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Inventio: A New Section

 

Besides the changes happening in Topoi, we are delighted to be announcing a brand new section that Kairos will implement, starting Fall 2007. This new section, called Inventio, will feature one webtext that we follow from inception to publication. The purpose of this section is two-fold: (a) to provide a publication venue for experimental scholarly texts that push technological boundaries, and (b) to make Kairos’ editorial and peer-review decisions for innovative scholarly webtexts more explicit. So, when we say that the webtext in this section will be followed “from inception to publication,” we mean the following:

The Inventio section will track a webtext from its earliest forms (possibly even in thought and idea stage, sketched out in e-mails or on napkins) to its argument and design development (through the mentoring and/or assistance of the Inventio Editors and an editorial board member) to its publication. Kairos will provide as much technical and content-development help as we can while including the developmental discussions (edited for coherence and privacy) as part of the publication itself. Those published discussions might include, for example, editors’ responses to initial author queries that offer first-look assessments and directions for a possible submission, sections of the open-discussion portion of the editorial board review as well as selected review letters that the board members write, and e-mail exchanges between author and editors as the text is revised and copy-edited.

We believe that publishing a text with descriptions of its editorial process will accomplish a major goal that Kairos authors have been searching for: It will help readers (and tenure committee members) understand how the editors and editorial board reads and values (and, thus, finds significant scholarly merit in) innovative, nontraditional and, sometimes, highly multi-mediated webtexts. By providing a breakdown of interpretations, responses, and reviews of a webtext-in-process (including dissenting reviews of a text when they help us show how interpretations of innovative texts are built), authors whose work appears in Inventio will have built-in arguments for tenure cases, if needed, as well as built-in interpretations for readers who want to learn how to better read innovative texts. We suspect that even for authors (and readers) for whom tenure is not an issue, being able to access this supporting material along with a webtext will be of much use in many facets of our scholarly lives.

While we have many details to work out regarding publication of this section, we are thrilled to announce that Madeleine Sorapure, this year’s winner of the Kairos Best Webtext Award and a frequent author of innovative webtexts, has agreed to serve as the editor for Inventio. We expect to add a co-editor to Inventio within the year. Look for a brief column from Madeleine in the Spring 2007 issue, and the first Inventio text in Fall 2007. For authors who are interested in having their work published in the Inventio section, please note that at this time we are not able to take submission queries and that, likely, candidates for this section will be pulled from the general submissions to Topoi and/or solicited directly from authors. We’ll provide more details in the Spring 2007 issue.

Overview

Kairos 11.1

Vol. 11 Iss. 1 Fall 2006