Introduction
Facing the Future of Electronic Publishing

Enculturation, Vol. 4, No. 1, Spring 2002

History

In the spring of 1995, I attended my first Conference on College Composition and Communication; there I met a group of extraordinary people—people passionate about the possibilities for new expression (both new kinds of scholarship and new pedagogical directions)) afforded by computer technologies. That same year, the Alliance for Computers and Writing was formed, and the first issue of Kairos was planned and designed (although it was not published until January of 1996). I consider that year a pivotal turning point, both in my professional life and as the beginning of the struggle to make electronic publication a valid form of scholarship in our discipline.

Kairos was not the first peer-reviewed electronic journal in the humanities (PostModern Culture, delivered via listserv, was founded in 1990; the web-based Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication predates Kairos by just six months), but it was the first peer- reviewed journal to specifically engage new media (hypertext) in a dialectic relationship with the scholarship being presented: submissions to Kairos were required to be in "native" hypertext—that is, they were to use the medium as an integral part of the message, not merely as a vehicle for distributing linear esssays.

Since its inception, Kairos has been criticized both for being too non-traditional and for being too traditional. The journal has always been engaged in a delicate balancing act: we want our authors to have their submissions recognized as valid peer-reviewed scholarship for purposes of tenure and promotion, and we want to make sure that we aren't simply replicating the kind of scholarship that could just as easily exist in a print journal. The tension between these two goals has led to several compromises, including the development of a production cycle that publishes "issues" rather than creating a space that is constantly growing, changing, and evolving over time. In a way, too, Kairos has served as an initial model upon which other groups have based new online journals to varying degrees, in some cases pushing against the compromises we have made.

In This Issue

The two essays in the Archiving/History section of this multi-journal issue each present a different perspective on electronic publishing, representing two very different approaches. In "A brief history and technical overview of the current state of JAC Online, with a few observations about how the Internet is influencing (or failing to influence) scholarship: Or, who says you can’t find JAC Online?" George Pullman discusses the process of making electronic versions of works published in JAC available online, focusing on the electronic archive’s history and technical development. The essay is linear, rather than hypertextual, which is unusual for works published in Kairos; however, it instantiates the practices were put into place for the transitioning of texts from the print version of JAC to the online electronic archive.

Mick Doherty and Mike Salvo, in "Kairos: Past, Present and Future(s)," present a very different kind of work—one that presents a hypertext dialogue between the two authors, representing the kind of work that Kairos traditionallly publishes. When read together, the contrast between these two contributions is striking, and it serves to remind the reader that each approach is appropriate to the purpose of the journal it represents . . . and that each of the journals represented in this issue can provide a different, yet equally valid, vision of electronic publication in the field of composition.

— DE

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