At the 2005 annual meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, Gregory L. Ulmer reminded conference-goers of the importance of understanding our relationships to writing and print, the apparatus from which our identities, perspectives, theories and practices emerge. Over the course of thirty years and eight books, Ulmer has called for us not only to be aware of the emerging apparatus he dubbed “electracy” but also to help invent and shape it.

This issue of Textshop Experiments asks contributors to respond to Ulmer’s call to interrogate print culture (its works, technologies, and operations) and respond to Ulmer’s call to participate in the definition and activities in electracy. This is a call for scholarship on the history of print, books, literacy, publishing, and policy from the future. The issue will publish video essays up to 15 minutes in length and accompanying Author Statements (which theoretically frame and contextualize their respective videos) no more than 1000 words.

Contributors will then be asked to contribute full essays (about 5,000-7,000 words) based on these videos. These essays will be compiled into a printed anthology. Topics should specifically address the relationship between print and electracy. Some possible topics and questions for this issue include, but are not limited to, the following:

~Electracy in the K-12 and university classroom and curriculum
~Digital culture / participatory culture, practice and politics
~Electrate love letters to print
~Celebrations, commemorations, and mourning for print
~Oral traditions, manuscript and writing practices & print / paper crafts
~Storage, Preservation, & Erasure
~Lessons learned from the failures or oppressive nature of print
~Visions for the future of electronic publishing, publishers, platforms, and formats
~Criticism on individual authors, illustrators, creators, editors, and publishers or their work(s)
~Changes in authorship, readership, the submission/editorial process, consumerism, production
~Law and public policy, copyright, and censorship,
~Marketing, promotion, publicity, controlling costs and prices
~Understanding and shaping the Fifth Estate
~Analysis of specific platforms/tools, etc. (broadly defined)
~Electracy and the augmentation and/or obsolescence of print
~Reflections and forecasts of theory, scholarship, creative writing, and media history

Topics and formats are open, and artists, scholars, and writers alike can address a range of ideas in history, museum and memory studies, composition & rhetoric, literary studies, digital culture, art and graphic design, electronic media, and experimental pedagogy.

Completed work is due September 1, 2017. If you wish to be considered for the printed anthology of this issue, please contact the editor before the final deadline. You will be asked for an abstract proposal (250-300 words, in English), a short bibliography of 3-5 key works in your video/essay, a list of 3-5 key terms, and a short biography.

Submissions should be sent via email to the issue editor, K. A. Wisniewski, at ulmertextshop@gmail.com.