Ann Hill Duin - Writing Futures: Collaborative, Algorithmic, Autonomous

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The development of Writing Futures was never a solitary experience. We were lucky enough to be surrounded (virtually and physically) by colleagues, students, family, and friends who constantly inspired us over the seasons it took to create it.

We are grateful for the work of Sharon Caldwell, whose expertise, creativity, and steadfast attention to detail helped us build our archived collection and integrate it with book chapters in truly skillful ways. We owe our gracious thanks to Molly M. Kessler, Lee-Ann Kastman Breuch, and Laura Gurak, who each selflessly helped in very important ways. We thank James Harbeck, with his insightful and fastidious copyedit. Our Springer editors and production team, Thomas Ditzinger, Gowrishankar Ayyasamy, and Sylvia Schneider, were immensely helpful while we wrote and prepared the manuscript. We thank our blind reviewers for their time, energy, and direction on the book. Developer Seth Kaufman from Whirl-i-Gig Inc. made some cliffhanger deadlines for much-needed changes to the Fabric database in light of the books design.

We are honored for the collaboration of the Intertext authors, Heidi A. McKee and James E. Porter, Jennifer Keating and Illah Nourbakhsh, and Scott Sundvall, who probed and provoked the books themes in myriad novel ways. It is stronger with their voices.

We extend our thanks to our academic collaborators and friends, whose wisdom, camaraderie, and scholarship exhilarated us, including Jason Tham, Daniel Hocutt, Andrew Iliadis, Tom Everrett, Peter Turk, Tanner Mirrlees, Jayden Cooper, and Jack Adam Narine. We acknowledge the important role of our students: Ann Hill Duins graduate class at the University of Minnesota, scholars Mikayla Davis, Sean Golden, Brian Le Lay, Shane Rose, and Rira Zamani, willing to share opinions, raise debates, and question the future landscape of writing studies through their distinct scholarly lenses. The students of Isabel Pedersens computer science graduate course at Ontario Tech University, Global AI Ethics brought their own insights to bear on many debated topics surrounding the emergence of AI during the writing of the book. Another group that influenced our thinking and writing was the Building Digital Literacy team, including graduate students Katlynne Davis, Saveena (Chakrika) Veeramoothoo, and Danielle Stambler; scholars and professors Jason Tham, Daniel Hocutt, Jessica Campbell, Stephen Fonash, Laura Gonzales, John Misak, and Nupoor Ranade, who integrated Fabric of Digital Life in coursework over three phases of an eighteen-month study. These engaging scholars from diverse backgrounds (composition, rhetoric, technical communication, education) met regularly, shared instructional materials, and wrote research papers together. We are glad to have collaborated in this ongoing dialog over the concept of digital literacy.

We thank all the futurists who inspire us daily, and we both marvel and shudder at the speed with which their predictions become reality in collaborative, algorithmic, and autonomous writing futures.

We thank our families for allowing us the time and space to muse over writing futures and to aspire to create a framework for preparing for writing futures in advance of major technological transformations. We thank each other for a truly remarkable collaborative experience.

Last, we acknowledge that this research was undertaken, in part, thanks to funding from the Canada Research Chairs program and from the US Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication.