CALL FOR HOSTS: Computers and Writing 2009 **Online**

The CCCC Committee on Computers in Composition and Communication (7Cs) invites all interested individuals and/or institutions to submit proposals to host Computers and Writing (C&W) 2009 Online.

Each year a separate, online conference is held to complement the C&W onsite conference. The 2009 onsite conference is being hosted by UC- Davis, who is interested in co-hosting the online conference with potential organizers. If you would like to propose to co-/host the C&W Online 2009 conference, please read below:

Deadline for nominations: April 5, 2008

The CCCC Committee on Computers in Composition and Communication will honor an innovator in our community at the 2008 Computers and Writing Conference in Athens, GA, and we need your help to identify a person who has pushed our field regarding excellence in teaching, more rigorous scholarship, and deeper levels of service.

If you'll be at CCCC next week, please consider joining members of the CCCC Committee on Computers in Composition and Communication (7Cs) for the annual "5th C" Computers SIG.

We'll discuss future sites for the online and onsite Computers and Writing conferences, talk about 7Cs initiatives such as Open Source Opens Thinking, and solicit action plans for the committee's task force, which all are welcome to join.

Thursday, March 22nd, 6:30-7:30 PM
New York Hilton, Madison Suite, Second Floor

Computers and Writing Online 2007 begins Monday, Feb. 5. Registration is free, and there are both synchronous and asynchronous events to participate in.

Corey Anton, editor-elect for Explorations in Media Ecology is now accepting manuscripts for forthcoming publication.

Explorations in Media Ecology {EME}, the journal of the Media Ecology Association, is an international journal dedicated to extending our understanding of media and media environments. EME welcomes diverse theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of media environments, including (but not limited to) philosophical, aesthetic, literary, historical, psychological, sociological, anthropological, political, economic, and scientific investigations, as well as applied, professional, and pedagogical perspectives. In addition to scholarly articles, EME also publishes essays, commentary, and critical examinations relevant to media ecology as a field of study and practice.

I'm pleased to announce, on behalf of the Pius XII Memorial Library at Saint Louis University, that the Walter J. Ong Collection Web site is now live. The Walter J. Ong Collection website seeks to provide scholars, students, and researchers with information about the Walter J. Ong Manuscript Collection, to host a digital repository for collection materials, and to serve as a comprehensive resource on the life and works of Walter J. Ong, S.J. Our initial digital offerings include a number of unpublished lectures (typescripts saved as .pdf files), including those from his Lincoln Lecture Series in Africa in 1974, an audio recording of a lecture, and a number of photographs of Walter J. Ong and his family.

From the British Academy News, dated 18 September 2006:

A report from the British Academy, launched on 18 September, expresses fears that the copyright system may in important respects be impeding, rather than stimulating, the production of new ideas and new scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.

It is in the nature of creative activity and scholarship that original material builds on what has gone before – ‘if I have seen further, it is because I had stood on the shoulders of giants’ – therefore provisions that are overly protective of the rights of existing ideas may inhibit the development of new ones. [Read more.] Via Archivalia and if:book.

I thought I'd mention that the journal Oral Tradition, published since 1986, has become a free online journal. While articles are distributed as PDF files, the journal allows for the inclusion of digital components. I mention this because, as some of you know, I think the study of oral traditions, especially in regards to issues of media dynamics such as materiality and performance, have much to tell us about the study of digital texts and vise versa. In fact, immediately after browsing the most recent issues of Oral Tradition, I experienced Daniel Anderson's performance of “Where I’m At,” and I was struck by the connections. In the last three issues of OT there are multiple articles on poetry readings as performance; on oral performance and the visual; and on transcribing, reading, and representing oral performance in print and digital forms. As I experienced Dan’s performance of “Where I’m At,” I couldn't help but think of it as poetic performance which is, in fact, part of an emerging oral tradition.

I don't think this has been posted here yet. Jeff Rice, chair of C&W 2007, has created a trailer for next year's conference, which will be hosted by Wayne State U: http://englishweb.clas.wayne.edu/~cw07/trailer_cw2.mov.

The European Commission’s Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) initiative is funding the NEW TIES project, which seeks to create a "computer society" of software agents capable of developing their own culture and language. From the intro of the feature story "Searching for the Soul in the Machine":

If computers could create a society, what kind of world would they make? Thanks to the work of an ambitious project that adds a whole new meaning to the phrase, ‘computer society’, in which millions of software agents will potentially evolve their own culture, we could be about to find out.