Logging On - Fall 2023
doi:10.7940/M328.1.LOGGINGON.FARIS

Michael J. Faris, Editor

In This Issue

This issue brings some exciting new webtexts in our regular sections as well as some great new developments that Kairos is excited to share with our readers.

This issue features two Disputatio webtexts. In "Making a Webtext with ChatGPT," Kairos Senior Editor Doug Eyman elicited the coauthorship of ChatGPT, asking the text generation site to design and create content for a website that could help writing studies creators use generative artificial intellegience to produce multimodal essays. Doug shares the prompts he gave ChatGPT, its output, and his reflection and thoughts on the process. The html and css of the webtext is almost entirely ChatGPT's design (in response to Doug's questions).

In the second Disputatio webtext, "Leaving Academia: Hot Takes, Tips, and Voices from Out There…," Senior Editor Cheryl E. Ball provides feedback from scholars in the field who have left academia, particularly their answers to the question, "What skills do you most use from your time as a digital writing studies person in academia?" If you'd like to contribute anything to this ongoing resource, please email us at kairosrtp@gmail.com.

In the Topoi section, we have a new webtext by Sara West, "Student Perceptions of Anonymous Applications." West provides a rich methodological discussion of four students' perceptions of the anonymous social media app Yik Yak. Her webtext explores questions related to how these student participants understand privacy and anonymity on Yik Yak and how researchers might approach researching anonymous apps like Yik Yak.

This issue also launches our Inventio in 5 series. Envisioned by section editors Liz Chamberlain and Rich Shivener, Inventio in 5 is a series in which recently published Kairos authors discuss their composing processes in videos of about 5 minutes each. This season was produced in collaboration with Leah Ciani and Chante Douglas, recent graduates from York University's Professional Writing program. Season One is available now on our YouTube channel and on this issue's page for Inventio in 5. A big thanks to authors Shantam Goyal, Stacey Copeland, Richard Holeton, Nancy Small, and Stephen Paur for participating in Season One. We're excited about the future of this series.

We also have two PraxisWiki webtexts in this issue. In "The Multimodal Advocacy Project: Centering Accessible Composing Choices," Molly E. Ubbesen shares how she centered disability and accessibilty in designing and teaching the Multimodal Advocacy Project. In "Re-envisioning the Abstract: Visual Abstracts in Writing Studies," Molly Ryan explains how and why she developed a visual abstract assignment in her first-year writing and research course. (And we are currently considering whether and how to implement visual abstracts for upcoming issues of the journal.)

We're excited to announce that PraxisWiki is also the new home of the MMU Scholar Bibliography and MMU Scholars List, two resources created by Cana Uluak Itchuaqiyaq and recently updated by Itchuaqiyaq, Natasha N. Jones, and Jennifer Sano-Franchini, who now serve as the MMU Database Advisory Board. These two resources have been quite useful for scholars in technical communication as they seek to read, cite, and support research by multiply marginalized and underrepresented (MMU) scholars in the field. Kairos is looking forward to continuing to support this project by continuing to host these two resources and support the MMU Database Advisory Board as they keep them updated.

Kairos also has two book Reviews published in this issue: Ashley M. Beardsley reviews Making Matters: Craft, Ethics, and New Materialist Rhetorics by Leigh Gruwell, and Basanti Timalsina reviews Multimodal Composing: Strategies for Twenty-First-Century Writing Consultations, edited by Lindsay A. Sabatino and Brian Fallon.

CFP: Science Communication: Multimodal Challenges and Opportunities

Guest Editors Karen Lunsford, Kara Mae Brown, Rebecca Chenoweth, Kenny Smith, and Amanda Stansell invite submissions for a special issue of Kairos that aims to investigate how digital and multimodal technologies have transformed science communication (broadly defined) over the last decade. As they note, "We have seen changes in how both researchers and the public interact with scientific information—changes driven by scientific concerns (e.g., the pandemic, climate change) and recent technological developments (e.g., in social media, video games, transcription, artificial intelligence, sound)." The guest editors seek scholarship that both takes into account the current state of science communication but also anticipates where the field is headed in the future. We encourage pieces that guide and challenge our colleagues as they and their students navigate the shifting science writing landscape. Read the full CFP for more details.

Kairos Book

Cheryl E. Ball and Doug Eyman are finally making available the book project they've been talking about for ages, using Ghost as a platform to release content on a regular basis. The book is called Publishing Digital Scholarship: A How-To Guide and Oral History [of the Longest, Continuously Running Open-Access Scholarly Multimedia Journal]. We are pretty proud of the editorial accomplishments that have created Kairos, and this book is an attempt to more definitively showcase what Kairos is, how it works, why it's the longest continuously running scholarly multimedia journal, and why that's important. Our goal is to help people see how digital publishing works, quite literally, for an online journal (like Kairos, but also other digital journals) as well as to trace the history of scholarly journal-based digital publishing. This book is a record of preservation and a set of best practice options for digital publishers across disciplines, not just a single journal or field. It includes tons of editor interviews, stories, practical tips, and theoretical framing for publishing digital scholarship that will be rolled out on a bi-weekly basis starting now.

Other Announcements!

Several new items have been added to Stasis, our long-running archive of Computers and Writing resources that have lost their original homes. With this issue, we've added:

  • The first entries in an ongoing effort to archive CCC Online, which currently includes editorials from February 2000 and Cheryl Ball's interview with Todd Taylor about CCC Online from August 2015;
  • an archive of the original website for the Hawisher and Selfe Caring for the Future award (now administered here at Kairos); and
  • Greg Ulmer's "Noonstar", which is the first in a series of Ulmer projects we will be archiving.

Last, in our commitement to usability and sustainability, Kairos is slowly assigning Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to past and recent issues. Years ago, we started this effort, which fell by the wayside with so many other things keeping our attention, but we're trying to catch up. On this page, you can find a searchable list of publications with DOIs assigned. It only has the three most recent issues, but we'll try to update it as we assign DOIs to older issues. And you might notice that the Logging On column and PraxisWiki entries in this issue list their DOIs. (We're not sure how to integrate DOIs well into author-designed webtexts yet, but we're thinking through it.)