(cross-posted from if:book)

I’ve got the somewhat daunting pleasure of introducing the readers of if:book to one of the Institute’s projects-in-progress, MediaCommons. (What follows is long. In a day or so, I’ll tuck the majority of it beneath the fold.)

As has been mentioned several times here, the Institute for the Future of the Book has spent much of 2006 exploring the future of electronic scholarly publishing and its many implications, including the development of alternate modes of peer-review and the possibilities for networked interaction amongst authors and texts. Over the course of the spring, we brainstormed, wrote a bunch of manifestos, and planned a meeting at which a group of primarily humanities-based scholars discussed the possibilities for a new model of academic publishing. Since that meeting, we’ve been working on a draft proposal for what we’re now thinking of as a wide-ranging scholarly network — an ecosystem, if you can bear that metaphor — in which folks working in media studies can write, publish, review, and discuss, in forms ranging from the blog to the monograph, from the purely textual to the multi-mediated, with all manner of degrees inbetween.

We decided to focus our efforts on the field of media studies for a number of reasons, some intellectual and some structural. On the intellectual side, scholars in media studies explore the very tools that a network such as the one we’re proposing will use, thus allowing for a productive self-reflexivity, leaving the network itself open to continual analysis and critique. Moreover, publishing within such a network seems increasingly crucial to media scholars, who need the ability to quote from the multi-mediated materials they write about, and for whom form needs to be able to follow content, allowing not just for writing about mediation but writing in a mediated environment. This connects to one of the key structural reasons for our choice: we’re convinced that media studies scholars will need to lead the way in convincing tenure and promotion committees that new modes of publishing like this network are not simply valid but important. As media scholars can make the “form must follow content” argument convincingly, and as tenure qualifications in media studies often include work done in media other than print already, we hope that media studies will provide a key point of entry for a broader reshaping of publishing in the humanities.

Our shift from thinking about an “electronic press” to thinking about a “scholarly network” came about gradually; the more we thought about the purposes behind electronic scholarly publishing, the more we became focused on the need not simply to provide better access to discrete scholarly texts but rather to reinvigorate intellectual discourse, and thus connections, amongst peers (and, not incidentally, discourse between the academy and the wider intellectual public). This need has grown for any number of systemic reasons, including the substantive and often debilitating time-lags between the completion of a piece of scholarly writing and its publication, as well as the subsequent delays between publication of the primary text and publication of any reviews or responses to that text. These time-lags have been worsened by the increasing economic difficulties threatening many university presses and libraries, which each year face new administrative and financial obstacles to producing, distributing, and making available the full range of publishable texts and ideas in development in any given field. The combination of such structural problems in academic publishing has resulted in an increasing disconnection among scholars, whose work requires a give-and-take with peers, and yet is produced in greater and greater isolation.

Such isolation is highlighted, of course, in thinking about the relationship between the academy and the rest of contemporary society. The financial crisis in scholarly publishing is of course not unrelated to the failure of most academic writing to find any audience outside the academy. While we wouldn’t want to suggest that all scholarly production ought to be accessible to non-specialists — there’s certainly a need for the kinds of communication amongst peers that wouldn’t be of interest to most mainstream readers — we do nonetheless believe that the lack of communication between the academy and the wider reading public points to a need to rethink the role of the academic in public intellectual life.

Most universities provide fairly structured definitions of the academic’s role, both as part of the institution’s mission and as informing the criteria under which faculty are hired and reviewed: the academic’s function is to conduct and communicate the products of research through publication, to disseminate knowledge through teaching, and to perform various kinds of service to communities ranging from the institution to the professional society to the wider public. Traditional modes of scholarly life tend to make these goals appear discrete, and they often take place in three very different discursive registers. Despite often being defined as a public good, in fact, much academic discourse remains inaccessible and impenetrable to the publics it seeks to serve.

We believe, however, that the goals of scholarship, teaching, and service are deeply intertwined, and that a reimagining of the scholarly press through the affordances of contemporary network technologies will enable us not simply to build a better publishing process but also to forge better relationships among colleagues, and between the academy and the public. The move from the discrete, proprietary, market-driven press to an open access scholarly network became in our conversations both a logical way of meeting the multiple mandates that academics operate within and a necessary intervention for the academy, allowing it to forge a more inclusive community of scholars who challenge opaque forms of traditional scholarship by foregrounding process and emphasizing critical dialogue. Such dialogue will foster new scholarship that operates in modes that are collaborative, interactive, multimediated, networked, nonlinear, and multi-accented. In the process, an open access scholarly network will also build bridges with diverse non-academic communities, allowing the academy to regain its credibility with these constituencies who have come to equate scholarly critical discourse with ivory tower elitism.

With that as preamble, let me attempt to describe what we’re currently imagining. Much of what follows is speculative; no doubt we’ll get into the development process and discover that some of our desires can’t immediately be met. We’ll also no doubt be inspired to add new resources that we can’t currently imagine. This indeterminacy is not a drawback, however, but instead one of the most tangible benefits of working within a digitally networked environment, which allows for a malleability and growth that makes such evolution not just possible but desirable.

At the moment, we imagine MediaCommons as a wide-ranging network with a relatively static point of entry that brings the participant into the MediaCommons community and makes apparent the wealth of different resources at his or her disposal. On this front page will be different modules highlighting what’s happening in various nodes (”today in the blogs”; active forum topics; “just posted” texts from journals; featured projects). One module on this front page might be made customizable (”My MediaCommons”), such that participants can in some fashion design their own interfaces with the network, tracking the conversations and texts in which they are most interested.

The various nodes in this network will support the publication and discussion of a wide variety of forms of scholarly writing. Those nodes may include:

– electronic “monographs” (Mackenzie Wark’s GAM3R 7H30RY is a key model here), which will allow editors and authors to work together in the development of ideas that surface in blogs and other discussions, as well as in the design, production, publicizing, and review of individual and collaborative projects;

– electronic “casebooks,” which will bring together writing by many authors on a single subject — a single television program, for instance — along with pedagogical and other materials, allowing the casebooks to serve as continually evolving textbooks;

– electronic “journals,” in which editors bring together article-length texts on a range of subjects that are somehow interrelated;

– electronic reference works, in which a community collectively produces, in a mode analogous to current wiki projects, authoritative resources for research in the field;

– electronic forums, including both threaded discussions and a wealth of blogs, through which a wide range of media scholars, practitioners, policy makers, and users are able to discuss media events and texts can be discussed in real time. These nodes will promote ongoing discourse and interconnection among readers and writers, and will allow for the germination and exploration of the ideas and arguments of more sustained pieces of scholarly writing.

Many other such possibilities are imaginable. The key elements that they share, made possible by digital technologies, are their interconnections and their openness for discussion and revision. These potentials will help scholars energize their lives as writers, as teachers, and as public intellectuals.

Such openness and interconnection will also allow us to make the process of scholarly work just as visible and valuable as its product; readers will be able to follow the development of an idea from its germination in a blog, though its drafting as an article, to its revisions, and authors will be able to work in dialogue with those readers, generating discussion and obtaining feedback on work-in-progress at many different stages. Because such discussions will take place in the open, and because the enormous time lags of the current modes of academic publishing will be greatly lessened, this ongoing discourse among authors and readers will no doubt result in the generation of many new ideas, leading to more exciting new work.

Moreover, because participants in the network will come from many different perspectives — not just faculty, but also students, independent scholars, media makers, journalists, critics, activists, and interested members of the broader public — MediaCommons will promote the integration of research, teaching, and service. The network will contain nodes that are specifically designed for the development of pedagogical materials, and for the interactions of faculty and students; the network will also promote community engagement by inviting the participation of grass-roots media activists and by fostering dialogue among authors and readers from many different constituencies. We’ll be posting in more depth about these pedagogical and community-outreach functions very soon.

We’re of course still in the process of designing how MediaCommons will function on a day-to-day basis. MediaCommons will be a membership-driven network; membership will be open to anyone interested, including writers and readers both within and outside the academy, and that membership have a great deal of influence over the directions in which the network develops. At the moment, we imagine that the network’s operations will be led by an editorial board composed of two senior/coordinating editors, who will have oversight over the network as a whole, and a number of area editors, who will have oversight over different nodes on the network (such as long-form projects, community-building, design, etc), helping to shepherd discussion and develop projects. The editorial board will have the responsibility for setting and implementing network policy, but will do so in dialogue with the general membership.

In addition to the editorial board, MediaCommons will also recruit a range of on-the-ground editors, who will for relatively brief periods of time take charge of various aspects of or projects on the network, doing work such as copyediting and design, fostering conversation, and participating actively in the network’s many discussion spaces.

MediaCommons will also, crucially, serve as a profound intervention into the processes of scholarly peer review, processes which (as I’ve gone on at length about on other occasions) are of enormous importance to the warranting and credentialing needs of the contemporary academy but which are, we feel, of only marginal value to scholars themselves. Our plan is to develop and employ a process of “peer-to-peer review,” in which texts are discussed and, in some sense, “ranked” by a committed community of readers. This new process will shift the purpose of such review from a gatekeeping function, determining whether or not a manuscript should be published, to one that instead determines how a text should be received. Peer-to-peer review will also focus on the development of authors and the deepening of ideas, rather than simply an up-or-down vote on any particular text.

How exactly this peer-to-peer review process will work is open to some discussion, as yet. The editorial board will develop a set of guidelines for determining which readers will be designated “peers,” and within which nodes of MediaCommons; these “peers” will then have the ability to review the texts posted in their nodes. The authors of those texts undergoing review will be encouraged to respond to the comments and criticisms of their peers, transforming a one-way process of critique into a multi-dimensional conversation.

Because this process will take place in public, we feel that certain rules of engagement will be important, including that authors must take the first step in requesting review of their work, such that the fear of a potentially damaging critique being levied at a text-in-process can be ameliorated; that peers must comment publicly, and must take responsibility for their critiques by attaching their names to them, creating an atmosphere of honest, thoughtful debate; that authors should have the ability to request review from particular member constituencies whose readings may be of most help to them; that authors must have the ability to withdraw texts that have received negative reviews from the network, in order that they might revise and resubmit; and that authors and peers alike must commit themselves to regular participation in the processes of peer-to-peer review. Peers need not necessarily be authors, but authors should always be peers, invested in the discussion of the work of others on the network.

There’s obviously much more to be written about this project; we’ll no doubt be elaborating on many of the points briefly sketched out here in the days to come. We’d love some feedback on our thoughts thus far; in order for this network to take off, we’ll need broad buy-in right from the outset. Please let us know what you like here, what you don’t, what other features you’d like us to consider, and any other thoughts you might have about how we might really forge the scholarly discourse network of the future.

(cross-posted from Planned Obsolescence)

Henry over at Crooked Timber posted over the weekend about Yochai Benkler’s new book, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, which has just been released by Yale University Press. Benkler has also made the book available in PDF format, and has created a wiki for the text, allowing for a different kind of interaction between readers and this text:

The basic idea is to make this Wiki a place where people who read the book can do at least four things. First, collaborate on writing a summary of the ideas and claims of the book, as an initial point of entry. Second, provide an easy platform through which to access underlying research materials: both those used in the book’s notes, and more importantly, resources that are useful for further research, refinement, and updating. Third, the Wiki should be a place where participants can describe, link to, and analyze examples of the phenomena the book describes. The purpose is not to “make the case” for the book or find “gotcha” counter examples. What we are trying to do is provide a real research tool, annotated bibliography, and platform for collaborative learning. Examples and counter-examples should be selected and described with that purpose in mind. Fourth, the Wiki is itself a learning platform about what is valuable in a learning platform. Through separate pages devoted to ideas and experiments of what can be done with an online book to make it a learning platform, we hope to expand the range of uses to which this Wiki can be available.

In certain ways, a wiki is of course the ideal format for such a project, allowing as it does for multiple, collaborative authorship and a relatively boundless expansion. But the wiki seems also to maintain a separation between the primary text and its related paratexts — here are the static PDFs from which the author speaks, and here are the malleable wiki pages on which readers chime in. One of the questions I’m pondering as we move forward with the ElectraPress project is how we might imagine bringing those voices into closer conversation.

I’ve posted another polemic at The Valve (as well as Planned Obsolescence), arguing, as the title suggests, for a focus on cooperative labor in a project such as ElectraPress. I’d love to hear your responses, here or there.

As I mentioned sometime back, things have been happening behind the scenes here at ElectraPress, and all that set-building and light-hanging has prevented me from being able to do much in the way of actual performing here, in front of the curtain.

But now, at last, I can fill you in on what’s been going on. Back in January, after the “On the Future of Academic Publishing, Peer Review, and Tenure Requirements” post ran at The Valve, I was invited to New York to visit the Institute for the Future of the Book, and particularly to have some conversations with Bob Stein, the Institute’s founder, about how I imagined ElectraPress developing, and where I wanted to see it go.

In the course of our talks, Bob proposed an alliance, one I happily accepted. We’re working together to establish an all-electronic scholarly press, to be hosted by the Annenberg Center for Communication at USC (where the Institute is likewise housed). We imagine that this press will, for the time being, focus in the area of media studies; the projects that the press will publish will take many forms, many different lengths, and many different structures, but all will be “born digital,” and all will be rigorously peer reviewed — though through a newly reimagined peer review system that will make use of the network in its process.

We are now in the thick of imagining how this press might be structured, how it might function, and, most importantly, how it might transform scholarly communication. We’re trying to think both idealistically and pragmatically, puzzling through how we can create a publishing system that allows for the greatest possible range of innovation while still maintaining a broad level of acceptance within current academic structures. To that end, we’re holding a meeting in late April, bringing together a group of faculty and technologists, folks working in English, Media Studies, Film, and Information Science, to spend a day thinking out loud about the future of electronic scholarly publishing and the possibilities presented by ElectraPress.

But given that one of our hopes is to spend this meeting thinking about what happens when academic writing becomes fully networked — and not least what kinds of conversations among scholars might spring up in the process — we thought we’d begin our discussions now, online.

Moreover, we want to bring as many people into these conversations as possible, particularly people like you who have a stake in the outcome of our discussion. We wished that it were possible to get everybody who’s interested around that table in late April, though we simply couldn’t. But what the realities of facilities and funding make impossible, the network allows us to circumvent. We’ve set up an online conference on the Institute for the Future of the Book’s server, hoping to use the month between now and the meeting to stimulate as many ideas about electronic scholarly publishing as possible.

I’d like to ask you all to join us there soon, and continuing over the course of the next few weeks, so that we can begin thinking together about the kinds of projects that ElectraPress will be building upon and the kinds of possibilities that are ahead of us.

The protracted silence here at the ElectraPress blog has no doubt produced an unfortunate dissipation of attention and energies, but I hope that those of you still poking around here will keep poking around, and that those of you with things to contribute will, in fact, contribute them. There are Big Things happening behind the scenes, Things that I can’t yet make public, but that will move this enterprise forward rather rapidly, rather soon.

Excuses and disclaimers out of the way, this post and some number of posts to follow will focus on current experiments in publishing (particularly, though not exclusively, academic publishing), and I hope that we might begin some discussions exploring what ElectraPress might learn from them.

First up, a couple of projects (and a project in development) from the Institute for the Future of the Book (see also the associated if:book blog) that are attempting to push the boundaries of the blog, rethinking the relationship between the kinds of intellectual work that gets done in blog posts and discussions and the kinds of work more traditionally made public in other venues, such as books and galleries:

• IT IN place: artist Alex Itin describes his blog, created as part of his tenure as artist-in-residence at the Institute, as “a scroll on which my brain is splayed.” As Bob Stein suggests, Alex’s interactions with the blog quickly outstripped the Institute’s hopes for what he’d do, evolving and developing as the technologies with which he was working found their way into his art. IT IN place has become not a place to talk about the work, and not an alternative space in which to view the work, but a fundamental part of the work itself.
• Without Gods: Mitchell Stephens, a professor of journalism at NYU and the author of several books, including The Rise of the Image, The Fall of the Word, is at work on a history of atheism, and is blogging the writing of the book — again, not just writing about the writing of this book, but putting the book’s ideas into circulation and discussion as he’s working, in ways that are changing the shape of the book as he works.
• And, finally, a project in process: McKenzie Wark’s Gamer Theory. In this blog-to-be, Wark is going to publish his forthcoming book serially, with room both for discussion by readers and for revision and versioning of the original text based on those discussions. Right now, the folks at the Institute are wrestling with the shape of this forthcoming blog, in a most literal sense: how can the page be laid out such that the discussion of the text isn’t hidden behind the scenes, but is in fact given the same kinds of authority as the original posts? Can the blog be made horizontal rather than vertical? This discussion is ongoing over at if:book, and promises to result in a fascinating new model for the networked book.

Take a look at these projects — in what directions do they spur your imagination? How might the electronic press of the future make use of some of these innovations?

The ElectraPress wiki is open for business. Editor accounts on the wiki are freely available (and encouraged! really!), but due to a series of bot infestations, those desiring accounts must obtain them by emailing the management (electra AT electrapress DOT com). Sorry for the inconvenience.

The most notable resource currently available there is a wiki-able version of the bibliography I posted earlier this morning on Planned Obsolescence. Please add entries to it, as well as other pages and resources.

Also note that this blog has been upgraded to WordPress 2.0, which comes with a raft of new features for your bemused exploration.

cross-posted from The Valve:

Inside Higher Ed reported a few days back on the work thus far done by an MLA task force on the evaluation of scholarship for tenure and promotion, and on the multiple recommendations thus far made by the panel, whose members include current MLA president Domna C. Stanton, Donald E. Hall, Sean Latham, Leonard Cassuto, and our blogging friend Michael Bérubé.

What follows is a lengthy consideration and extension of one of the recommendations made by this panel, as well as a sketch of one possible future, presented in the hopes of opening up a larger conversation about where academic publishing ought to go, and how we might best take it there.

Several weeks back, when I moved the ElectraPress blog over to this WordPress install, I mentioned having done so out of a desire to transfer the several conversations that I’d recently had about EP into a public space, where we might collectively think through the issues that they raised. Of course, grading and moving intervened; hence the protracted radio silence. But: break is upon us! And my sabbatical has begun! And thus, once again, full speed ahead!

So, conversations, beginning with an email message from John Willinsky, of the University of British Columbia’s Public Knowledge Project. John invited me to post an edited version of his email:

Hi, all. I’ve bumped all registered users up to permissions level 5, which means that you now have the ability not only to post, and to comment, but also to add links and link categories for the sidebar. Please do so!

A test post, but I also wanted to link to to this description of Columbia UP’s electronic imprint.