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 OPEN-ACCESS,
MULTIMODALITY,
AND WRITING
CENTER STUDIES

Elisabeth H. Buck
Open-Access, Multimodality,
and Writing Center Studies
 Elisabeth H. Buck

Open-Access,
Multimodality, and
Writing Center Studies
Elisabeth H. Buck
Writing and Reading Center
University of Massachusetts
Dartmouth, Massachusetts, USA

ISBN 978-3-319-69504-4    ISBN 978-3-319-69505-1 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69505-1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017955716

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Open Access Chapter 5 is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution
4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). For further
details see license information in the chapter.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher
nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material
contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher
remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and i­nstitutional
affiliations.

Cover illustration: Détail de la Tour Eiffel © nemesis2207/Fotolia.co.uk

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 For Martin, Eleanor, Jean, and Ted,
who (in various and important ways) bolstered
my journey into higher education
And for Clara, who is just starting hers
 Acknowledgments

On a spring day in 2008, I received an email that changed my life. An

anonymous professor had recommended that I apply to work as a tutor in
the Learning Resource Center and, as goes the cliché, this book represents
the culmination of that simple missive. My sincere thanks then goes to
Ann Stenglein, Maureen McBride, Bill Macauley, and Jackie Grutsch
McKinney for giving me the opportunity to explore this path. I thank you
all for your guidance, support, and embodiment of what it means to be a
successful writing center practitioner.
Thanks to all those in Muncie and Massachusetts who supported me
throughout this process, especially Nicki Baker, Kat Greene, Morgan
Gross, Kelsie Walker, Alison Klein, and Katie DeLuca. Particular thanks
too to Rory Lee and Paul Gestwicki for their invaluable comments on
early versions of this project. And Jennifer Grouling—you have been my
cheerleader since day one. Thank you for everything.
Much appreciation is due to Shaun Vigil and the editorial team at
Palgrave for their enthusiasm about and commitment to this project, as
well as to the two reviewers whose comments demonstrated the truly rare
combination of astuteness, utility, and kindness. Everything about this
process has run counter to the standard angst-ridden narratives of aca-
demic publication (many of which I chronicle here!) and for that I feel
both incredibly fortunate and enormously grateful. On this note, signifi-
cant appreciation too is due to the administrator-scholars who shared their
perspectives with me for Chap. 5. This work benefits immeasurably from
their honesty and insights.

vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

And, finally, thank you to my family, especially my exceptionally

s­ upportive in-laws (John, Judy, Kate, Sara, and Bailey), my sister, and my
parents, Lisa, Bob, and Vikki. You have all done so much to help me make
it to this point. And, to Tom, thanks always for being my adventure and
for keeping me in socks.
 Contents

1 Introduction   1

2 Writing Scholars on the Status of Academic

Publications: Implications for Digital Future(s)  11

3 Digital Histories of Writing Lab Newsletter,

Writing Center Journal, and Praxis: A Writing
Center Journal  27

4 Collaborative Spaces in Online Environments:

Writing Center Journals as Digital Artifacts  73

5 Conversations with Writing Center Scholars

on the Status of Publication in the
Twenty-First Century  93

6 Conclusion: Writing Center Scholarship

as Case Study 111

ix
x Contents

Appendix 1  123

Appendix 2  131

Works Cited 133

Index 145
 List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Top ten journals subscribed to most frequently 16

Fig. 2.2 Top ten journals referred to most frequently 17
Fig. 2.3 Factors influencing decision to submit to a particular journal 19
Fig. 2.4 Factors inhibiting decision to submit to a particular journal 20
Fig. 3.1 Overall digital representation in Writing Lab Newsletter43
Fig. 3.2 Overall digital representation in Writing Center Journal51
Fig. 3.3 Overall digital representation in Praxis: A Writing
Center Journal57
Fig. 3.4 Overall digital representation in all journals 2003–2015 62
Fig. 4.1 Analysis of @WLNewsletter 80
Fig. 4.2 Analysis of @ampersandWCJ 84
Fig. 4.3 Analysis of @PraxisUWC 88

xi
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract This chapter describes questions that are central to the work of
the academy, yet heretofore largely undiscussed: how do scholars perceive
the current status of academic publishing, and in what ways do these per-
ceptions affect what is produced and “counts” as academic writing? While,
in the past 30 years, there have been increasing venues for and institutional
acceptance of open-access and multimodal forms of scholarship, to say
that these emerging modes are on par with traditional print publications
elides multiple strata of consciousness and history. As such, the evolution
of academic publication should be of concern to writers in all academic
disciplines. Writing center studies ultimately functions as a microcosm of
many of the larger issues at play in the contemporary academic publishing
landscape.

Keywords Open-access • Multimodality • Writing center studies • Empirical

research • Academic publishing

Consider the following scenarios:

You are an undergraduate student writing a research paper. You want to

locate scholarly research pertaining to your chosen topic, so you start by doing a
search on your college’s library webpage. You find an article that seems perfect,
but you’re having trouble figuring out how to access it. Your library’s database

© The Author(s) 2018 1

E.H. Buck, Open-Access, Multimodality, and Writing Center Studies,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69505-1_1
2 E.H. BUCK

lists the title, but indicates that the institution does not subscribe to the full text
version of the journal. You spend five minutes clicking all the links on the page,
hoping that the article might manifest. Frustrated, you decide to just Google
your topic and hope for the best.
You are a graduate student. You have been told that publishing in a peer-­
reviewed edited collection will significantly improve your chances of securing a
tenure-track job. You submit to a call-for-papers because the subject area
matches your research interests. The editors publish your research as a chapter in
the collection, but you learn that the full text costs $180. The publisher provides
no complementary print copies to contributors. You cannot afford to purchase
your own research.
You are an early-career scholar. Your work has just been accepted to an innova-
tive refereed journal that publishes research as digital, hypermediated webtexts.
Although you feel confident with the text-based elements of your work, you also
must use hypertext markup language (HTML) and cascading style sheets
(CSS) to code your webtext. You give it your best shot (this is your first time try-
ing something like this), but your peer reviewers are not enthusiastic about your
design. You have reached the limits of your coding abilities. You wonder whether
it might be easier to pull your piece and submit it instead to a more traditional
publication. You just need to have this research published in order to advance
your career.
You are the editor of a well-established journal. You think that it is time that
your publication joins the 21st century and determines new ways to interact
with readers. So, you create social media accounts, but you are unsure exactly
what tone you want to strike. Should you try to be funny? Who should you inter-
act with? You realize too that, if you want to share journal content on these
accounts, it would be helpful to publish some articles as open-access texts. You
recognize that there are significant time and monetary costs associated with
open-access. You also worry how your readership will perceive these changes—
whether they will begin to think of your publication as less rigorous if you begin
to use social media and publish open-access articles, even if you alter nothing
about your peer review process or acceptance rate.

If you see yourself in any of these stories, this book is for you.
These situations represent aspects of the contemporary academic pub-
lishing landscape. Researchers at all levels hunt for the most germane
scholarship. Many graduate students and current faculty must publish in
order to obtain or keep an academic position. A healthy publication record
becomes especially important given the tenuous status of employment in
higher education. For every attempt at publishing innovation, there are
 INTRODUCTION 3

attendant risks or obstacles. Publishing is a significant investment for all

parties involved, from authors to editors, peer reviewers to students. In
short, to participate in academic publishing, as reader, scholar, or distribu-
tor, means engaging in a complex ecology of conscious and unconscious
choices on a near-daily basis.
The questions that motivate this book are thus central to the work of
the academy, yet heretofore largely undiscussed: how do researchers per-
ceive the current status of academic publishing, and in what ways do these
perceptions affect what is produced and “counts” as academic writing?
Gail Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe noted in 2001 that “the new electronic
wor(l)ds of writing and publishing can be glimpsed, but not yet fully
examined; contemplated, but not yet comprehended” (187). In the nearly
two decades since Hawisher and Selfe’s piece, there have been increasing
venues for and institutional acceptance of open-access and multimodal
forms of scholarship. To say, however, that these emerging modes are on
par with traditional print publications elides multiple strata of conscious-
ness and history.
This is where the third element of this book’s title—specifically, writing
center studies—comes into play. Although, according to Elizabeth
Bouquet (1999), citing Lerner and Gere, the concept of an institutional
writing center likely has its origins in the late 19th century ideology of
“conference practice” and the “extracurriculum of composition,” writing
center studies as an academic discipline only began to constellate in the
late 1970s/early 1980s (466). This is when WLN: A Journal of Writing
Center Scholarship (formerly Writing Lab Newsletter), founded in 1976,
and The Writing Center Journal, established in 1980, began to dissemi-
nate academic conversations pertaining to the work of writing centers.
A third publication, Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, began to publish
scholarship on writing center studies in 2003. WLN, Writing Center
Journal, and Praxis exist across a spectrum of digital and print representa-
tion. WLN is primarily a print-based journal, but the publication makes its
entire archives—except for the most recent issue—freely accessible to indi-
viduals on its website. Writing Center Journal is the most prestigious
forum for writing center-related scholarship, and it only publishes in print
format, although its archives are available through some databases and
online resources. Praxis, on the other hand, is a native digital, open-access
journal. It does not publish multimodal webtexts (i.e., that would include
images, audio, video, etc.), but instead distributes articles as PDFs and
simple HTML pages.
4 E.H. BUCK

In some ways, these established publications exist in tension with two

new journals within writing center studies, The Peer Review—a journal
launched in October 2015 that, according to its website, is a “fully online,
open-access, multimodal, and multilingual journal for the promotion of
scholarship by graduate, undergraduate, and high school practitioners and
their collaborators”—and Tutors: A Site for Multiliteracies About Tutoring,
which launched in 2014 and also showcases digital, multimodal work. The
emergence of these two highly hypermediated publications within the past
three years thus seems to suggest an important shift within the sub-­
discipline of writing center studies—a transition that increasingly interacts
with native digital modes of distribution. Writing Lab Newsletter, Writing
Center Journal, and Praxis also, however, sustain a variety of other media,
including blogs, research databases, and social networking accounts. These
are all supplementary tools enabled by digital technologies that exist apart
from the content of the journal itself, but work to shape a journal’s overall
ethos. As a discipline then, writing center studies is small enough to be
assessed comprehensively, but large enough to stand as emblematic of the
kinds of queries central to contemporary academic publishing, especially
those that have taken place in the past 40 years.
Writing center studies also maintains a unique exigency regarding the
relationship between digitality and accessibility. It could be argued that the
value of openness is central to writing center ideology. Stephen North’s
(1984) “The Idea of a Writing Center” is a foundational writing center text
that, according to Lerner (2014), “appears in nearly every third article’s
[published in Writing Center Journal] list of works cited” (68). North’s
oft-cited piece might therefore demonstrate one basis for this core belief.
In his conclusion, North waxes nostalgic on the origin of writing centers,
which he locates within an Athenian marketplace, where “a tutor called
Socrates set up the same kind of shop: open to all comers, no fees charged,
offering, on whatever subject a visitor might propose, a continuous dialec-
tic that is, finally, its own end” (445). More recently, the 2016 National
Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing, one of the two major North
American conferences on writing center studies, was held at the University
of Puget Sound and had as its theme “It’s For Everyone: The Inclusive
Writing Center.” Its call-for-papers asked participants to, “[explore] the
question of how we can more effectively serve all students, particularly
those who may be otherwise marginalized by the academy.” Even Nancy
Grimm’s (1999) influential text Good Intentions: Writing Center Work for
Postmodern Times—a work critical of standard approaches to writing center
 INTRODUCTION 5

labor—still advocates an embedded openness toward multiple forms of

literacy as central to the center’s purpose. She explains, “Writing centers
cannot resolve the national confusion about literacy, but I believe that over
time they can contribute to a deeper understanding of literacy and to more
democratic approaches to literacy education” (xiii). Any barriers to demo-
cratic access could therefore be viewed as contradicting this central princi-
ple of writing center work. For those researchers and tutors who look to
scholarship to guide their own practices, the extent to which the digital
enables—or possibly complicates—accessibility is therefore an important
consideration within writing center studies specifically. Significant too is the
fact that scholarship about the work of writing centers can by its very nature
illustrate the trajectory of conversations about writing across the curricu-
lum and the status of writing within a university setting.
In some important ways then, writing center studies, like many disci-
plines, seeks to validate emerging modes of scholarship. More than just
reaffirming the conventional wisdom about it—that such a shift is happen-
ing and we do not always know how to pinpoint these changes—I argue
in this work that the labor of legitimizing emerging digital scholarship is a
responsibility to be shared by many stakeholders, from journals, to faculty
and administrators making tenure decisions, to the scholars themselves. As
much a comprehensive reading of the state of the field, I suggest that
scholars in all disciplines, compositionists, and writing center practitioners
should work to understand the nuances of academic publishing, as they
manifest in the interconnected histories of a publication, attempts at out-
reach, and scholars’ perceptions. In this large-scale, multifaceted assess-
ment of writing center studies, I provide a focused and critical lens for
gaining insight into factors that influence the production of scholarship in
toto. I seek then in Open-Access, Multimodality, and Writing Center Studies
to use the history, broadly conceived, of one discipline—writing center
studies—to reveal significant implications for the relationship between the
old and new guards of academic publishing.

Overview of Open-Access, Multimodality,

and Writing Center Studies

Given this implicit, introductory call for increasing open-access publica-

tion venues, let me first address the obvious: this book is not digital and/
or wholly open-access. As I will illustrate, however, merely making a text
open-access is not a panacea and, in choosing only to distribute research
6 E.H. BUCK

through one format, authors risk alienating traditionalists. To put this

point more directly, if paradoxically: in order to reach those individuals
who might benefit most from the arguments presented here, it is necessary
to make this text exist in as many forms as logistically possible, including
print. Although many other recent works discuss the efficacy of open-­
access and/or multimodal scholarly publishing,1 very little has incorpo-
rated any empirical analysis on this topic or provided a highly specific lens
for thinking about these concerns. In some ways then, this book takes as
its starting point Gary Hall’s 2008 monograph—the title of which,
Digitize this Book! The Politics of New Media or Why We Need Open Access
Now, winks self-consciously at the irony of producing an argument about
e-publishing within a print medium. Hall discusses how comparatively
small readerships, more restricted academic presses, and the high cost/
mark-up of print texts all contribute to an increasingly high-pressure cir-
cumstance for academics whose job security depends on their production
of a book (48). And so, too, the production of this book depends on the
confluence of several factors, one of which is institutional publication
requirements for tenure-track faculty.
My own experiences as an academic researcher also shape this inquiry.
I found as a graduate student that I was unable to afford a book in which
I had contributed a chapter. Excited as I was to have my research accepted,
it never occurred to me to ask questions about the publisher or the extent
to which my research would be accessible. And how could I know which
questions to ask? No conversation about the intricacies of publishing
accompanied the tacit you must publish as much as you can right now in
order to increase your chances of getting a job. I have also contributed a
scholarly webtext to a digital journal (see Buck 2015) and struggled with
matching my entirely self-taught HTML coding abilities with the expec-
tations of the journal. My excellent peer reviewers for this webtext pushed
me to think about how I could take much more advantage of the affor-
dances of digital publishing, including incorporating audio clips from my
interviewees, a more purposeful design of my navigational menu, and
additional considerations for readers who enter the text non-linearly (i.e.,
not from the main launch page). Let me be forthcoming about this: this
process was difficult and nothing in my academic training had theretofore
prepared me for the technical acumen and innovation required by this jour-
nal. Publishing this piece represented a two-year-long learning process where
I had to attenuate my digital visions with the very clear, very firm limita-
tions of my digital proficiencies. As a writing center researcher too, I have
 INTRODUCTION 7

s­ ubmitted to, published in, and/or referred frequently to the ­publications

that I discuss throughout this work. While I strive for objectivity, as with
any empirical undertaking, the ways that I describe the results will inevi-
tably be shaped by these experiences, just as the various tacit and explicit
requirements of the genre of academic publishing tacitly and explicitly
determine the ultimate character of this book.
Open-Access, Multimodality, and Writing Center Studies includes data
collected in spring 2015 through spring 2016. The text also discusses
writing shaped through various technologies. To use then a common say-
ing, a portion of what is represented here signifies an attempt to track a
moving target: journals publish new articles, they update their websites,
contributors write new blogs, and someone (editorial assistants? graduate
students?) posts on social media. The data often changes before it can be
committed to a page. As such, this book is a snapshot of a discipline as it
existed at a particular moment in time. It is of course impossible to predict
the future of the publications I reference here. Important instead is what
they can demonstrate about how we have come to this point and what we
can learn about our shared (scholarly) futures through them. When we
have perhaps evolved to the point of implanted cranial microcomputers
that allow us to read and compose scholarship without ever lifting a finger,
this book will function as a relic of the ways that things were. As the sec-
ond chapter in this text illustrates, however, there are still important
insights that can be gleaned through a comprehensive assessment of his-
tory, especially regarding the ways that publications make sense of techno-
logical innovations.
This book consequently represents an attempt to understand the
nuances of academic publishing via a unique method and methodology—
it includes historiographic, quantitative, and qualitative analysis, in order
to capture the complex, imbricated ways that digitality manifests both
within the content of the writing center journals and as related to how the
journals themselves function as signifiers of writing center studies’ visibil-
ity and bearers of various social and professional relations. A thorough
assessment of all these data points is necessary to paint a fuller, more pro-
ductive picture of the issues at play in this larger conversation—specifically,
the digital pluralities of writing center scholarship.
Each chapter can be read as a “mini-study” with its own methods,
methodology, and attendant research questions. There are, however, five
inquiries that unify the cohesive work.
8 E.H. BUCK

• How do scholars working in writing studies (and, more specifically,

writing center studies) conceptualize and negotiate the current pub-
lishing landscape?
• How do writing center journals establish ethos through their digital
engagement and content?
• How do a journal’s affiliated media (e.g., social media accounts,
blogs, etc.) support and reflect the content and overall intent of the
journals? To what extent do these digital tools work to promote col-
laboration and outreach?
• What is the current state of writing center studies, especially as exem-
plified in the tension(s) between print and digital modes of
distribution?
• What does the digital suggest for the future of writing center studies,
and, by extension, all academic publications?

The overall structure of this book can be articulated through metaphor.

The microscope zooms out first, and then gradually narrows its focus. In
Chap. 2, I begin with a broad portrait of the ways in which contemporary
scholars perceive and interact with journals in writing studies. By reading
the results of a survey distributed to the WPA-L, Wcenter, WAC-L, and
gWPA-L professional listservs that was ultimately taken by 232 individu-
als, I contextualize some of the perceptions about print versus digital pub-
lishing that emerge throughout the project. I ask questions about which
journals scholars refer to frequently in their own research practices, which
journals they have institutional access to, and more explicit questions
about perception, including what factors most influence decisions to sub-
mit to particular journals (e.g., prestige, open-access). Offering then
important insights not just into views of writing center publications—but
rather the discipline of writing studies as a whole—this chapter impor-
tantly situates “where we are” with regard to what matters to scholars
when they interact with academic texts.
Following this broad-based inquiry, Chap. 3 narrows the focus specifi-
cally on Writing Lab Newsletter, Writing Center Journal, and Praxis. This
chapter functions as an historiographic analysis of the treatment of com-
puters and computer technologies within writing center publications. In
reading every article within these publications that focused on these tech-
nologies, I think first about what can be gleaned from comprehensive
historical work on a specific topic, especially as a means to compare and
contrast the trajectories of two publications (Writing Lab Newsletter and
Writing Center Journal) that began producing content at roughly the
 INTRODUCTION 9

same time. Chapter 3 therefore describes the way that these “digital histo-
ries” exist both parallel to and apart from each other and articulates the
overall importance of these histories to the future of writing center stud-
ies. In this chapter, I also document the shifting accessibility of these mate-
rials, including the overall navigability and availability of each journal’s
archives from within my position as an institutional researcher.
In Chap. 4, I focus not on the peer-reviewed content of Writing Lab
Newsletter, Writing Center Journal, and Praxis, but on the supplementary
digital tools used and/or developed by these journals. These materials
include each journal’s websites and Twitter accounts, as well as affiliated
blogs, research tools, and attempts at building digital writing center com-
munities. I consider the ways that these affordances—that exist separately
from the journal’s refereed content—work to shape a publication’s larger
identity, thereby interrogating whether the digital redefines (or even
“distracts” from) a journal’s purpose.
In the final chapter of this project, I synthesize interviews with seven
individuals working prominently within the discipline of writing center
studies. I discuss how these scholars conceptualize and define their experi-
ences with Writing Lab Newsletter, Writing Center Journal, and/or
Praxis, and also reveal their ways of describing the broader significance of
digital and open-access scholarship. This chapter thus brings the focus
back to a wider perspective, demonstrating what these scholars’ insights
reveal to be lasting barriers to scholarly accessibility.
In sum, anyone who has published in an academic journal or who hopes
to publish in such a journal in the future can benefit from the lessons
offered by this comprehensive view of writing center studies. Writing
­center practitioners, in particular, might see in this book a lens through
which we can understand the past, present, and, possibly, the future of our
discipline. It is my hope too that scholars in other fields might replicate the
methods I describe here vis-à-vis their own discipline’s journals in order to
explore this key question: how does a journal’s overall relationship to
open-access and/or multimodality dictate what is (or what can be) pro-
duced in and as scholarship? Technological affordances matter, but only
insofar as they are legible and interpreted positively by a wide range of
readers, scholars, institutions, and the profession, more abstractly. Why an
article or journal takes a particular form—whether that form is print or
digital, closed or open-access, or somewhere in between—is a complicated
question, but it is one that writing center studies, for the reasons outlined
previously, is particularly positioned to engage.
10 E.H. BUCK

Note
1. For example, Peter Suber’s 2012 text for the MIT Press Essential Knowledge
Series Open Access; Martin Paul Eve’s 2014 work Open Access and the
Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future; George Pullman’s 2003
book chapter, “Digital Archives and the Future of Scholarly Publishing;”
and Purdy and Walker’s 2010 Profession piece “Valuing Digital Scholarship:
Exploring the Changing Realities of Intellectual Work,” just to name a few.

Works Cited
Bouquet, Elizabeth. 1999. ‘Our Little Secret’: A History of Writing Centers, Pre-­
to-­Post Open Admissions. College Composition and Communication 50 (3):
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A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy 19 (3). http://technorhetoric.
net/19.3/praxis/buck/. Accessed 30 Mar 2016.
Grimm, Nancy. 1999. Good Intentions: Writing Center Work for Postmodern Times.
Portsmouth: Heinemann.
Hall, Gary. 2008. Digitize This Book!: The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need
Open Access Now. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press.
Hawisher, Gail E., and Cynthia L. Selfe. 2001. Dispatches from the Middlewor(l)ds
of Computers and Composition: Experimenting with Writing and Visualizing
the Future. In New Worlds, New Words: Exploring Pathways for Writing About
and in Electronic Environments, ed. John F. Barber and Dene Grigar, 185–209.
Cresskill: Hampton Press.
Lerner, Neal. 2014. The Unpromising Present of Writing Center Studies: Author
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Center Journal 34 (1): 67–102.
North, Stephen. 1984. The Idea of a Writing Center. College English 46 (5):
433–446.
Pullman, George. 2003. Digital Archives and the Future of Scholarly Publishing.
In Digital Publishing F5 Refreshed, ed. Kate Agena, Karl Stolley, Rita Wu,
Christopher Eklund, et al., 47–61. Anderson, : Parlor Press.
Purdy, James P., and Joyce R. Walker. 2010. Valuing Digital Scholarship: Exploring
the Changing Realities of Intellectual Work. Profession: 177–195.
Suber, Peter. 2012. Open Access. Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press.
 CHAPTER 2

Writing Scholars on the Status

of Academic Publications: Implications
for Digital Future(s)

Abstract This chapter articulates the results from an international survey

distributed to the Writing Program Administration listserv (WPA-L),
Writing Center listserv (Wcenter), Writing Across the Curriculum listserv
(WAC-L), and Graduate Writing Program Administration listserv (gWPA-L)
that was ultimately taken by 232 writing scholars. It contextualizes some
of the perceptions about print versus digital publishing that emerge
throughout the book. The results of the survey indicate, for example, that
although institutions increasingly value digital publications for the pur-
poses of tenure and promotion, scholars are still hesitant to refer and
submit to digital publications with the same frequency as traditional pub-
lications that primarily produce print copies of articles.

Keywords Survey • Print journals • Open-access • Digital journals • Tenure

requirements

For the majority of present-day researchers, questions about and in the

digital increasingly permeate academic work. With the variety of publica-
tion options enabled by new media technologies—ranging from the digi-
tal delivery of a print journal to open-access online publications and
HTML-coded webtexts—consciously or unconsciously, these modes of
distribution will dictate how and where scholars produce their work, as
well as who is able to read and engage with this scholarship. This is a

© The Author(s) 2018 11

E.H. Buck, Open-Access, Multimodality, and Writing Center Studies,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69505-1_2
12 E.H. BUCK

situation not confined only to individuals working in writing studies, but

it also factors significantly within the larger space of academe. On March
2, 2015, for example, Inside Higher Education featured an article describ-
ing how Canada’s three largest funding agencies will now require, “all
peer-­reviewed publicly funded research be made available for free online
within 12 months of publication” (Straumsheim). Additionally, all
University of California (UC) schools, as of October 28, 2015, authorized
their employees to publish their work via the UC system’s open-access
forum in conjunction with scholarly journals; the goal of this policy is
to “[enable] the university system and associated national labs to pro-
vide unprecedented access to scholarly research.” (“Groundbreaking
University of California Policy Extends Free Access to All Scholarly
Articles Written by UC Employees”). The idea behind this digital distri-
bution is that online status automatically equates to more accessibility
and availability of information. While this is true to some extent, and
online delivery (especially freely available content) eliminates many
institutional barriers, thinking only about these implications of digital
publishing neglects important corollaries to the conversation, particularly
when online publication of scholarship is not yet a universal mandate.
Some of these other concerns include how institutions perceive digital
scholarship for tenure and promotion purposes, the current ability of
researchers to access print-only journals, as well as the journals and research
procedures (digitally-based or otherwise) that individuals engage with.
What is therefore missing from the current discussion are the perspectives
of those who actually interact with these journals: those who read, research,
and seek to contribute within this increasingly complicated publication
spectrum.
In this chapter, I discuss the results of an international survey distrib-
uted to individuals with self-proclaimed expertise in writing studies. I
address important questions about access, institutional affiliation, and the
current level of support for digitally produced scholarship, thus situating
and contextualizing the larger focus of this project. The survey takes on
not just the question of the usability of these journals, but also their rela-
tionship to traditional print publications. Instead of focusing on journals
only within writing center studies (e.g., Writing Lab Newsletter, Praxis,
and Writing Center Journal), however, this chapter broadens the scope to
all publications within writing studies. While these writing center journals
are a part of this larger field of study (and, indeed, this chapter will con-
sider the overall level of representation of these writing center texts), this
 WRITING SCHOLARS ON THE STATUS OF ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS… 13

particular inquiry seeks to gain a broader perspective on what the digital

currently suggests for those in the larger discipline of which writing center
work is traditionally considered a part.
As such, my goal is to describe a contemporary moment in this disci-
pline’s history, to interrogate the implicit call in Hawisher and Selfe’s
2001 claim that there is “much work to be done before electronic publish-
ing gains the academic credibility of print” (196). In reporting then on
the results of an international survey conducted via several professional
listservs and taken by 232 individuals who self-identified as invested in
writing studies scholarship, I provide an empirical consideration of how
scholars themselves demonstrate and/or complicate perceived differences
between print and digital frameworks for publication. I provide data on
current engagement with and opinions of these academic resources, espe-
cially as juxtaposed with more traditional print journals in writing studies
such as College Composition and Communication, College English, and
WPA: Writing Program Administration. This chapter begins an important
conversation about what the digital signifies (or does not yet signify) for
scholars in the contemporary moment and beyond.

Methods
I initially distributed an 11-question, Institutional Review Board (IRB)-
approved survey (see Appendix 1) to four professional listservs affiliated
with writing studies—the Writing Program Administration listserv (WPA-­
L), the Graduate Writing Program Administration listserv (gWPA-L), the
Writing Center listserv (Wcenter), and the Writing Across the Curriculum
listserv (WAC-L) on April 23, 2015. These particular listservs were chosen
due to their perceived high levels of activity by individuals in the target
audience (scholars working in writing studies), as well as for their use in
other scholarly contexts. Several researchers1 have used WPA-L and
Wcenter to solicit participants for projects related to writing studies, and,
in consequence, these lists represent effective measures to reach a large
population of individuals interested in writing studies as a discipline. For
this reason, I consider the sampling method utilized here to be homoge-
nous sampling, as my intended audience included individuals with similar
educational and work backgrounds/interests (Blakeslee and Fleisher 148).
Prior to distribution, several academic peers piloted the survey to assess
and provide feedback on its length, clarity, and overall fluidity. The survey
was distributed using the Qualtrics survey platform; this platform was
14 E.H. BUCK

chosen due to prior familiarity as well as my perception of its professional

design. A link was also included in a tweet on my personal Twitter handle
(@ElisabethHBuck). This tweet requested that individuals who were
“readers of and/or writers in writing studies journals” take the survey, and
it was ultimately retweeted 16 times by other Twitter users, thus expand-
ing its overall reach beyond my personal networks (Buck, 23 April 2015).
A few minor revisions of the survey questions occurred during the pro-
cess of distribution as a result of individuals who commented on the sur-
vey and/or emailed me directly. The journal Philosophy and Rhetoric, for
instance, was initially incorrectly indicated as Philosophy and Writing. One
participant noted that, in the question asking participants to identify which
journals libraries subscribed to, it was a bit ambiguous as to whether I
intended participants to identify print publications. The wording on this
question was therefore revised to correct this ambiguity. The survey was
re-distributed to the WPA-L and WCenter listservs on May 13, 2015.
Prior to this re-distribution, the survey was slightly re-ordered, as it
became apparent that users were spending more time than anticipated
answering the first survey item (that asked participants to identify which
journals their institution currently subscribes to). In an effort to improve
the survey’s retention/completion rate, this question was moved to appear
as the last question within the first section of the survey. I closed the sur-
vey on May 20, 2015.

Limitations
This survey primarily generated quantitative data, although some qualita-
tive responses were produced when participants were asked to identify
journals or processes that fell under the category of “other.” While a major
goal of this survey was to ascertain digital research processes, this could
mean, however, that those more inclined to use other, non-digital means
of communication—as well as the large number of individuals working in
writing studies who are not members of any of these listservs—were likely
excluded from participation in this study. Individuals also self-select into
participation with these listservs as subscribers, and actual affiliation with
or training in writing studies is difficult to ascertain, since users might
identify various reasons for becoming members (e.g., desire to keep up
with conversations pertaining to the discipline, interest in viewing relevant
calls-for-papers for conferences and publishing opportunities, or, for
emerging scholars, a desire to gain insight into an informal professional
network). With these caveats in mind, the data represents responses
 WRITING SCHOLARS ON THE STATUS OF ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS… 15

collected from many of these individuals who belong to these writing

studies-­oriented listservs—I collected no demographic data in this survey
beyond participants agreeing for IRB-approval purposes that they were
over 18 years of age. In one question, participants were asked to identify
their current institutional rank to solicit those with tenure-track status to
indicate whether their institution perceives publishing in a digital and/or
open-­access text with the same merit as a print publication.
The recruitment email sent via the listservs included the survey link that
requested that participants be “individual[s] who [engage] (in any capacity)
with writing studies journals—as a student, faculty member, or an inde-
pendent researcher,” but it is again impossible to ascertain the specific
interests and/or affiliations of listserv members. Given also that all three
lists represent a specific area of emphasis—that is, writing program admin-
istration, writing centers, and writing across the curriculum—it is probable
that journals publishing works affiliated with these areas of interest would
be selected more frequently than had the survey been distributed to a
more general population of individuals working within writing studies.

Results
Between April 23 and May 20, 2015, 232 individuals participated in this
survey; of these participants, 187 responded to every question, which
resulted in a completion rate of approximately 80%. The first section of the
survey was intended to ascertain which journals in writing studies partici-
pants interacted with most frequently as researchers, and to understand
what tools they rely on during their research processes. The first question,
consequently, asked participants to identify which print journals they sub-
scribe to, and as is evident in Fig. 2.1, the journals College Composition
and Communication, College English, and WPA: Writing Program
Administration are the most subscribed to journals by a fairly substantial
margin. Participants could also select “other” as a response, and, of these
answers, the journal Research in the Teaching of English was mentioned
most frequently (by eight participants).
The next question asked respondents to identify their first step in
their research process in terms of locating scholarship most relevant to
their research topic. Forty-five percent of participants indicated that
their first step is to, “perform a search using my institution’s library
databases,” ­followed by 25% of respondents who noted that they, “use
a rhet/comp-­specific database (e.g., comppile.org, WcORD, the WAC
Clearinghouse)” to locate relevant scholarship. Thirteen percent of
16 E.H. BUCK

Fig. 2.1 Top ten journals subscribed to most frequently

participants indicated that they “perform a search using an Internet

search engine (e.g., Google, Bing, etc.)” and less than 10% of partici-
pants each responded that they either “refer to print copies of relevant
journals or books” (3%), “refer to digital copies of relevant journals or
books” (6%), or perform some other process (9%). Of those who
selected “other,” the most common response was to use the Google
Scholar search engine, which, as one participant noted, “I would
differentiate [from] a simple Internet search.”
 WRITING SCHOLARS ON THE STATUS OF ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS… 17

The next question in this section asked participants to identify which

journals they most frequently refer to in their own research processes (the
list included both print and digital journals) and requested that they select
all applicable publications. Figure 2.2 illustrates the top ten responses to this
question. Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy was the
only open-access digital journal that was selected by over 50 ­participants,
although Computers and Composition Online (chosen by 34 participants),
Praxis: A Writing Center Journal (31 participants), and Enculturation

Fig. 2.2 Top ten journals referred to most frequently

18 E.H. BUCK

(22 participants) also received a significant number of responses. Again,

Research in the Teaching of English represented a significant portion of the
“other” responses, with nine individuals who refer to this journal fre-
quently in their research.
The final question in this section asked participants to identify—to the
best of their knowledge—the print journals that the institution they are
currently affiliated with subscribes to. The top ten most selected journals
were College Composition and Communication (70%), College English
(67%), Rhetoric Society Quarterly (43%), Rhetoric Review (42%), Computers
and Composition (42%), Written Communication (39%), JAC: A Journal
of Composition Theory (36%), Composition Studies (34%), Journal of
Business and Technical Communication (32%), Teaching English in the
Two-Year College (30%), and Technical Communication Quarterly (28%).
In the “other” response category, one participant noted that because their
institution subscribes to the database JSTOR, they “had access to many
of these digitally” and another commented, “we have MARVELOUS
databases so I have ACCESS to most of these journals” (emphasis is the
participant’s own).
In the second section of the survey, the participants were asked to
approach the questions as authors who have published in or hope to pub-
lish in these journals. The first question in this section requested that
respondents select all the journals in which that they have ever submitted
an article for consideration. The top most selected journals for this ques-
tion were College Composition and Communication (41%), College English
(27%), Composition Studies (25%), WPA: Writing Program Administration
(23%), Computers and Composition (17%), Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric,
Technology, and Pedagogy (14%), Rhetoric Review (14%), Writing Lab
Newsletter (14%), Across the Disciplines (13%), Composition Forum (11%),
Praxis: A Writing Center Journal (11%), Teaching English in the Two-Year
College (11%), and Writing Center Journal (11%). Frequent responses in
the “other” category for this question again included Research in the
Teaching of English (six respondents), Pedagogy (six respondents), and
Peitho (four respondents).
The subsequent two questions asked participants to consider what fac-
tors influence or inhibit their decisions to submit to a particular journal.
For the first of these two questions, participants were instructed to drag
and drop certain attributes (e.g., “prestige”) to columns marked “very
important,” “important,” and “not important.” Figures 2.3 and 2.4 rep-
resent the results of when participants were asked to prioritize the
 WRITING SCHOLARS ON THE STATUS OF ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS… 19

Fig. 2.3 Factors influencing decision to submit to a particular journal

factors that influence their decision to submit to a particular publication,

as well as when they were asked to identify which factors would inhibit
their decision to submit to a particular journal, again using the drag-
and-drop survey feature.
The final two questions in the survey asked individuals to first identify
their current academic rank. Those who selected professor, associate
­professor, or assistant professor were then directed to a question about
whether publication in a digital peer-reviewed (refereed) journal carries
20 E.H. BUCK

Fig. 2.4 Factors inhibiting decision to submit to a particular journal

the same weight for the purposes of tenure and promotion as a publication
in a print refereed journal. As such, assistant professors (28%) were the
most common survey participants, followed by associate professors (20%),
graduate students (15%), professors (14%), those of other academic ranks
(11%), non-tenure-track professors/lecturers (10%), adjunct instructors
(2%), and those not currently affiliated with an institution (1%). Several of
those who selected “other” identified that they were professional tutors,
directors or coordinators of writing centers, or administrators. Those who
 WRITING SCHOLARS ON THE STATUS OF ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS… 21

selected their rank as assistant, associate, or full professor were then asked
the question about digital versus print publications as related to tenure
and promotion. Forty-eight percent of respondents noted that publication
in a digital refereed journal carries the same weight as publication in a
print refereed journal for the purposes of tenure and promotion, and
only 9% indicated that it did not. Twenty-four percent of participants
indicated that the particular journal and/or article determined whether
or not a digital publication is considered with the same weight as a print
publication.

Discussion
This modest survey of a population of individuals interested in writing
studies has several important implications for larger conversations pertain-
ing to digital publication. Most encouragingly, a very large portion of
tenure-track survey respondents (nearly 50%) indicated that publication in
a digital refereed journal carries the same weight as publication in a print
refereed journal for the purposes of tenure and promotion. Again, only
ten participants indicated directly that digital publications were not given
the same weight, and a quarter of respondents noted that the journal’s
reputation (but not necessarily its medium) influenced tenure and promo-
tion decisions.
The remaining results, however, reveal several tensions between the
print and the digital as related to research process, accessibility, and
engagement. The most glaring marker of this is that, in several categories
of assessment—journal referred to most frequently, journal in which
authors submitted pieces for consideration—traditional print journals
continue to dominate. Although this is likely unsurprising given that these
journals—most notably College Composition and Communication, College
English, Composition Studies, Computers and Composition, and WPA:
Writing Program Administration—are among the most selective in the
discipline, they are also among the most traditional in that they continue
to distribute print copies and have very little content (particularly their
most recent content) available freely on the web. It is encouraging that
almost a quarter of the survey population indicated that they refer to the
digital, open-access journal Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and
Pedagogy frequently, but, given the significant dominance of these print
publications, it is clear that these native digital texts are not perceived with
the same level of merit as these traditional publications—again, if “merit”
22 E.H. BUCK

can be extrapolated from what journals these researchers read most

frequently and hope to appear as an author in. This might partially be due
to the fact that there are so many more extant print journals, and
these journals are often more established then digital and/or open-access
publications. For this reason then, as these journal options become more
available, the evolution in the submission and reader rates will be impor-
tant to track.
On the issue of prestige, one astute respondent noted in an email
exchange that this concept could be interpreted both as a reason why
individuals might not submit to journals that they consider low prestige,
but also that individuals might choose not to submit to a journal that
they consider too prestigious for their skill level. Another participant
(who gave me permission to include her words here) noted that turn-
around time is also an important factor, suggesting that, “it’s better for
me to go to a lower-prestige journal that I know will be responsive and
humane to me rather than a higher prestige journal that I never hear
from or that doesn't treat authors well.” She also indicated that some
prestigious journals have notoriously long turnaround times, and, for
someone who must consider “the realities of the tenure clock,” these
long response times for feedback and/or publication can be untenable.
In either case, the 77% of participants who noted that prestige was either
a “very important” or “important” factor in their decision to submit
to a particular journal suggests that this prestige—either actual or
perceived—is incredibly significant within this process. Again, this might
be a particular manifestation of the extent to which tenure and promotion
protocols place value on “high-impact” publications. This is potentially
troublesome in relation to access, because, if the most important con-
versations are occurring in the prestigious, print-­only journals, it is more
likely that only those with an institutional affiliation or subscription will
be able to fully engage with these texts. It could also indicate that
authors might eschew pursuing a publication in a digital journal because
of perceptions of its lower prestige level, or the recognition that an arti-
cle is more likely to be read within a prestigious forum, regardless of its
open-or-closed-access status.
Another interesting tension manifests when considering how the survey
respondents consider digital affordances. Although the vast majority indi-
cated that they use digital tools (library webpages, Internet searches, rhet/
comp-specific databases) as the first step in their own research processes,
they do not often consider implementing digital or multimodal elements
 WRITING SCHOLARS ON THE STATUS OF ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS… 23

in their own work. It is striking that 63% of participants noted that the
ability to include multimodal elements (e.g., video, audio, color images)
in an article was “not important” as a factor for considering whether to
submit to a particular journal. Furthermore, only 17% of individuals con-
sidered it “very important” that content be open-access (although the
majority—86%—did indicate that a mandate for open-access content
would not inhibit their decision to submit to a particular journal). These
results suggest that a journal’s scope/focus or a specific call-for-papers are
the most important factors when submitting to a particular journal, but it
is also noteworthy that nearly half of the participants indicated that a
requirement to include multimodal elements would inhibit their decision
to submit to a particular journal. Coupled with the large amount of par-
ticipants who also consider these elements to be “not important,” this
suggests that large numbers of scholars still see these elements as not coin-
cident with written-word text.
This particular result has several important implications for academic
labor. Given the recent preponderance of scholarship on the value of
incorporating multimodality both pedagogically and in scholarly con-
texts,2 these outcomes suggest a disconnect between the stated value of
these practices and the participants’ perceptions of their importance. This
perhaps indicates that while the discipline of writing studies values multi-
modality, this value is largely incongruous with participants’ willingness or
ability to incorporate multimodal elements into scholarly work—or again
reinforces the perception that texts classified as “multimodal” are funda-
mentally different from “traditional” works that only incorporate alpha-
betic text. Since digital/open-access texts are often forums where elements
of new media can be best or most readily deployed, the resistance to incor-
porating these elements is telling in terms how it relates to scholars’ inter-
est in both reading and producing these works.
A final important consideration within this analysis is the low number
of adjuncts and those operating outside of the ranks of tenure who com-
pleted this survey. Although this again is a probable consequence of the
forums of distribution, in many ways, this issue of access affects those
without institutional privilege much more than those who possess this
privilege. These voices are critically important within this larger conversa-
tion and, unfortunately, are largely missing from this current project.
Graduate students whose institutions do not subscribe to journals are
much less likely to be able to access full copies of large texts or subscribe
to print iterations of current issues. Interlibrary loan services might make
24 E.H. BUCK

some of this access possible, but this has limitations for larger-scale research
projects. Future inquiry into this topic might therefore focus specifically
on those populations outside of the tenure track, to see how these issues
of access and prestige factor in terms of their interaction with academic
publications.
The next chapter of this project describes the history of the digital
within three specific publications, Writing Lab Newsletter, Writing Center
Journal, and Praxis: A Writing Center Journal. If this chapter focuses on
how others in the discipline perceive journals as artifacts, Chap. 3 discusses
journals as artifacts with a particular focus. This survey reveals that writing
center scholarship at large still represents a relatively small portion of
research within writing studies and, again, these results might actually be
higher than had the survey been distributed to a more general population.
Since these three prominent forums for writing center scholarship have
varying extents to which they discuss topics pertaining to computers—and
also themselves exist across a spectrum of digital representation—their his-
tories work to reveal the foundation for many of these tensions within the
digital and print publication binary. As contextualizing material, however,
this survey data provides further insight into the role of the digital as it
relates to both academic publications and the future of writing center
studies.

Notes
1. See, for example, Vie 2015 and Jackson and Grutsch McKinney 2011.
2. See Ball 2004; Anderson et al. 2006; Selfe 2007; Lauer 2012.

Works Cited
Anderson, Daniel, Anthony Atkins, Cheryl E. Ball, Krista Homicz Millar, Cynthia
Selfe, and Richard Selfe. 2006. Integrating Multimodality into Composition
Curricula: Survey Methodology and Results from a CCCC Research Grant.
Composition Studies 34 (2): 59–84.
Ball, Cheryl. 2004. Show, Not Tell: The Value of New Media Scholarship.
Computers and Composition 21 (4): 403–425.
Blakeslee, Ann, and Cathy Fleischer. 2007. Becoming a Writing Researcher.
London: Routledge.
@ElisabethHBuck. 2015. Are You a Reader of and/or Writer in Rhetoric and
Composition Journals? If So, Please Take My (Very Short!) Survey! http://
goo.gl/VpNh0O. Twitter, April 23, 11:04 am.
 WRITING SCHOLARS ON THE STATUS OF ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS… 25

Groundbreaking University of California Policy Extends Free Access to All

Scholarly Articles Written by UC Employees. 2015. Office of Scholarly
Communication. University of California, October 28. http://osc.universi-
tyofcalifornia.edu/2015/10/groundbreaking-presidential-oa-policy-covers-
all-employees/. Accessed 1 Nov 2015.
Hawisher, Gail E., and Cynthia L. Selfe. 2001. Dispatches from the Middlewor(l)
ds of Computers and Composition: Experimenting with Writing and Visualizing
the Future. In New Worlds, New Words: Exploring Pathways for Writing About
and in Electronic Environments, ed. John F. Barber and Dene Grigar, 185–209.
Cresskill: Hampton Press.
Jackson, Rebecca, and Jackie Grutsch McKinney. 2011. Beyond Tutoring:
Mapping the Invisible Landscape of Writing Center Work. Praxis: A Writing
Center Journal 9 (1). http://www.praxisuwc.com/jackson-mckinney-91/.
Accessed 16 May 2017.
Lauer, Claire. 2012. What’s in a Name? The Anatomy of Defining New/Multi/
Modal/Digital/Media Texts. Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and
Pedagogy 17 (1). http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/17.1/inventio/lauer/.
Accessed 27 Feb 2016.
Selfe, Cynthia, ed. 2007. Multimodal Composition: Resources for Teachers. Cresskill:
Hampton Press.
Straumsheim, Carl. 2015. Canadian Funding Agencies Release Open-Access
Policy. Inside Higher Education, March 2. https://www.insidehighered.com/
quicktakes/2015/03/02/canadian-funding-agenciesrelease-open-access-
policy. Accessed 20 July 2015.
Vie, Stephanie. 2015. What’s Going On?: Challenges and Opportunities for Social
Media Use in the Writing Classroom. Journal of Faculty Development 29 (2):
33–44.
 CHAPTER 3

Digital Histories of Writing Lab Newsletter,

Writing Center Journal, and Praxis:
A Writing Center Journal

Abstract This chapter functions as an historiography of the treatment of

computers and computer technologies within Writing Lab Newsletter,
Writing Center Journal, and Praxis: A Writing Center Journal. This chap-
ter describes the way that these “digital histories” exist both parallel to and
in contrast with each other and articulates the overall importance of these
histories to the future of writing center studies. This chapter also docu-
ments the shifting accessibility of these materials, including the overall
navigability and availability of each journal’s archives.

Keywords Historiography • Writing Lab Newsletter • Writing Center

Journal • Praxis • Archives • Computers

In his 1989 corpus analysis of The Writing Lab Newsletter, Jim Bell justifies
his study based on a still highly relevant premise: “If you want to join the
discussion, it helps to know what the group is talking about. If you are
already an active member of the writing center community, you may want
to pause and review the discussion” (1). This idea suggests that to under-
stand a discipline’s future, knowledge of its past is necessary. And yet, what
signifies history—even within Bell’s chosen forum of analysis, the Writing
Lab Newsletter—takes on a very different meaning within a contemporary
context. More specifically, and especially within the discipline of writing
center studies, the digital presence of a journal means that what is accessible,

© The Author(s) 2018 27

E.H. Buck, Open-Access, Multimodality, and Writing Center Studies,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69505-1_3
28 E.H. BUCK

visible, and preserved dictates, in part, the history of an academic conversa-

tion. Assessing a journal’s past (and present) is no longer a matter of leafing
through paper archives, but instead becomes a process of considering the
wide range of ways that the Internet enables scholarly discussions about
writing centers to perpetuate.
Chapter 2 situated some of the concerns about the digital and print
publication binary—suggesting that, despite the strides that digital publi-
cations have made, they still are not referred or submitted to as frequently
as print journals—and this chapter attempts to identify one possible basis
for some of these perceptions: the frequency in which journals include
discussion about digital topics within their published articles, and the arti-
cles’ overall accessibility. The content published in Writing Lab Newsletter,
Writing Center Journal, and Praxis plays a significant role in defining the
history of writing center studies; for this reason, analyzing how conversa-
tions about computers and computer technologies have evolved in each of
these journals—and the similarities and differences in how this topic has
been treated in each publication—can reveal something important about
each journal’s identity and future direction. Lerner (2014), in performing
an analysis of the author and citation patterns in Writing Center Journal,
argued that looking at what is cited in a particular journal can “demon-
strate the high stakes” involved with seeing journals as academic currency,
“whether as a way to characterize the knowledge domains of a particular
field or journal or to ensure that the intellectual work of particular scholars
gets an opportunity to join the larger conversation” (72). I believe these
same principles can also extend to journal content. The extent to which
digital topics have been discussed within publications can signify some-
thing critical about a journal’s ethos and, in aggregate, the identity of
writing center studies.
Several book-length projects, such as Eric Hobson’s Wiring the Writing
Center (1998), Dave Coogan’s Electronic Writing Centers: Computing in
the Field of Composition (2000), James Inman’s Taking Flight with OWLs:
Examining Electronic Writing Center Work (2000b), David Sheridan and
James Inman’s Multiliteracy Centers: Writing Center Work, New Media,
and Multimodal Rhetoric (2010), and Sohui Lee and Russell Carpenter’s
The Routledge Reader on Writing Centers and New Media (2014) address,
at length, the intersections of the digital with the work conducted at writ-
ing centers. I believe that writing center journals specifically are particularly
poised to reveal an important conversation about this topic for two primary
reasons. First, Writing Lab Newsletter, Praxis, and Writing Center Journal
 DIGITAL HISTORIES OF WRITING LAB NEWSLETTER, WRITING CENTER… 29

exist across a spectrum of digital/print representation, and p ­ erhaps in ten-

sion with two, new, entirely open-access digital publications that have been
developed within the past two years—The Peer Review: A Journal for
Writing Center Practitioners and Tutors: A Site for Multiliteracies about
Tutoring. Second, digital engagement could be viewed as an extension of a
core tenet of writing center work, given how much emphasis the discipline
at large places on interactivity and facilitating connections between writers.
James Inman and Donna Sewell’s (2003) “Mentoring in Electronic Spaces:
Using Resources to Sustain Relationships” discusses specifically the ways
that the digital can help connect writing center scholars. Inman and Sewell
conclude that, “Given the global and increasingly high-tech ethos of the
contemporary writing center community, electronic media provide valu-
able options… for supporting relationships that help us improve as profes-
sionals” (188). I believe, however, that given this “high-­tech ethos,” it is
equally important to think about how the forums for writing center schol-
arship support and implement professional endeavors. By looking at evi-
dence of the digital in the publication histories of Writing Lab Newsletter,
Writing Center Journal, and Praxis, it is possible to get a fuller picture of
how each publication and, collectively, the larger discipline of writing cen-
ter studies, treated and evolved conversations about computers and com-
puter technologies. The articles discussed here represent those published in
each journal through the summer of 2015. The last issues included in this
analysis are 39.9–10 (Writing Lab Newsletter), 34.2 (Writing Center
Journal), and 12.2 (Praxis). By looking then at the history of this topic
within Writing Lab Newsletter, Writing Center Journal, and Praxis, I pro-
vide an overview of what these conversations signify in relation to the work
conducted in and through writing centers. In this chapter, I also consider
the processes through which researchers can (or must) navigate through
these texts—again, a critical skill for supporting the ability to work as a
professional writing center researcher—thereby putting each journal’s con-
tent in dialogue with the overall accessibility of these works.

The Writing Lab Newsletter: A Persistent Innovator

I begin this discussion with an analysis of the Writing Lab Newsletter
because, as the oldest forum for the discipline’s scholarship, this pub-
lication created the precedent for subsequent conversations about
writing centers. Purdue University’s Muriel Harris established Writing
Lab Newsletter in 1977 as initially a means to connect writing center
30 E.H. BUCK

directors, that then expanded to reflect a particular mission; according

to an interview with Harris that appeared on WLN’s affiliated blog, “a
‘reader survey’ indicated that the WLN readers wanted a publication
that was useful, informative, reasonably scholarly, somewhat informal
(‘no MLA jargon’ as someone wrote), and fairly short in the number
of pages” (“The History of the WLN Part One”). The publication’s
recent name change to WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship,
which occurred officially with the September 2015 issue, is a visible
marker that reflects WLN’s transition from a more informal text to, as
Harris notes, “a peer-reviewed publication with subscribers from all
over the globe” (“The History of the WLN Part Two”). The journal
includes a complete archive of its print-based newsletters, with all but
the most current issue available for free perusal. The archives of WLN
replicate exactly how the publication appears in print format: from the
early typewritten and photocopied newsletters of the 1970s and 1980s
to the most recent (archived) issue, the archives include neither links
nor other features of hypermediated content.
There have been several studies that have assessed the history of the
WLN, using both broad and specific frameworks. In addition to Bell’s
corpus study, the archives page on WLN also helpfully refers to several
other pieces that comment on the WLN’s trajectory, including Ballard and
Anderson’s 1989 piece for Composition Chronicle that focused on this his-
tory of collaboration in the text and Michael Pemberton’s chapter for The
Center Will Hold: Critical Perspectives on Writing Center Scholarship. The
latter text concerns especially the ways that the WLN’s trajectory in many
ways mirrors the burgeoning professionalization and legitimacy of writing
center studies at large. In therefore tracing the evolution of the digital in
WLN throughout the publication’s near 40-year history1, I wish to follow
Pemberton’s lead by highlighting articles that seem to signify a shift in the
conversation: that signal a new approach or direction in relation to what
the digital means for writing center work.
I recognize here that the concept of the digital is neither a fully trans-
parent nor a cohesive term. Indeed, there is some slippage regarding how
the digital relates to the multimodal—while the former generally encom-
passes the latter, the latter does not always include the former. Because, as
many scholars argue (see, for example, George 2002; Selfe 2009; Shipka
2011), the process of composing has always been fundamentally multi-
modal, for the purposes of this assessment, I understand and define the
digital as referring specifically to that which is conducted on and through
computers or devices like iPods, tablets, and so on.
 DIGITAL HISTORIES OF WRITING LAB NEWSLETTER, WRITING CENTER… 31

The Rise of the “Lion in the Front Seat of a Mercedes”

The first explicit mention of computers in Writing Lab Newsletter occurred
quite early in its history. As Pemberton notes, the WLN during the late
1970s resembled something of a bulletin board, with very short blurbs
written by various writing center staff members, generally announcing
campus writing activities. The final pages of the June 1977 issue ask read-
ers to respond to a survey about the scope, staff, materials, problems,
financing, details of operation, and evaluation of university writing labs.
Many of these questions, it should be noted, still sound remarkably apro-
pos to contemporary writing center circumstances: for example, “how do
you avoid proofreading?”; “should writing labs serve the whole school, or
should they focus on supporting English courses?”; “To what degree is
your lab held accountable for student progress?” One question specifically
asks participants to respond to whether they use “computer terminals”
in the lab. A computer terminal is not the same as a modern PC:
while their functions varied depending on their level of sophistication,
they were frequently used to enter/display data and functioned as an
access point to the (shared, often room-sized) computer. The subsequent
issue of WLN, published later that year, includes a printed response to this
survey by Michigan Tech’s Richard Mason. In this response, Mason hopes
that a computer terminal will be installed at Michigan Technological
University in the fall, but also indicates that they, “intend to use it primar-
ily for administrative control and academic accounting purposes (pen and
paper are just not fast enough)” (2). To put this discussion in context,
1977 was the year that one of the first mass-produced “minicomputers,”
Apple II, according to California’s Computer History Museum, “became
an instant success…with its printed circuit motherboard, switching
power supply, keyboard, case assembly, manual, game paddles, A/C
power cord, and cassette tape with the computer game ‘Breakout’”
(“Timeline of Computer History”). Computers were therefore very much
an emerging—but still incredibly costly—technology. Even though Mason
is not yet conceptualizing computer terminals as having a use beyond an
administrative function within his writing lab, the fact that the WLN
included this question within the survey seems to suggest optimism about
what this technology might accomplish or enable within the writing labs;
it implies also a recognition that students’ ability to access terminals might
impact the writing process. It is unfortunate, however, that Mason’s is the
only response that appears in the Newsletter, as he is writing from within
his position at a tech-affiliated university, which presumably had a greater
need to invest in technologies than other universities.
32 E.H. BUCK

The next reference to computers in WLN emerges from faculty member

Gaylene Rosachi at Brigham Young University. Her article, “Computer
Assisted Instruction,” which appeared in the March 1978 issue of WLN,
mentions writing labs only tangentially; the focus of the article is on the
cumbersomely monikered TICCIT computer system. As Rosachi
describes, TICCIT is an acronym for “time shared, interactive, computer-­
controlled, information television,” and I find the piece especially enlight-
ening because it functions mainly to describe the advantages of this system
as a means of facilitating writing instruction. Rosachi writes that TICCIT
provides students with the “option of choosing their own learning strat-
egy as they move through the Rules, Examples, Practice problems and
Helps.” Although she says that the course was written specifically for use
on TICCIT, it is also, “used at Phoenix Community College and at
Northern Virginia Community College. These colleges use TICCIT as
the main instruction” (4). At BYU, Rosachi notes that the computer is
used for “adjunctive instruction to class lectures and as main instruction
for some remedial groups”; in connecting this specifically with the writing
lab, she indicates that, “Students with spelling, grammar or composition
problems are often referred to us by the writing lab. We can keep track of
the student’s progress and we can relay that information to the lab instruc-
tor by means of a computer printout” (4). This short article is thus com-
pelling for three specific reasons: (a) the intimation that writing labs can
refer students to other campus resources (as opposed to vice versa), (b) the
idea that, in 1978, computers were replacing teachers (even in remedial
courses!), and the concept is presented here entirely uncritically, and (c)
that this conversation occurred in a forum for writing centers, and that the
connection between computers and the work of the writing lab is primar-
ily to aid correction—that computers can be helpful particularly for “fix-
ing” the mechanical deficiencies in student writing. This analysis is also
particularly interesting when paired with two other WLN pieces from late
1979/early 1980. In his piece, “Are Machines the Answer?” Richard
Vait—although he does not mention computers specifically—cautions
against the use of “machines” in the writing lab. He defines “machines” as
encompassing things like, “eye-scanners, auto-tutorial programs, and
other paraphernalia,” and warns against viewing these technologies as
panaceas, especially because they limit contact between people: “human
contact in the lab does work, and it is our obligation to propagandize for
humanistic labs to share whatever wisdom we’ve gained with newcomers
to writing labs, and to assure them that, even without training, they have
 DIGITAL HISTORIES OF WRITING LAB NEWSLETTER, WRITING CENTER… 33

more to offer students than machines” (1–2). And yet, barely two issues
later, there is another article, “Computer-Programmed Instruction in
Elements of Grammar for Students with Remedial Problems in Writing”
that advocates using computers in lieu of human interaction, again to
“fix” the particular concerns of remedial writers. As the University of
Wisconsin-Oshkosh’s Gary Kriewald writes, the computer program can be
used to “relieve” both tutors and composition instructors of the “burden
of technical explanations of grammatical concepts,” specifically by having
the student take a series of grammatical quizzes using nonsensical words
and having the student identify which sentence represents a correct gram-
matical structure. Kriewald notes that, “the time thus saved by the pro-
gram could be used to instruct the student in more of those advanced
principles of English composition—particularly the construction of a vari-
ety of correct and intelligible sentence patterns—appropriate to a college-­
level curriculum” (5). From a contemporary perspective, this assertion is
obviously problematic, but, to sum up the WLN’s early conversations
about computers, there seems to be interesting tensions between what
these technologies can or should be used for within the writing lab. The
fact though that computers are most explicitly aligned with helping both
tutors and composition instructors “free up” their time for more “impor-
tant” matters (or, perhaps, more important writers?) is an intriguing
premise, and reflects a current-traditional epistemology.
Aside from a few scattered references to writing labs acquiring more
computers, the next instance in which computers comprise a major focus
is in the May 1982 issue of WLN. In a lengthy piece, also by Michigan
Tech’s Richard Mason, “Computer Assistance in the Writing Lab,” Mason
notes that because both the cost and usability difficulties associated with
computers have largely been alleviated, he predicts, accurately, that by
1985, the microcomputer will be largely integrated into both private
homes and universities. He suggests, however, that the largest significance
of these devices to writing labs is in their ability to include text-processing
programs, “[allowing] one to compose, change, insert, combine, delete,
edit, store, and/or print whatever material is typed on the terminal key-
board” and also to aid in record-keeping (1). Mason largely seems to view
computers though as a self-instruction method, and responds to the argu-
ment about this technology possibly replacing human-to-human interac-
tion: “Rather than treat self-instruction media-aids as some sort of cross
between a Skinner machine and Darth Vader, we should understand them,
master them, and get on with our responsibilities” (4). Ultimately arguing
34 E.H. BUCK

that the computers hold more advantages than disadvantages, Mason

concludes that, “It is certain that the advent of the typewriter raised hell
with the practice of penmanship, but I know of no one who wants to
destroy his/her typewriter. Connect that typewriter, now electric, to a
computer and one is building a key part of the writing lab future” (5).
Mason’s words here are prescient and represent the first time that comput-
ers are discussed at length specifically in terms of how they will importantly
and inevitably affect the work conducted in the writing center, beyond just
merely as a way to fix the mistakes of basic writers. The March and April
1983 issues of WLN also feature extended profiles on how computer-­
assisted instruction was being incorporated within two writing labs, at
Miami-Dade Community College and at York College, CUNY, although
the latter again specifically notes that, “grammar is a subject which is per-
fectly suited to computer-assisted instruction” (1). Another WLN from
that year—volume eight, issue six—also announced the publication of the
newsletter Computers and Composition, which ultimately became a peer-­
reviewed journal and includes additional references to word processing.
The years between 1984 and 1989 clearly signify a shift in terms of
how authors conceive the computer and especially its efficacy within a
writing center. As Bell notes in his corpus analysis of roughly this same
time period, articles about computers and computer software were the
second most frequently occurring topic within WLN (4). Indeed, there
are over 20 articles within this five-year span that explicitly mention
computers; this heightened attention, however, mirrors the increasing
prominence of desktop computers as increasingly affordable and accessible
technologies. Looking specifically at some of these articles reveals an inter-
esting glimpse at the transition into computers’ omnipresence. The
September 1984 piece, “Tutoring Theresa,” for example, amusingly notes
that, “when we first brought a microcomputer into the Writing Lab, it was
kind of like putting a lion in the front seat of a Mercedes: it looked impres-
sive, but who wants to get close enough to take it for a test drive?” (Reimer
1). The article also includes strategies for tutors to encourage tutees to
familiarize themselves with word processing and, while the author notes
that the microcomputer—which they dubbed “Theresa”—is most useful
for text editing, they “have been experimenting with a document reposi-
tory, a handout index, and a student record-keeping program” (Reimer
2). By 1985, there are several articles that deal more explicitly with the
question of what computers can (or should) be to the writing center.
The June 1985 issue includes several software reviews of programs
 DIGITAL HISTORIES OF WRITING LAB NEWSLETTER, WRITING CENTER… 35

designed to help prompt and organize prewriting, and Cameron

University’s Leigh Howard Holmes writes an eight-part rationale for why
her writing lab chose to include computers, including importantly that
computers signify a developing, transferable literacy especially for teacher-­
tutors and offer possible professionalization opportunities, as “English
majors need composing experiences with varied types of software which
will make them competitive in the job market.” (14). The preoccupation,
however, with attempting to determine what exactly to do with computers
is featured frequently within WLN—almost to the point of prosaic repeti-
tion. For instance, there is March 1986’s “What Should a Computer-­
Assisted Composition Lab Be?,” May 1986’s “Making the Computer
Writing Center a Reality,” November 1986’s “You Can Teach an Old Dog
New Tricks: Observations on Entering the Computer Age,” and January
1987’s “Using Computer Software in the Writing Center.” The November
piece by Sally Crisp seems to encapsulate the recognition again that, while
computers signify a fundamental shift in the form of the work conducted
at the writing center, the nature of the work remains fundamentally the
same. She explains,

I believe that we have seen the emphasis on writing (as opposed to usage
review) because writing—doing it, talking about it, collaborating on it—was
our emphasis before the computers. And the computers have enhanced this
emphasis on writing. Perhaps in part because of the word processing, we are
seeing writers of all ability levels begin to behave like writers, to care about
style, to be committed to meaning. (14)

If I can offer an assessment of what this particular period means to the

WLN’s trajectory, and possibly, the larger relationship of what the digi-
tal means to the writing center, the authors during this time frame
attempt to negotiate not just the functional affordances (e.g., which
software or ­computer model is best? How can our lab afford and imple-
ment these technologies?), but also the understanding that computers
and writing are inextricably linked. It then becomes a matter of deter-
mining what tutors can or should do to help other writers recognize
these linkages.
The year 1988 is a landmark for Writing Lab Newsletter because it marked
the first time that the newsletter itself was produced using computer technol-
ogy. Issue 12.5 features the “new” newsletter with, as editor Harris notes, a
redesign courtesy of “the magic of desktop publishing.” Also significant in
36 E.H. BUCK

that year is the debut of the recurring column “Micro Style,” the first of three
columns that would appear throughout the Writing Lab Newsletter’s history
specifically dedicated to computers and computer technologies. “Micro
Style” initially appears in the November 1988 issue, and it was published
sporadically until 1990 (its last appearance was in issue 15.2). It was most
frequently written by editors Evelyn Posey or Rebecca Moore, and it covers
already-familiar territory, with the first column titled “Computers in the
Writing Center—Who Needs Them?” This first column, in particular, is
interesting for its reference to a Reader Interest Survey conducted by Muriel
Harris in which she reportedly found that, “large numbers [of participants]
indicated little or no interest in anything related to computers”—hence
Posey’s need to (again) justify the number of ways that computers are relevant
to writing centers (8). This apparent lack of interest is also fascinating in light
of the number of articles about computers that had already appeared in WLN
up to this point.2 “Micro Style” largely seems to reiterate content that had, to
varying extents, received substantial coverage in the newsletter, such as issue
13.9’s column “Purchasing Software for the Writing Center” and 14.4’s
“Using a Word Processor to Enhance Prewriting.” Given the way that WLN
was distributed during this time (i.e., as a newsletter mailed to subscribers),
some repetition would certainly be expected. The fact that these issues keep
recurring, and that “Micro Style”explored computer logistics in additional
depth speaks to the fact that—professed interest or not—computers were on
the collective consciousness of WLN readers and writers.

The New Problem: Writing Centers and the Internet

By 1992, the content of the Writing Lab Newsletter signifies another clear
shift in the nature of conversations about the digital. Although a few
articles appeared in this interval that addressed territory again familiar
(e.g., issue 14.3’s “The Union of a Writing Center with a Computer
Center: What to Put in the Marriage Contract”; 15.4’s “Coping with
Computers in the Writing Center”) and innovative (e.g., 15.5’s
“Computers for the Disabled,” a supplement to a “Micro Style”column;
16.9–10’s “Computer-­ Integrated Tutoring,” which includes specific
computer-based strategies—such as using boldface type, cut and paste,
and blank page space—within a session), there was a new digital technol-
ogy that the writing center would need to grapple with: the Internet. Eric
Crump’s October 1992 piece, “Online Community: Writing Centers
Join the Networked World,” I would argue, ushers in this new era. Crump
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 form the basis of similar contracts at the present day. The
requirement of ordinary or extraordinary diligence and care was
then, as now, dependent upon the question whether one or both
parties derived benefit from the bailment. In case of gross
negligence or fraud, the bailor was entitled to an animal or article
of equal value to the one lost or destroyed; just as he can now,
under similar circumstances, recover damages in a suit at law.
The forfeiture of half the value of the property loaned, when it was
stolen, and negligence was not established, or even alleged, is a
novel regulation, and one especially calculated to render the
bailee more careful and alert. The custom of pawning property as
security for money loaned is, no doubt, as ancient as any
business transaction, and is the pignori acceptum of the Roman,
and Civil and Common Law authorities. The question of
negligence does not seem to have been considered where a
pledge was stolen; for, in this case, the entire loss was sustained
by the bailor, and not half of it, as when the article was merely
loaned by way of accommodation, and no remuneration for its
use was expected.—[Ed.]
]
[32] The savage Lex Talionis of the Mosaic Code, which
demanded “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” was
permitted by the Visigothic jurisprudence, as is disclosed by this
and other chapters. In most instances it was authorized where, on
account of the poverty of the culprit, a pecuniary compensation
was not forthcoming. Notwithstanding the abuse to which it was
inevitably liable, there is certainly a measure of stern and
retributive justice in the provision consigning a false accuser to
the vengeance of the family of his deceased victim; as well as in
the case of a wicked and corrupt judge, who maliciously permitted
an innocent man to be tortured to death. The Lex Talionis was not
unknown to the Romans, and is referred to in the Twelve Tables;
but, in after times, their ideas of the proper functions of judicial
tribunals, in the infliction of penalties, were too correct to
countenance either its acceptance or enforcement.—[Ed.]
[33] Ignorance, inhumanity, and contemptuous disregard of the
principles underlying the law of evidence, have, in all ages,
impelled semi-barbarians and churchmen to the employment of
torture. The absolute unreliability of such a means of eliciting
truth, one would naturally suppose would cause it to be rejected
by nations in the enjoyment of advanced educational facilities and
occupying a high rank in the scale of civilization. Such, however,
was far from being the case. An inheritance of the atrocities of the
Inquisition, it was still used in France and Spain during the
eighteenth century. In Scotland, which was subject to the Civil
Law, it was not forbidden until the time of Queen Anne. Although
prohibited by Magna Charta, and absolutely unknown to the
Common Law of England, torture was, nevertheless, frequently
employed as late as the reign of Charles I. A form of it, the peine
forte et dure, applied where a prisoner accused of felony stood
mute, was authorized by the Statute I, 3, Edward I. During the
reign of the tyrannical Henry VIII, the question was in high favor
with that monarch and his legal advisers, and the public
tormentor, while his profession carried with it the highest possible
degree of execration and infamy, was the object of both fear and
adulation among the rabble. Such famous lawyers as Sir Edward
Coke and Sir Francis Bacon, were earnest advocates of the
efficacy of the rack in extorting evidence from recalcitrant
witnesses and suspected traitors. In none of the above mentioned
instances, were any restraints imposed upon the zeal or
malevolence of those entrusted with the application of this relic of
barbarian procedure. Under the judicial system of the Visigoths,
however, the abuse of torture, or even negligence in its
employment, was severely punished; and sometimes, as may be
seen from the above, retribution was exacted by the no less
iniquitous Lex Talionis. Pecuniary compensation for damages
sustained through malice, or neglect of proper care, or where an
innocent person was put to the torture, while an inadequate return
for the wrong inflicted, was not, under similar circumstances,
sanctioned by the customs and practice of more cultured nations,
nine centuries subsequently. As a slave was a chattel, he
possessed no civil rights, and his master, for this reason, had the
privilege to compound his offence, if it were not of too serious a
character. The fixing of a prescribed limit, in the value of the
property involved, for less than which the question could not be
employed, is derived from the arbitrary tariff of fines imposed for
the loss of limbs, and other personal injuries, which has always
been in use among semi-civilized races. Distinction in point of
rank and social position was sedulously observed by the Visigoths
in the case of the infliction of torture, as well as in the imposition
of penalties for violating the laws and in all subjection to civil
disabilities. The worse than useless character of this mode of
examination was never considered by mediæval authorities,
although it was ably set forth many centuries previously by
Cicero, in the following terse and vigorous language: “Regit
quæsitor, flectit libido, corrumpit spes, infirmat metus, ut in tot
rerum angustiis nihil veritati loci relinquatur.”—[Ed.]
[34] This would have been readily accepted as law under
James I, a thousand years subsequently; and, no doubt, would
have been indorsed as sound by Cotton Mather, whose
sanguinary executions for witchcraft took place nearly eleven
centuries after the death of the Visigothic king, Chintasvintus. The
penalties for sorcery set forth in the Forum Judicum, were far less
harsh than those prescribed by the Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence.
The punishment of death was not permitted by the former, except
where life had been lost through the effect of incantations or
charms; a rare occurrence, as may well be surmised; and torture
by fire is not even referred to, still less tolerated. In this instance,
as in many others, the more lenient policy of the barbarian
appears in striking contrast to the fierce and blind intolerance and
cruelty of nations in the possession of superior culture and
intelligence, and living in a far more progressive age.—[Ed.]
[35] While abortion, as is well known, was not a crime at
Common Law, and, under statutory regulations, was for a long
time not considered punishable until the period of quickening; it
was, however, recognized as a serious offence by the Romans,
whose legislation on the subject was copied by the Visigoths. The
wide variation of the penalties prescribed was, as is usual, largely
dependent upon the social standing of the culprit; excepting in the
provisions of the seventh chapter, where the innate cruelty of
barbarian retribution is disclosed by one of the most frightful of
punishments.—[Ed.]
[36] It is probable, from the extreme cruelty of the penalty
imposed for professing ignorance of the laws of the land, that this
defence had been frequently set up by criminals, and that it had,
in not a few instances, been pleaded with success. There is not,
in the entire Code, a sentence exceeding this in severity, as the
crime itself is supposed to have been sufficiently expiated by the
infliction of the Lex Talionis.—[Ed.]
[37] The various degrees of homicide, as set forth in the
preceding chapters, were clearly understood if not specifically
designated, by the Visigothic legislator. Chapter XI, which
describes the crime corresponding to murder in the first degree, is
the only one of undoubted Roman origin; all the others being the
acts of Councils, or the edicts of kings. In the first and second
chapters, the circumstances which characterize excusable
homicide are stated; and in the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and
seventh, the conditions attending the crime of manslaughter are
explicitly defined. The vital question of intent, or the existence or
non-existence of malice prepense, is referred to repeatedly, both
in a positive and negative manner, whenever homicide is
described. The humane protection afforded the slave from the
cruelty of his master, as provided for by Chapter XII, suggests
what frightful abuses must have previously resulted from the
unrestrained exercise of magisterial tyranny. The guilt of the
accessory-before-the-fact was not considered as great as that of
the principal; as the penalty to which the former was liable, while
being severe, as well as in the highest degree ignominious, fell
short of the infliction of death. The horror with which a parricide
has always been regarded, was likewise felt by the Visigoths, as
is disclosed by his summary execution by the same means that
he employed to take the life of his victim; a form of the Lex
Talionis which was only made use of in the case of crimes of
peculiar atrocity. The blinding to which a murderer was subjected,
who had claimed the right of asylum, was far from being an
exhibition of clemency, and certainly entailed greater suffering
than the extreme penalty otherwise prescribed by the law.
Homicide was justifiable, as has been seen, when committed in
self-defence against an attacking party; in certain cases of
trespass vi et armis, and where a father killed his adulterous
daughter in his own home, or a husband caught an adulterer with
his wife, in flagrante delicto. In the latter instances the offender
was especially exonerated from all blame, on account of the
provocation; and, therefore, could not be held for manslaughter,
as he now can be, under the statutes of the majority of our States.
Justification could also be pleaded where a criminal was killed
while committing highway robbery, larceny, or burglary; the latter
(furtum nocturnum) being a much more comprehensive term than
ours, and including all kinds of nocturnal depredations. The
employment of that popular American fiction, the “unwritten law,”
by means of which so many homicides have been acquitted, and
which appeals so strongly to the primitive sense of retributive
justice which still dominates humanity, was thus openly endorsed
by the Visigothic Code. Insanity, as a defence for homicide, was
utterly unknown to the legal systems of antiquity; and it is only
under the highly artificial conditions of modern civilization that this
theory has attained such an extraordinary, and often pernicious,
development.—[Ed.]
 [38] It is rather remarkable that the theft of royal property
should only have been punished by the imposition of a fine equal
to that prescribed where a private individual was robbed. It is
evident that, under a strict construction of this law, no other
penalty could be inflicted.—[Ed.]
[39] This chapter, a survival of the irresponsible authority
exercised by the Roman dominus, is the only one in the Code
where the fate of a slave, guilty of crime, is specifically and
absolutely left to the will of his master. It is possible that, on
account of the facility afforded for the commission of such
offences, the possession of extraordinary power was supposed to
be required, as a safeguard.—[Ed.]
[40] The enforcement of the Lex Talionis in case of the
kidnapping of a freeborn person indicates the abhorrence with
which the crime, ever regarded by all nations as one of the most
atrocious in the calendar, was viewed by the Visigoths. As slaves
were valuable articles of property, the legislation of the Code was
principally directed against those who stole them. The kidnapping
of women, having been already provided for under the title of
Rape, is, for that reason, not referred to here.—[Ed.]
[41] The mildness of the sentence imposed for the crime
described in this chapter, which seems to include the capital
offences of treason and lèse-majesté, as well as the lesser one of
forgery, is most extraordinary and inexplicable. Although “the
divinity that doth hedge a king” was not fully recognized or
appreciated by the Visigoths of the seventh century, whose
monarch was the creature of an ecclesiastical council, and not
infrequently deduced his origin from any but a princely house, it is
still inconceivable that these offences being particularly directed
against the regal dignity, should have been regarded as personal
and of trifling moment, for it can be readily conjectured what
serious trouble and embarrassment a spurious edict, purporting to
emanate from the throne, might cause.
The “notaries” herein referred to were secretaries, shorthand
writers or amanuenses.
This law is of Roman origin, and the amputation of a finger or
a hand, while not unusual under that system, was a more
prominent feature of Greek penal legislation, from which the
Romans, at the time of the adoption of the Law of the Twelve
Tables, borrowed many of their punishments.—[Ed.]
 [42] The penalty above described for an offence of such
gravity as highway robbery, seems to be grossly inadequate. It is,
however, a peculiarity of the Visigothic Code that, for many
breaches of the law which we class as misdemeanors, it
authorizes punishments generally inflicted for the commission of
felony, and vice versa. Perhaps the courts construed the
expression “complete legal satisfaction,” to mean the sentence
usually imposed for theft. There can be little doubt that the
obscurity of the language which often characterizes the edicts of
the Forum Judicum, would, under a less strict and impartial
judicial system, have offered many opportunities for the escape of
an offender from the legal consequences of his crime.—[Ed.]
[43] Between one twelfth and one fourteenth of an acre. The
great Roman highways, portions of which are still in good
preservation in some of the provinces of the Spanish Peninsula,
and especially in Estremadura, were usually from eleven to fifteen
feet wide; and, with the space required by the Visigothic laws to
be left unenclosed for the passage of cattle, were sometimes sixty
to a hundred feet in their entire width.
The Visigothic surface measures were partly Roman, partly
Gallic, and partly Gothic. The standard, the Jugerum .622 acre,
was older than the Roman Republic; the Arepennis, equal to half
a Jugerum, was used by the Gauls; and the Aratrum, or
“ploughland,” corresponded to an area of a hundred and twenty
acres, approximately, and is of Northern derivation. The Aratrum
was divided into “oxgates,” or “oxlands,” being as much arable
soil as could be tilled by an ox, usually fifteen acres, but varying
according to country and custom. For purposes of description, the
latter term, evidently an importation of the Danes or Saxons, is
frequently employed in the ancient English works on tenures;
particularly where the latter were of the classes designated as
“base,” and “in gross”; as well as in conveyances and leases,
where absolute accuracy of boundaries was either unnecessary
or unattainable. The divisions of “ploughland” and “oxgate” were
used much more recently in Scotland than in England.—[Ed.]
[44] The reader cannot have failed to remark the striking
analogy existing between the laws of the Forum Judicum relating
to strays, and our own statutory enactments on the same subject.
Indeed, aside from some of the penalties imposed, and the
amount of compensation allowed, the regulations are, in many
instances, almost identical. Unlike a great part of the Visigothic
legislation, where trespass, and other violations of the law of real
property are involved, few of the provisions concerning strays are
derived from Roman sources. Most of them are unquestionably
survivals of the ancient legal traditions of the wandering Gothic
tribes, the great bulk of whose wealth consisted of flocks and
herds of sheep and cattle.—[Ed.]
[45] This law was evidently intended to repeal the preceding
one, although this is not specifically stated. Its enactment, as is
set forth in the preamble, was demanded by the constantly
increasing number of marriages between freeborn persons and
slaves. The degradation attending such unions does not seem to
have been regarded by the masses with the same prejudice that
actuated the law-making power, whose interest it was to rigidly
maintain the barriers of caste.—[Ed.]
[46] The great value of slaves, as articles of personal property,
and the manifest sympathy of the people with them, seem to have
prompted the enactment of this law, by which the inhabitants of
an entire district were to be turned into a corps of detectives for
the capture of fugitives; and the severest penalties were
denounced against all, irrespective of age, sex, social standing, or
rank, for non-compliance with its provisions. The statement that
no community, large or small, was without a number of fugitive
slaves, who, sure of the assistance of their neighbors, scarcely
took the trouble to conceal themselves, indicates that human
servitude was not popular with the majority of the people of the
Iberian Peninsula. It would appear, also, that the magistrates,
whose executive delinquencies rendered them liable to the same
punishment as the offenders themselves, were frequently loth to
execute the law. The marked consideration always shown the
clergy by their legislative brethren, is again disclosed by the
amusing inequality of penalties prescribed for the neglect of
official duties. There is a great and painful difference between the
limitation to one meal a day, for a month (a privation, it is hardly
necessary to add, which might be readily evaded) and two
hundred lashes, laid on vigorously with a scourge. This law gives
us a curious insight into life in those times, and one that could
have been derived from no other source; and it is especially
instructive in the information it affords concerning the feelings
entertained by all, except the comparatively few members of the
privileged classes, towards those in the servile condition.—[Ed.]
 [47] The military organization of the Visigoths bore a striking
resemblance to those of modern armies, and coincided, in only a
few unimportant particulars, with that of the Roman legion.
Division by means of the decimal system, popular among all
semi-barbarian races on account of its simplicity, and the facility
of arrangement it affords, was universally employed. The
commander-in-chief, styled in the Code, præpositus hostis, was
usually a dux, or duke; the lieutenant-general a comes, or count.
The commander of a thousand men, corresponding to our
colonel, was denominated tiuphadus; next in rank came the
quingentarius, who had charge of a battalion of five hundred; then
the centurion, and the decurion, in command of a company of a
hundred, and a squad of ten men, respectively. The conscription
officers were called compulsores exercitus, and the quarter-
masters or commissaries, annonarii.
This military gradation was also maintained in civil life, in time
of peace. The dux was the governor of the province in which he
lived; the comes, the governor of the chief city of his district; the
tiuphadus was responsible for the behavior of the thousand men,
and their families, over whom he exercised control. All these, with
several other civil functionaries, had the privilege of holding court,
and were invested by the law with the title of judge: “judicis
nomine censeantur ex lege.” See Code II, 1–25.—[Ed.]
[48] While this is an early instance of the recognition of the
offence of scandalum magnatum, subsequently regarded as a
heinous crime against the Lord’s anointed, and still, under the
name of lèse majesté, punished with exemplary severity by many
of the monarchs of Europe, it here assumes a broader
significance than it did in later times, as it applies also to the
people, and thus includes the torts of slander and libel.—[Ed.]
[49] The gardingus was the third in rank of the Visigothic
nobility, coming after the dux and comes. Unlike either of them,
however, he, as a rule, exercised no public employment; and
being ordinarily a person of great wealth, and descended from a
long line of ancestors, materially contributed, by the richness of
his appointments, and the number of his retinue, to the pomp and
splendor of the royal court.—[Ed.]
[50] The intricate questions relating to the leasing,
conveyance, descent, and forfeiture of real property are, as has
been seen, elaborated and set forth with great skill and learning in
the Visigothic Code. Not a single chapter treating of this subject is
designated Antiqua, to indicate that it is derived from the Civil
Law. And this is the more remarkable when the nomadic origin
and barbarous customs of the not remote ancestors of those who
enacted these important regulations, are considered. A nation of
shepherds and marauders could not be supposed to be familiar
with the tenures, contracts, transfers, boundaries, and torts, by
which the title to landed estates is either acquired or lost; yet the
Visigoths framed their laws with due consideration for the
principles of equity, and the general welfare of all classes of
freeborn citizens. In many respects their laws were superior to
those of the Romans. Only two years by the Twelve Tables, and
twenty under the Code of Justinian, were necessary to create a
prescriptive right to the ownership of land. Under the Roman
jurisprudence, until the population became debased by servile
and barbarian marriages, no foreigner could legally hold or
convey real-property. The Visigothic Code, on the other hand,
carefully guarded the rights of the subject race, and prevented
them from being prejudiced by the fraud or oppression of their
rulers. The inferior classes under the Republic and the Empire,
were practically serfs, living in a condition of abject villenage;
those of corresponding station subject to the domination of the
Visigoths, were often thrifty tenants of indulgent landlords, or, at
the worst, were bound by exacting contracts which they had
entered into of their own free will. The extreme solicitude
manifested for the protection of the rights of all parties, where the
title to real-property is concerned, is disclosed by the manifold
precautions enjoined, and the stringent rules to be observed, in
determining the existence of adverse possession. A contract for
the rental of land, which would be valid in any of our courts, could
easily be drawn from the laws of the Code relating to leaseholds.
—[Ed.]
[51] “Ludibrium interdum adcrescat.” It would appear from this
precautionary measure, that the members of the medical
profession, in that age, did not differ greatly from some of their
brethren of to-day. The practice of medicine was not highly
regarded by the Visigoths, a nation of warriors, and it was often
exercised by slaves, as formerly at Rome, and subsequently by
barbers and charlatans during the Middle Ages. Malpractice was
a term of the broadest significance; the risks assumed by the
practitioner, even in ordinary cases, were not compensated for by
the fees he was entitled to receive, when successful; and the
danger of damages and penalties he incurred where he lost a
patient, made the profession anything but an alluring one. After
rendering conscientious and assiduous services, to be considered
guilty of homicide, and be surrendered to the exasperated
relatives of the deceased patient, as a subject for the savage
excesses of the Lex Talionis, was not a prospect calculated to
advance the interests of medical science.
Not until three centuries later, under the Moorish domination,
did the physician and the surgeon acquire the extensive
knowledge, and attain the professional eminence, which made
the medical colleges of the Spanish Peninsula the centre of that
branch of learning, not only of Europe, but of the then known
world.—[Ed.]
[52] This law, which grants to every foreign trader the privilege
of being judged by his own magistrates, is the precursor of
modern legislation establishing consular and other tribunals
instituted to protect the commercial interests, and define the
judicial rights, of persons transacting business in another country,
and is of unknown antiquity. It is, however, at least thirteen
hundred years old. A people capable of appreciating and adopting
such a measure, must have had intelligent conceptions of the
maxims and requirements of international law and have made no
inconsiderable progress in the arts of civilization.—[Ed.]
[53] This pleasing homily, which precedes a collection of the
most atrocious laws ever devised for the suppression of human
thought and the persecution of heretics—with the sole exception
of the rules of the Inquisition, of which it is the prototype—is
extremely edifying. The confidence and assurance of a heavenly
recompense, expressed by the pious king in whose name this
edict was promulgated, reveals the degrading superstition of the
time, and the absolute domination of the monarch by his spiritual
advisers.—[Ed.]
[54] The translator has interpolated between this and the
succeeding title, in the Castilian version, another, of nine
chapters, under the head of “Concerning insults and opprobrious
language.” Part of it relates to false accusations of physical
deformity and disease, or slander; part to assault, or attempted
assault, where no apparent injury resulted; and the remainder is
devoted to laws punishing those who call Christians Saracens, or
assert that they have been circumcised. The moderate penalty of
a hundred and fifty lashes was prescribed for the last two
offences.—[Ed.]
 [55] In the words of the text, “veretri ex toto amputatione
plectetur.” The sentence will not bear translation, and, in the
words of a famous writer referring to a similar case, “must be
veiled in the obscurity of a learned language.” While certainly to
be classed under “cruel and unusual punishments,” it reveals a
fiendish ingenuity in adapting the penalty to the so-called offence.
—[Ed.]

Transcriber’s Notes:

1. Obvious printers’, punctuation and spelling errors have been corrected

silently.

2. Where hyphenation is in doubt, it has been retained as in the original.

3. Some hyphenated and non-hyphenated versions of the same words have

been retained as in the original.
 *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE
VISIGOTHIC CODE ***

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