Conferences and CFPs
Cheryl E. Ball, Editor
Speaking of conferences, if you weren’t at Computers and Writing in Athens, Georgia, in May, you missed a great conference! More over, you missed the first-ever Kairos author workshop, where we discussed issues in digital scholarship such as querying editors, thinking visually and organically about your argument, creating webtext prototypes, and designing with easy and sustainable code. Attendance was great, and we hope to offer more workshops in the future.
During the banquet on Friday, we also presented the annual Kairos awards. Here are this year’s winners, which are also posted on our awards page. The Kairos Graduate Student/Adjunct Awards for Teaching, Research, and Service carry $500 prizes and are generously sponsored by Bedford/St. Martin’s Press. (Not surprisingly, our Bedford liaison for these awards, Nick Carbone, won the Charles Moran Award for Distinguished Service to the Field this year! See other Computers and Composition awards on their website.) The winners of the GA/Adjunct awards were: Jentery Sayers (Teaching); Jim Ridolfo (Research); and M. Remi Yergeau (Service). Congratulations to each of them. Incidentally, Kairos is honored that these three graduate students have chosen this journal as a publication venue recently (although, to note, that is not a stipulation in the awards criteria).
Our other winners include James Purdy and Joyce Walker for Best Webtext (“Digital Breadcrumbs: Case Studies of Online Research”) and Alex Reid for the John Lovas Academic Weblog Award (“Digital Digs”). We would also like to call readers’ attention to our changed deadlines for the awards, which is February 1 of every year. In order to accommodate the earlier deadline, we have moved the webtext publication criteria for the Best Webtext Award to the calendar year of January – December. (It was March – March.) We hope this change will make it easier to nominate texts since the year of publication is often more important than the month of publication.
Finally, another first (and hopefully not last) for Kairos at C&W was the bowling event at Kingpin’s Bowl and Brew on Saturday. The evening was sponsored in part by Illinois State University’s English Department (thanks Tim and Jim!), with smiling logistical support by Scott Reed of University of Georgia, and oodles of picture-taking by Carrie Lamanna and Vera Dukaj. Thanks to everyone who was able to make it; we had a blast!
In upcoming conference news, I hope everyone can make it to the 2008 Thomas R. Watson Conference at the University of Louisville, October 16–18. The theme is “The New Work of Composing,” and although the full schedule isn’t out as of this writing, I’ve heard through the grapevine that lots of digital writing scholars (aka Kairos readers and authors) will be presenting. Although we’re saddened that DJ Spooky had to cancel his keynote, the featured sessions look amazing and include renowned scholars of interest to our fields including (in just one session): Andrew Feenberg, N. Katherine Hayles, Lev Manovich, and Mitchell Stephens. Wow. Conference Host Debra Journet has once again conceived of a stellar schedule. In addition to the conference, a book is planned. But it’s not just any book; it’s a multimodal, digital book that will be submitted to the new Computers and Composition Digital Press. As a co-editor of this collection (with Debra and Ryan Trauman), I hope you are as excited as I am by the prospect of what form a digital, multimedia book might take! If you are presenting at Watson, please consider submitting to the collection. (Think webtext-sized chapters!)
Finally, we present a call for webtexts for an upcoming special issue in Kairos, guest-edited by Mike Edwards and Alexis Hart. The theme is “dot mil: Rhetoric, Technology, and the Military.” Mike and Alexis both work at military institutions of higher education, and they are Kairos staffers as well, so we know this issue – which will be published May 2010 – will be great! Read the call, linked above, to find out more information.
