Part of the reluctance is the impasse of "you first" in terms of acceptance
and submitting articles. Those who accept electronic publications are in a
double bind, willing to publish in them but can't justify it when tenure
committees are apt to discount it. Considering, though, that the oldest
web journals you mention have been around for less than, what? three or
four years, we are making progress. Maybe the notion of competing with
print doesn't get us where we want to go. We keep talking about how
conversational genres like e-mail are different--hypertext too--from print.
Competiton levels those differences when in fact the new media are
valuable precisely because they accomplish new forms of communication.
Acceptance will be gradual, driven perhaps by citation, participation, and
maybe most of all, need for the knowledge produced (and the process of
production) by the new genres.
-Albert
Albert Rouzie
Computer Writing and Research Lab
Division of Rhetoric & Composition/Department of English
University of Texas at Austin
e-mail: rouzie@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu
Associate Editor, the Electronic Journal of Computer Writing, Rhetoric and
Literature (_CWRL_): http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~cwrl/
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http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~rouzie/rouziepage.html
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Soon to be at Ohio University, Dept of English, Athens, OH.