I'd like to use my bloggy pulpit to draw your attention to a draft of Kathleen Fitzpatrick's essay, "Infinite Summer: Reading the Social Network," which discusses the origin and signifiance of an online effort to read Infinite Jest the summer after David Foster Wallace's suicide.
This essay is destined to become part of a collection of essays on David Foster Wallace, which I am co-editing with Sam Cohen, called The Legacy of David Foster Wallace: Critical and Creative Assessments. The collection is forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press.
Beyond the content of the essay, I want to start a conversation about the future of scholarship and academic communities on the Internet. Along with group blogs (Arcade, The Valve, Crooked Timber, and countless group and personal blogs), there are journals that publish exclusively online (electronic book review), wiki-like resources dedicated to certain fields (Modernism Lab at Yale), and electronic "gateway" or aggregator sites (Nines).
What is new, as far as I know, about the model Fitzpatrick is using is that she is getting commentary on her drafts of written essays through an "open" peer review process. She has gone through this open review process with her new book, Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Internet (which is also forthcoming from NYU Press) and she has gone so far as to put her first book, The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television (which Vanderbilt first published in 2006), online in full.
In a sense, Fitzpatrick is "blogging" this essay -- she is using Wordpress as a framework to make her essay available -- but the open-source Wordpress theme/plugin (CommentPress) she is using facilitates reading her text like a book and commenting on individual pages and paragraphs. There have been other projects that led to the development of this framework, including McKenzie Wark's Gamer Theory, which was subsequently published by Harvard UP.
All of this leads me to ask a few questions: What are the advantages and disadvantages of showing work in progress online and inviting commentary? Is there any reason why, a few years after a work of scholarship has come out, and in the overwhelming majority of cases has sold most of what it will ever sell, we should not all be placing our books online? Are we too print-bound? Too locked into norms that guarantee that our work is inaccessible to vast majority of readers? Or are there good reasons for keeping our systems of scholarly dissemination more or less as they are today?
I ask these questions without much of an agenda. Rather, I'd like to spark a conversation that will help me think through these issues.
Relevant article from the NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/24/arts/24peer.html
I do some preliminary writing on (a friends-locked) LiveJournal. Good comments, and an audience approximating some of my ideal narrates.
I am hoping Arcade will (one day) feel like that too.
I'd missed this article. I agree, Arcade would be a great institutional home for open-source sharing of drafts. My initial impulse is that this sort of process would be a supplement to -- not replacement for -- traditional peer review.
Wow: three cheers for Fitzpatrick--that's very brave and very neat. Thanks to you for publicizing this and for prompting conversation. Especially when some of us Arcadians have been a bit…absentee of late.
Fitzpatrick's essay is, in its current form, not, I would say, a draft at all but rather, in virtue of its polish and its public status, more like a preprint. Compare the physicists' preprint archive, called the arXiv, now the dominant mode of circulation in some scientific fields. These are papers, not peer-reviewed but carefully prepared as articles, that are made publicly available on a much faster cycle than the journals can manage. Eventually some of these preprints become peer-reviewed journal articles, but the real scholarly public sphere is on the arXiv. (Apparently the classicists have been exploring something similar with the Princeton-Stanford Working Papers in Classics.)
Now what's important about the preprint is that, as the arXiv demonstrates, it actually has the potential to take over many of the functions of peer-reviewed print publication. These functions are quite different from the functions of circulating a draft: a draft must always bracket its claims to disseminate knowledge and arguments as preliminary, in progress, "not to be cited or circulated further without permission." A preprint is a different story--perhaps not as thoroughly vetted and consecrated as a peer-reviewed print work supposedly is, but thoroughly public and recirculatable (and something that could and should appear on a CV).
Notice that the transition to electronic distribution must, at first, be symbolically subsidized by the legitimacy of print and peer review: Fitzpatrick puts up her preprint, but we already know she's going to press in your edited collection. Your idea, Lee, of making out-of-print monographs available online (and, I presume, Open Access), works the same way. The question then is whether a further transition would take place, in which electronic forms accumulate enough recognition on their own to do without the subsidy... That might be one way in which some of the pressure on the existing academic publishing system could be relieved.
Thoughts of a dry brain...
As Lee notes, Kathleen's book Planned Obsolescence is also up in its entirety, and an Arxiv-like model is also fairly close to what she advocates there.
...which shouldn't surprise anyone. Thanks, Natalia. Clearly I need more Fitzpatrick in my life. I can't wait to read her discussion of the future of peer review. Then I might have some more informed comments to make.
Ha. While I do think that anyone interested in academic publishing and peer review should read Planned Obsolescence, technically speaking you can't be expected to have read it yet, since it hasn't yet been "published" (on paper). Which is to say that if K hadn't negotiated with NYUP to put the book up for open peer review, it wouldn't yet be available at all, and I wouldn't know that she'd written about the arXiv and other such repositories. That fact alone is sort of an argument in favor of the preprint model.
I will say that CommentPress is currently hard to bookmark, and consequently I kept the tab open in Firefox basically for the entire month while I was intermittently reading the book. It's not the worst way to read, but it's not the best either, and as Dan Cohen recently pointed out on Twitter, you can't really Instapaper something on CommentPress. Decisions, decisions.
You can submit to a journal directly from arXiv, and cite things on arXiv regardless of whether they've received a journal's imprimatur—it's really interesting. Grigori Perelman's papers on the Poincaré Conjecture that won him the Fields Medal and the Clay Millennium prize were, I believe, only published on arXiv. It hasn't, so far, mattered that they haven't appeared in a journal.
Thanks for the responses. I use the term "draft" loosely to refer to any text subject to later revision, but your point is important, Andrew, especially considering the possibility of endless revision. I think print may in time lose its dominance, but the definitiveness of a "release," an event staged at a definite time, will retain its appeal. Likewise, I suspect university presses and high-end journals will not lose their gatekeeper functions, but will act as aggregators or curators of content. I am--for now--happy to have them retain that institutional function so long as the actual content of articles and monographs is freely available. Reflecting on the Times article Bill cites, I think we might even construct a two-tiered "open review" process where the same system allows both publicized reviews as well as private comments that go directly to editors, tenure committees, authors, etc.
I put up "Cinematic Obsolescence" in the spirit of getting feedback on an article-in-progress, largely not on the model of high polish but nonetheless on the model of a complete sentence. There is a syntax; a beginning, a middle, and an end; an argumentative trajectory. My hope--and this was to some degree achieved--was to get some responses on the record, not to mention getting myself on the record. I found this incredibly useful, though I will say I felt that I needed to put up at some level a piece that was in an experimental stage since the politics of publishing--and perhaps the ethics--entail some respect towards whatever journal or collection I ultimately submit this piece to. A couple of other points: this piece was more polished and argumentative than some of the other things I've posted at Arcade, closer to an essay than earlier ones; at the same time, it evoked giving a talk to me. In other words, it seems to me that conferences, talks, lectures are forums in which we have for decades pre-circulated work, so we might want to avoid overstating the newness of new-media ways of doing the same thing. None of which is to say it isn't different, it is, but only that its difference is not absolute, which the digital mode sometimes has the unfortunate consequence of being marketed as (as much among academics as media types). Basically, it just seems like good practice to make use of sites like Arcade as a space for "publishing" work in progress in the name of dialogue as much as anything else.
Joel Burges, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities, MIT
Arcade has a Seminar function that, I believe, is intended for work-shopping work-in-progress. Don't know whether anyone's been using it, but it's there. You upload a paper and invite specific people to comment. The conversation is closed to others.
Yes, Bill is correct; there is a private seminar function available on Arcade (and people do use it!). While blogging is great for informal, open review, some things require confidential or private discussion. When private online discussion is needed, ArcadeWorks is an excellent option. (Of course, right now it's so private that no one knows it's even in use; in the future we'd like to find ways to make ArcadeWorks manifest signs of life without compromising the privacy of its users.)
Yeah, I'm definitely for giving authors the option to make their seminars public if they choose. I would love that.
Meanwhile, NASA's arsenic-based life fiasco provides interesting counterpoint:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/the-lay-scientist/2010/dec/08/2?CMP=tw...
This doesn't have to do with online scholarship (or it does, remotely), but I've been wondering:
Wouldn't it be great to have a "send a note" function on Arcade? With which short notes can be written, sent and read on Arcade? I know there's "Contact" menu we can use to contact a particular user, but messages through that menu are to be read at users' e-mail accounts. And, aren't e-mails sometimes a little too "formal"? I mean, I would hesitate a lot before sending an e-mail to Joel when I have a quick question about a film he has been discussing. (Pardon me for calling on your name, Joel!) I seem to think such a thing will make visiting Arcade much more fun! Wouldn't it be like passing notes in class?
Will it only increase backstairs trafficking and gossiping?
(Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, I seem to think. Some good may certainly come out of them.)
It may be used for obviously good ends: showing support or agreement, sending thanks, exchanging ideas. These can be done "in the open," of course, but aren't there times we would rather do them privately?
(*So I wondered. It would be great if I'm not the only one thinking these things. It would also be great if I am the only one thinking them. I mean, I wrote this comment in the spirit of "The More the Comments, the Better"!)
Sunjoo: We will take this up at our next opportunity to discuss new features, and let you know what the possibilities are. Thanks for suggesting it.