Logging On
Cheryl Ball & Douglas Eyman, Editors
In This Issue
In our Topoi section, we have three webtexts that each provide a different approach to multimodal scholarship, focusing on video, audio, and interactive text, respectively. In "Motherhood on the Screen: An Exploration of Wounds Opened and Closed through Home Video", Alexandra Hidalgo uses video to demonstrate how conversation can be used in the service of scholarly argument. Hidalgo mediates a conversation between two mothers that uses home video as a touchstone to explore issues of composition, recomposition, memory, and remediation, simultaneously examining home video as an object of study and using video as the publication medium for that study. We're particularly excited by this piece because it is also one of the first (and most comprehensive) bilingual works we have had the opportunity to publish, as much of the conversation in the video is in Spanish with English subtitles. In "Arranging Delivery, Delivering Arrangement: An Ecological Sonic Rhetoric of Podcasting," Abigail Lambke takes up sound as the scholarly medium, noting that her analysis of sonic rhetoric and audio podcasts is "designed ... to be received aurally." Much like Hidalgo uses video to explore and interrogate video objects of study, Lambke uses audio to explore and analyze audio objects of study. The final piece in this section is Jason Crider and Kenny Anderson's "Disney Death Tour." Designed as a guided tour of Disney World in Florida that explores the deaths that have taken place in the theme park, Crider and Anderson have constructed an Ulmerian MEmorial, with the aim of "recognizing and writing communal attitudes towards tragedy." While this webtext can be read anywhere, it is particularly effective when experienced at Disney World itself and has been optimized for use on mobile devices for just such an occurrence.
In the PraxisWiki section this issue, Amber Buck and Lilian Mina present a group activity of close, critical reading of news on social media sites using the social media curation tool Wakelet in "Critical Rhetorical Analysis of Social Media Sites". As is becoming increasingly apparent, students need clear guidance as they navigate an increasingly chaotic and challenging social media environment, and this assignment provides one approach that works well in writing classes.
In this issue we are pleased to present interviews with two award-winning scholars, Cynthia Haynes and Sean Zdenek. Charlotte Lucke and Diane Beltran use the thematic structures of slash—"an attempt to join similar or even disparate terms" and glitch—"an opening or opportunity" that arises from the moment when something goes wrong, to create a nonlinear interview that echoes Haynes's own approaches to rhetorical theory and practice. And in the final episode of KairosCast, Courtney Danforth and Harley Ferris provide a wide-ranging conversation with Sean Zdenek, focusing on his work on closed captions and subtitles, and discussing in particular his recent Kairos article "Designing Captions: Disruptive Experiments with Typography, Color, Icons, and Effects" in issue 23.1. Our tireless Assistant Editor, Erin Bahl, provided the transcript for this podcast/interview)
This issue also features a plethora of reviews. The first three reviews focus on works specific to composition: Nicole Pfannenstiel reviews Mobile Technologies and the Writing Classroom: Resources for Teachers (ed. Claire Lutkewitte), Amber Simpson and Nick Stanovick both review and map Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies (ed. Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle), and Erin Fitzgerald reviews Beth Hewett's The Online Writing Conference: A Guide for Teachers and Tutors. Manako Yabe brings a personal accounting to her review of Jay Dolmage's Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education and Kelly Scarff brings to bear a writing-studies lens on Jimmy Guignard's Pedaling the Sacrifice Zone: Teaching, Writing, and Living as an example of the fusion of physical and digital spaces as platforms for literacy development. Appropriately, Estefany Palacio provides a series of videos in her review of Stephen Apkon's The Age of the Image: Redefining Literacy in a World of Screens, and Ruth Li provides a review of Douglas Eyman's Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice (which the author is seeing for the first time as he writes this, and is much looking forward to reading!)
Comings and Goings and Section Changes
2018 was a full year in the Kairos family, with Cheryl moving to Wayne State University Libraries to continue her work with the Vega academic publishing platform, which will roll out on GitHub and in hosted form later this year! One of the goals of this work will be to showcase the professional development work that Kairos tries to embody in training and mentoring its staff. Having more documentation on starting online journals, particularly those with multimedia components, and guiding new copyeditors who become seasoned mentors for others is a goal that we've tried to fulfill with every production cycle for the last 10 years, but in earnest since 2012 when we created an internal wiki of our documentation. It's now time to really start spreading that information farther and wider—teaching more classes, both in person and online, on how to edit and publish and author scholarly multimedia. Watch for news on this front as we seek to expand this work in the coming years!
Meanwhile, several of our staff members who, it feels like, have grown up academically within our editorial ranks are ready to move forward in other areas of their careers. We are so excited for them! But, as always, sad to see them go—after all, many of our departing staff members, particularly section editors, have been with the journal for a decade or more! Specifically, with this issue, we say goodbye to Topoi Editors Mike Edwards and Ashley Holmes, Interviews Editors Margaret "Peg" Strain and D. Alexis Hart, and KairosCast Editors Courtney Danforth and Harley Ferris. That's a ton of change for the journal, and I would be lying if I said I weren't super nervous about the independent timing of these folks' departures. 2018 was just that kind of year, I guess. Doug and I have worked with these folks for so long that it really is like having family move away. We are going to miss working with ALL of you and want to say that you're ALWAYS invited to the Kairos parties!
Having so many senior leaders retire from the journal means, however, that we get the opportunity to train many new leaders into these important roles. Whenever we have major staff changes at the journal, Doug and I like to re-assess the sections and make sure they're doing the work we feel readers want and that the journal needs. For instance, with this time for reflection, we considered combining the Topoi and Praxis sections into a single section, since so many of our Praxis webtexts of late have been more Topoi-y in their focus (meaning, often, that we have to ask authors to add more practical, classroom-based discussion into their Praxis pieces). We were worried that continuing to do so would further confuse the difference between Praxis and PraxisWiki. However, instead of combining the two sections, we talked with the editors, including Elkie Burnside, who edits Praxis solo right now, and decided to keep the sections distinct, but to change up Praxis slightly to be more practically oriented while still webtextual. PraxisWiki is always meant to be straight-up classroom or digital research practice/methods oriented, but usually those pieces are shorter and with a linear/wiki-based design. We will now push the Praxis section to include shorter webtexts as an option, since some of the longer pieces end up getting moved over to Topoi because of their more-research-oriented nature. And PraxisWiki will continue to host Calls for Papers around specific teaching or research method topics.
In addition to the changes in the Praxis section, we have decided to retire the KairosCast section. We had hoped to be able to solicit more external participation for KCast, as an educational outpost, with webinars and the like, for and by journal readers, but a lot of that pedagogical work ended up in PraxisWiki, as it should, and KCast became more about podcasts with interviews. So, in this issue, we've merged the KCast interview of Sean Zdenek with the existing Interviews section. That means we won't be hiring new KCast editors, but we will soon be hiring (both from our internal pool of excellent staff members and through open calls) for the following positions: two new Topoi Co-Editors, one Praxis co-editor to work with Elkie, two new Interviews editors, and one new co-editor for the Disputatio section (because we like co-editors and Moe Folk is a great guy to work with). We are expecting to be able to move some of our existing Associate Editors and Section Editors into these new roles, but we will definitely have room for more to play! And, with any existing staff members we promote, that means we will have more entry-level positions, for assistant editors, to hire. We don't have the job ads quite ready yet—but keep an eye out for them in the coming week! We offer extensive training and a collaborative, virtual work environment that runs fairly autonomously but with lots of support. These volunteer positions put you at the forefront of the best scholarship in the best online journal in the world :)
