Show Your Work: 
Investigating Digital Methods in Humanities Research

Call for Papers, Kairos PraxisWiki

While digital methodologies for the production, publication, and circulation of research are increasingly becoming mainstream in English studies, especially among digital rhetoric and humanities practitioners (Grabill & Pigg, 2012; McKee & Devoss, 2007; Nickoson & Sheridan, 2012), such methods are not always rendered transparent in ways that allow us to “show our work.” Efforts to bring more visibility to discussions of research, such as the creation of the Research Exchange Index (REx), demonstrate the opportunities made available by open-access venues that can focus attention on writing research. This special year-long theme of PraxisWiki will focus specifically on digital methodologies informing emerging research, publishing brief webtexts throughout 2016. To that end, we invite submissions that investigate and report on digital research methodologies in fields relating to rhetoric, technology, pedagogy, and/or digital humanities.

In particular, we welcome narrative reviews of specific software or research processes that answer the following questions:

• How do you capture data in audio, video, or virtual-reality formats for research purposes?
• What method have you found successful for preserving or curating digital texts for research purposes?
• How have data visualization tools (e.g. qephi) and methodologies influenced your research process?
• In what ways do methods of text mining and/or textual analysis (macroanalysis, concordance, big data) enter into your research methodologies?
• How do you teach any of these digital research methodologies?
• How has your teaching of research methods changed in light of specific digital research processes?

By opening this call to a spectrum of scholars across digital humanities and computers and writing communities, we hope to challenge disciplinary boundaries to produce an issue that offers rich examinations of new digital research methodologies for a diverse audience.

PraxisWiki is a peer-reviewed section of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. We welcome submissions ranging between 2000-3000 words, and encourage potential authors to include media components illustrating their software or methodological processes. To see examples of our multimodal webtexts, please visit PraxisWiki. To be considered for this year-long theme, submit manuscripts before any of the the following deadlines: Oct. 1, Jan. 1, and Apr. 1 to PraxisWiki Editors Kathryn Perry (perry.kathryn@gmail.com), Kristi McDuffie (kristimcduffie@gmail.com), and Matthew Vetter (vetter@ohio.edu). We also welcome queries and are happy to provide feedback on proposals in advance of the deadline for submissions.