From Digital to Print (Special Issue) -- Textshop Experiments

Kevin Wisniewski Announcement
Subject Fields
Art, Art History & Visual Studies, Composition & Rhetoric, Digital Humanities, Intellectual History, Library and Information Science

At the 2005 annual meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, Gregory L. Ulmer reminded conference-goers of the importance of understanding our relationships to writing and print, the apparatus from which our identities, perspectives, theories and practices emerge.  Over the course of thirty years and eight books, Ulmer has called for us not only to be aware of the emerging apparatus he dubbed “electracy” but also to help invent and shape it.

This issue of Textshop Experiments asks contributors to respond to Ulmer’s call to interrogate print culture (its works, technologies, and operations) and respond to Ulmer’s call to participate in the definition and activities in electracy.  This is a call for scholarship on the history of print, books, literacy, publishing, and policy from the future.  The issue will publish video essays up to 15 minutes in length and accompanying Author Statements (which theoretically frame and contextualize their respective videos) no more than 1000 words.  

Contributors will then be asked to contribute full essays (about 5,000-7,000 words) based on these videos.  These essays will be compiled into a printed anthology.  Topics should specifically address the relationship between print and electracy.  Some possible topics and questions for this issue include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Electracy in the K-12 and university classroom and curriculum
  • Electracy, participatory culture, and politics
  • Electrate love letters to print
  • Celebrations, commemorations, and mourning for print
  • Lessons learned from the failures or oppressive nature of print
  • Visions for the future of electronic publishing, publishers, platforms, and formats
  • Criticism on individual authors, illustrators, creators, editors, and publishers or their work(s)
  • Changes in authorship, readership, the submission/editorial process, consumerism, production
  • Law and public policy, copyright, and censorship,
  • Marketing, promotion, publicity, controlling costs and prices
  • Understanding and shaping the Fifth Estate
  • Analysis of specific platforms/tools, etc. (broadly defined)
  • Electracy and the augmentation and/or obsolescence of print
  • Reflections and forecasts of theory, scholarship, creative writing, and media history

Topics and formats are open, and artists, scholars, and writers alike can address a range of ideas in history, museum and memory studies, composition & rhetoric, literary studies, digital culture, art and graphic design, electronic media, and experimental pedagogy.

Please send your abstract proposal (250-300 words, in English), a short bibliography of 3-5 key works in your video/essay, a list of 3-5 key terms, and a short biography to the issue editors, K. A. Wisniewski and Felix Burgos, at ulmertextshop@gmail.com.

Proposals are due May 1, 2017. Completed videos/submissions for the Textshop issue will be due August 15, 2017; a writing schedule for completed essays for the anthology will be assigned upon the acceptance of the proposals.

Contact Information

K. A. Wisniewski, Managing Editor
Textshop Experiments
ulmertextshop@gmail.com

Contact Email
ulmertextshop@gmail.com