Reading the Archives:
Ten Years on Nonlinear (Kairos) History

A Ten-Year Slice of Kairos

When I started to read the Kairos archives, I quickly became overwhelmed by the sheer volume of work that Kairos has produced over the decade. It is an achievement we should be careful not to underestimate. Journals that endure, endure for a reason. They are too much a labor of love for it to be otherwise.

I needed to find a way to get a handle on the scope of this work. I decided first to limit my examination to CoverWeb texts and Features and to also exclude the reports from town halls and other large collaborative pieces. I was interested in authors' conceptions of hypertext and how those conceptions changed. CoverWebs and Features were sections where I was confident that I could find such work.

Unfortunately, limiting my reading to Features and CoverWeb texts still left me with 231 webbed texts to review. To begin, I created a ten-year slice of Kairos using a random number generator to pick one webbed text from each year that Kairos has been published. I used a random number generator not for any statistical purpose, but to make sure that there was no hidden bias in the construction of the slice. (If you are not a regular reader of Kairos, and you passed on my random walk through the archives, you might want to pause for a moment to browse these webbed texts in order to get a feel of what reading Kairos for the last ten years has been like.)

Browsing this slice suggested several interesting insights that I discuss below. Ultimately, however, the slice analysis was not particularly satisfying beyond suggesting large trends as there proved to be no easy way to drill down from the big picture to more detailed information. Consequently, I completed two additional analyses which you will find in separate pages. First I read through the archive, attempting to identify all the different types of hypertext that I could find, and then I went through and counted how many times these types of hypertext appeared in Kairos' ten years.

What Does this Slice Reveal or Hide?
On first skimming the reduced screen shots of the ten sample texts, I was struck by how visually similar they appeared to be—many looked as if they could have been submitted to a graduate seminar (Ball, 2004, develops this argument about the dependence of online scholarship on print forms in considerably more detail). Anderson pushes the visuals of the Kairos webtext by adding graphic headers and a menu, as does Bowie with her frame and long menu of topics, but in this particular slice, the first really strong break from the metaphor of the seminar page is Whipple and Dornsife in 2004. ()

This observation shows both the strength and the weakness of a slice analysis. Not all Kairos texts look like seminar papers on steroids. Indeed, the very first webtext in the very first issue of Kairos, Stuart Blythe's "Why owls? Value, risk, and evolution" looks nothing like an 8-1/2 x 11-inch page. It uses a graphic header, short, Storyspace-like pages of text, and a table-of-contents organizational structure that forces readers to keep looping back to the table of contents to find their way. Throughout Kairos' history, there have been many webtexts that included sophisticated designs, strong visuals, and other media elements; and these texts are the ones that I tend to remember (such as any of Anne Wysocki's, Madeleine Sorapure's or Joseph Squier's elegant hypertexts). All the plain pages recede in memory. Thus this slice analysis captures an important insight (and one that I don't particularly want to remember): Texts that remediate (and hypermediate) the seminar paper, without moving much beyond its visual boundaries, dominate the early volumes of Kairos.

The second thing this slice shows us, however, is that underneath the visual similarities of these texts is an amazing amount of diversity and creativity. Every single one of these webtexts uses slightly different visual and hypertextual strategies, representing most of the form of hypertext that I discuss in the next section (it lacks only the relatively rare forms of multi-windowed and timeline hypertexts). Starting with Mauer's use of a sentence to embed his navigation, Anderson's complex use of frames and drop-down menus, Janice Walker's exploratory structure and inclusion of an animated graphic of her toes, Whipple and Dornsife's use of show/hide layers to create complex submenus, and Ellertson's use of Flash and video examples, Kairos authors may remediate print articles but they are doing so in many subtle, fascinating, and creative ways. They are finding new hypertextual techniques, new software, and increasingly sophisticated graphical elements. As I discussed in the previous section on editorial policies, putting authors in charge of the appearance and hypertextual structure of their pieces created a space that has encouraged experimentation and diversity. Although many of Kairos' early authors may have resisted this space and relied on design metaphors from the seminar paper, many others embraced the opportunity.