Last week marked the release of the ten year anniversary issue of Kairos, the online refereed journal of rhetoric, technology and pedagogy. The anniversary issue looks both back and forward. This milestone is notable because ten web years feels like dog years. Just consider the state of the web in 1996, where amazon.com was one year old, altavista was the leading search engine, Flash 1 got its release, and javascript was the cutting edge in web programming. Started by graduate students, Kairos has always focused on webtexts which explored the new potentials of the web as a medium, rather than simply uploading the static text of a print journal.
The issue contains interviews with people reflecting upon their experiences with rhetoric/ composition and digital technology and Kairos. As well, Jim Kalmbach gives a good overview of the scholarship which took place within Kairos over the past ten years. He concludes with this following statement:
“…we do not need ever more stunning hypermediated essays; we need new forms of scholarship; we need to think about new ways of using digital writing spaces to make meaning.”
His statement is a good transition to a new section in Kairos called Inventio, which will publicly track an article through the editorial process from inception to publication. As described, this section will:
(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.
I’m looking forward to seeing the first article from this section to appear in the fall of next year. It is another project along the same lines as our project, MediaCommons. People from many directions are clearly realizing the potential in pursuing more ways to develop and share academic scholarship. I excited to see that it is starting to occur on many fronts, and I am happy that the institute, as well as, this pioneering journal are part of it.