1 January 2011
As editor of this journal, I’m very pleased to welcome you to Technoculture‘s first issue!
Volume 1 (2011) has been a long time in the works since Kevin Moberly and I first talked about starting a new journal, and I’ve learned a lot in the process (I’d done a lot of editorial work in the past, but never an entire journal). Though Kevin’s workload at Old Dominion University has made it necessary for him to step down from the editorship of the journal, I am grateful he is still on the editorial board. In spite of truly hectic publishing and teaching loads, all of the editorial board have been a real help as they lent their expertise to this new venture. Their openness to serve has been truly appreciated by the staff as we worked on this issue.
I also want to thank our anonymous reviewers for their hard work, both in reading through abstracts and essays alike and in being both honest yet empathetic in their attention to other writers’ work. As any of our readers know who have served as peer reviewers, it seems a thankless task, especially with essays that take a great deal of work to read yet are not yet ready for publication. It’s never easy saying no.
Those who responded to the first call for essays, from a call issued several years ago now and distributed on a number of listservs and other sites, including the Penn CFP site, also deserve recognition. In spite of our initial slow publication, many of those first potential authors were patient enough and kind enough to resubmit their abstracts upon our revival, and so you see some of their work in this issue–we also have some new works in the mix, abstracts that came to the editorial staff in the past year. As a result, our work flow was a bit complex to manage, but we have a number of essays and creative works ready to go and would like to present them now.
We also have some works that have made it through this year’s editorial peer review process and are in the very last stages of revision/solution of technical problems. However, as editor, and following the advice of my editorial board, I didn’t see any reason for an online journal to wait until all the essays and other works were in place. Instead, we are offering continuous publication from now till the end of the year, issuing a new version number as new articles and essays are published. Once we’ve posted all the essays and other works listed in this table of contents, we’ll send off all of Volume 1 (2011) for abstracting by the various databases and bibliographies that make it possible for other scholars to find and in turn cite the contents of this journal.
And we have exciting news as well: Technoculture has already received over 24 abstracts for both creative works and critical essays for Volume 2 (2012). The papers and other projects currently under consideration look very intriguing and exciting. Those that make it through our peer review process–at this point we’ve merely asked for full length drafts–will be both insightful and enjoyable additions to our next issue. In order to address our work load, we’re also adding new staff and are seeking some more volunteers, notably a creative editor. I’ll introduce our new staff to you in the Editor’s Letter in the next issue.
And finally, I would like to announce the Call for Projects for our third issue, Volume 3 (2013). The third issue will focus especially on lost, dead and old technologies that have been largely or mostly abandoned by their users. We’re calling it the Retro Issue, and we think it will be quite fun.
In any event, please enjoy the essays you see linked below in Volume 1 (2011); in it, and the months to come through the end of this year, we are proud to present critical and creative works by scholars, poets, essayists and artists alike that employ a wide ranging conception of technology in order to illuminate the ways in which the arts and humanities engage us as humans and make our modern and contemporary world in part what it is.
Respectfully yours,
Keith Dorwick,
Editor, Technoculture.
