suggests, the value of peer-reviewed digital publications might be greater if tenure committees knew how to read them, a problem that is heightened by the unfamiliarity of new media scholarship. To help, I examine a webtext to show how authors, editors, and review boards value a new media publication so as to provide an example for understanding scholarly innovation, which T&P committees can follow.
co-presenters
- Joyce Walker and James Purdy, “Valuing Digital Scholarship, Parts I and II”
- Cindy Selfe and Gail Hawisher, “New Scholarship for a New World, Parts I and II”
attendance: 100+
accompanying materials