Introduction

Computers and Writing: A Separate Field or Subfield?

One of the central questions underpinning The History Book was whether computers and writing is a separate field or subfield from the larger field of writing studies. This question remains central in our book as well. (Indeed, as we discuss subsequently, this debate drove our decision to use the term (sub)field in this text to reference computers and writing.) Ours, though, is certainly not the first text to reflect on the (sub)field of computers and writing and its relationship to the field of writing studies as a whole. In 2004 a group of teacher-scholars in the field composed a "multivocal" article published in Computers and Composition. Steven D. Krause began this article predicting that

[i]n the near future, the field/interest/sub-discipline of computers and writing will cease to be different from the field/interest/larger discipline composition and rhetoric because all composition specialists shall be expected to understand the importance of using computers and other technologies to teach writing. (Hart-Davidson & Krause et al., 2004, p. 147)

Along with Krause, some of the contributors claimed that, as computers and emergent technologies became more ubiquitous, the entire field of writing studies would be about computers and writing (as a research area) rather than a separate branch of the larger field. Certainly, as the interviews we share in this eBook show, advancements in computing technologies have indeed opened new directions for writing studies as a field and led writing studies to incorporate into its mainstream publications discussions about technologies' impact upon writing. As the title of our eBook, Are We There Yet?, suggests, however, whether writing studies has become synonymous with computers and writing is arguable. Several years after Hart-Davidson & Krause et al.'s 2004 prognostication, in 2011, Janice R. Walker et al. wrote "Computers and Composition 20/20: A Conversation Piece, Or What Some Very Smart People Have to Say about the Future" in Computers and Composition as an extension of the "Town Hall" style conversation held each year at the Computers and Writing Conference. For this article, the contributors offered predictions about what writing will be, where it will exist, and what it will do (a question we likewise engage in the next chapter). A common thread among participants was acknowledgement of the importance of educating students about the multiple facets of digital literacy. If anything, the larger field of writing studies has picked up this trend because of the impact digital age technologies have upon professional and personal lives. Our eBook continues these ongoing conversations and debates about the uses of computers for writing, the promise and challenges of digital literacy, and the (sub)field's impact on the larger field of writing studies.

Our Lives

Just as Hawisher et al. (1996) recognized that their history cannot help but be filtered through their eyes, we realize that our own subject positions inevitably shape the story we tell, as well as what we choose to leave out or do not know to include. Indeed, what Hawisher et al. (1996) wrote of themselves continues to ring true for us: "we remain four situated individuals who have read ourselves into the lives and works of people whose histories are told here" (p. 10). Moreover, we likewise recognize this relationship as reciprocal: "even as we write history, history is writing us" (Hawisher et al., 1996, p. 218). As such, we, as the authors of this eBook, have our own histories with writing and technology that inevitably shape the history we construct here.

Collectively we have been part of the computers and writing community for 32 years. Jenn first attended the Computers and Writing Conference in 2008 with a presentation critiquing Learning Management Systems (LMSs). Jim first attended in 2002 with a presentation on narratives employed to legitimize the use of networked computer classrooms for composition courses. We both attended graduate school in the first decade of the twenty-first century at public research-intensive institutions. While we both specialized in rhetoric and composition/writing studies, Jenn didn’t study computers and writing as an area of that field as part of the graduate curriculum—coming to it later during the process of writing her dissertation on pedagogical issues with LMSs. Jim entered graduate school to study computers and writing, having been introduced to Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe’s work in an undergraduate course with Stuart Selber at Penn State. At the time of this writing, we are both writing program administrators (Jenn of a first-year writing program and Jim of a writing center) at private institutions of higher education. We both teach or have taught first-year writing, upper-level undergraduate courses, and graduate courses.

We are merely two voices, two scholars in a growing (sub)field of hundreds. As such, we recognize throughout this eBook that our subject positions limit what we have read, studied, taught, and experienced. We acknowledge there are undoubtedly important texts that we do not reference in this project. We hope others will discuss them in their own histories.

The Stakes

Hawisher et al. (1996) told readers that the radical impact computers (will) have on the values of democratic education required them to "pause and take the time to write a history (or rather, a collection of histories) of where the field has been" (p. 7). In many ways, this eBook acts as a response to that call. Now, as we compose this eBook, at a time when computers and related digital technologies are often taken for granted as integral to writing processes, it is especially important to keep in view the ideological situatedness of these tools.

In some sense, it seems that the (sub)field of computers and writing has not changed radically over the twenty years of our history (1995–2015) in terms of its philosophy. In 1996, Hawisher et al. described the "agenda" of computers and writing as "to develop an understanding of how computers can contribute to a better, more just and equitable writing classroom and thereby a better and more just educational system and society" (p. 2), an idea consistent with the (sub)field's explicit feminist orientation.

Computers and writing has always positioned itself as a definitively feminist field. In the video below, Cynthia L. Selfe, an author of The History Book and a founder of the (sub)field, discusses that stance.

This feminist framework and resultant desire for egalitarianism has persisted. For instance, in 2001, Janice R. Walker pointed to this goal (through critiquing it) in her essay "Resisting Resistance: Power and Control in the Technologized Classroom": "The computer classroom has often been hailed as [. . .] a social-democratic space, helping to promote a liberatory pedagogy by fostering student resistance, empowering students by decentering the classroom" (p. 119). In his review of the first 20 years of Computers and Composition for the journal's 20th anniversary special issue in 2003, Charles Moran highlighted the prevalence of this feminist focus, locating it in the historical moment of "our profession's reaction to the policies of the Reagan-Bush years":

the 1996–1997 issues seem a kind of watershed; before these issues, hopes for improved writing and the teaching of writing through technology predominated; after these volumes, we increasingly saw the computer as potentially, or inherently, supportive of critical pedagogy and, through this pedagogy, of a new and more just society. (p. 352)

A year later, in his 2004 introduction to Computers and Writing: The Cyborg Era, James Inman described the pedagogy of computers and writing specifically as one that "promote[s] equity and diversity" (p. 1). We argue that these assessments and goal statements continued to characterize the (sub)field from 1995 to 2015 (and even today), even if it has not always foregrounded a critical pedagogy approach to instruction and even as it has recognized the challenges to and critiqued these goals.

The (sub)field’s commitment to equity and diversity as well as to egalitarian and liberatory pedagogical approaches is directly related to it being a feminist (sub)field. In this video, Will Hochman and Charles Moran discuss computers and writing’s pedagogical commitments.

In addition to embracing this overt goal of using computer technologies to improve the teaching of writing and achieve democratic ends, teacher-scholars in computers and writing have long been interested in ideological readings and critiques of technology. The (sub)field has sought an understanding of

how thoroughly ideology shapes many of the technological decisions that educators make; how it infuses processes of technology design, marketing and use; and how it contributes to an underlying stability to educational environments within which technology is employed. (Hawisher et al., 1996, p. 9)

This critical understanding of technologies, along with the commitment to a socially just, democratic, and decentered writing classroom, continues to be among the central tenets of the (sub)field.

The questions that Hawisher et al. (1996) posed in the "Coming of Age" section of The History Book regarding the limits to the potential for "positive educational change" as supported by computers are still relevant to the scholarship we cover in this history:

• Was change limited to those classrooms or teachers that already supported a critical or reformist vision of education?
• To what extent was the radical potential of technology ultimately constrained within existing social structures and ideological formations?
• Was it possible […] that technology could provide the basis for fundamental and far-reaching social reform? (pp. 210-211)

Much of what was at stake then rings true as of the time of this writing. There is a strong need for scholars and teachers of writing to address the laws, policies, and procedures that governments, corporations, universities, and other vested stakeholders write and execute that govern our professional and personal online (and offline) lives. This need becomes the fuel for the computers and writing community to address the ideological freight of digital spaces, a trend we found in the scholarship discussed in The History Book. The stories over the past twenty years have revealed that our educational, financial, legal, medical, professional, and social lives are at stake when we do not investigate the complex ecological technological network governing our mediated lives.

The Past Twenty Years

Twenty years after publication of The History Book, many aspects of higher education remain unchanged. For instance, despite the growth of online classes, most colleges and universities have not abandoned the "brick and mortar" computer classroom altogether, nor have practitioners abandoned alphabetic/print writing as the central object of study in the field of writing studies or as the central form of production in writing classes, despite some early predictions otherwise (e.g., Anson, 1999; Bolter, 2001). If the philosophical and theoretical leanings of the field have not changed much in the twenty years since The History Book was published, certainly the story of "how people in the field used computers" (Hawisher et al., 1996, p. 2) has shifted. Technological platforms, innovations, and their pedagogical implementation have changed remarkably since the close of the book in 1994. In his 1992 chapter from Re-Imagining Computers and Composition, Charles Moran predicted that "the writing classroom of the next millennium will be radically different from the writing classroom of today" (p. 10). Here Moran is prescient, though perhaps the classroom is not as radically different as Moran predicted.

What has changed significantly, however, in the twenty years since Hawisher et al. (1996) published their text is that the sites, spaces, and potentialities for writing in all forms have expanded in ways that could not have been predicted. For example, online course options have grown tremendously from their first appearance in the mid-1980s. And while many writing courses continue to be taught in computer labs, cloud computing, laptops, and mobile devices mean that neither students nor instructors need to remain tethered to the space of a physical computer lab on campus (as long as they have access to robust wireless networks and internet connectivity). In addition, mobile devices are ubiquitous and often do not require (or even have) keyboards. Though many teachers may lament the presence of cell phones in classrooms, students today rely on them to access readings, look up concepts discussed in class (Parry, 2011), write papers (Grabill et al., 2010), do research, live tweet, communicate with their instructors, watch videos (Pflugfelder, 2015), and so on. In fact, one of the most exciting developments of the past twenty years is how much writing—including writing that is deeply social and highly collaborative—takes place beyond the computer lab in online spaces likes blogs, wikis, Twitter, and Google Docs (see Yancey, 2004). Moreover, both the production and consumption of digital texts in writing classrooms has become not only more common, but regularly expected, as is illustrated by the Council of Writing Program Administrators, National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), and National Writing Project's (2011) Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing and NCTE's Definition of 21st Century Literacies (2013) (updated to Definition of Literacy in a Digital Age, 2019, at the time we are revising this eBook). When it comes to the professional parameters of our field, early computers and writing teacher-scholars debated whether or not software development could count for tenure (Lang, Walker, & Dorwick, 2000), but during the period we cover in this history teacher-scholars have considered how we might need to rethink tenure requirements altogether in an age of digital composing and scholarship (Ball & Moeller, 2008; Purdy & Walker, 2010; Purdy & Walker, 2012; Selfe, Hawisher, & Berry, 2009).

In a (sub)field with technology as a central object of study, the changes we describe above often take place quickly. In the following video, teacher-scholars who have been part of computers and writing for the past three decades (and longer for some) describe the shifts in theories, technologies, and practices that they have seen since the (sub)field’s inception.

Another significant change since the publication of The History Book is that computers are now a ubiquitous mainstream writing tool. As Lisa Gerrard (1995) wrote,

In the early 1980s, many of our colleagues [. . .] thought we were exaggerating when we claimed that computers improved students' attitudes toward composition, made it easy for them to revise, and led them to approach writing as a process. How modest those claims seem now." (p. 286)

Rather than asking whether computers are valuable for the writing process (which is now taken mostly as a given), the story of how people use, as well as subvert, computers and digital media has become increasingly important as computer technologies shape the pedagogical and theoretical work of the (sub)field. Perhaps as a result, the earlier perspective that scholars involved in computers and writing were outliers or "oddities" (Gerrard, 1995, p. 280) began to wane even by 1995. As Gerrard noted, "[C]omputer studies is no longer on the lunatic fringe of English studies. We may not be mainstream, but we're not clinging to the margins anymore, either" (p. 289). Indeed, this sentiment was shared by many of the teacher-scholars we interviewed.

In addition to (or perhaps as part of) moving from the margins, the (sub)field has become more "social." The "social turn" in the field of writing studies is by now a familiar part of the (sub)field's shared history, but our work on this eBook suggests that the (sub)field is now in the midst of yet another "social turn" brought about by the rise of digital technologies. While the original "social turn" described an expanded understanding of the social construction of knowledge, writers, and texts, in this second social turn we see that the "turn" digital technologies have taken is "social," namely, interactive and participatory. Douglas Eyman laid the groundwork for this digital "social turn" in composition theory in his 1996 Kairos webtext, "Hypertext in the Computer-Facilitated Writing Class":

Computer mediated communication technologies afford the classroom instructor the medium through which a social-epistemic rhetoric can be enacted in the classroom, serving as both a focal point for the building of community and a method of collaboration.

This social turn is also evident in the use of the term Web 2.0 to describe the read/write web. With Web 2.0, no longer were people passive consumers of the material the web had to offer, but they could become active participants in and composers of the texts that comprise the web.

Our Sources, Our Histories, Our Questions

To narrow the scope of our project, we settled on five primary sites of research: Computers and Composition, Computers and Composition Online, Kairos, programs from the Computers and Writing Conference, and books (including monographs and edited collections in print and online). We selected Computers and Composition, Computers and Composition Online, and Kairos because they are the three peer-reviewed journals most directly relevant to computers and writing and they each have established histories of influence in the (sub)field. Certainly, computers and writing scholars have published important work in other journals, including the flagship National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) journals of writing studies, College English and College Composition and Communication, and we occasionally still reference texts in these journals when relevant to answer the research questions governing each chapter. However, focusing our research archive allowed us to

1. direct our reading efforts
2. concentrate on significant voices in computers and writing
3. create a manageable corpus
4. more readily track trends in scholarship.

We recognize this archive potentially leaves out important voices. We hope readers will understand the need to put parameters around our objects of analyses.

Our goal in analyzing these texts was to discern notable movements, concepts, and themes in the (sub)field—particularly those that addressed our research questions. Those research questions were

1. What is and how do we in computers and writing define writing?
2. What do we mean by and how do we define computer in computers and writing? In what ways have the technologies we used and studied changed?
3. What do we learn about computers and writing by employing machine reading of twenty-one years (1995–2015) of conference programs from the (sub)field’s primary conference, Computers and Writing?
4. In what ways do we define the (sub)field and its relationship to another technology focused field, the digital humanities?
5. To what extent has computers and writing achieved its goals? Are we “there” yet? That is, to what extent has computers and writing cohered and been recognized as its own autonomous (sub)field?

We focus on one of these questions in each of our chapters. For instance, Chapter 1 focuses on question 1, Chapter 2 focuses on question 2, and so forth.

We further narrowed our research corpus by attending to citation counts and keywords in particular time periods. We divided the research into ten year spans (1995–2004 and 2005–2015) for each of us as authors, and then we focused our reading and analysis on peer-reviewed articles and books with certain citation counts (though each author also wrote about texts in the other author's period, as well as texts outside the designated citation count that addressed the research questions).

However, we needed to be flexible and responsive in determining these citation count thresholds. As Colleen A. Reilly and Douglas Eyman (2007) pointed out in their essay "Multifaceted Methods for Multimodal Texts," journals in computers and writing "may be underrepresented in the standard citation databases"—especially online journals—due to their "low impact rating" (p. 357). Thus, the benchmark for the numbers of citations that we selected depended on several factors, including medium (digital or print) and year of publication. For the former, we found that print publications inevitably had higher citation counts, so for digital publications we had to lower the threshold for the number of citations that constituted a significant work for us to read. For the latter, we found that more recent publications had fewer citations, as people have had less time to cite them, so we likewise had to lower the citation threshold for these publications.

We collected citation data using Google Scholar. Collecting citation counts from Google Scholar for all articles and webtexts published in Kairos and Computers and Composition during the years 1995–2015 gave us a loose indication of which key works and landmark texts to study most closely. We selected Google Scholar because we could access it easily and it is commonly used and held in high repute in academia.

In addition to relying on citation counts to help us narrow our corpus, we also attended to article keywords. Attending to text keywords allowed us to include in our objects of analysis texts topically relevant to our research questions. That is, we also referenced texts with pertinent keywords, even if they did not have high citation counts. Articles in Computers and Composition, as well as Kairos, in some cases, provided keywords. Thus, we were able to rely on those. However, Computers and Composition Online webtexts, as well as some Kairos webtexts, did not provide keywords. Thus, we needed a way to determine them. To do this work, we used Voyant Tools. We selected Voyant Tools because it is free machine reading software that can process large amounts of digital text. It also provided a list of most frequently used terms in those texts.

We struggled to provide a diverse and inclusive history. As cultural studies gained traction in the academy in the mid-to-late 1990s, computers and writing, as a (sub)field grounded in feminism, attended to gender equality. However, it was slower to address issues of race. The result, in the words of one of this eBook’s reviewers, was (and still is) a “whiteness problem.” Our history reflects the (sub)field’s struggle to solve this whiteness problem.

We added a second round of interviews to help diversify the voices represented in our videos. However, our interviews and references list still illustrate a lack of racial diversity in the (sub)field. (This is underscored by the fact that we, as authors of this eBook, both identify as white.) As we note in Chapter 3, race did not appear in Computers and Writing Conference program titles or descriptions until 2001. Attention to issues of race has increased since then. However, we as a (sub)field still have a long way to go. We return to this point in the Conclusion.

Terminology of the (Sub)field

Part of the process of reflecting on the (sub)field's history since The History Book entailed selecting which terms to use in our eBook. We chose writing studies to designate the larger discipline also known as rhetoric and composition or composition studies in order to reflect our sense of the term most widely accepted as of the time of this writing and to capture the full range of work done by teacher-scholars. That is, following Susan Miller (2002), we selected writing studies as a term that is capacious and that accounts for the multiple forms and types of texts computers and writing professionals create, study, and teach. Certainly, as with all the terms we selected, arguments can be made for other selections.

We decided to use the term computers and writing for our (sub)field given its prevalence and its use to designate the flagship conference for teacher-scholars who self-identify in this area. We also wanted to distinguish references to the discipline from references to its flagship journal, Computers and Composition.

Concomitantly, we needed to decide which term to use to capture the status of computers and writing. We chose the term (sub)field to reflect the conversation, which we address earlier in this chapter and again in the Conclusion, surrounding whether computers and writing is a subfield of writing studies, has been absorbed into or is now indistinguishable from writing studies, or is its own distinct field. Our research and interviews suggest this is an unsettled question, so we selected a term that reflects this debate.

To reflect another unsettled debate in the (sub)field, we use the terms writing and composing interchangeably. We recognize, however, that some members of the (sub)field have strong preferences for one term over the other, often associated with whether they see the term composing as referencing a broader range of activities (e.g., video production, podcasts, graphics, etc.) and whether they believe the (sub)field should attend to these practices.

We also needed to make seemingly small but, for our (sub)field, significant choices regarding the use and capitalization of particular terms. For instance, we reference this project as an eBook to use a known term that highlights the book’s digital nature (the term dBook, or digital book, has not yet been adopted!). With apologies to Janice R. Walker and Todd Taylor (2006), we lowercase the terms internet and web to reflect recent trends in this direction. For instance, as of June 1, 2016, the Associated Press Stylebook stipulated that internet and web should be lowercased. Other prominent online publications, including Buzzfeed, Wired, and Vox, likewise lowercase internet (Martin, 2016). As of June 17, 2017, the Wikipedia article on the subject ("Capitalization," 2017), also indicated that the lowercase spelling of internet is more and more commonly used. We note, though, that APA (American Psychological Association), MLA (Modern Language Association), and Chicago styles, as well as the Oxford Dictionaries, all continue to capitalize internet and web at the time of this writing, as far as we know. Still, we believe that lowercased use is just a matter of time and we want our eBook to read as looking toward the future.

Additionally, we reference technologies in the plural throughout this eBook to emphasize the multiple, varied machines, hardware, software, and programs that we use for our teaching, research, and service. Finally, we use the term teacher-scholar to refer to members of the (sub)field in order to acknowledge the dual roles of practitioners in the (sub)field. Hawisher et al. (1996) also used this term in The History Book.

A Note on the eBook's Structure

This eBook is designed to enhance aspects of The History Book through digitization. For example, hyperlinks and hyperlinked footnotes replace material that was found in the "sidebar" marginalia of The History Book. Navigational options, including dropdown menus, can be used used to explore the eBook chapters in both linear and nonlinear ways. Our supplemental and supportive interview videos are interspersed throughout this eBook, embedded within the text and compiled together on the Interviews page, instead of appearing as transcripts at the end of chapters, as they did in The History Book. Consistent with Hawisher et al.'s (1996) integration of interview content, we allow these compiled interview segments to speak for themselves. That is, we do not explicitly analyze these interviews in our text, though we, of course, provide transcripts of them and introduce them to provide context. The videos in this eBook appear as they were recorded, using the platform preferred by the interviewee. Thus, as a result, there is variance in how the interviews appear. Sometimes Jenn appears side by side with interviewees, sometimes she appears in a little box at the bottom, and sometimes she does not appear at all. In identifying speakers in the videos, we followed conventions of documentary film, naming speakers the first time they appear in each video.

Our transcript of the Twitter conversation appears much like the MOO transcript did in the closing pages of The History Book, but it includes screen captures of the tweets themselves. Readers, moreover, can interact with our eBook in ways not possible in The History Book. For instance, they can search for particular terms from Computers and Writing Conference programs from 1995–2015.

While The History Book was organized in chronological order by chapter—that is, each chapter covered approximately a three year period—we decided to structure each of our chapters around a research question governed by a theme. For instance, Chapter 1 focuses around the (sub)field's definition of writing, Chapter 4 focuses on the (sub)field's relationships with the digital humanities, and so forth. Within the individual chapters, we lay out a loose chronology of trends and emerging concepts during the twenty year period we cover, while making note of significant shifts and pointing out enduring tendencies.

We decided to organize the eBook chapters around research questions rather than time periods based largely on the volume and pace of technological advancements during 1995–2015. It is important to remember that The History Book covered "only" fifteen years of slower change and growth in the (sub)field. It is also important to note that Hawisher et. al. (1996) also struggled with this chronological organization. While they defended their choice, as we do ours, they also acknowledged facing "a number of major problems" related to the pace of change, as well as to creating the tacit (and faulty) idea that "the field is a static, fixed entity moving through time" (pp. 12–13). Moreover, the authors pointed out that history is an ongoing process, happening as we attempt to record it (p. 14). With the organizational structure of our eBook, we point to patterns as they emerge, repeat, and disappear in the scholarship of this (sub)field. In order to provide commentary in a (at times) nonlinear fashion, we needed a less constraining format than covering only a limited time period within a chapter. Because our individual chapters work internally in chronological order, we were not able to apply the helpful organizing framework provided in each chapter of The History Book: "Considering Contexts," "Observing Trends," and "Recognizing Challenges"; however, we do our best to comment on each of these considerations within the analysis provided in each chapter. At times we do diverge from our chronology within individual chapters, particularly when describing emerging concepts, topics, and ideas that have continued importance in the (sub)field across a large span of years. Typically, when we complete the discussion and analysis of that concept or topic, we pick up the chronology where we left off.

Overview

Chapter 1 explores the question of how members of the (sub)field defined and redefined what they mean by writing from 1995–2015. In particular, the chapter addresses the shift to multimodality from computers and writing's early focus on alphabetic text. Whereas early MUDs and MOOs captured movement (e.g., waves goodbye), setting, and emotion in the form of print text, today's online interactions and communication involve multiple forms of media and modes—combining still images, audio, video, and print text—removing (or lessening) the need to recreate "real life" experience through the written word. Texts like Jason Palmeri's Remixing Composition (2012), of course, remind us that rhetoric has always taken medium into consideration. Ted Nellen shared a similar perspective in his contribution to "Re: The Future of Computers and Writing: A Multivocal Textumentary":

[C]omposition got sidetracked from the original forms of communication—orality, drama, and visual arts—to focus just on the alphabet and text. [...] Our word writing connotes letters and words, whereas the Greeks and Romans had gram and graph, which roughly translate into writing and drawing; these terms were interchangeable for the Greeks, but not for us. [...] That we have restricted composition and rhetoric to the alphabet and to words is too bad, and has limited us. (Hart-Davidson & Krause et al., 2004, pp. 155–156)

While keeping in mind the fact that multimodal composing practices are not entirely new to the (sub)field, the chapter describes scholarly discussions of this dimension of teaching (in first-year writing and beyond) and composing.

Chapter 2 addresses the following questions: What do members of the (sub)field mean by and how do they define the "computers" part of computers and writing? In what ways have the technologies commonly used and studied in the (sub)field changed? The History Book ended by proclaiming the soon-to-be normalcy of word processing as part of the writing process. In the ensuing years, computing has become ubiquitous, creating educational opportunities that extend far beyond the classroom, reach many more students, and are often networked and online. We have shifted from alphabetic texts written on computers in labs using word processing software to more social, multimedia, and multimodal forms of composing (as we describe in Chapter 1). This chapter discusses the rise of Online Writing Instruction (OWI) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), as well as other forms of educational technologies now commonly used in the writing classroom, including blogs, Twitter, Wikipedia, and so on. In addition, this chapter also addresses mobile education, as the primary space within which computers and writing was enacted moved away from computer labs to ubiquitous and cloud computing spaces where composing can happen everywhere and anywhere.

Chapter 3 uses digital humanities approaches to explore what we learn about computers and writing by employing machine reading of twenty-one years (1995–2015) of conference programs from the (sub)field’s primary conference, Computers and Writing. It considers which terms are most commonly used in presentation titles, abstracts, and descriptions as well as what trends in the (sub)field can be deduced from examining this keyword data.

Chapter 4 examines the rise of the digital humanities (DH) and its relationship to writing studies, a particularly pressing issue in the 2010s. Douglas Eyman (2015) defined DH as “a kind of catch-all description for a very broad range of approaches and methods that involve use of digital technologies” in humanities disciplines (p. 59). Despite computers and writing's longstanding history of "doing" DH work, this area of scholarship has been claimed by literary studies. This chapter identifies three prevailing responses to DH within the (sub)field:

1. Computers and writing teacher-scholars should be indignant, given that computers and writing has been doing for over 20 years what DH is doing now.
2. Computers and writing teacher-scholars should do DH work—and call the work they do DH—rather than be concerned about who started DH-related work.
3. Computers and writing teacher-scholars should just keep doing what they have always been doing and ignore DH.

Ultimately, this chapter considers the ways we define the (sub)field's relationship with/to DH and suggests ways we might work to grow and improve upon this relationship.

The Conclusion takes stock of the status of the relationship between computers and writing and writing studies as well as provides ideas for new directions for research and teaching. This chapter engages the following questions: To what extent has computers and writing achieved the goals and "agenda" outlined in The History Book?, To what extent has computers and writing cohered as its own autonomous (sub)field?, and What is the (sub)field's relationship to writing studies more broadly?

Readers can access eBook content from the Table of Contents (TOC). The TOC, accessible by clicking the gold “Are We There Yet?” words in the upper left-hand corner of the browser window, provides links to the major components of the text: Introduction, Chapter 1, References, Archives, and so forth. The links are organized into two groups. The top group, titled Text Chapters, includes the chapters (e.g., Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Conclusion), and the bottom group, titled Additional Materials, includes the supplemental materials (e.g., References, Archives, Interviews). Readers can click on the icon or textual hyperlink for each component to be directed to that part of the text. For example, clicking on “Introduction” will take readers to the first page of the Introduction.

Readers can navigate through eBook content in three ways:

1. By clicking links in the dropdown list under each component title in the top navigation bar
2. By clicking the horizontal breadcrumb bars at the bottom of each page
3. By clicking the vertical bars that appear on hover on the left and right of each screen.

Explanations of each of these methods are provided below.

#1: The navigation bar that appears at the top of every page provides links to the major components of the eBook. The sections of each component appear when the component name is clicked, and a scrollbar allows readers to see all the sections of that component. Readers can then click on the title of the section they wish to view/read.

#2: At the bottom of each page are horizontal breadcrumb bars that show how many pages comprise each component. The page a reader is on will be indicated by a longer gold bar. Readers can click on the next bar to move to the next page, click on the previous bar to move to the previous page, or select whichever bar they wish to read pages in a different order.

#3: When readers hover over the far right or far left of the browser window, a thin vertical bar will appear. Readers can click on the right vertical bar to move forward (i.e., to the next page). They can click on the left vertical bar to move backward (i.e., to the previous page).

Acknowledgements

Jenn

I would like to thank Gail Hawisher and Cindy Selfe for encouraging this project (the way they are known to do) from my early vision to the 2016 Computers and Writing Conference where they thoughtfully led me to Jim as a co-author and then as willing interviewees and quiet cheerleaders as the eBook underwent its years of work. They knew the kind of person I most needed to work with, and they were right. I want to thank Jim for his consistent dedication to this mammoth project, his willingness to listen to and reflect upon my revolving door of ideas, and all of his careful research, writing, editing (such an amazing editor!), and skillful coding of the project. Without his ability to stay focused on myriad small details and completion, this eBook would likely never have materialized.

A shout out also to students and alumni at The College of Saint Rose: Nerys Pichardo, who worked on a web design for an earlier draft of this eBook, and Caitlyn Murphy and Julia Ciaccio, who transcribed the accompanying transcriptions for each video.

Jim

I wish to thank Jenn for her vision for this history, her superb video editing and interview skills, and her collegiality. Thank you for inviting me to be part of this amazing project. You are a wonderful collaborator. I would also like to thank Nik Schmidt for his web authoring and coding expertise, his flexibility, and his insightful problem-solving. Thanks, too, to capable Duquesne student Chad Szalkowski-Ference for his help with proofreading, usability testing, and citation checking.

As always, I am also grateful to my family for their unflagging love and support in everything.

Both

We would like to extend thanks to Estee Beck and Megan Fulwiler for their early involvement in this project. Their collective insights certainly helped to get this work off the ground in its infancy.

We are grateful to the members of the computers and writing community who kindly and willingly shared their stories, insights, and reflections. As we note throughout this project, it is the people who make the (sub)field. Including their voices in this eBook testifies to that. We are also grateful to Gail Hawisher, Paul LeBlanc, Charles Moran, and Cindy Selfe for giving computers and writing The History Book.

Dedication

We dedicate this eBook to the memories of Will Hochman and Charles Moran, who both passed away after Jenn interviewed them for this project. Both were foundational figures in computers and writing, dedicated teacher-scholars without whose positive and enduring influence the (sub)field would not be what it is. To our knowledge, this project includes the last recorded interviews with each of them. Thus, for us, their words take on particular resonance, and we hope they will for readers as well. Will noted during his interview that "computers and writing has been very good to me." Completing this eBook has helped us remember how he and Charlie were very good to computers and writing.