Value Added: The Shape of the E-Journal

MLA 2009
Philadelphia, PA

This session is intended to allow editors of e-journals and of special issues of e-journals to present at a new format for the MLA: the digital roundtable. This will bring together people who are working in the field of digital publications to show off the kinds of work that can be done with electronic publications and how the possibilities already inherent in print become just that much easier (and frankly, cheaper) in an e-journal. Graphics, video and audio, in particular, are much easier to deliver in an organic way, by embedding them directly in the text or through the use of links, though of course print journals have supplied such materials by use of ancillary websites and reference by URL or by use of an associated DVD or CD shipped with the journal. At the same time, however, the e-journal can be as respectable a publication through the use of a peer review process, the presence of an editorial board, and stable URLs and archiving to make sure that the journal doesn't simply disappear.

The journals on this panel include a wide range of both audience and technologies, from literary studies to student journals past and present to technical communications and rhetoric.

Presider: Keith Dorwick, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette

Participants, Journals and Special Issues on the program include:

Jon Cotner’s and Andrew Fitch’s double-issue on Interdisciplinary Transcriptions in Interval(le)s, an e-journal based at University of Liège in Belgium
http://www.cipa.ulg.ac.be/intervalles4/contentsinter4.php

Eric Dean Rasmussen
ebr (Electronic Book Review)
http://www.electronicbookreview.com

Joseph Tabbi
ebr (Electronic Book Review)
http://www.electronicbookreview.com

Elizabeth Rosen
Muhlenberg College, Allentown PA
Editor of US Studies Online (the postgraduate journal for the British Association of American Studies) in 2005/2006
http://www.baas.ac.uk/resources/usstudiesonline/default.asp

Past Editor, Moveable Type
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english/graduate/

Current Nonfiction Editor of a New York webzine called Ducts, http://www.ducts.org/content/

Julianne Newmark, Xchanges
New Mexico Tech
http://nmt.edu/~xchanges/

Keith Dorwick
Co-Editor, Technoculture
http://tcjournal.org

Cheryl Ball, Editor, Kairos
http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/

These individuals and their journals represent the wide range of possibilities e-scholarship can offer and we look forward to serving the MLA by showing our work in 2009.

Scholarship

Jon Cotner is a Ph.D. candidate in the SUNY Buffalo Poetics Program. His colleague, Andy Fitch, recently defended his dissertation at the CUNY Graduate Center, and will begin teaching in the University of Wyoming's MFA program next fall. This year they co-edited a double-issue of an e-journal based at University of Liège in Belgium. The journal is called Interval(le)s, and their special issue concerned "interdisciplinary transcriptions." It is available at:

http://www.cipa.ulg.ac.be/intervalles4/contentsinter4.php

The 1,036-page project contains poets, critics, anthropologists, and visual artists (as well as an introduction composed at a beach in Berlin). Contributors include David Antin, Eleanor Antin, Rae Armantrout, Lauren Berlant, Charles Bernstein, Wayne Koestenbaum, Walter Benn Michaels, Eileen Myles, Wendy Steiner, Susan Stewart, Dennis Tedlock, and Lynne Tillman.

Joseph Tabbi is the editor and Eric Dean Rasmussen (now a visiting professor at the University of Bergen in Norway) the associate editor of one of the longest running e-journals. ebr (the Electronic Book Review) which has been publishing for decades now. Joseph Tabbi is the author of Cognitive Fictions (2002) and Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk (Cornell). He has edited and introduced William Gaddis's last fiction and collected non-fiction (Viking/Penguin). His essay on Mark Amerika appeared at the Walker Art Center's phon:e:me site, a 2000 Webby Award nominee. Eric Dean Rasmussen is visiting Assistant Professor of Digital Culture in the Department of Linguistic, Literary, and Aesthetic Studies at the University of Bergen. His research interests include ethics, aesthetics, and ideology in 20th/21st-century literature and the impact of new media technologies on the (digital) humanities. He is currently co-editing a cas-e-book on Lynne Tillman and writing "Senseless Resistances," a study of affect and materiality in multimodal American fiction.

Elizabeth Rosen, a longtime editor of electronic spaces, is Visiting Assistant Professor at Muhlenberg College. She has published a book (Apocalyptic Transformation: Apocalypse and the Postmodern Imagination) at Lexington Press in 2008 and author of many articles. She is currently the nonfiction editor of a New York webzine called Ducts (http://www.ducts.org/content/) for the last three years and was an assistant editor for their fiction division before her current position. She was also the editor of US Studies Online (the postgraduate journal for the British Association of American Studies) in 2005/2006 while she was completing her Ph.d at the University of London, University College, http://www.baas.ac.uk/resources/usstudiesonline/default.asp. While in her final year at the University College, London, she began and edited their postgraduate online journal called Moveable Type, http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english/graduate/MThome.htm, which is still publishing.

Julianne Newmark is the Editor of the online-only journal Xchanges (http://nmt.edu/~xchanges/), which began its life during her graduate school years at Wayne State University; she created and edited the journal there for three years. The journal during that time was an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed American Studies journal that published works by upper-level undergraduate and graduate-student scholars from America and abroad.

Now an assistant professor at New Mexico Tech, she has moved the journal from its original home and has reinvented it, bringing it into line with the mission of NMT and, more specifically, its Technical Communication program. The journal remains listed in the MLA international bibliography, and each issue is indexed. They are committed to developing Xchanges with a focus on interdisciplinary communication studies and scholars are encouraged to use the opportunities a web-only journal affords in terms of visionary and hypertextual publication.

Keith Dorwick, Associate Professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, is a long time user, writer and editor of virtual spaces. He wrote the first web-based hypertextual dissertation and published an article in the first volume (1.3) of Kairos, a journal specializing in rhetoric, technology, and pedagogy, and has articles about technology in a number of journals. He was also on the editorial board for many years. He is, with Kevin Moberly of St. Cloud State University, the co-editor of Technoculture, a new journal that examines the ways in which technology co-exists with and informs society. He served on the Committee on Computers and Composition of the Conference on College Composition and Communication for the last three years and served an earlier term on that committee during his graduate school days.

Cheryl Ball is an Assistant Professor at Illinois State University, and is one of the leading scholars working on contemporary technological studies. She has published many articles and books. In addition, she served as chair of the Committee on Computers and Composition of the Conference on College Composition and Communication for the last three years, and co-chair for the three years before that. She is on the editorial board of Computers and Composition Online as well as Editor of Kairos.

Last Modified: March 31, 2009
For further information, contact Keith Dorwick or Jameela Lares