Introduction
Facing the Future of Electronic Publishing

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

Kudos for Kairos

As a graduate student, I had the good fortune to spend some time and share a manhattan with Jim Kinneavy on a couple of occasions, even though he was not a professor at the university I attended. My first CCCC program participation was as chair of one of his talks on kairos, an unparalleled term in our field. He, of course, developed an intricately articulated body of work around the term kairos in classical rhetoric, which, for the crude purposes of this column, I define as having an apt sense of rhetorical timing. When I met him, in the early 1990s, Jim seemed to feel that the connection between computers and rhetoric was obvious if not powerful. Jim's almost taken-for-granted belief in the kind of early digital work I admired gave me confidence that the intersection of computers and writing was a worthwhile place to spend one's time. And so, kudos for Jim's kairos; the timing of a big-time classical rhetorician's support for digital work made a difference for me and many others I know.

Kudos for Byron Hawk's kairos too. Although all of the contributors and other co-editors of this special issue deserve much praise, it's important to document that Byron was the real force behind this multi-ejournal collaborative issue. Between CCCC's recently published Tenure and Promotion Cases for Faculty Who Work With Technology and the President of MLA's recent "Call for Action on Problems in Scholarly Book Publishing," one can sense that the intensity and number of challenges regarding online scholarly publishing are mounting as of the summer of 2002--which is why this joint special issue is so timely. Byron could have more easily published an issue on this topic in his own ejournal, Enculturation, but doing so across established journals in our field was a good idea at this time, because it demonstrates at this critical moment that the contributors' values and ideas have purchase throughout the discipline, not just in isolated places. Byron deserves special kudos not only for his sense of timing, but also for his tenacity. He herded the cats home, and I was almost certainly the worst of the strays. There have been hundreds of special issues in our field, but none that's special like this one, thanks largely to Byron's vision.

Kudos for Steven Krause's kairos. His article, jointly published in the September 2002 CCC/CCC Online and this multi-journal issue, moves the conversation regarding tenure, promotion, and online scholarship along to a new place. He locates evidence that publishing in ejournals has now gained (relative) acceptance as "scholarship" in rhetoric and composition. Then, he wrangles in his article with the demons that surround similar recognition for probably our next-most familiar online scholarly genre: the self-published Web site. Many of us have them. Almost no one knows what to do with them. Krause has sensed where we are stuck, and his perspective on moving us forward is well timed.

Lastly, kudos to Kairos itself, the ejournal that probably brought us here today. Despite the fact that I made some early feeble attempts of my own (see Pullman in this special issue), the founders, editors, and contributors to Kairos (especially in the beginning), deserve special recognition on the occasion of this collaborative issue for their sense of timing as well. They were the first to establish a fully-developed, peer-reviewed ejournal in our field. Just a few years ago, I expect most folks in rhetoric and composition probably assumed that publication in an ejournal lacked credibility and refinement simply because many of us incorrectly associated Internet publication with "self-publication." Few people in the know would make the same mistake today, and we should thank the flagship of ejournals in rhetoric and composition, Kairos, for guiding the way.

I hope readers enjoy this multi-journal special issue. I hope they find here a tantalizing mixture emerging from this unprecedented collaboration. Online scholarly publishing is developing and changing so rapidly at this moment that this special issue will no doubt be charmingly outdated in just a few years. However, it's precisely because this moment is so pivotal that the time for this project is so right--a claim I can make with modesty because the folks I mention above deserve all of the credit.

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