Cynthia L. Selfe, Gail E. Hawisher, and Patrick W. Berry
PRINCIPLE #2
Scholarly models
of production are not fixed. Rather, they are fluid, and socially and
technologically shaped and contingent. Scholarship, increasingly, is created,
maintained, and circulated in a range of electronic environments that can be
used to extend the intellectual reach of ideas and the development of academic
fields and subfields.
By the beginning
of the 21st century, the use of scholarly materials in digital forms had become
commonplace for English faculty: electronic databases of digital materials
(e.g., The Wilfred Owen Multimedia Digital Archive, Project Perseus, The Vergil
Project at the University of Pennsylvania, the Rossetti Archive, The William
Blake Archive), online journals (Kairos:
Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy; Enculturation; Computers and Composition Online),
and digital tools for searching and finding information, conducting original
scholarship, and composing (Google Scholar, HyperResearcher and InterClipper,
Microsoft Word, Adobe Dreamweaver, Windows MovieMaker and Apple iMovie, among
many others). It remained less common, however, for departments of English to
value scholarship published in digital venues, using digital forms of
collaborative production and adopting emerging digital formats.
In
responding to this dynamic context, we attempted to balance conservative and
not-so-conservative values in ways that seemed sustainable at the time and
within the situated contexts of our academic lives. We continued to recognize
the disparate models of scholarship in play at the time, as well as to
recognize the profession’s value on peer review and intellectual excellence in
scholarly projects while taking advantage of changing digital environments to
support new models of design, production, exchange, and circulation.
More specifically, during the 1990s, we initiated an online version of
the print journal, which came to be called Computers
and Composition Online. Various iterations of this journal, edited first by
Keith Comer, then in Sweden, and Margaret Syverson, at the University of Texas,
have been in existence since 1996. Sustaining this effort, however, has not
always been easy, especially in the 1990s. As much as we believed that the
profession was ready for online publication, academic departments still viewed
electronic articles as less rigorous than their print counterparts, and authors
were understandably cautious in publishing online. In 2002, however, when
Kristine Blair, at Bowling Green State University, assumed the editorship, the
journal began to focus on texts that could not be fully or adequately
accommodated by print publications. These pieces included articles that
featured video and audio content, hypermedia documents, and webbed text. Although we still worry about adequately preserving early issues
of the journal, thanks to Blair’s farsighted-leadership, Computers and Composition Online provides a valuable instantiation
of arguments being articulated by scholars in the New London Group (among them
Cope & Kalantzis, 2000; Kress, 1999, 2000; Kress & Van Leeuwen, 1996),
who had begun to recognize the contributions that various semiotic modalities
made to complex communication tasks and the inability of any one modality to
fully convey meaning. To sustain the considerable effort associated with Computers and Composition Online, Blair,
too, relied on tenets of feminist networking and involvement: encouraging
talented graduate students seeking editorial experience to participate on the
journal’s staff, weaving the journal and its operations into the institutional
fabric of her university, and using her extensive personal networks to recruit
outstanding scholarship and encourage scholars. Blair’s key strength in this
effort is her recognition that sustainability factors will continue to figure
centrally in the rapidly changing technological landscape the journal inhabits.
She understands, as do we, that sustainability is an ongoing concern, not a
short-term project. With Blair’s always-conscientious attention to the journal,
we continue to search for additional ways to ensure both the online journal’s
history and its future.
Click on media box to play.
Establishing Computers and
Composition Online gave new intellectual definition to the print journal
and provided scholars and practitioners in the field another valuable venue for
new forms of digital media scholarship,[3] one that retained a value on peer review and excellence while accommodating new
forms of academic projects responsive to the new communicative and scholarly
forms created, exchanged, and circulated in extended electronic networks. Computers and Composition Online, for
example, published a special issue on sound as a compositional space in fall
2006 (edited by Cheryl Ball, Illinois State University, and Byron Hawk, George
Mason University) that included a range of sound files and examples that could
not have been reproduced in a print format.
The rapid extension of digital networks was
also having effects on the print journal, Computers
and Composition, which continued to transform itself in response to
changing and contingent digital contexts. When the journal was acquired first
by Ablex in 1994 and then by Elsevier in 1999, for instance, its international
reach became even more pronounced. Elsevier moved to a new electronic editing
and delivery system in 2005, creating a new set of challenges and possibilities
for the journal. As an Elsevier journal, for example, Computers and Composition was bundled into the publisher’s ScienceDirect
offerings, which were marketed to libraries as a consolidated group for a
considerable subscription fee. This strategy—when coupled with increases
in production costs and journal subscription costs experienced by other presses
and journals—stretched already overtaxed library budgets in ways that
have, at times, been painful to observe.
Click on media box to play.
At the same time, however, the fact that the print journal was available
in an electronic venue as well as in print meant that increasing numbers of
libraries around the world had access to the information contained in the
journal in a timely manner. As the journal became increasingly available
online, for instance, subscriptions outside the United States rose
dramatically, as did opportunities to encourage submissions from scholars in
other countries. In 2007, for example, Computers
and Composition was not only being read in more than 64 countries around
the world, but also published special issues focusing on international
contributions (edited by Taku Sugimoto at Chiba Institute of Technology, Japan)
and on computer gaming (co-edited by Matthew
Johnson, Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, and Pilar Lacasa,
University of Alcalá, Spain). Elsevier’s electronic delivery system also
allowed subscribers to download individual articles from various journal
issues, and thus provided scholars with another means of identifying the ways
in which—and the extent to which—their work was being circulated
and read, ensuring additional evidence for their tenure and promotion
portfolios.
These new electronic environments, then, through various intensional
networks, worked to accelerate the already-rapid spread of information and
encouraged emerging disciplinary communities, such as computers and writing, to
extend themselves over large distances (Brown & Duguid, 1996; Castells,
1997). Indeed, as John Brown and Paul Duguid pointed out, such communities are
increasingly held together, at least in part, by digital networks that promote
“documents circulating among members, keeping each other conscious of being a
member and aware of what others are up to” (p. 4). There is every indication
that this disciplinary networking, now occurring many years after Brown and
Duguid’s historic article, continues to grow and expand as scholarship moves, more and more,
into digital contexts.
--->>>>link to next section > Principle #3 --->>>
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NOTE:
[3] In this
effort, we were inspired, in part, by three similar efforts: Postmodern Culture, first published
online in 1990 and edited by John Unsworth and Eyal Amiran; Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, which published
its first issue in 1996, edited by Mick Doherty, Elizabeth Pass, Michael Salvo,
Jason Teaugue, Amy Hanson, Greg Siering, and Corey Wick; and, Enculturation: An Electric Journal for
Cultural Studies and Theory, which published its first issue in 1997 under
the editorial leadership of Byron Hawk and Thomas Rickert.
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