On Editing and Contributing to a Field: The Everyday Work of Editors

Why would scholars become editors? Why would teachers? As coeditors of Computers and Composition and several book series that focus on the uses of computers in educational settings, we often hear these questions from knowledgeable colleagues and graduate students. As these individuals know, academic editors often go unpaid and underappreciated for their labor, which frequently keeps them from tending to their own scholarly projects. Further, the job of editing includes much that could be construed as mundane—organizing and hounding busy reviewers, photocopying and filing manuscripts, writing letters, corresponding with publishers over the minutiae of proofs and permissions. Moreover, editors risk being described by fellow scholars and teachers as undiscriminating, willfully obtuse, or enamored of the role of gatekeeper.

When talking to graduate students about these very real perspectives, however, we also take care to describe how the editor's desk can be a powerful intellectual forge—an environment where theory and politics bump up against the pragmatic practices of a profession, where the vision of a discipline's future and potential both shapes and influences its present concerns. Those who occupy such a desk, we contend, can affect a discipline in very productive ways, even though they face an enormous set of challenges—just a few of which include providing a historical tracing of a discipline or field; helping to chart productive directions for its many possible futures; representing, in responsible ways, its breadth and depth, agreements and arguments; and providing a public venue where the voices of the old guard and newcomers alike mingle to create the rich chorus of a field's knowledge.

But how, exactly, does the work of editors come to make a difference in a field, especially one like our own—rhetoric and composition studies—in which teaching and scholarship figure so centrally? With these questions as a backdrop, in the following pages we reflect on the editing we have done for Computers and Composition: An International Journal and for the various book series we have undertaken over the past twenty years. This historical period has seen enormous changes in the ways that written communication—and sometimes teaching—is carried out in our everyday lives, changes that are intimately tied to the introduction of new technologies and new media, changes that continue to shape, and be shaped by, the work of scholars and teachers of rhetoric and composition.

In part, our task in this essay is to step back and consider such transformations—primarily in the context of Computers and Composition and the goals we continue to set for this journal and its associated book series. We also try to assess the intersections between our work as editors and our own scholarly and teaching efforts. Our hope is that these reflections will have value for Pedagogy's readers—demonstrating not only the crucial role editors can play in establishing intellectual spaces for pedagogical discussions but also the productive ways in which editing can link teaching, scholarship, and the concerns of a discipline.

Some History

The connection between a journal and a field may be strongest, perhaps, when both grow up together. Certainly this is true in the case of Computers and Composition, which was founded as a journal in 1983, shortly after the first fully assembled microcomputers began to enter composition classrooms, the time when colleagues interested in these new machines began to think of themselves as a distinct group of professionals.

These professionals were not quite like the usual composition scholars who focused on writing and rhetoric as practices but generally ignored the new electronic environments in which these endeavors were beginning to take place; nor were they the usual computer specialists interested in bits
and bites, architecture and hardware, but less immediately concerned with the communicative practices that took place in the new electronic spaces. Nor were they exactly like technology studies scholars, many of whom were engaged...