UPDATE: Avi Santo’s follow-up post, “Renewed Publics, Revised Pedagogies”, is now up.
I’ve got the somewhat daunting pleasure of introducing the readers of if:book to one of the Institute’s projects-in-progress, MediaCommons.
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.
UPDATE: Avi Santo’s follow-up post, “Renewed Publics, Revised Pedagogies”, is now up.
if:book
A Project of the Institute for the Future of the Book
What’s not to like? This is great news, and the good news is that feature-wise and technically much of it is likely doable. Some reactions: Choosing media studies makes sense, but I would be careful not to limit the notion that writers must compose in mediated spaces to media studies scholars–I love the notion, but think it applies to anyone these days, especially to those who are not yet composing that way. Perhaps the pedagogical nodes can ameliorate insulation and extend the gesture.
I also wonder about the bridging of the academic and general publics. Again, I think the idea is great, but there is the danger that in opening up the process, it will only amplify what seem irrelevant and abstract conversations in a public eye–that is if a general public were to take time to even listen. Perhaps the editors and media tie ins will be of help here–more than this process just happening naturally. Perhaps targetted interviews or distillations, or something. Making public academic talk might do more harm than good, in some ways 🙂
Great stuff.
Whither Sophie?
Sophie will undoubtedly be a key tool in this endeavor.
Sounds great. The question of the “peer” is, however, important. You don’t want to fall into a Slashdot trap where everything is bogged down by endless comments and banter. And as someone who is an academic who writes, it is important for me to receive feedback from my “peers” and not just anybody (I hope that doesn’t sound snooty – it is meant to mean that people who are familiar with the conversation I am taking part in).
But you also have to “know” who it is to include when you choose peers. That’s why Dan’s point is important too. “Media studies” is a term that might include any number of people; it’s a very flexible category stretching from composition, to literary studies, to cultural studies, to communication studies, and on and on.
Still, I’m eager to see this develop. What is the time-table for going live? Or is that too far off to guess?
Thanks for the comments thus far; they’re really exciting. Daniel, can I ask you to say something more about the risks you see in making academic talk public? My own experience of those risks mostly has to do with the snarky articles that get published every year around the time of the MLA, talking about what those wacky cultural studies types are studying now. But I think the problem in that situation is not that the public has access to the MLA program, but rather that they only have access to the program — perhaps if they heard the talks, rather than just reading the titles, there’d be less of a tendency toward dismissiveness.
Or perhaps not. Perhaps what will mostly change if academic discourse goes fully public is that academics themselves will have to develop (a) more accessible voices, and (b) thicker skin. But I’d like to hear more about your thinking on this.
And as long as I’m here: Jeff, thanks for your note of concern about the potential problems in the slashdotting of the academy. This is an extremely important point; how we determine who “peers” are is key to the entire enterprise. On the one hand, we’re hoping to open things up a bit, to allow the participants in the network to play an active role in determining what a “peer” is. On the other hand, there’s a potential risk in moving from one exclusionary system to another, in which all the cool kids call one another “peers” and close others out of the conversation. Any thoughts you might have on how peer status could best be determined would be hugely appreciated!
I guess I’m of a mind that, if readers of the MLA-bashing pieces actually did sit in on a session, they would still come away with a dubious sense of the value of academic work. Some of the knee-jerk political reaction might subside, but the remaining questions might be equally powerful about the relevance of the talk.
Perhaps conceptions of audience are all that need to work to help bridge any gaps. If non-academics are now able to listen in on conversations about false epistemological assumptions concerning the status of textual elements in new media compositions, they will likely leave bewildered and looking for their checkbook to contribute to the academic booster club.
And I wouldn’t blame them. I’m probably just showing my practical bias. I understand academic communication is a specialized discourse, but it is for this reason that making the process public can cut both ways. Again, I doubt people are going to abandon YouTube and swarm to MediaCommons for their Darwin awards fix. But, a bridge between the communities will eventually neccesitate at least some change in pitch. Probably a healthy corrective.
At the risk of preaching to the choir, I have to say that this project is what the academy desperately needs. And while I recognize Dan’s concern, I think academic processes ought to be FAR more transparent. I’ve always felt that way about the classroom – if the classes I teach cannot hold up to public scrutiny, then I don’t belong in one – and it seems to me our scholarship and merit processes ought to follow a similar path. I’m not sure the public will pay that much attention but should they, I can’t see how abstraction will be construed as wasteful. Of course our huge salaries might be questioned (!).
On the subject of peers, I really like the rules of engagement which seem to me absolutely crucial. I do however, wonder about something that came up at the spring meeting: review of multimodal texts is difficult and few are qualified to do respond to them in any productive way. I wonder how y’all see the process of form/content critique. The form/content split is increasingly blurry but there are still many, many cases where form simply stems from technical possibility (or, as in my case, technical prowess – or lack thereof); thus the whole notion of a peer is dicey. I would hope this category can remain fairly flexible at the very least.
Really nice work you guys and I can’t wait to see how this all shakes out!
Let me chime in with the chorus on how great and necessary this project is.
As as has already been pointed out, the key is who is your peer? I do think we should not collapse the academic/non-academic divide just yet. We should make it transparent, sure. Perhaps, we can even leave it up to the individual scholars as to which gradation of open-peer-review they would like to subject their project to.
So, for example, I may decide that the first read/comments only from those academics in my exact theme; second stage open to all academics; third stage, public etc.
How do we tell who is an academic? Do it kinda like any peer-review journal handles it:
1. Institutional affiliation
2. Published credentials for independent scholars.
Next, one should be able to self-select from a group the research-interests/topics/themes that mirror ones own.
I’m going to add to the general approval we’re already seeing in the comments here. For some years, I have been working on theoretical models that would allow academics (and chief among them those on tenure and promotion committees) to see the kind of incremental, iterative, and collaborative research and scholarship we do on listservs and blogs as worthy of credit for more than just “service to the discipline” or “hallway chat about teaching and research.”
Like Kathleen, I have been most interested in the value of 1) getting ideas out to audiences quickly, and 2) making the process visible by showing the increments and iterations. I’m in favor of an online venue where we can share more than the kind of static scholarship BEING, and move into the realm of scholarship DOING.
That said, like Dan and Jeff, I’m wondering who the peers will be, and how broadly we define media studies. I’m also wondering who is going to be willing to take on the rather large job of senior editorship, and who will be able to serve on the editorial board. And I remember that we talked about the peer review system and rules of engagement at our meeting at USC; it seemed like it would be pretty difficult to come up with rules and criteria that were fair and that most of us could agree on. But maybe I’m being too pessimistic.
Overall? Sounds like a very worthy endeavor, and I’d like to support this and any other efforts that get us further away from the old models of print publication as the only path to academic recognition. Thanks Kathleen; keep us posted!
Great ideas and follow ups regarding transparency. I’m actually all for it, and manan’s point about gradations of publicness makes sense. I also think it’s smart to think of the classroom component. (I hated the way courseware slammed shut the virtual classroom door after the early Web pried it open, speaking of transparency.) I like the way Kathleen has spelled out how the pedagogical piece might have a role in bridging the academic and at-large(r) dimensions. The reframing that takes place to create the right teaching materials can take us a long way toward other audiences and publics.
I also like the way the question of peer review logistics–especially the tools and processes for assessment of media–swings back to the aim of making it a space for media practitioners. I may be over-reading, but, if work in (not just about) media is an emphasis, then reviewers would ideally have some hands-on media savvy. It would be fun if reviewers could capture aspects of the materials–screen shots, screen recordings, etc, add comments (audio, text, callouts, marginalia) and otherwise compose reviews natively in a space with a name like MediaCommons. Could even push it further and repurpose, remix, etc. I’m not sure that would really address some of the assessment concerns, but it might work toward making participants more aware of the issues at play. Or, just let everyone play. No point circling too tightly around media practice. Is there?
Yes to all that, and more. Personally I am most interested in seeing the development of mediums for multimedia scholarly publication (such as the experiments with TK3 done by Bob Stein, Virginia Kuhn, and others). In film studies, for example, the opportunities seem almost endless, including online annotated versions of films and scholarly treatments with interactive media, links, notes, etc. Like everybody else I’m extremely frustrated by the slow nature of the academic publishing beast and the dead quality of the printed page snoring downstairs in the periodical room. And of course I’d like access to a commons where it’s easy to find people working in my field. I do worry about a tsunami of bloggings and postings and ditherings that waste our time. The beauty of peer review, when it works, is to provide a reasonable gatekeeping function and some degree of elegance in information browsing and retrieval. If the commons is overrun, the grass will be stamped out, the garbage will pile up, and the place eventually abandoned to the squirrels. Still, I’d love to be involved.
These comments so far have been fantastic and are right on target with the conversations Kathleen and I have been having with Bob Stein, Ben Vershbow and the rest of the gurus at the Institute while coming up with the initial MediaCommons proposal.
A few recurring themes that have emerged in the comments have been:
1) Who is a peer (and more to the point, who gets to be called a peer)?
2) How will MediaCommons engage non-academic audiences (and is this a good thing)?
3) How are we defining media studies (and is this too limiting a community for this project)?
I will attempt to offer some preliminary thoughts here, but will elaborate on them more fully in my post on Monday about the pedagogical and community-building functions of the site.
1) Though as an academic, I fully support the need for rigor and specialization in determining a peer community, I also recognize the downsides to this exclusivity and opaqueness. Lots of voices never get heard; lots of ideas that could potentially invigorate new modes of scholarship are regularly ignored. I am not suggesting that a peer should be defined as anybody with an opinion, but I am open to the idea that academics can walk in multiple peer communities (whether other academic disciplines or larger social, political, professional, or identity-based ones) and that by providing opportunities for those communities to respond to work through this site (and also by allowing authors to select the communities they want to have count as peers on a piece-by-piece basis, instead of the hierarchy of peers that Michael Day suggests — though this will likely have value for editors behind the scenes) might not only make for stronger scholarship, but more valuable scholarship as well. To concretize this for a moment: say I am very interested in the changing representation of the disease AIDS and those who have contracted it as depicted in fictional medical dramas like ER and Grey’s Anatomy and what this suggests about the emergence of GLBT and other minority communities as desirable consumer groups but also as powerful lobby groups. Of course, I would want feedback from fellow television scholars, but also health communication, GLBT and other area studies scholars as well. I would also love to hear from members of those communities whose experiences are being depicted on such programs: medical professionals, lobbyists for queer and minority rights. Also, what about the producers of these shows? Do all of these groups weigh equally? Probably not. How I would rank them, however, should be largely determined by what it is I am trying to accomplish with this piece. Expertise is contextual.
One of the wonderful things about how MediaCommons would work is that it would allow (if the author so desires) a piece to be written in public and for feedback, suggestions and conversation to commence at a much earlier point than the actual ‘peer-to-peer’ review process. One of the benefits of this system is that it would allow an author to test out a piece on different communities before determining which ones they might select as peers for a more formal review. I agree with Michael Day that there needs to be some form of accreditation in order to determine what community(s) a member belongs to, but this should not be limited only to academics. I also think that we might seriously consider a ranking system within each sub-community of peers based on participation, level of engagement, and value of feedback that would be voted on by other members of those sub-communities. This is open to much debate.
2) Engaging non-academic communities is a tricky thing. I am of the general belief that we need to do more than just let them “listen in” on the conversation. I have recently begun seriously considering what roles I believe academics, and particularly those in the humanities, serve in society. At the moment, I am leaning toward the idea that we are intended to be public intellectuals who help the public develop critical thinking skills and encourage informed discussion. I believe that the academy’s increased institutionalization has diminished our abilities to fulfill those roles fully. Moreover, I believe that if we want to be leaders in a community, we first need to be members of that community. As such, MediaCommons provides a wonderful opportunity for not only making the processes of critical thinking, scholarly writing, and intellectual pusuit more transparent, but in so doing, it also allows non-academics to re-engage with us, to participate in the conversation, to feel like we are all members of a larger community. As I wrote in a previous response to one of Kathleen’s wonderful posts:
the value of changing the current publishing culture should be tied to a reformulation (or, more accurately, a remembering) of the role of the academic within the community in general, as stewards of public and critical intellectual discourse. As such, I feel as though the emphasis placed on what a digital press can do that a traditional press cannot should ultimately be tied to a fulfillment of our outreach and pedagogical missions. A digital press that foregrounds process, encourages critical discussion and engagement at multiple entry points, promotes the networking and interlinking of ideas that otherwise would never likely cross-fertilize, and emphasizes the progression from idea to product is an important intervention in teaching critical thinking, breaking down ivory tower barriers that discourage non-academics from participating (and thus recognizing their ability to be critical thinkers), encouraging active engagement rather than passive consumption of both media and ideas about media, making a so-called ‘gift’ of the resources housed within academic classrooms and institutions, thus fulfilling important service and outreach components, and is also an important form of professional development, because it teaches teachers how to listen and engage with the knowledge already possessed by their students as the basis for strengthening student skills and interest in critical discourse. In other words, a scholarly digital press is a learning environment and a common site for civic participation.
Now, I know this all sounds idealistic and I’m not a huge “build it and they will come” believer, but I do imagine that by actively soliciting non-academic (but not anti-scholarly or uninformed) contributors, discussants, reviewers, and editors who would be equal members of the MediaCommons community alongside academics from the start, we are already opening the gates slightly. It seems to me that the question of how one becomes a contributing member of the MediaCommons community (whether as an author or ‘peer’ or editor) is one that requires considerable discussion, since different constituencies will have different criteria.
3) While I agree that contributors must not be limited to media studies scholars, I do believe that an initial area of mutual interest that binds the community will allow the networking and interconnectivity facets of the MediaCommons site to develop more smoothly. As a site that is intended to do far more than just provide alternate publishing formats or venues, but also create new forms of engagement with fellow scholars, students, community activists and a broader public, media studies seems a spot on topic. As people increasingly look to the internet and other digital media for news, information, and other forms of knowledge, the role of the media studies scholar has become vital in teaching the critical media literacy skills that will help these communities to analyze, decipher, and navigate between the various sources they engage and to better recognize the roles that power, profit, and policy – whether institutional or corporate -play in the construction of so-called credible knowledge.
It seems logical to me that MediaCommons must engage as much with its form as with its content and must address the institutional, legal, economic, technological, ideological and cultural processes that shape and constrain digital literacy and scholarship even as we seeks to use the digital environment to revolutionize scholarly discourse. This is an integral part of making the process transparent and inclusive, and in order to gain legitimacy, we must be willing to be critical of our own assumptions and the tools we use to express them. This seems a territory best covered by media studies, since it requires scholarship that both uses and breaks down the modes of production, distribution, and reception/interaction at its disposal simultaneously.
I also believe that by tying in these scholarly concerns with pedagogy and community building, we will create an environment where conversation is accessible, relevant (and not just to academics), and interactive. My post Monday will address these elements in greater detail.
Apologies for the extended jibber-jabber.
Avi
I tried sending a trackback ping from my Grand Text Auto post yesterday, but so far it seems lost in the ether or caught in a moderation queue.
Here’s my main thought from that post:
There’s some good models out there already for what you propose. For instance, check out “Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies http://liminalities.net/, and–of course–Vectors http://vectors.iml.annenberg.edu/.
I’m not so sure I want to replicate the whole peer review thing, again. I’d be more interested in seeing some editors with vision and guts working without the consent of a lengthy peer review process. You know, some people who want to see some things grow that aren’t necessarily so rooted in the established “ecosystem”.
Mark
Just quickly: I think this is a very promising, constructive move (congratulations to all the collaborators, and especially to Kathleen for her very smart persistence). Leaving the peer review issues aside for now: good move.
And just a word on the old bugabear of peer review itself (with Kathleen’s interesting piece of a few weeks ago in mind here, along with the historical account of peer review that I think Ben Vershbow called to our attention several weeks ago):
Clearly there are too, too, too many things to be said about it to capture it in a few sentences, but one very serious concern that should never, I believe, be ignored is the real danger of misleading younger/untenured scholars into potentially fatal misunderstandings. This *cannot* be, in itself, any kind of argument for maintaining the status quo, but it is an argument for proceeding in a state of full alertness. Peer review is rich and complex and part of a rich and complex system with a rich and complex history. With contradictions, of course, and also with consequences that should always be on the minds of all who wish to improve the system. “Transparency” has uses–but transparency is not among the universal cardinal virtues. Opacity–confidentiality, in both directions, “blind” review–also has uses, and confidentiality is not very usefully cast as a cardinal vice. That opposition is just too simple to cover the complexities of the situations that actually exist in the world. I believe.
Optimistically, Morris
Let me add my enthusiasm to the mix: MediaCommons sounds like the kind of online space that I’d want to visit on a daily basis. Like a cafe or studio or eitheenth-century salon, it promises to be an intellectual social destination as much as a resource for new scholarship–a concept that holds far more appeal than a document database or repository. I’m enormously excited about the project, and look forward to following its development. I do have one observation to make: Kathleen’s original idea of an electronic press really foregrounded the scholarly monograph and the importance of reinvigorating its role and presence in academic life. As recently as the April 24 meeting, the mandate for the online publication venture was conceived as “rescuing the scholarly book” from its “imminent demise.” But the shift from “electronic press” to “scholarly network” seems to have also entailed a shift from book to other scholarly genres, ranging from threaded discussions to reference works to blog entries–“intellectual discourse in all its forms,” as a previous post on the subject puts it. True, the book does still receive mention in KF’s announcement, but it has been largely eclipsed by other genres. As the project has conceptually advanced over time, the felt urgency of preserving the academic monograph seems to have diminished. This is not at all a criticism, merely an observation. Perhaps the academic monograph is so closely tied to its print means of production that its historical and institutional moment has passed. I don’t know. The other way to look at this, however, is that MediaCommons, with its emphasis on process as much as product, seeks to transform the way books are written, rather than displace them by other forms of intellectual discourse. The idea that blog entries might provide the initial fodder for books is interesting (and may already have a proven track record), and suggests that the different forms of discourse can be integrated in such a way as to promote a kind of fluidity among and between them such as we have not previously seen. I suspect much of this, of course, cannot be dictated in advance–MediaCommons will provide an environment for unforeseen and emergent behavior among its participants. I can’t wait.
Avi makes some great points about the importance of including as many voices as possible. I suspect that the “Slashdot trap” that Jeff describes is likely to be a non-issue for quite a while as building any sort of participation will be the real problem. To touch on Noah’s point, David Wiley’s Pitch Journal is one example of a more open peer review electronic publication which failed because of lack of participation. Solving problems from too much participation are easy to do later on.
Nevertheless, a good strategy to avoid this problem and grant the opportunity for other voices is to have an open review system with some/a couple official reviewers (either anonymous or named) appointed by MediaCommons and maybe also author selected/appointed reviewers. Authors would be expected to engage with the official reviews and any other wortwhile feedback provided by others. The official reviewers could also evalute whether the author had addressed well (or not) during discussion any of the more relevant open feedback before giving final approval of the text.
Morris’ comment, “but one very serious concern that should never, I believe, be ignored is the real danger of misleading younger/untenured scholars into potentially fatal misunderstandings. This *cannot* be, in itself, any kind of argument for maintaining the status quo, but it is an argument for proceeding in a state of full alertness” is really important for a number of reasons. One reason is an academic reality that traditional publication is still the way towards tenure. I’m enthusiastic for this project, and I’m not ready yet to accept the idea of it in place of the current system.
But also – when I brought up peer review issues, I did for all the reasons the responses addressed, but also because while some kind of system should be considered, I wonder if your goals should not be to replace a system which exists (the system that un-tenured academics still need and that tenured still need to get promotion and pay raises) but to offer another kind of space that – as Kathleen’s post stated – “energizes [academics’] lives as writers, as teachers, and as public intellectuals.”
So – you are encouraging a new type of space, maybe something which extends – as someone else here noted – spaces already actively engaged with online. That helps with the participation problem (which is also an ideological problem) and keeps you from having to worry about massive participation from the get-go. You start with the choir, to re-mix that phrase. You don’t want to alienate the choir with a daunting system of review, but you don’t want to put them off when you mis-match them with inappropriate (yet alternative) reviewers either. And you don’t necessarily want to give them what they already have elsewhere – the difference being that it serves as a quicker path towards exposure. The “energizing” factor seems more important that the quick exposure factor.
On defining “peers,” one potential model to reference is Amazon.com, which includes both editoral reviews and user reviews. I don’t think we need to be that binary, and I can see a process being created to allow commenters (academics and non-academics) who consistently share insightful feedback to be elected or upgraded to an “editoral” status. The processes for the upgrade could both involve objective (community ranking systems) and subjective criteria or some combination of both.
” a process being created to allow commenters (academics and non-academics) who consistently share insightful feedback to be elected or upgraded”
I was also thinking along the lines of a Digg-like system.
In fact, as long as we are kicking stuff around, I could imagine this new space to be some combination of a Content Management System, social networking and web-tagging [drupal+digg+del.icio.us]. Of course, we will need a straightforward archival space as well.
It is interesting to point to the irony that new technologies, such as the Internet, are finally allowing us to go back to the basics of what Socrates intended to be the role of the intellectual which is to bring the fire of knowledge closer to the people and therefore enriching their lives instead of having it locked up in the Ivory Tower in an autistic discourse among academics. It is important to note, however, that traditional publishing academic journals and companies are not going away anytime soon. They are still can leverage tremendous power with copyright laws and fair-use practices. It is, consequently, important to get a legal apparatus in place to deal with these potential legal problems.
Olivier
Hi, I looked at the websites that you sent with observations about your new project. I think that among the observations the writers offered, the following issues/problems will be of concern for you:
1–universities and academics may disdain electronic publication without a paper journal article as well;
2–existing venues and activities of scholars who do use online formats will affect how they regard your project, and they are potentially your greatest supporters, so must be taken very seriously;
3–the time constraints of people you might want to get as reviewers means you have to think about what they gain from being involved;
4–you must show willingness to use frame grabs, screen shots, etc. as visual, or video, or audio examples; including here, your willingness to assert fair use and not make the user get “permission” to use those clips, images, etc.;
5–all of the site remains free of charge to any user;
6–you develop ways of keeping out spam yet encouraging media users’ comments on a site about media.
In other words, right now, you have two potential constituencies:
1. Most academics, who know little of electronic media’s potential (eg., many faculty do not know how to send email attachments or do not use courseware like Blackboard to create a “discussion board” for student interaction);
2. Aademics who use the Internet a lot, mostly for research, but sometimes for maintaining an electronic presence. The latter in the field of media studies are mostly people who work in new media, and not film or television scholars or people doing mass communications research. Journalism schools have begun to teach courses in participatory journalism, so they would understand a lot of what you are doing.
I myself would judge the new endeavor very strictly according to issues 4 and 5 above; a conservative response by your sponsors to these issues would be disasterous. You have to remain free to the public, and to encourage the use of lots of audio and video and still image examples in a scholarly context. SCMS has a document on fair use that was adopted by the membership and which you can find on its website.
Good luck on the many challenges facing you. I look forward to seeing how the project develops. I do not know if it will be you personally, but the whole thing will need a visionary at the helm to pilot it over the course of its first few years.
Regards, Julia Lesage, co-editor Jump Cut: A Review of
Contemporary Media
A bold project and a fascinating discussion. All i would add is that any practice of peer review and publishing is also at the same time a pedagogy. What you have here, besides a very interesting publishing model, is also a teaching model, and potentially a very interesting one. As soem have already pointed out, getting people using it at all is initially going to be a much bigger problem than teaching them to use it wisely.
A thoroughly fascinating project and discussion. I would be interested to learn how it is proposed to finance this project. Is the plan for the funding to be made available on an ongoing basis by a host institution or philanthropy? Nothing wrong with that, but I would like to know.
As a former scholarly-press editor and now a digital librarian, I find this idea and the discussion very exciting. Changing the publishing/tenure/scholarly communication model is a complex task, and MediaCommons is one way to approach it.
I have some questions, though, in common with a few recent commenters. The first is about cost, and the second is about peer review.
First, what is the financial model for MediaCommons? One of the enormous challenges of non-profit scholarly book publishing in the humanities and social sciences is the business model. The need for publishers to break even requires a careful look at not only potential audiences but at *markets.* As my old boss used to say when one of his editors enthusiastically proposed an edgy, interdisciplinary or otherwise unorthodox book: “Who’s going to to buy it?” We could never avoid that question, and it powerfully underlies the many frustrations expressed about scholarly publishing. Most scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences does not support itself, and publishers cannot ignore that painful truth.
Let me anticipate one retort: these books did not just need to be “properly marketed.” There are many fine scholarly publishers with smart marketing staffs, and we all faced grim sales numbers for some excellent books.
What Media Commons, Rice University all-digital press, and others must face is that it costs serious money to produce and distribute good scholarship. Digital technology can only minimize, not eliminate, those costs. All discussions about the future of the scholarly book need to grapple with the cost issue, because it underlies many aspects of the current system. Those of us who want to change the system must acknowledge that scholarship rarely supports itself as a free-market venture; we must also find ways to persuade the relevant parties to pay for it.
Question Two: on peer review models. Have y’all considered arXiv.org, the longstanding service for scholars in physics, math, computer science and quantitative biology to post and commont on work in progress? As I understand it, posting to the site does not prevent authors from ultimately publishing their work in more conventional venues. arXiv.org is a distribution mechanism that makes informal peer review possible, and greatly speeds the discussion of new work. Presumably, these disciplines have found a way to grant tenure and promotion to people who use the service. This may not be what MediaCommons intends, but it’s worth considering for potential lessons learned.
As an academic who loves to read and write and who is co-founder of HASTAC (“haystack”: Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technologgy Advanced Collaboratory), I am thrilled by MediaCommons. I very much like the conversation happening here and the dexterity of the thinking. I am especially happy about it because I find myself both excited and bored by so many conversations over the future of electronic publishing. The excitement is because this is such a potentially great and productive discussion with enormous implications for the future. The boredom is when I see the kind of zero-sum hyperbolic commentary (i.e. the book is dead! who needs refereeing? scholarly publishing will be changed forever! who needs authors?) that has persisted in the history of technology. People thought the mass publication on cheap paper of popular novels would lead to the end of serious literature and the corruption of the masses. Some people thought photography would spell the end of art. Radio would end newspapers, television would end radio, video would end movies, the internet would end everything else, including the book (one of the oldest forms of technology and still the cheapest if our metric is centuries). I really want to get past “the death of” rhetorics.
Even problem-solving rhetorics are limiting since they so often draw the problem in the narrowest terms in order that technology can “solve it” without addressing an array of underlying social conditions, human relationships, and institutional affiliations that the originary technology filled. Substitution doesn’t excite me. What does is innovation and what the Media Commons and other forms can add to our possibilities for thinking together, for writing and learning collaboratively. Do I sound like an old fout when I say that I don’t want to give up the hours I spend slaving over every comma of my writing. I happen to love that. And I happen to love reading great writers (and my definition of great is expansive)who ponder every comma. Am I an innovator when I say I love working collaboratively on such things as an upcoming project with ten of us working on serious games and virtual reality and new multimedia tests for so-called learning disabilities? Both/and. Why do we have to give up one or another form when we can have both?
Here’s an example where both/and thinking applies. Blogging and the communitarian refereeing of blogging is productive in so many contexts. Is it the best way to develop a complex argument, when part of the fun of the argument is seeing how a mind (or even a couple of minds) work out complexities together? Probably not. Should it count for tenure? If editing an encyclopedia or a collection of essays counts, certainly a blog should. Will it replace the well-argued, refereed booklength argument as the gold standard for tenure in those fields where such a book now is the standard? Maybe in some circumstances, but probably not in all.
My point is that worrying about replacement (the substitution of an old standard for a new one) could well be a counter-force to envisioning innovation. Either/or tends to do that. If the whole point of multi-user, progressive blog-style collaboration is to get past binaristic and limited thinking, why not also get rid of the binary of the book versus the blog? I don’t like the way it narrows one’s vision of the future to have to think of a new media form as having to accomplish everything that is already accomplished by existing forms.
Another example: Several people have raised the issue of cost and clearly cost has to be factored in terms of a goal of sustainability Do we want these blogs to exist for days, weeks, months, years, centuries? Who will sustain them? Under what funding mechanisms? And for what purpose? If credentialing for tenure is the purpose, sustainability is presumably more important than spontaneity as a goal. If the goal is creation of interesting ideas without credentialing (i.e. tenure) as a byproduct, then presumably sustainability may not be as important and then we have a different set of issues, with potentially different costs, different institutional ties. Similarly, if the goal is to make one tenurable through one’s blogs (without additional publication in book or article–paper or electronic–form as a supplement), then that will govern the conditions by which the rules of participation/refereeing/hierarchy/
review/evaluation are generated.
As we all know, publication, on the internet as in books, is a complex process with an extended network of affiliations and outcomes, communication being only one part of that process. As an intellectual model, I would rather think about what new things I am able to accomplish with new forms than to think about how to duplicate what is now available (i.e. “the book”) in a new medium. This requires thinking of new paradigms for a new communication and publication circuit.
Hi, Monica–A physicist friend with whom I have worked on several projects has said that arXiv.org works in his discipline because the discipline itself is fragmented into numerous highly specialized projects on which only a handful of people have expertise. That intense specialization in what is a relatively small field means that everyone knows who is contributing what. In his opinion, this minimizes any ambiguity over who should receive the author credit that occurs in collaboratve ventures in larger fields. I don’t know if other physicists agree with this pov or not. Best, Cathy
the vocabulary is so obtuse here
that you couldn’t involve the public
if you wanted to — they’ll run away
screaming — so i don’t think you need
to worry much about “who is a peer?”;
if someone sticks around, it’s likely
because they belong…
-bowerbird
Hey, it’s Michael Day!
Sorry I’m so slow reading in here. Been trying to keep up, but there’s this little thing going on in the Middle East.
Bob and Ben, have you met Michael before? If not, he’s a guy whose brain you may want to pick about open peer review processes and stuff, as he’s worked on an innovative and ground-breaking online journal, Kairos, and was doing a lot of this stuff some time ago, with the technorhetoricians and computer-assisted composition folks.
Michael, I hope you will offer your 2 cents in here. These are good folks, and they’d probably enjoy some war stories from your experiences.
Chris
Chris,
Technorhetoricians are a tight knit group. We were happy to have Michael Day attend our nexttext project meeting last spring and also our paths crossed at Computers and Writing 2006. Michael and his colleagues have been great supporters of the institute, more than often supplying insights on our work. We always open to hearing more.
I’m arriving late to this conversation but I wanted to echo the common sentiment here. It’s a fantastic development. MediaCommons extends many of the goals that Avi and I had at the genesis of Flow and although the ambitions here are considerably greater, the commitment to inspire conversation and collaboration and make some intervention in the mode of scholarly exchange seems absolutely necessary to me for the many reasons Kathleen and Avi laid out above. I’ll throw in two of my own observations from the experience of creating Flow that may be pertinent. First, while it may be premature to talk about the process of actually constructing MediaCommons, I would share that the metaphor of architecture became increasingly important to me as Flow went along — both the navigable architecture of the site and that of our recruitment/audience-building processes — each of these (I’m somewhat embarassed to admit) proving to be far more definitional – read, inescapable – than I expected and the source of what we eventually came to describe as limitations for our vision of Flow. In the former case the upshot was that, as editors, Avi and I had be far more engaged in the technical side of the venture than we expected and we certainly found ourselves feeling ‘hybrid’–editors that could talk – or write – code (at least a little) working with coders that had to think – or write – like editors (at least a little). We spent a lot of time translating in both directions. The discussion on this page so far makes clear that many in the if:book community have already crossed that technical/academic frontier — as have Kathleen and Avi obviously — and there’s an enormous wealth of e-publishing knowledge here. I don’t know how widespread that knowledge is. The architecture described above is several orders of magnitude more complex than Flow and the importance of identifying multilingual architects, if you will, for the masthead and the back office alike seems crucial to its success.
The lattar case above – our recruitment processes – goes to the challenges of drawing and keeping the attention of academics and non-academics. Several folks above recognized this challenge as well and these are valuable insights and criticisms, I think. The pithy little PR phrase that Avi and I repeatedly used to describe Flow – scholarship at the speed of media – was part of an effort to make the goals of that project instantly recognizable to specialists and laypersons alike. In the end, of course, the primacy of ‘scholarship’ in both the slogan and the concept couldn’t be escaped. MediaCommons has several worthy ambitions, including the experiment with peer-to-peer review, collaborative research, and the creation of pedagogical materials and communities to name a few. I found myself wondering, as I read all of these excellent ideas, how I would communicate the potential and purpose of this project quickly – forgive the market-speak here – the ‘value’ of it – in way that ties these threads together? (I hasten to acknowledge that answering and operationalizing this question leads inexorably toward the design questions above) It’s there somewhere, perhaps in ‘collaboration’ – the arXiv.org model is interesting – or ‘network’ – in the more functional sense of networking – or ‘teaching.’ I think many of us interested in this sort of project see the promise of building an online scholarly community. Yet, my sense is that that notion by itself has little attraction for media scholars, policymakers, or creatives. We have so many communities to contend with already. The closer the beta of MediaCommons comes to presenting promise and solutions for real, concrete and contemporary needs or gaps felt by the very diverse communities we’d like to see here, the more effective it will be, as Noah Wardrip Fruin writes above, at pre-constituting that ‘dedicated community.’
A thoroughly fascinating project and discussion. I would be interested to learn how it is proposed to finance this project. Is the plan for the funding to be made available on an ongoing basis by a host institution or philanthropy? Nothing wrong with that, but I would like to know.
In the former case the upshot was that, as editors, Avi and I had be far more engaged in the technical side of the venture than we expected and we certainly found ourselves feeling ‘hybrid’–editors that could talk – or write – code (at least a little) working with coders that had to think – or write – like editors (at least a little). We spent a lot of time translating in both directions. The discussion on this page so far makes clear that many in the if:book community have already crossed that technical/academic frontier — as have Kathleen and Avi obviously — and there’s an enormous wealth of e-publishing knowledge here. I don’t know how widespread that knowledge is. The architecture described above is several orders of magnitude more complex than Flow and the importance of identifying multilingual architects, if you will, for the masthead and the back office alike seems crucial to its success. info
As we all know, publication, on the internet as in books, is a complex process with an extended network of affiliations and outcomes, communication being only one part of that process. As an intellectual model, I would rather think about what new things I am able to accomplish with new forms than to think about how to duplicate what is now available (i.e. “the book”) in a new medium. This requires thinking of new paradigms for a new communication and publication circuit.
Christopher Lucas – I’m arriving late to this conversation but I wanted to echo the common sentiment here. It’s a fantastic development. MediaCommons extends many of the goals that Avi and I had at the genesis of Flow and although the ambitions here are considerably greater, the commitment to inspire conversation and collaboration and make some intervention in the mode of scholarly exchange seems absolutely necessary to me for the many reasons Kathleen and Avi laid out above. I’ll throw in two of my own observations from the experience of creating Flow that may be pertinent. First, while it may be premature to talk about the process of actually constructing MediaCommons, I would share that the metaphor of architecture became increasingly important to me as Flow went along — both the navigable architecture of the site and that of our recruitment/audience-building processes — each of these (I’m somewhat embarassed to admit) proving to be far more definitional – read, inescapable – than I expected and the source of what we eventually came to describe as limitations for our vision of Flow. In the former case the upshot was that, as editors, Avi and I had be far more engaged in the technical side of the venture than we expected and we certainly found ourselves feeling ‘hybrid’–editors that could talk – or write – code (at least a little) working with coders that had to think – or write – like editors (at least a little). We spent a lot of time translating in both directions. The discussion on this page so far makes clear that many in the if:book community have already crossed that technical/academic frontier — as have Kathleen and Avi obviously — and there’s an enormous wealth of e-publishing knowledge here. I don’t know how widespread that knowledge is. The architecture described above is several orders of magnitude more complex than Flow and the importance of identifying multilingual architects, if you will, for the masthead and the back office alike seems crucial to its success.
good job.