CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

We are pleased to announce the call for submissions for the UM Press/Sweetland Publication Prize in Digital Rhetoric. The prize, funded by the Sweetland Center for Writing, is awarded to an innovative and important, born-digital or substantially digitally enhanced, book-length project that displays critical and rigorous engagement in the field of digital rhetoric. These projects should be completed or very near completion.

Eligible projects will be peer reviewed, with the prize recipient determined by the DRC advisory board and directors. The advisory board members are Jonathan Alexander (University of California, Irvine), Kristine Blair (Duquesne University), Antonio Byrd (University of Missouri, Kansas City), Douglas Eyman (George Mason University), Laura Gonzales (University of Florida), Troy Hicks (Central Michigan University), Derek Mueller (Virginia Tech), and Jentery Sayers (University of British Columbia). The directors are Anne Ruggles Gere, Naomi Silver, and Simone Sessolo (University of Michigan). The prize will be announced at the 2023 Computers and Writing Conference at UC Davis.

For consideration, authors should provide by email a portfolio including the prospectus and full manuscript for the completed project. The prospectus should provide the following information: a description of the goals, intended audience, and significance; and a detailed explanation of technical requirements, feasibility, and long-term sustainability. The full manuscript should include all digital materials (manuscript and materials can be submitted as a url). We also ask that authors provide a recent CV.  

Please send submissions by April 1, 2023 to Sara Jo Cohen, Senior Acquiring Editor for the University of Michigan Press, and the DRC directors, using this email address: SweetlandDRCBooks@umich.edu.

The prize is open to scholars of all ranks, though preference is for first and single-author projects of younger scholars. An advance contract for publication in the DRC book series will be awarded. The recipient will be announced on the DRC website and at the Computers and Writing conference.

DRC Book Prize Winners

2013 Daniel Anderson, Video Scholarship and Screen Composing
2016 Laura Gonzales, Sites of Translation: What Multilinguals Can Teach Us about Digital Writing and Rhetoric
2017 Kevin Brock, Rhetorical Code Studies: Discovering Arguments in and around Code
2018 Tim Lockridge and Derek Van Ittersum, Writing Workflows: Beyond Word Processing
2019 Jason Palmieri and Ben McCorkle, 100 Years of New Media Pedagogy
2022 Christa J. Olson and Brandee Easter, Accounting for Visual Rhetoric

General Guidelines for Prospectus Submission to the Digital Rhetoric Collaborative

The Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative publishes texts that investigate the multiliteracies of digitally mediated spaces both within academia as well as other contexts. We encourage discussions that include but are not limited to topics such as:

• new convergences and economies;
• shifting ideologies and politics;
• global contexts and multilingual discourses;
• reconstructions of race, class, gender, sexuality, and (dis)ability;
• emerging theories and technologies; and
• reconfigured divisions and connections within these spaces.

The DRC is known for its born-digital as well as substantially digitally enhanced submissions of book-length scope — in the form of collections and monographs of varying genres — that engage with digital rhetoric’s histories and futures; its border-fields and transdisciplines; its ethics and aesthetics; its materialities, networks, praxes and pedagogies.

Reviewers and series editors will consider the following criteria when evaluating submissions.  Strong submissions will:

• demonstrate informed awareness of relevant literature, models and/or practices;
• define and develop emerging issues and perspectives;
• provide a significant contribution to the field;
• offer an analytic, creative, or critical contribution to the field;
• be original, provocative, or groundbreaking;
• employ innovative digital formats and technology appropriate to the subject;
• enhance understanding of the relationship of form to content and of design to meaning;
• be feasible and sustainable.

Final publication will be contingent on positive external reviews and approval by the Executive Board of the University of Michigan Press. The Press and MPublishing, the University’s center for scholarly publishing, are dedicated to publishing innovative work in digital rhetoric.

Additional points to consider in preparing submissions.