Logging On

Cheryl Ball, Editor

In this issue

The Topoi section offers another robust collection from Victor Vitanza and Virginia Kuhn, curators of the 2012 MLA panel "MoMLA: From Panel to Gallery" and presented here in edited form as "MoMLA: From Gallery to Webtext." Seven sets of authors are featured in this collection (listed alphabetically here):

  • Sarah Arroyo and Bahareh Alaei's beautiful and enigmatic, "The Dancing Floor," which metaphorically connects chora with digital sharing practices.
  • Geof Carter's punc(h)ty "A Thrilla in ManiLA," which explores and explodes relationships between Muhammed Ali, Joe Frazier, Sylvester Stallone, and Chuck Wepner.
  • Jason Helms' interactive "Vorhandenheit" that asks readers to co-construct its argument through game-like play.
  • Justin Hodgson's five-part "Walking in the (Electra)City: A Fevered and Frivolous Spectacle," which summons the trope of flaneur to help us examine the role of digital archives and information.
  • Virginia Kuhn's kinetic typography webtext "Metonymy" on the eponymous topic.
  • bonnie kyburz's installation "screencube," which includes a documentary exploring affect in emergent performance spaces/desires.
  • Robert Leston's "Anomalous Composition: A Horror in Video" draws on Delueze and Guattari's becoming-animal to provoke invention.

These webtexts, like the previous collection, form a corpus large enough to be called book- or exhibit-length in its intellectual scope. Together, there exists well over an hour of filmic viewing and interaction and, like excellent edited collections and exhibits, the MoMLA gallery can be taken in together or piecemeal over several sittings, with each set of authors' webtexts standing alone or appreciated as a whole. The curators speak best to the collection's purpose and trajectory in their introduction. I'll add that from an editorial perspective, I find that one of the challenges of such a digital-media collection, which draws heavily on remix methods, is finding a set of citation styles appropriate to the remixed clips (e.g., images, songs, footage) in ways that make sense to readers and that establish a line of provenance suitable to the (long list of) authors. I think we've done a fine enough job with that task in this piece, and much thanks to the authors who worked with me. So, in return, I ask readers to do the same due diligence with their citation practices of this piece, citing the individual webtexts within this digital collection as you would a chapter within an edited collection.

The Praxis section branches out into our Kairos wiki once again, to publish "Virtual Teaming: Faculty Collaboration in Online Spaces" by Jennifer Almjeld, Sergey Rybas, and Natalia Rybas. This wiki-webtext discusses the authors' decisions to create a cross-institutional, collaborative, business-writing assignment for students. Both students and faculty had to learn to navigate the wiki space to complete this Virtual Teams project.

In PraxisWiki, authors Derek Mueller, Jana Rosinski, Chelsea Lonsdale, Becky Morrison, and Adam Nannini present a wiki version of their digital pedagogy poster from CCCC 2012. This wiki poster, "Lessons in Generative Design, Publishing, and Circulation: What EM-Journal's First Year Has Taught Us," includes QR codes from the original, print poster and links that will take readers to audio-file descriptions of the authors discussing how they started a new journal for writing studies at Eastern Michigan University.

In Disputatio, Timothy Briggs presents "Writing a Professional Life on Facebook," a ten-minute video analysis and reflection of how his engagement with Facebook impacted his multimodal composition pedagogy.

The Interviews section features Tim Amidon's "Spotlight on Intellectual Property," a series of interviews with members of the CCCC's intellectual property caucus.

We are also pleased to showcase the CCCC 2012 Reviews, edited by Christopher Dean, which features 42 session and event reviews from the 2012 Conference on College Composition and Communication in St. Louis, MO. Thank you to all the reviewers who continue to volunteer this service to the community.

Coming soon

This May, we will bring you a special issue, guest-edited by Karen Lunsford, on Multimodal Research Within/Across/Without Borders. This work is an outgrowth of Karen's international connections at the Writing Research Across Borders conference and her long-time research interests in scholarly communication. It's going to be another stunning special issue, to be published May 15.

Thank yous

Two staff members, Jamie Bono (Praxis Assistant Editor) and Allison Carr (PraxisWiki Assistant Editor), leave us to pursue new endeavors in their academic lives. We wish them the very best and look forward to a new group of assistant editors who we are in the midst of interviewing.