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Conjectura

Kairos  represents more than just a publication containing information we need in order to do our jobs effectively or a place to publish ideas that will lead to tenure and promotion. Instead, like any electronic text produced in this "late age of print," to borrow Jay David Bolter's term for our time (2), it holds historical significance. For contained in our webtexts are views and visions of thinkers representing this early age of technology.

It is not far-fetched to imagine at some late date that without tools for translating the WWW on a non-PC or Mac computer platform some distant researcher may ponder over the HTML codes for Kairos  websites as Napoleon's soldiers wondered at the Rosetta Stone. As we all know, French translators cracked the code of the Rosetta stone by connecting the Greek language also printed on the tablet to the pictures that comprise Egyptian hieroglyphics.

A far-thinking scribe, perhaps, understood the folly of placing too much faith on one iteration of language and allowed us many possibilities for accessing the information left behind. No matter what the purpose of the various languages printed on the stone was, the result remains the same: The information gained about ancient Egypt from the multiple iterations of language inscribed on this tablet opened our eyes to that great culture that lay beneath the sands of Africa.

While we are not suggesting that the knowledge we find in Kairos  equals that of the Egyptian culture, we are implying that information about the way we view technology and writing today as presented in our publication may be key to scholars in the not-so-distant future trying to understand themselves and their relationship to technology.

It is for this reason that we propose to begin an active campaign to archive the webbed text of Kairos  in various more static forms, thus capturing the actual and yet continue with our push for the potential inherent in the word we have chosen as the title of our journal.


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Thema
Philosophia
Verba Volant
Et semper et nunc
Disputatio Forma
Conjectura
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