Chris Armstrong's message raises once again the important issue of interaction of technology and culture. Electronic publishing does threaten the idea of a single definitive version of a scholarly article. Is that a bug or a feature? There are simple technical solutions (metadata, cryptographic authentication and digital timestamping) that would let us preserve the features of our current system. However, will we want to, since those features are also limitations? We should not forget that those limitations are artificial, imposed by the technology of print. Here is a passage from "The slow evolution of electronic publishing" (available at <http://www.research.att.com/~amo/doc/eworld.html>):
Gutenberg's invention of movable type did prove to be revolutionary. Initially, though, it was an extremely conservative development [Cook, Eisenstein, Steinberg]. It did enable considerably less expensive production of large runs of books (as well as of indulgences). Still, it took considerable further development, technical, social, and economic, before the full impact of movable type became apparent. The first books had initial letters in paragraphs hand-colored, and were produced in ungainly folio volumes. There was also extensive resistance to print by scholars [Hibbitts1, O'Donnell], which included calls for banning the new technology. Many of the objections have a familiar ring to them (only trash was getting into print, books were not as durable as parchments, etc.). For a long time print was treated with suspicion. What is interesting is that many of the criticisms were serious one. Although this view is generally discredited, even some modern scholars (cf. [Eisenstein]) have felt that initially print reduced the variety of scholarly information that was widely available. (Setting the type for a book was much more expensive than copying the manuscript by hand, and it was only the large number of copies that could be printed at once that reduced the per-copy cost.) There were also more subtle effects. Scholars of the 15th century were trained in the art of comparing a variety of copies of a treatise to figure out the mistakes of the scribes and thus discern the original words of the author. With print, that was impossible! A mistake made in typesetting would be propagated in all copies in that print run. Indeed, some of the mistakes that slipped through were egregious, as in the "wicked Bible" in 17th century England, in which the Seventh Commandment was rendered as "Thou shalt commit adultery" (p. 204 of [Steinberg]). Of course, methods (such as proofreading and printed errata) to compensate for such deficiencies were invented, and we have developed a culture of print. Scholars work with the mental image of an edition, a definitive work that stays immutable. Many of the objections to electronic publications (such as that of Quinn [Quinn]) are based on perceived threats to this model. Yet before movable type was invented, there were no definitive editions, and scholars lived in a much more fluid world. Electronic publishing removes the choke point that the step of going to print represented, and is likely to lead to a much more diffuse (and also much more effective) communication system. However, the habits developed over 500 years are not easy to break, which is why I am not astonished by the slow evolution of electronic publishing. For those readers of this list who have a few spare hours, and access to a good library, I highly recommend the book "Johannes Trithemius: In Praise of Scribes, 'De Laude Scriptorum,'" edited with an introduction by Klaus Arnold, translated by Roland Behrendt, Coronado Press, Lawrence , Kansas, 1974. Trithemius' tract, with the first version written in the early 1490s, and the Klaus Arnold introduction, illustrate nicely the problems scholars had in the transition to print. Andrew Odlyzko ************************************************************************ Andrew Odlyzko a...@research.att.com AT&T Labs - Research voice: 973-360-8410 http://www.research.att.com/~amo fax: 973-360-8178 ************************************************************************