Thema

Kairos , a Greek concept, denotes time. But unlike the word chronos , which suggests a specific point in time like a week or a year, kairos  implies both an exact point in time, as well as time's changing nature and its effects upon the world around us: the seasons, the weather, even language and communications.

The existing, yet ever-changing, aspect of language and communications suggested in the word kairos  corresponds to the way we view hypertextual writing--evolving, open-ended texts that lend themselves to multiple readings and recollections.

Yet while multiple readings of a text pose little problem for audiences comfortable with modernity and post-modern theories like reader-response and hypertext theory, multiple recollections of material do. Scholarship, as well as tenure and promotion, relies on the careful documentation, or recalling, of text held in a reclaimable format located in some place where both scholars and their audiences can find it--what we generally call an archive. However, this need to reclaim text in a static, documentable format seems at first to run counter to the notion of Kairos  constantly changing, evolving hypertextuality.

What we seek to do here is to reconcile this notion of the static and the changing nature of kairos  with that of archiving hypertextual writing. In particular, we want to present Kairos'  position on the preservation of its text in various formats, such as print and CD-ROMs, in addition to its present webbed iteration.