Welcome

<1> Welcome to CWRL-- an electronic journal devoted to the intersections of computers, writing, rhetoric, and literature. We meant to publish this first issue back in May, but, ironically, we were caught off-guard by the pace of technological change, or rather by our desire to keep pace with that change. Over the last year the World Wide Web has exploded and new graphically-oriented navigation browsers have drastically altered the ways in which readers perceive the on-line world. Instead of going with our original plans-- to gather papers presented at the First Annual Spring Colloquium of the Computer Writing and Research Lab in April 1994 and either e-mail them to subscribers or put them on a Gopher server--we decided instead to make CWRL a Web journal.

<2> Putting it on the Web solved certain problems and raised others. It solved the distribution problem rather neatly, eliminating the bother of maintaining a subscription list and the risk of overwhelming the electronic inboxes of readers with limited diskspace. Publication on the Web would more or less ensure that no one would access CWRL who didn't actually want to look at it.

<3> But Web publication poses other problems that aren't so neatly solved. The Association of Research Libraries reports that there were more than 440 electronic scholarly journals as of July 1994. I do not know how many of these were Web-based, nor do I know how many of them pertained to rhetoric or literary studies. The very existence of a Web-based journal seems somehow contradictory, since the Web makes self-publication such a simple matter (for those with access, that is). Why would authors "submit" their work to us when they could publish it themselves (indeed, two of our current contributors, Daniel Anderson and Susan Warshauer, have both made earlier versions of their work available on the Web)? and why would anyone choose to access our journal?

<4> Discussing these issues in an editorial meeting early in the semester, we concluded that an e-journal is an information filter. Our role as editors is to identify "essays" that we believe will be of interest to a number of readers outside our immediate circle of acquaintance, and to make them available to anyone who wants to read them and has the means to do so. We undertake to say that they are among the things on the Web worth reading, that they make a contribution to the evolving discourse about the ways computers intersect with our conceptions of writing, reading, rhetoric, and literature.

CWRL Table of Contents