Welcome to Issue 11.2 of Xchanges!
Welcome to Issue 11.2 of Xchanges! A lot has been going on with us, and we’re excited to catch our readers up.
As of Fall 2015, Xchanges has a new home at the University of New Mexico. After eight great years at New Mexico Tech, Xchanges is excited about new opportunities and growth from its new base at UNM. The format you see here, which is a new design and operates on a new content management system, is the work of a great group of New Mexico Tech Technical Communication students, undertaken as a part of their ENGL 371 course, “Publications Management,” in Spring 2015. The students redesigned the site, migrated the old site over to the new CMS, and fixed a good many glitches that existed on our old HTML site. Many thanks to the NMT students who worked so hard on the journal, particularly Summer 2015 intern Makala Hannagan. In Spring 2016, a University of New Mexico exchange student, Ashleigh Topping, whose home university is Swansea University in the UK, worked as an Xchanges intern, building the current issue you see here and the forthcoming graduate student issue, 12.2. Many thanks to Ashleigh, also, for her incredible work.
In Spring 2016, Xchanges was the “client” for a group of Documentation students in UNM’s ENGL 414 class, and the insights they derived from analysis of the journal and its web traffic metrics will be invaluable to the journal’s growth. Editors of other multimodal writing studies journals (Doug Eyman of Kairos and Justin Hodgson of TheJUMP) both shared their insights with these students via Skype visits and significantly enhanced the analyses the UNM students were able to produce in various types of documents examining multiple aspects of Xchanges.
As I’ve expressed above, one of Xchanges’s principal missions is a “teaching” mission, as Xchanges is the project on which many technical and professional communication students have worked over many of the last fifteen years, since the journal was founded. But, of course, Xchanges is nothing – in fact, cannot exist as a journal, naturally -- without the multimodal and traditional scholarly works of the student writers who are published on its web pages. You will find in the current issue here, Issue 11.2, four excellently written and well designed undergraduate research projects. As the journal’s editor, I hope that these upper-level undergraduate research projects serve as inspirations and models of this level of scholarly rigor and clear information design for other undergraduate students who might be working on a project for a class or who might be hoping to publish their own undergraduate thesis or capstone project.
In this issue are articles by Wyn Andrews-Richards (University of Nebraska Lincoln), Benjamin Sherick (University of Calgary), Kristy Lesperance (University of British Columbia), and Mikal Lambdin (George Mason University). These four texts reveal the rich diversity of approaches within writing studies to primary text analysis, whether this “primary text” is a film (as it is in Lambdin’s essay "A Different Kind of War Film: The Ethos of the Individual Soldier in The Hurt Locker"), mathematical scholarly journal articles (the subject of Lesperance’s study of “code glosses” in "Strengthening Connections with the Audience: Reformation and Exemplification in Mathematics Research Articles"), online forums of those skeptical of vaccine safety (communities studied by Andrews-Richards in "Exploring Science Literacy and the Literacy Communities of the Anti-Vaccination Movement"), or the ethos-generating capacity of a preacher’s Sunday morning sermon (studied by Sherick in "The Ethos of Mark Driscoll: A Summary of an Undergraduate Thesis"). By reading the titles of these four article alone, I am confident that Xchanges’s readers will be excited by this breadth and will be curious to read the conclusions drawn by these undergraduate researchers in the fields of rhetoric, communication, the rhetoric of science, and mathematical discourse analysis.
As Xchanges celebrates its fifteenth birthday, as Editor I want to thank all of our readers, the faculty members who encourage their undergraduate students and graduate students to submit their work for review, the readers who comprise our 20+-member-strong faculty review board, the supportive members of the ejournal community within writing studies, and the students who have worked on/for Xchanges as students enrolled in courses that I have taught, as interns who have worked dedicatedly on journal production and social media expansion, and as directed study students. Xchanges is poised for growth, the next example of which is our next issue, graduate-student issue 12.1, which will be released quickly on the heels of this present issue.
We look forward to receiving new submissions from prospective authors for our next undergraduate and graduate-student writers in the coming academic year and we – the entire Xchanges production collaborative—hope you will follow us or “like” us on Facebook and Twitter and will visit us at conferences in 2016-2017 (including the Research Network Forum at CCCCs). Enjoy this current issue!
--Julianne Newmark