Digital scholarship workshops & resources

I relay these presentations about Kairos because I am committed to promoting the work of the journal—which includes your submissions and readerly attention—to new audiences and stakeholders. Nothing gives me greater pleasure than talking about the kinds of scholarship Kairos publishes and seeing the mixture of delight and confusion (soon, usually, to be remedied) on people’s faces.

To continue this promotional work, the journal will again offer a half-day workshop at the Computers and Writing conference on Composing Digital Scholarship. This workshop (hosted by Senior Editor Douglas Eyman, Inventio Editor Madeleine Sorapure, and myself) will guide and encourage authors interested in composing digital scholarship for online journals. Editors will discuss authoring processes from the beginning of research projects to the publication stage, including visualizing your design to add value to your research project, storyboarding/prototyping, creating sustainable and accessible designs, querying editors, finding local resources, submitting webtexts, and revising in-progress work. Although the workshop’s primary emphasis will be on webtext-sized digital scholarship (for journals like, but not exclusively for, Kairos), authors interested in larger projects such as online collections and digital books will also benefit from this workshop. The editors in attendance can also speak to individual authors’ needs regarding the teaching and evaluating of digital scholarship. This workshop will take place Thursday, May 20, 2010, from 9am–noon on the campus of Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN. Check the conference website for more information once the schedule is posted (after this column will be published).

Although the next workshop isn’t Kairos-specific, it certainly relates to the mission of the journal. As part of the Computers and Writing Online conference, I will be moderating a free, online workshop for anyone interested in learning how to better evaluate/assess digital media scholarship. Presenting with scholars including Bob Broad, Joyce Walker, Michael Salvo, Catherine Braun, Dànielle DeVoss, Carrie Lamanna, and Kathie Gossett, participants will create a set of criteria useful for evaluating multiple kinds of digital media scholarship. From that criteria, workshop participants will help draft suggested guidelines for consideration by the 7Cs (CCCC Committee on Computers in Composition and Communication), with possible adoption or emendation to the current CCCC Position Statement on Promotion and Tenure Guidelines for Work with Technology. The results of the workshop, prior to 7Cs proposal, will also be available for feedback at the onsite C&W conference. This workshop, which runs a/synchronously from April 16–May 13, 2010, will be open to anyone interested in learning how to evaluate digital media or contributing to national guidelines for evaluation practices within English studies. Watch the C&W website for more information on this workshop.

And, finally, speaking of the great work that the 7Cs has done to support teachers, scholars, and administrators working with digital technology over the years, readers can now access (once again) the 7Cs set of “Tenure and Promotion Cases for Composition Faculty Who Work with Technology,” which once resided on Cynthia Selfe’s server space at Michigan Tech, but is now being hosted by the National Council of Teachers of English. Back, in all its narrative glory (minus the late 90s web design! hehe). A big thank you goes to Cynthia, Senior Editor and current 7Cs chair Douglas Eyman, NCTE Administrative Liaison Specialist Kristen Suchor, and good ol’ Wayback Machine for making this long-used (and too-long-offline) resource available once again!