Goals of Inventio

Teaching and Inspiring

Inventio provides an opportunity for readers of Kairos to gain insight into new media scholarship by examining the real, lived production and publication experience of a specific webtext. Indeed, webtexts in Inventio are meant to teach and inspire others in our field: from seasoned digital producer/scholars to new, interested scholars who wish to expand into digital production as part of their scholarly activities.

The webtexts presented across all of the different sections of Kairos have, in their own right, likely been a source of inspiration for scholars to structure and design webtexts. Inventio seeks to take this idea of inspiration one step further, by allowing authors to show us their own processes and choices more explicitly. All of us who engage in digital production understand ourselves as learners; it seems appropriate to start demonstrating that process of learning itself as inspirational.

As Joyce Walker put it in her recent "hyper.activity" webtext, "If we can generate some good, thick descriptions of people's reading and composing activities, we will be better equipped to explore digital productions of scholarly ideas" (2006).

Demonstrating Value

A second purpose of Inventio is to allow others outside of our field--including tenure and promotion committees--to see the important intellectual labor behind digital production.

For the past 10 years, Kairos has been publishing innovative texts authored specifically for the Web, providing authors with the opportunity to explore the academic potential of many tools and technologies, from AJAX to wikis. Jim Kalmbach's overview of Kairos' first decade shows the wide range of strategies used by authors of the 231 (!) CoverWeb or Feature webtexts published to that point.

With Inventio, we want to make a case for the value of this enterprise and for the place of new media scholarship in our field. As Cheryl Ball (2004) and others have noted, new media scholarship is often devalued to the extent that it diverges from the conventions of print scholarship. By helping readers understand the meaning-making and production strategies in multimodal, interactive texts, Inventio aims to improve the scholarly profile of these texts.

Writing teachers and researchers, inclined by training and practice to think about production in terms of audience, meaning, and rhetorical purpose, are well qualified to articulate the value of new media scholarship to skeptical colleagues and to those in other fields. We hope that Inventio will serve as an important forum for this discussion.

"I love the direction this is going..."

When an email from an editor begins this way, you know there are revisions in your future. Writing this introduction, we've been guided by Cheryl Ball and Beth Hewett's editorial wisdom and by their careful, insightful reading of drafts. Both Cheryl and Beth have undoubtedly been guided by their sense of Kairos's mission through their interactions with past and present Kairos staff and editorial board members. Invention (and Inventio) is collaboration.

Reconceptualizing Writing

A shift in what we mean by "writing" is clearly underway in our courses, as we ask our increasingly technology-savvy students to conduct online discussions, contribute to wikis and blogs, analyze and compose with visual texts, and/or experiment with video and audio projects.

Our own scholarship, though, is decidedly behind the times. What would scholarly writing look like if it followed Andrea Lunsford's (2006) suggestion that writing be re-envisioned as "epistemic, performative, multivocal, multimodal, and multimediated" (171)? What strategies would we use to compose and read this kind of sophisticated new media scholarship?

We hope that Inventio will stimulate discussion of these questions and expand the paradigms of traditional print scholarship.

Assessing New Media Scholarship

It's fortuitous that Inventio is launching in the same issue of Kairos as "Constructing a Tool for Assessing Scholarly Webtexts." In this webtext, Allison Warner takes on precisely the issue of how online publications are valued in tenure and promotion reviews and by other professional measures. Warner develops and tests a set of questions to ask of online publications that establish both their continuities with and differences from standard scholarly publications in print.