Sunday, December 8

K A I R O S: 7.x
George Pullman writes about putting the JAC online, and some of the issues it raises:

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Although I began the archive using FrontPage 2000, I quickly abandoned it for Macromedia’s DreamWeaver because it makes much cleaner code, can clean up Word to HTML debris, and doesn’t populate the server with crucial but inscrutable files and directories. DreamWeaver also communicated with Linux and Apache more smoothly and more securely than FrontPage could.

The archive, from the first issue in 1980 up until 1997 (the editor has decided that in order to keep the archive from competing with journal sales, a three year gap in publication is necessary) was available online within a few months, but the copies were of varying quality. It has taken 2 years and the labor of 6 different people to clean the archive to its current state, which is perhaps one final proofreading from being a virtual re-presentation of the journal itself.

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But the enterprise has completely revolutionized the training I try to provide rhetoric students with now. The electronic practices I have learned doing JAC Online have filtered into many of the writing classes I teach, and I have created a new graduate class in digital rhetoric (http://rhetcomp.gsu.edu/DIS). The question all these changes raises, is how much technical knowledge of electronic communications practices is relevant to current and future scholarship in the humanities. One can, as most have, simply farm the electronic archive of a journal out to an organization like Project Muse (http://muse.jhu.edu/). But then one loses control of the archive and its destiny rests in the hands of larger interests. Also, whatever additional benefits in terms of the increased circulation or prestige that might accrue to the paper journal as a result of it’s own website are acceded to another organization.
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