The Computer Writing & Research Lab has become the Digital Writing & Research Lab. This is the second name change for what began in the late 1980s as the Computer Research Lab, which was founded by Jerry Bump and a handful of graduate student hackers who literally drilled holes in the walls in a crude but successful attempt to wire a lab and a classroom for synchronous online communication. The innovation of the CRL, as John Slatin once defined it, was its pairing of a “computational lab” with a “classroom,” of technological research and development with teaching, making teaching a research activity and granting research a pedagogical investment.

The CRL became the CWRL around 1993, continuing the very same dedication to cutting-edge research and outstanding teaching at the intersection of writing, rhetoric, literature, and technology. Now the CWRL has become the DWRL, a new name for an abiding vision.