opening an invitation to remix: interviews with Kairos best webtext winners
>> susan delagrange, david rieder, madeleine sorapure, and M. Remi Yergeau
Invitation to participate
We’d like to see what you make of these interviews—literally.
While each interview is interesting on its own, we think that there are many valuable connections, contrasts, and insights to be found between and among them. With the goal of continuing the conversations that are at the heart of these interviews, we invite you to mix and remix and elicit new conversations. We hope to publish one remix each month for the next year, adding links to this webtext so that the remixes ultimately become part of the completed project.
We’ve provided tags for each interview that can serve as a starting point for a remix; these keyword tags indicate some of the larger issues that emerged across interviews. For instance, many of the interviewees commented on the choices they made as they designed the interface for their webtext. For some, the interface provides a metaphor that conveys a message associated with and underscoring the meanings of the webtext: the human body as book in Anne Wysocki’s “Bookling Monument”; the screen as a canvas or compositional performance space in Dan Anderson’s webtexts. Other authors designed their interface primarily to enable and constrain certain reading practices, as when Erin Anderson describes her choice of horizontal scrolling in “The Olive Project”: “I wanted to force a kind of different interaction, I guess, with the interface.” A remix might bring together these comments on interface design in order to see how some of the most notable and successful webtexts in Kairos have approached this fundamental element of digital scholarship—an element that absolutely distinguishes webtexts from printed scholarship.
As Kairos looks back on its 20th anniversary and looks forward to future publishing in the digital age, these interviews also look back in order to look forward. The interviews return us to the original webtexts—one of the earliest published in 2000—to evoke the contexts and processes and influences that brought them into being. The interviews also look forward to new projects and ongoing scholarly questions associated with multimodal composing. Remixing the interviews provides a way to focus in on key issues as well as to broaden the conversation.
So go ahead: Click on the videos and listen in on the conversations they present. Find what interests you and create a new conversation. Download the videos and remix them using the software of your choice. You might explore tutorials on iMovie or Windows Movie Maker if you're looking for a place to get started. If you have any questions, feel free to contact one of us at the email addresses below:
- Susan Delagrange, delagrange.2@osu.edu
- David Rieder, dmrieder@ncsu.edu
- Madeleine Sorapure, sorapure@writing.ucsb.edu
- M. Remi Yergeau, myergeau@umich.edu
We look forward to your participation in this project!