Meeting the First Kairos Editors

Transcript: Meeting the First Editors of Kairos

Transcribed with Otter.ai on Tue, Dec 05, 2023 11:19AM • 4:20

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

conference, kairos, met, called, salvo, michael, conversations, moo, hanging, dupont circle, grand hyatt, writing, mud, room, usenet, crump, party, marcy, listserv, hitched

SPEAKERS

Doug Eyman, Cheryl Ball

Doug Eyman  00:05

Every Tuesday night, I was hanging out with all these people at this thing called Tuesday Cafe, which was hosted on a MUD, a MOO (a MUD that's Object Oriented). And that's where the first where I first heard the term technorhetoric, which was coined by Eric Crump. And there was a room within the MOO called the Technorhetoricians Bar and Grill. And so that's, that's where we would usually hang out and just have these conversations about teaching with technology. With all the people who were like, the computer, they were the computers and writing field, people who were really interested in doing this kind of work, and I didn't know them, because I hadn't met them in person yet. I got to know them virtually, which was pretty cool. You know, as I was learning and meeting a lot of different interesting people who had these great ideas.

Doug Eyman  00:55

So when I finished my master's degree, I decided I was going to go to a conference. And you know, this is kind of indicative of where we were at the time, too, is at my institution, they were like, well, you're just a master's student, why would you go to a conference? Right? So, they, I was getting no support from from my institution at the time. So I hitched a ride with somebody else who was going to go to CCCCs, so I went to my first four C's conferences in 1995, in the Grand Hyatt in, in Dupont Circle, here in Washington, DC. And that, that was where it all started for me.

Doug Eyman  01:34

Yeah, so I got to meet a lot of these people in person. Right. I'm like, Oh, you're Scog. She's Sharon Cogdill in real life.

Cheryl Ball  01:40

[interrupts] Sharon Cogdill!

Doug Eyman  01:42

Or marcyb, Marcy Bauman is here, right? Mday, Michael Day. So I started meeting all these people. And I went to this kind of meeting that had been called I can't remember even if I how I found out about it, it might have been through Michael Day. But I was, I was also had met and spent a lot of time hanging out with and having a, you know, really good conversations and starting to build what I, you know, felt was like a, I don't know, we would seem really compatible. Right? So I was spending a lot of time with Michael Salvo, who was at the time a master's student also finishing up. He hadn't yet gone on to Texas Tech for his PhD and hadn't had become part of Kairos yet, but got involved in some of those conversations that would become Kairos at this conference, I think. Although, he can tell, you know, we'd have to ask him. He may have been in touch with some of the folks doing some of that work before I knew about it for sure.

Doug Eyman  02:41

But I remember going to this big room just, you know, chairs had been made in a big circle. So people would talk about like, what are we going to do? How can we leverage our interests and make ourselves an interest group here at CCCCs? And that the group that convened was a fledgling group that they were calling themselves the Alliance for Computers and Writing, ACW. They started a listserv called ACW-L which was actually an extension of a Usenet newsgroup that was originally called Megabyte University, or MBU-L. And it was like my introduction to all these this great community.

Doug Eyman  03:20

So yeah, I met all those people. And some of the people I met were having a party. And the people that were having the party were the people who would be the first editors of Kairos. And so I ended up going to this party. I remember Elizabeth Pass. Amy Hansen. Who else was there? Mike Salvo came with me. Mick Doherty was there. I don't think Jason Teague was there. He tended not to come to our conferences, because he was not a computer, he was not a Writing Studies scholar. Right. He was a technology guy. He was a he was more of a information systems, software development kind of person. And still is. So, so I got to meet those folks. And it was really interesting, and I got excited about the project that they were working on, and I ended up publishing my very first peer-reviewed article, webtext, in issue 1.1 of Kairos.