Call for Papers & New Media Texts: Reading (and Writing) New Media
(a collection of essay-texts edited by Jim Kalmbach and Cheryl Ball)

Reading has long been studied in literary theory and pedagogy, in education, and in composition studies, but we have not yet interrogated the act of reading in the context of digital new media texts. Consequently, as teachers of digital literacy, multimodal writing, and web authoring, we often ask students to interact with and create digital, multimodal, and web-based texts without asking them to reflect on what it means to read such texts.

The editors of Reading (and Writing) New Media invite proposals that address questions such as What does it mean to read new media? How have digital spaces changed the activity of reading? How does reading digital texts—including games, instant messages, digital art and music, and other forms— enlarge our conception of what a text is? Is there a digital canon forming, and what are the consequences of such a move? We also recognize that every act of reading is also an act of writing—a construction—and that reading cannot be separated from writing. We ask: What happens when writing morphs into composition or design? What sorts of composing processes inform the creation and reading of new media texts? What teaching possibilities lay at the intersection between reading and composing new media texts? We invite essays and new media texts that reflect broadly on these issues. New media texts will be published in an accompanying CD with print connections (i.e., an author of a new media text can submit an artist’s statement to be published in the book and which would point readers to the CD). The CD will also contain selections from the new media projects discussed in the essays.