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# Planned Obsolescence
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### Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy
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[Kathleen Fitzpatrick](http://plannedobsolescence.net) // [@kfitz](http://twitter.com/kfitz) // [kfitzpatrick at mla dot org](mailto:kfitzpatrick@mla.org)
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Note: This talk is an overview of some work I’ve been doing over the better part of the last decade — which is to say that, being an overview, it’s fairly long on generalizations and polemics and a good bit shorter on detail. I’ll hope that the discussion afterward might focus in on some of the spots where questions lie. I should also note that the issues I’m focused on here are problems particular to the book-based fields within the humanities, though I think there are some relationships that can be drawn to the other forms of scholarly communication dominant in other areas of the academy more broadly. But I begin with two epigraphs:
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> “In many cases, traditions last not because they are excellent, but because influential people are averse to change and because of the sheer burdens of transition to a better state.”
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— Cass Sunstein, _Infotopia_
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> “There is no way to stop the shake-up of the university press system from happening. It has already begun.”
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— Lindsay Waters, _Enemies of Promise_
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## overview
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1. obsolescence
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2. undead
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3. material obsolescence
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4. institutional obsolescence
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5. mediacommons
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6. planned obsolescence
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7. peer review
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8. open questions
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## obsolescence
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Note: While the work I’m here to talk about with you today has been very much future-oriented, focused on the changes in scholarly communication that are taking root across the academy, it nonetheless starts with the past, in no small part because certain aspects of the ways that scholars in the US have traditionally worked, particularly in the humanities, are rapidly becoming obsolete. By this, however, I don’t mean to say that we are facing the
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## death
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Note: “death” of the book, for instance, only that certain aspects of our reliance on the book as a primary mode of scholarly communication aren’t serving us as well as they once might have. In fact, the argument that I made in my first book,
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## the anxiety of obsolescence
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Note: The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television, was precisely that the so-called
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## death of the novel
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Note: “death of the novel” wasn’t at all based in material fact, but was instead an ideological claim designed to ensure the novel’s continuance. This continues to be true: neither the novel nor the book more broadly, nor even print in general are in any sense dying forms, but claims of this demise are often used as a means of creating what I like to think of as a kind of
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## “cultural wildlife preserve”
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Note: cultural wildlife preserve, a protected space within which a form that is apparently under threat from predatory forms of newer media can flourish. I bring my first book project up in no small part because of what happened once I’d finished that manuscript. Naively, I’d assumed that publishing a book that makes the argument that the book isn’t dead wouldn’t be that hard, that somebody might have an interest in getting that argument into print. What I hadn’t counted on, though, was the effect that
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## dot-com crash
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Note: the first dot-com crash was having on university presses. It took me nearly a year to find a press willing to consider the project, as press after press told me how much they liked it, but that they just couldn’t afford to publish it. Finally, though, I found a willing press, and in December 2003, after the manuscript had been under review for ten months, I received an email message from the editor. The news was not good: the press was declining to publish the book. The note, which was as encouraging as a rejection can ever be, stressed that in so far as fault could be attributed, it lay not with the manuscript but with the climate; the press had received two enthusiastically positive readers’ reports, and the editor was supportive of the project. The marketing department, however, overruled him on the editorial board, declaring that the book posed
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> “too much financial risk… to pursue in the current economy.”
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— the marketing guys
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Note: “too much financial risk… to pursue in the current economy.”
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This particular cause for rejection prompted two immediate responses, one of which was most clearly articulated by my mother, who said
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> “they were planning on making money off of your book?”
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— mom
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Note: “they were planning on making money off of your book?” The fact is, they were — not much, perhaps, but that the press involved needed the book to make money, at least enough to return its costs, and that it doubted it would, highlights one of the most significant problems facing academic publishing today:
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## insupportable economic model
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Note: an insupportable economic model. To backtrack for a second: university presses in the United States were founded in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a means of distributing the work being produced by university-based scholars, precisely because there was no market for that work, and so commercial publishers refused to take it on. In order to get scholars’ work into circulation, universities had to take on the responsibility for reproducing and circulating it, often giving it away for free to other institutions’ libraries, in exchange for similar work being produced at those institutions. And yet gradually, over the course of the first half of the 20th century, university presses professionalized, becoming revenue centers on their campuses rather than service organizations. As a result, market values all but inevitably came to be applied to the circulation of scholarship — and almost from that moment, the discussion of
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## “crisis”
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Note: the “crisis in scholarly publishing” was born.
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Though these problems have been building for a long time, things suddenly got much, much worse after the dot-com bubble burst in 2000. During this dramatic turn in the stock market, when many US university budgets took a nosedive (a situation that 2008 made to seem like mere foreshadowing), among the academic units whose budgets took the hardest hits were
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## university presses
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Note: university presses and
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## university libraries
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Note: university libraries. And the cuts in funding for libraries represented a further budget cut for presses, as numerous libraries, already straining under
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## rising cost of journals
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Note: the exponentially rising costs of journals, especially in the sciences, managed the cutbacks by reducing the number of monographs they purchased. The result for many university library users was perhaps only a slightly longer wait to obtain any book they needed, as libraries increasingly turned to consortial arrangements for
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## collection sharing
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Note: collection-sharing, but the result for presses was devastating. For a university press of the caliber of, say, Harvard’s, the expectation for decades was that they could count on every library in the University of California system buying a copy of each title they published. After 2001, however, the rule increasingly became such that one library in the system would buy that title - and today even that’s not a certainty, given systems of demand-driven acquisition being implemented at many libraries. This has happened with every system around the country, such that, as Jennifer Crewe noted in 2004, sales of monographs to libraries had already fallen to less than
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## one-third
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Note: one-third of what they had been in the previous decade — and again, that was in 2004, a full ten years of crisis ago. So library cutbacks resulted in vastly reduced sales for university presses, at precisely the moment when severe cutbacks in the percentage of university press budgets
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## subsidies
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Note: provided through institutional subsidies have made those presses dependent on income from sales for their survival. (The average university press receives well under 10% of its annual budget from its institution. And even that small percentage is being withdrawn in the current funding climate.) It’s for this reason, among others, that I have argued that the financial model under which university press publishing operates is simply not sustainable into the future. A foretaste of a likely future has been visible for a while now, as numerous presses are being shut down by their institutions, and as many of those that survive
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## reduced number of titles published
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Note: are required to reduce the number of titles that they publish each year, and as
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## marketing
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Note: marketing concerns are coming at times, of necessity, to compete with scholarly merit in making publication decisions.
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In my case, things turned out well; the book got picked up (if only well over a year later) by a smaller press, one with a larger subsidy and thus more modest sales expectations, and the book managed to exceed those expectations - as well, ironically, as the requirements of that other press. But despite the fact that The Anxiety of Obsolescence was, finally, successfully published, my experience of the crisis in academic publishing led me to begin rethinking my earlier argument that the book wasn’t an endangered species. Perhaps there is a particular form of book —
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## the academic book
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Note: the academic book — that is indeed threatened with a kind of obsolescence. Even so, this is not to say that the academic book is dead. These books are still published, after all, if not exactly in the numbers they might need to be in order to satisfy all our hiring and tenure requirements, and they still sell, if not exactly in the numbers required to support the presses that put them out. The academic book is, however, in a curious state, one that might usefully complicate conventional associations of obsolescence with the “death” of this or that cultural form, for while the academic book is
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## no longer viable
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Note: no longer viable as a primary means of scholarly communication,
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## but still required
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Note: it is still required in many fields in the US in order to obtain tenure. If anything, the academic book isn’t dead; it is
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## undead
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Note: undead, exercising a kind of power over the ways we work without really, truly, being alive. If this is the case, if the academic book is undead, what do we do with it? There’s of course a real question to be asked about how far I want to carry this metaphor; the suggestion that contemporary academic publishing is governed by a kind of
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## zombie
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Note: zombie logic, for instance, might be read as indicating that these old forms refuse to stay put in their graves, but instead walk the earth, rotting and putrescent, wholly devoid of consciousness, eating the brains of the living and susceptible to nothing but decapitation — and this might seem a bit of an over-response. On the other hand, it’s worth considering the extensive scholarship in media studies on the figure of the zombie,
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Note: which is often understood to act as a stand-in for the narcotized subject of capitalism, particularly at those moments when capitalism’s contradictions become most apparent. If there is a relationship between the zombie and the subject of late capital,
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Note: the cultural anxiety that figure marks is currently, with reason, off the charts.
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Note: So far off the charts, in fact, that some have begun to grow weary of the zombie’s proliferation as metaphor in contemporary culture. I do still think it’s a useful one, however, precisely because of its viral spread.
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Note: Zombies are everywhere for a reason, and not least within the academy, as we not only find our ways of communicating increasingly threatened with a sort of death-in-life,
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## death-in-livelihood
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Note: but also find our livelihoods themselves decreasingly lively, as the liberal arts are overtaken by the study of supposedly more pragmatic fields, as a growing culture of assessment requires us to spend more time accounting for our work and less actually doing the work itself, as tenure-track faculty lines in US institutions are rapidly being replaced with more contingent forms of labor, and as too many newly-minted PhDs are finding themselves without the job opportunities they need to survive.
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## really?
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Note: but also find our livelihoods themselves decreasingly lively, as the liberal arts are overtaken by the study of supposedly more pragmatic fields, as a growing culture of assessment requires us to spend more time accounting for our work and less actually doing the work itself, as tenure-track faculty lines in US institutions are rapidly being replaced with more contingent forms of labor, and as too many newly-minted PhDs are finding themselves without the job opportunities they need to survive.
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## undead
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Note: the undead of academic publishing, as studies of radio and the vinyl LP indicate that obsolete media forms have long gone on to productive afterlives. But one key difference between those cases and the case of the academic book, of course, is that it isn’t being driven out of the marketplace by a newer form; in fact, we don’t yet have a good replacement for the work that the book has long done. It’s thus important for us to consider what the book is and isn’t doing for us, the ways that it remains vibrant and vital, and the ways that it has become undead, haunting the living from beyond the grave. But a few distinctions are necessary.
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## material obsolescence
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Note: The obsolescence faced by the academic book is not, primarily, material, any more than is the obsolescence of the novel; a radical shift to all-digital delivery would by itself do nothing to revive the form. However much I would insist that we in the humanities must move beyond our singular focus on
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## ink-on-paper
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Note: producing ink-on-paper (or its PDF surrogate) to really understand and take advantage of
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## pixels-on-screens
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Note: the affordances of pixels-on-screens, a simple move away from
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## print
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Note: print and toward electronic distribution within the current structures of academic publishing will not be enough to bail the system out, as printing, storing, and distributing the material form of the book only represents a
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## fraction
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Note: fraction of its current production costs — less than a third. And, of course,
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## digital
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Note: the digital has its own costs of production, storage, and maintenance to be accounted for — not to mention that, as many have pointed out, digital work may be more prone to a kind of material obsolescence than is print. But even that obsolescence needs a bit of further thought: on the one hand, there’s the obsolescence that you encounter if you try to read a first-generation hypertext like
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Note: Michael Joyce’s Afternoon on a Mac these days. (It’s all but impossible, unless you’ve happened to preserve or are able to emulate the system on which it originally ran.) Technological progress in fact creates an enormous problem for digital preservation that is currently the subject of significant investment and research. On the other hand, certain kinds of digital texts also reveal
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## persistences
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Note: unexpected persistences; one might, for instance, think about
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## blog
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Note: the form of the blog, which seems to be a perfectly
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## ephemeral
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Note: ephemeral form, as each post scrolls down the front page and off into the archives — and yet, the apparent ephemerality of the blog post bears within it a surprising
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## durability
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Note: durability, thanks both to the technologies of searching, filtering, and archiving that have developed across the web, as well as to the networked conversations that keep the
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## archives
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Note: archives in play. Blogs do die, often when their authors stop posting, sometimes when they’re deleted. But even when apparently dead, a blog persists, in archives and caches, and continues to draw readers in through old links and search engines. A form of obsolescence may be engineered into a blog’s architecture, but this ephemerality is misleading; our
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## interaction
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Note: interactions with blogs keep them alive long after they’ve apparently died.
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## institutional obsolescence
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Note: I want to hold up, alongside the interactions produced by blogs, the state of the academic book, which I’d argue faces an obsolescence that is not primarily material but instead institutional, arising from the environment in which it is produced. That is to say, if there’s something obsolete about the book, it’s not its content; despite my general conviction that the book shouldn’t be the make-or-break form of scholarship in tenure reviews in the humanities, there’s still a kind of large-scale synthetic work done in the form of the book that remains important to the development of scholarly thought. So the book’s content isn’t obsolete, but neither is the problem the book’s form; the pages still turn just fine. What has ceased to function in the academic book is the
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## system
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Note: system itself, the process through which the book comes into being. I mentioned earlier that the message I’d received from that press, declining my book on financial grounds, produced two immediate responses. The first was my mother’s bewildered disbelief; the second came from my colleague Matt Kirschenbaum, who left a comment on a blog post of mine saying that he could not understand why I couldn’t simply take the manuscript and the two positive readers’ reports and put the whole thing online — voilà: peer-reviewed publication — where it would likely garner a readership both wider and larger than the same manuscript in print would.
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Note: “In fact I completely understand why that’s not realistic,” he went on to say, “and I’m not seriously advocating it. Nor am I suggesting that we all become our own online publishers, at least not unless that’s part of a continuum of different options. But the point is, the system’s broken and it’s time we got busy fixing it. What ought to count is peer review and scholarly merit, not the physical form in which the text is ultimately delivered.”
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This exchange with Matt, and a number of other conversations that I had in the ensuing months, persuaded me to stop thinking about
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## scholarly publishing
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Note: scholarly publishing as a system that would simply bring my work into being, and instead approach it as the object of that work, thinking seriously about both the institutional models and the material forms through which scholarship might best circulate. About the time I began a fairly vague set of discussions about the possibility of founding an all-electronic scholarly press,
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Note: the Modern Language Association began to report back on the work of its task force on evaluating scholarship for tenure and promotion. The recommendations of the task force included a strong call to departments
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### consider articles published by tenure candidates as seriously as books
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Note: to give serious consideration to articles published by tenure candidates, thus decentering the book as the gold standard of scholarly production, and to communicate that expanded range of acceptable venues for publication to their administrations. The task force also urged those departments
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### acknowledge and fairly evaluate online scholarship
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Note: to acknowledge that scholarship of many different varieties is taking place online, and to evaluate that scholarship without media-related bias.
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These were of course extremely important recommendations, but there was a significant degree of
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## “easier said than done”
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Note: “easier said than done” in the responses that the report received, and for no small reason: in effect, they called for a substantive rethinking not simply of the processes through which the academy tenures its faculty, but in how those faculty do their work, how they communicate that work, and how that work is read both inside and outside the academy. Those changes cannot simply be technological; they must be both social and institutional. That kind of social and institutional change became the focus of two projects that I began work on then, both of which were aimed at creating the kinds of change I think necessary for the survival of scholarly communication in the humanities into the twenty-first century.
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## mediacommons
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Note: The first of these is MediaCommons, a digital scholarly publishing network focused on media studies, which my colleague Avi Santo and I co-founded with support from the Institute for the Future of the Book, the NEH Office of Digital Humanities, and the NYU Digital Library Technology Services group.
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Note: MediaCommons has worked over the last seven years to become a space in which the multiplicity of conversations in and about media studies taking place online can be brought together, through a range of projects that experiment with the form, the weight, and the time signature of scholarly communication. The longest-running of these projects is
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Note: In Media Res, which asks five scholars a week to comment briefly on some up-to-the-minute media text as a means of opening discussion about the issues it presents for media scholars, students, practitioners, and activists.
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Note: Similarly, The New Everyday brings clusters of scholars working on particular issues together in dialogue; the project is an experiment in “middle-state publishing,” focusing on articles that are more formal than blog posts, but not yet as fixed as the journal article.
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Note: #Alt-academy similarly remediates the edited volume and journal as a space for lengthier discussion about a particular issue.
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Note: Our newest project, inTransition, is a collaboration with Cinema Journal featuring videographic film criticism — video essays, that is, that make use of the form in thinking about the form.
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Note: And MediaCommons Press publishes longer texts for open discussion, some of which are moving through the digital phase on their way to a primary life in print,
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Note: like the recent open review of Jason Mittell’s book, Complex Television, while other projects are meant to remain primarily digital.
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Note: But one of our key interests in building MediaCommons was thinking about the social connections it could promote among scholars in the field, getting those scholars in communication with one another, discussing and possibly collaborating on their work. To that end, we focused the platform around a peer network that enables scholars to use their profiles to gather together the writing they’re doing across the web and to provide citations for offline work, creating a digital portfolio that provides a snapshot of their scholarly identities.
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## mediacommons
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Note: However, working on this project taught me several things that I sort of knew already, but hadn’t fully internalized, one of which is that any software development project will inevitably take far longer than you could possibly predict at the outset, and the second, and most important, is that no matter how slowly such software development projects move, the rate of change within the academy is positively glacial in comparison.
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## planned obsolescence
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Note: And it was my need to advocate for such change that led to the other project, the one I’m mostly talking about today. For while numerous publications over the last decade have argued for the need for new systems and practices in scholarly publishing, including, just to name two,
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- John Willinsky, *The Access Principle*
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- Christine Borgman, *Scholarship in the Digital Age*
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Note: John Willinsky’s The Access Principle and Christine Borgman’s Scholarship in the Digital Age, the arguments of these books too often fail to account for the fundamentally
|
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## conservative
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Note: conservative nature of academic institutions in the US and of the academics that comprise them. In the main, we are extraordinarily resistant to change in our ways of working; it is not without reason that a senior colleague once joked to me that the motto of my institution (one that might usefully be extended to the academy as a whole) could well be
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## “we have never done it that way before”
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Note: “we have never done it that way before.” Or, as Donald Hall has put it,
|
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> “While we are very adept at discussing the texts of novels, plays, poems, film, advertising, and even television shows, we are usually very reticent, if not wholly unwilling, to examine the textuality of our own profession, its scripts, values, biases, and behavioral norms.”
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— Donald Hall
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Note: scholars often resist applying the critical skills that we bring to our subject matter to an examination of “the textuality of our own profession, its scripts, values, biases, and behavioral norms” (Hall xiv). This kind of
|
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## self-criticism
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Note: self-criticism is a risky endeavor, and those of us who have been privileged enough to succeed within the existing system are often reluctant to bite the hand that feeds us. Changing our technologies, changing our ways of doing research, changing our modes of production and distribution of the results of that research, may well be crucial to the continued vitality of the academy —
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## change
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|
||||
Note: and yet none of those changes can possibly come about unless there is first a profound change in the ways of thinking of scholars themselves. Until scholars really believe that publishing on the web is as valuable as publishing in print — and more importantly, until they believe that their institutions believe it, too — few will be willing to risk their careers on a new way of working, with the result that that new way of working will remain marginal, undervalued, and risky.
|
||||
So what I have been interested in, then, is not just the set of technological changes that many believe are necessary to allow academic publishing to flourish into the future, but
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
## social
|
||||
## intellectual
|
||||
## institutional
|
||||
|
||||
Note: the social, intellectual, and institutional changes that are necessary to pave the way for these new technologies. In order for new modes of communication to become broadly accepted within the academy, scholars and their institutions must take a new look at the mission of the university, the goals of scholarly publishing, and the processes through which scholars conduct their work. We must collectively consider what new technologies have to offer not us, not just in terms of
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
## cost
|
||||
## access
|
||||
|
||||
Note: reducing the cost of publishing or increasing access to publications (though these are huge issues that deserve far more exploration than they have received); instead, we need to consider the ways that the new technologies with which we are in daily, intimate interaction
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
## the ways we research
|
||||
|
||||
Note: will change the ways we research,
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
## the ways we write
|
||||
|
||||
Note: the ways we write,
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
## the ways we review
|
||||
|
||||
Note: and the ways we review.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
## peer review
|
||||
|
||||
Note: And it’s the structures of peer review that I have argued we need to begin with, not least because over the course of developing MediaCommons, in the dozens of meetings and conferences and panel discussions that I participated in, every single conversation came back, again and again, to the question “what are you going to do about peer review?” And no wonder, I suppose; concerns about peer review are quite understandable,
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
## sine qua non
|
||||
|
||||
Note: given that it is in some sense the sine qua non of the academy. We employ it in almost every aspect of the ways that we work, from hiring decisions through promotion and tenure reviews, in both internal and external grant and fellowship competitions, and, of course, in publishing. The work we do as scholars is repeatedly subjected to a series of vetting processes that enable us to indicate that the results of our work have been scrutinized by authorities in the field, and that those results are therefore themselves authoritative.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
## but
|
||||
|
||||
Note: But I also want to suggest that the current system of peer review is in fact part of what’s broken. There’s a rather extraordinary literature available, mostly in the sciences and social sciences, on the problems with conventional peer review, including its biases and its flaws. Every scholar, I’d be willing to bet, has had direct, personal experience of those flaws — the review that misses the point, the review that must be personally motivated, or perhaps worst, the review that we never even get to see. And for such an imperfect system, peer review as we know it requires an astonishing amount of labor on our part, for which we can never receive “credit.” And so when Matt Kirschenbaum says that
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
> “What ought to count is peer review and scholarly merit, not the physical form in which the text is ultimately delivered.”
|
||||
|
||||
— Matt Kirschenbaum
|
||||
|
||||
Note: [read quote], I agree, but at the same time feel quite strongly that the system of peer review that we know today could be vastly improved — particularly in a networked environment. For that reason, I want us to take a closer look at what we mean when we say peer review, what it is we expect peer review to do, and how such processes might best work online.
|
||||
One of the problems with using our current model of peer review in digital publishing is a fundamental misalignment between the net-native means through which “authority” is determined online and
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
## disciplinary technology
|
||||
|
||||
Note: what Mario Biagioli has referred to as the “disciplinary technology” of peer review, a decidedly Foucauldian form of
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
## self-policing
|
||||
|
||||
Note: self-policing that regulates knowledge through discipline. The problem with simply transferring this system to the networked world is, in no small part, that the network has its own preferred ways of working. The placement of conventional peer review prior to selection for publication in the traditional print-based process indicates that it serves a primarily
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
## gatekeeping
|
||||
|
||||
Note: gatekeeping function, one that allows certain kinds of academic discourse to thrive while excluding other ideas from the realm of the thinkable. Such gatekeeping is arguably necessary in print, in order to cope with the scarcities of print’s economics — only so many pages, in so many books and journals, can be published each year. In the digital, however, this kind of
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
## scarcity is over
|
||||
|
||||
Note: scarcity is over. Because anyone can publishing anything online — and, from a perspective that values the free and open communication of the products of scholarly research, not only can but should — we face instead a extraordinary
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
## plenitude
|
||||
|
||||
Note: plenitude. For this reason, I argue that what digital scholarly publishing must develop is not a means of applying the current system of peer review to new modes of online work in order to
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
## create artificial scarcity
|
||||
|
||||
Note: create artificial scarcity, but instead a net-native system that enables us to
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
## cope with abundance
|
||||
|
||||
Note: cope with abundance. As it is, increasing numbers of scholars are either self-publishing their work via their blogs or are forming new online publishing networks like MediaCommons, and in many cases, these publications are having a greater
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
## impact
|
||||
|
||||
Note: impact on the scholarly community than their traditional peer-reviewed publications are. It’s certainly true in my case: all of my first citations, lecture invitations, and other forms of public recognition stemmed not from my journal articles or my book, but from the work I was doing on my blog. But of course these new modes of publishing demand some kind of assessment, even if that assessment comes after the fact. For that reason, peer review online might fruitfully include
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
## post-publication
|
||||
|
||||
Note: an open, post-publication means of review that doesn’t determine
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
## whether a text should be published
|
||||
|
||||
Note: whether a text should be published (after all, the stuff is already out there) but rather measures
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
## how it has been (and should be) received
|
||||
|
||||
Note: how it has been (and how it should be) received, what its place in the ecosystem of scholarly communication is, and what kinds of responses it has provoked. Such a system would shift the center of gravity of peer review for online scholarship
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
## from regulation to communication
|
||||
|
||||
Note: from regulation to communication, transforming review into a mechanism for
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
## facilitating
|
||||
|
||||
Note: facilitating more fluid and productive exchanges amongst peers — and, not at all incidentally, a system in which the work of reviewing itself becomes visible as work, and the reviews themselves become part of the scholarly record.
|
||||
What I argue is that we need to develop a system of
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
## “peer-to-peer review”
|
||||
|
||||
Note: “peer-to-peer review,” one that takes advantage of networked publishing’s capacity for discussion and dialogue, as well as of what Michael Jensen has called
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
> “the new metrics of scholarly authority”
|
||||
|
||||
— Michael Jensen
|
||||
|
||||
Note: the “new metrics of scholarly authority” — things like hits and downloads, of course, but also comments and inbound links, which reveal how web-based texts get used — in order to provide a post-publication mode of filtering the wealth of content that should be made available via networked publishing. After all,
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
## scarcity
|
||||
|
||||
Note: scarcity does linger in internet-based communication — it’s just that, for the most part, what has become scarce is time and attention, rather than the materials of production. What internet-based scholarly publishing requires is not gatekeepers but
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
## filters
|
||||
|
||||
Note: filters, systems that allow a community of scholars working with and responding to one another to set and maintain their own standards, guiding one another to the best work being produced in their fields.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
Note: Though Planned Obsolescence came out in print from NYUPress in 2011, in order to put my money (at least metaphorically) where my mouth was, I put the entire draft manuscript online for open review in 2009. It wasn’t a perfect process, but it had some great benefits - I was able to discuss the text at a much earlier stage than I would have been otherwise, and I had reviewers discussing the text with one another, disagreeing on points of assessment. And I also know a lot of things about the text. For instance:
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
### 31,650+ page loads
|
||||
### 12,100+ first-time visitors
|
||||
### 3370+ return visitors
|
||||
### 295 comments
|
||||
### 44 commenters
|
||||
|
||||
Note: I know that in the first nine months after the project launched, it had over 31000 page loads; over 12000 unique visitors came by for the first time, and more than 3300 of them came back; 44 unique commenters left a total of 295 comments. And the project was written about and linked to in more than 20 venues, including one review article in a scholarly journal, and it was taught during that same nine-month period in at least four graduate seminars and one undergraduate seminar that I know about.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
# 400
|
||||
|
||||
Note: And I want to place that alongside the fact that the average scholarly press monograph in the humanities sells fewer than 400 copies over its lifetime. Numbers of course aren’t everything, but they are still significant, particularly when coupled with the ability to see the reception of a text in action.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
## open questions
|
||||
|
||||
Note: Of course, an online review process such as this creates a number of open questions, not least around our notion of what publication is, and what purposes it serves. Was my book “published” in 2009? When NYU released the revised version in 2011, was that in effect a second edition? What status did the online version of the text take on once the print version came out? And what kind of relationship is there between the readers’ comments on the online version and the ways that I’ve incorporated them in my revision? A broadly implemented peer-to-peer review system will inevitably require us to think in new ways about
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
## authorship
|
||||
|
||||
Note: authorship, in no small part because such new modes of review will almost certainly necessitate a turn from thinking about academic publishing as being focused on the production and dissemination of individual
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
## products
|
||||
|
||||
Note: products to imagining a system focused more broadly on facilitating the
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
## processes
|
||||
|
||||
Note: processes of scholarly work, as the time and effort required to maintain a gift-economy-driven system of peer-to-peer review will require that scholars place some portion of their primary emphasis not on their own individual achievements, but rather on the advancement of the
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
## community
|
||||
|
||||
Note: community as a whole. This kind of collectivity is a utopian ideal, of course, and to a significant degree, it goes against our training as scholars, and particularly as scholars within the humanities; what we accomplish, we accomplish alone. Or so it seems to us, at least. Roland Barthes, of course, claimed back in 1967 that
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
> “We know now that a text consists not of a line of words, released a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God), but of a multi-dimensional space in which are married and contested several writings, none of which is original: the text is a fabric of quotations, resulting from a thousand sources of culture.”
|
||||
|
||||
— Roland Barthes
|
||||
|
||||
Note: no text is a single “line of words,” but that each instead is a “a fabric of quotations” (Barthes 52-53). We have long acknowledged the contested nature of the author, in theory — but we haven’t thought much about what such a proclamation might mean for our own status as authors. Now, I’m not arguing that we need to prepare to part with the lines on the CV that are the result of our authorship,
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
## interaction
|
||||
|
||||
Note: but I do want to suggest that digital networks, as structures that facilitate interaction, communication, and interconnection, will require us to think differently about what it is we’re doing as we write. As the example of the blog might suggest, communities best engage with one another around writing that is open rather than closed, in process rather than concluded.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
## process
|
||||
|
||||
Note: New publishing systems that foreground process will likely encourage us to “publish” work earlier in its development (at the conference paper stage, for instance), and to remain engaged with those texts much longer after they’ve been released to readers. Admittedly, this makes many scholars nervous, about letting the messiness of our processes be seen, about the prospect of never being fully “done” with a project, but it’s worth considering why we’re doing the work in the first place: to the degree that scholarship is about participating in an exchange of ideas with one’s peers, new networked publishing structures can facilitate that interaction, but will best do so if the discussion is open-ended.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
## control
|
||||
|
||||
Note: This foregrounding of process, however, may likely also require authors to be prepared to relinquish a certain degree of control over their texts, letting go of the illusion that their work springs wholly from the individual intelligence and acknowledging the ways that scholarship, even in fields in which sole authorship is the norm, has always been
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
## collaborative
|
||||
|
||||
Note: collaborative. The conversational structures of the web will inevitably intensify these collaborative relationships, sometimes producing new co-authoring relationships, though not always. It’s clear, however, that we’ll need to develop new citational practices that acknowledge the participation of our peers in the development of our work. Along the way, though, we’ll also need to think differently about
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
## originality
|
||||
|
||||
Note: “originality” in scholarly production, recognizing that, in a networked environment in which more and more discourse is available, some of the most important work that we will do as scholars may more closely resemble contemporary editorial or curatorial practices, bringing together and highlighting and
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
## remix
|
||||
|
||||
Note: remixing significant ideas in existing texts. We must find ways for these new modes of authorship — process-centered, collaborative, remix-oriented — to “count” within our systems of evaluation.
|
||||
There are many other such changes that will be required throughout the entire academic community if such new publishing practices are to take root:
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
## publishers
|
||||
|
||||
Note: publishers, for instance, will need to think differently about their business models (which may need to focus more on services and less on objects), about their editorial practices (which may require a greater investment in guiding the development of projects from an early stage), and about the structures of texts (which may become less linear and will undoubtedly become less uniformly “textual”);
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
## libraries
|
||||
|
||||
Note: they’ll also need to think in concert with libraries about ways to ensure that the texts they’re producing are discoverable and accessible, that preservation is a core focus of their systems of production, and that projects can degrade gracefully when necessary.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
## universities
|
||||
|
||||
Note: And universities, in the broadest sense, will need to rethink the relationship between the library, the university press, the information technology center, and the academic units within the institution, reimagining the funding model under which publishing operates and remembering the institutional purposes that such publishing was invented to serve — but also, and crucially, reimagining the relationship between the academic institution and the surrounding culture. As new systems of networked
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
## knowledge production
|
||||
|
||||
Note: knowledge production become increasingly prevalent and influential online, the university, and the scholars who comprise it, need to find ways to adapt those systems to our needs, or we will run the risk of becoming increasingly irrelevant to the ways that contemporary culture produces and communicates authority.
|
||||
In the end, we in the academy today face what is less a
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
## obsolescence
|
||||
|
||||
Note: material obsolescence than an institutional one; we are caught in entrenched systems that no longer serve our needs as well as they should. But because we are, by and large, our institutions, the greatest challenge we face is not that obsolescence, but our
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
## response
|
||||
|
||||
Note: response to it. Like the novelists I studied in my first book, who feel their cultural centrality threatened by the rise of newer media forms, we can shore up the boundaries between ourselves and the open spaces of intellectual exchange on the internet; we can extol the virtues of the ways things have always been done; we can bemoan our marginalization in a culture that continues marching forward into the digital future — and in so doing, we can further undermine our influence on the main threads of intellectual discussion in contemporary public life. We can build supports for an
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
## undead
|
||||
|
||||
Note: undead system, and we can watch the profession itself become undead.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
## change
|
||||
|
||||
Note: Or we can continue to try to change the ways we communicate and the systems through which we attribute value to such communication, opening ourselves to the possibility that new modes of publishing might enable not just more texts but better texts, not just an evasion of obsolescence but a new life for scholarship. The point, finally, is not whether any one particular technology can provide a viable future, but whether we have the institutional will to commit to the development of the systems that will make such a technology viable, and keep it and ourselves viable into the future.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
# thanks.
|
||||
[Kathleen Fitzpatrick](http://plannedobsolescence.net) // [@kfitz](http://twitter.com/kfitz) // [kfitzpatrick at mla dot org](mailto:kfitzpatrick@mla.org)
|
||||
Reference in New Issue
Block a user