The least interesting photograph ever taken in Athens, GA.
I should know better than to think I’m capable of blogging a conference. Particularly a small, intimate one like C&W, whose attendees are nothing but like-minded scholars interested in roughly the same things. To do anything but spend the whole conference listening and talking would have been a missed opportunity.
Needless to say, the conference was terrific: the UGA folks, particularly their graduate students, did an outstanding job hosting, keeping people fed, and providing, among many other things, some of the best presentation rooms I’ve seen at a conference. (Having helped to host C&W at Purdue in 2003, I remember all too well how much effort goes into keeping all of the conference attendees happy and organized.).
But beyond the hosting, the non-stop talking and collegiality made this conference what it was. Usually, the week after conferences is nothing but recovery from intellectual overload (if you’re lucky). But this one felt different. I remember being at the CCCC in Chicago one year, when I heard two prominent figures in the rhet/comp field talking on the escalator behind me: “Do you remember,” one of them observed/asked, “when we used to come to this conference and we actually got things done?” The comment always struck me as funny; but now I think I understand what that person was talking about. Coming together to discuss one other’s research, or meet in tiny informal groups and talk about electronic dissertations, up-and-coming digital presses, and even participate in the making of a conference presentation on “What is new media?” (video alone on YouTube)—that’s what makes it feel like something got done. Because something did. And there was no time to blog it.
To read: John Muckelbauer’s The Future of Invention: Rhetoric, Postmodernism, and the Problem of Change (recommended by Kelly P).
Permalink for this note.
UGA’s campus in the early morning.
The morning workshop I conducted with Cheryl, Doug, and Kathie went well, although I’d hoped to do more hands-on work in the section I lead on content-out prototyping.
It was a fun group, and there seemed to be a lot of enthusiasm in the room. Not bad, given that the workshop was pretty technical. Of course, there’s a big difference between getting excited about producing digital scholarship, and actually producing it. Which is exactly why I failed by not curtailing my talking and not getting down to actually trying some of the stuff out.
The Kairos redesign unveiling went well. Really well. The audience, mostly Kairos editors and editorial board members, couldn’t have been any more receptive–even though the unveiling had to start without Doug and Kathie, who have a lot more ethos and cachet with the Kairos crowd than I do.
(I hope to post links to the redesign materials soon, but it still needs some work before I’m comfortable releasing it into the wild).
Tonight we have the Bedford/St. Martin’s-sponsored welcome party. It should be a good time seeing more friends, but I already realize how much I have missed not attending this conference since helping to host it at Purdue back in 2003.
Weathered fragments.
I promised myself that I’d have this new site up by the time the Kairos special manifesto issue went live, in part so that my personal site better reflected some of the broader claims in the piece I wrote for the issue.
The Computers and Writing Conference is in Georgia this week; I’ll be traveling there Wednesday to help lead a workshop with other Kairos editors and staff on producing digital scholarship, and to give a presentation based on a draft article that uses activity theory to frame code-level digital production literacy. To help kick-start this blog, I plan to post regularly from C&W; it’s one conference where there’s never any shortage of internet access.