Influential since its founding in 1988, the journal Public Culture is adjusting its format to become more "open-ended." In a recent Editor's Letter, a new editorial team promises to complement the journal's conventional scholarly articles with more interviews, "analytic images," and accounts of how scholarship gets produced. Arcade and its two journals, Occasions and Republics of Letters, are mentioned in the article about these changes that appeared last week in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
We wish Public Culture well in this project of reinvention. Nearly everyone in our industry wants to find the quicksilver that will turn scholarly product into the rich vein of public conversation. The Arcade journals have done this pretty well—and certainly their readership numbers and citations compare very favorably to those of most print journals—but they were born both public and digital, without needing to overcome a long history in print as conventional publications.
Can it be done by a journal like Public Culture that, despite its name, has been conceived and read mostly for scholars? We will watch with interest.
