From Thursday, October 16th to Saturday, Octoboer 18th, I attended the 2008 Watson Conference on "The New Work of Composing," every minute of which was fantasticly rich and engaging. (View the conference program in .pdf.) From that conference, a book with contributions from conference attendees and tentatively with the same name as the conference theme will be submitted to Computers and Composition Digital Press. What's more, the editors are imagining this book in innovative and exciting ways. As the call for digital submissions suggests, the "edited collection?as an outgrowth of the conference theme?seeks to explore how new communicative technologies and genres are changing what we think of as 'composing' including such core concepts as 'writing,' 'text,' 'author,' 'literacy,' and 'scholarship.'"

Sounds like a great read, but here's where the book gets particularly intriguing (again, from the call for digital submissions): "Because the book will be published digitally, we are looking for scholarship that both addresses and enacts the 'new work of composing.' We welcome hypermediated scholarly papers and especially encourage other forms of digital scholarship, including video-texts, sound essays, networked books, webtexts, other conceptions of multi-genre and/or multimodal texts. We invite you to query us before proposal submission so that we can help you conceive of your work in digital, multimodal formats."

In short, the scholarly book and scholarly work are being re-thought and re-composed. During the conference, when I listened to the editors of the collection speak to their expecations of what's to come, I heard nothing but openness to possibility. That said, I have no clue what the book will ultimately read or sound like. But I do know that I really look forward to it and others like it. And that?what we might call the new work of composing?is a refreshing feeling indeed.