poster for talk, designed by Michele Melanie

abstract
Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy has been publishing digital media scholarship since 1996, and each new medium and digital technology offers authors changing ways that they can make meaning through visual, aural, linguistic, and other modes of communication. As editor of Kairos, it is my responsibility to understand the often cutting-edge and genre-bending moves authors make in their submissions to this rhetoric and composition journal. I will present a few examples of submissions (historical and recent) that required the staff and editorial board members to re-negotiate the ever-changing boundaries between ‘typical’ digital scholarship and “new media scholarship,” exemplified by the relationship between the visual and the linguistic (i.e., written).

accompanying materials

• Prezi presentation

abstract
In this panel session, three presenters spoke to digital projects they had undertaken (a digital archive, a wiktionary, and a scholarly webtext published in Kairos), discussing compositional, revision, and “counting” issues relating to tenure and promotion. I responded to the panelists based on my experience as editor of Kairos, as a junior faculty member using a lot of digital scholarship in my tenure case, and as a promoter/user of digital portfolios to make tenure arguments.

accompanying materials

• none available

abstract
In this session, five presenters — all editors of online journals or presses — speak to the state of digital scholarship, including issues regarding submission, tenure & promotion, professional development, and curricular importance. The majority of the session was for Q&A. I spoke about Kairos, the journal I edit.

accompanying materials

• none available

abstract
In “English Studies, Aestheticism, and the Art-Culture System,” Hardin (JAC: 1999) claimed that the split between composition and literature mimicked an unhealthy art-culture system of high (or valued) art versus low (or kitschy, nonvaluable) art within English departments. His purpose in making this comparison was not to say that composition studies, or its connection to rhetorical studies, was indeed a low form of art, but to suggest that English studies needed a bridge between low and high forms — one that would satisfy, or rather rectify, the traditional high/low, literature/composition, aesthetics/ rhetoric split but also one that would allow for students to take advantage of the both/and in their writing practices. New media production provides a 21st-century answer to this split. By having students produce new media texts, the departmental cultures of English studies can bridge the binaries of high and low, literature and composition, and aesthetic and academic discourse. In combining both aesthetic and textual (i.e., letterate) choices in meaning making, authors of new media texts draw on both academic and popular genres to make their points. I will demonstrate this possible bridge by discussing a student-produced new media text, focusing in particular on the rhetorical and aesthetic intentions the student demonstrated in his video, which uses academically styled voiceover, punk- and pop-rock soundtrack, original video and audio, and written text.

accompanying materials

• none available

see also

• “Combining Academic and Aesthetic Practices in New Media” (related talk; under Major Speeches)
• “Converging the ASS[umptions] between U and ME” (article that came out of this talk; under Peer-Reviewed Articles)

abstract
This roundtable provided undergraduate students the opportunity to ask questions about how and why to apply to graduate school, what the expectations are for different kinds of schools, and how to choose which school(s) to attend.

accompanying materials

• none available