I am so excited: I won the John Lovas Memorial award last night at the Computers and Writing Conference for my Snapchat Research Stories! The award is given by Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, the leading digitally-native journal for “scholarship that examines digital and multimodal composing practices, promoting work that enacts its scholarly argument through rhetorical and innovative uses of new media.” Here are the editors, Cheryl Ball and Doug Eyman, flanking my friend and earlier colleague Jan Rune Holmevik, who was at the conference and very kindly accepted the award for me:

The award has been given to a long and impressive list of academic bloggers. This is the first year it has been opened up to other forms of social media knowledge sharing, and I am honored to be the first award-winner to win for something other than blogging. Yay!

The John Lovas Award is sponsored by Kairos in recognition and remembrance of John Lovas’s contributions to the legitimation of academic knowledge­sharing using the emerging tools of Web publishing, from blogging, to newsletters, to social media. Each year the award underscores the valuable contributions that such knowledge-creation and community-building have made to the discipline by recognizing a person or project whose active, sustained engagement with topics in rhetoric, composition, or computers and writing using emerging communication tools best exemplifies John’s model of a public intellectual.

John Lovas was an influential early scholarly blogger, especially important within the fields of composition and rhetoric. I’ve been rereading some of his blog posts, and note that he experimented with visual argumentation in his blog, something that was quite unusual at the time, because it was more complicated to get images off cameras and onto the web than now, and bandwidth was limited too so images had to be carefully compressed in a photo editor so they would load before viewers got bored. So I like to think that John Lovas would have appreciated the combination of visual and textual communication about research that and other academics on Snapchat are exploring.

Here is an archive of some of my Snapchat Research Stories – they are better on snapchat, add me on Snapchat to see them live – I’m jilltxt. Thank you so much for this recognition – I really wish I could have been at the conference.