---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2006 10:13:25 -0400
From: Lloyd Hoffman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Frances L VanScoy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED],
[EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED],
Gayane Goltukhuhyan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Brian Sowers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
Alberto Santiago <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, [EMAIL PROTECTED],
[EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: Frances L VanScoy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: [vel] GAM3R 7H30RY wikimonograph
ALCON,
This requires a reread and some thought. A couple of initial points in no
particular order I would be happy to meet and discuss.
1. What are the psychological ramifications of the physical tangibility a
printed book has over an electronic one?
a. Beauty
b. Physical mobility (no hardware required)
c. Wacking a bug (harder to do with a device)
d. Tangible nature of illustrations for study and enjoyment versus
animation and sound potentials with a computer)
2. Is the issue a new publication form, or simply a new conversation
form using blog vice verbal speech?
3. Definition of serious peer review?
Lloyd
----- Original Message ----- From: "Frances L VanScoy" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>;
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; "Gayane Goltukhuhyan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; "Brian
Sowers" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; "Alberto Santiago" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>;
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>;
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: "Frances L VanScoy" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Wednesday, August 09, 2006 4:16 PM
Subject: [vel] GAM3R 7H30RY wikimonograph
From the issue dated July 28, 2006
Book 2.0
Scholars turn monographs into digital conversations
By JEFFREY R. YOUNG
New York
While most scholarly books are reviewed by a few carefully chosen experts
before publication, McKenzie Wark's latest monograph is getting line-by-line
critiques from hundreds of strangers in cyberspace, many of whom know
absolutely nothing about his academic field.
Mr. Wark, a professor of media and cultural studies at New School University,
has put the draft of his latest book online in an experimental format
inspired by academic blogs and the free-for-all spirit of Wikipedia, the
popular online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Each paragraph of Mr.
Wark's book has its own Web page, and next to each of those paragraphs is a
box where anyone can comment
though readers are not permitted to alter the original text.
The scholar says he looks forward to sitting down each day to read a new
batch of comments, some by colleagues whose names he recognizes and others by
people cloaked by pseudonyms.
That input has persuaded him to sharpen the opening section, and he says he
will probably make other changes as well. But not all the online feedback has
been helpful, or kind. "This doesn't have substance," wrote someone
identified as "toad." "Take some time off, and teach a little."
Mr. Wark is in the habit of responding publicly to just about every comment,
but that left him virtually speechless. "Harsh, dude," he replied.
Welcome to what is either an expansive new future for the book in the digital
age, or a cacophonous morass that will turn scholarship into a series of
flame wars
or both.
Scholars like Mr. Wark, who are as comfortable firing off comments on blogs
as they are pontificating at academic conferences, are beginning to question
whether the printed book is the best format for advancing scholarship and
communicating big ideas.
In tenure and promotion, of course, the book is still king
the whole academic enterprise often revolves around it. But several scholars
are using digital means to challenge the current model of academic
publishing.
Thanks to the Internet, they argue, the book should be dynamic rather than
fixed
not just a text, but a site of conversation. Printouts could still be made
and bound, but the real action would be online, and the commentary would form
a new kind of peer review.
Even some publishers are experimenting, though so far the most ambitious
efforts have been at scholarly journals. Nature, for instance, started a
program this summer in which authors can opt to have articles they submit
made available immediately as electronic pre-prints that anyone can comment
on. Those papers are still reviewed the old-fashioned way, but the comments
by online users are also taken into consideration.
Many academic publishers shrug off open-review e-books as simply the latest
technological fad, saying that the time-tested peer-review process should not
be replaced by bands of volunteers.
Whether traditional publishers join in or not, there is no doubt that
academic discourse is increasingly occurring on blogs and other online
forums. So how can that energy be channeled into accepted forms of
scholarship? Is it time for the book to get a high-tech makeover?
Game On
Mr. Wark's book is called GAM3R 7H30RY (pronounced "Gamer Theory," and
rendered in a code-like language style popular among computer geeks). It
offers a cultural critique of video games and argues that popular culture
increasingly casts life itself as a kind of game
where you're only truly a survivor if you can avoid being voted off the
island.
Mr. Wark originally planned on sticking with the old-fashioned peer-review
model
and he has, in fact, submitted the book for publication by a traditional
academic press (Harvard University Press). But as he was finishing a draft,
he was approached by Ben Vershbow, a researcher at the Institute for the
Future of the Book, an unusual academic center run by the University of
Southern California but based in Brooklyn.
Mr. Vershbow is a fan of one of Mr. Wark's previous books, A Hacker Manifesto
(Harvard University Press), an excerpt of which the scholar placed online. So
Mr. Vershbow asked whether Mr. Wark would have been interested in having
users comment on that book while it was under production.
"Hell, no," Mr. Wark responded
at least by his retelling, over brunch at a Brooklyn restaurant last month.
"That's one of those books where you sit alone on a mountaintop and not talk
to anybody. ... Not everything can be 'engage with the reader' every five
minutes."
But he agreed to turn GAM3R 7H30RY into a conversation with his audience. So
he sat down with researchers from the center
a group whose work ethic blends long brainstorming meetings with bouts of
hands-on multimedia production
and helped design a format that would put both text and comments in the
foreground. In May they unveiled their creation and opened the rhetorical
floodgates.
"The first thing I figured out about this is, you outsource the
proofreading," said Mr. Wark, noting that many of the comments have nitpicked
his text's grammar rather than confronting its substance. "I'm loving that
because I'm bad at it. I mean, structural things I can figure out, but,
particularly for a writer, it's hard to see tiny, tiny details."
Thanks to mentions on some popular blogs, the e-book has also attracted video
gamers who have commented on the book. The problem, though, is that many of
those gamers have dissed it. "They're saying, This is a stereotype of what
gamers are like," said Mr. Wark. "And I'm trying to say, I flip it over,
that's the whole point of the first chapter; I start with the stereotype and
then I flip it over. But you've got to signal that earlier on, so people
aren't put off."
He plans to make that change for the published version because he wants the
book to appeal to a broad audience. "The thing about scholarship is it tends
to create homogeneous readerships, so you write for the new-media-theory
crowd," he said. "I don't do High Theory, as it's called. I do Low Theory,
which is, Is there a way to bring a little bit of distance and reflection
into people's everyday experiences and lives?"
Mr. Wark admits that he is not much of a gamer himself, though he did pick
his favorite games to write about, including the Sims, a popular simulation
where players control the social interactions of a suburban family. He
considers himself a writer foremost, and he sports the markings of an artist
with hipster-style sneakers and a sticker for an experimental art group on
his laptop. He says he chose to write about video games because he thought
the subject would appeal to today's students.
"If you want to have conversations with 20-year-olds," he said, "one good way
is to start with their own common culture and make it unfamiliar."
Though a few of the comments on the e-book have been cutting
one user said "Is this a textbook or a novel? I'm confused"
Mr. Wark notes that most of the responses have been thoughtful. (In fact, a
look at the more than 300 comments reveal that readers are examining the
book's argument closely and posting specific suggestions.) He doesn't remove
any of them, no matter how negative, though he does delete spam, postings
similar to the ads that clutter many e-mail boxes.
"I'm meeting new people," he said, adding that the experiment is working. He
said he had interacted online with a range of people who had commented,
including a Derrida scholar, a fan of the video game Civilization, and a
middle-aged librarian. "To me that's half the reason to write anyways, to
meet new people."
One of Mr. Wark's inspirations for the e-book form is Wikipedia.
"That is the literary work of our time," he said. "It's the Shakespeare of
2006. It took a traditional form, which is an encyclopedia, and completely
rethought it. It rethought what authorship is. It rethought what
collaboration is. It rethought textual form."
That sentiment is likely to rile other scholars, many of whom dismiss
Wikipedia as full of inaccurate, misleading, or otherwise flawed information
contributed by people of unknown background. But Mr. Wark argues that
Wikipedia's power is that it brings many thinkers together. And because
Wikipedia allows anyone to see the history of who has added what to each
entry, he said, it is self-correcting when errors do emerge.
"Wikipedia is based in sound academic practices to do with peer review
it just changes who those peers are," he said. "They're not people who are
authorized by Ivy League degrees or anything like that. But there's more of
them, and they work faster."
Pointing to a recent study in Nature that showed that Wikipedia entries are
about as accurate as entries in Encyclopaedia Britannica (though Britannica
disputes those findings, and the study's methods), he said these new
knowledge-makers are "not doing too badly."
"You've really got to ask yourself," he said, "What have I got against free
knowledge produced by the people?"
A New Kind of Publishing
The Institute for the Future of the Book, which produced the GAM3R 7H30RY
e-book, is not your typical academic center. For one thing, it's located in a
row house in Brooklyn, just steps away from the residence of the institute's
founder and research director, Robert Stein. A tiny, hand-scrawled label on
the building's door buzzer is the only physical indication of its existence.
The institute's five researchers often work in the same room, sitting with
their laptops around a large, funky conference table. If one of them needs to
make a phone call, he goes into one of two small meeting rooms and shuts the
door. If you want to know what is on their minds on any particular day, you
can visit the institute's blog, called If:book, where the group's members
post thoughtful riffs on digital publishing.
On a recent afternoon, Mr. Stein, Mr. Vershbow, and the three other members
of the research team gathered around a table in the institute's yard to talk
about why they think academic publishing is broken. And, naturally, to talk
about the future of the book.
Mr. Stein has been involved in e-book publishing longer than just about
anyone. He founded the Voyager Company in the 1980s, which produced
multimedia projects on CD-ROM; he worked on electronic-text projects for the
research division of Atari, the early video game company; and he founded
Night Kitchen, a company that developed multimedia publishing tools in the
late 1990s. At least, that's what the Wikipedia entry about Mr. Stein says.
(And those facts check out.)
"For the first 20 years I was working in this field, I really thought the
main thing we were doing was putting audio and video in them," he said of
e-books. "In the last couple of years it's become clear that locating the
book inside of the network is fundamentally more important than adding
multimedia to it."
What changed his thinking was an essay by a University of California at
Berkeley historian, Carla Hesse. The essay, "Books in Time," argued that the
idea of the author was a fairly recent invention, dating from only about the
18th century. The implication: Books don't have to be so lonely.
"I realized that this questioning that goes on while you read, that that
could happen sort of in real time and in a dynamic way," he said. "And best
of all would be if readers could talk to each other, and if readers could
talk to the author, because the reason for a book is to afford conversation
across space and time, and so why shouldn't some of that conversation take
place literally within the book itself?"
Mr. Vershbow, who is newer to the field of e-publishing and does not yet have
a Wikipedia entry about his career, said the group is not advocating the
death of the physical book
though it is worth noting that there aren't many printed books visible in
the institute's offices. "This is not a proposition that every book should be
written in this way," he said. But the networked e-book is ideal for
scholarly books, or any work dealing with big ideas that might be difficult
for a lone author to tackle, he argued.
In a way, he said, the institute seeks to apply the model of open-source
software development to scholarship. Open-source software, in which a
distributed group of volunteer programmers contribute to large software
projects, was also the inspiration for Wikipedia.
"We're kind of talking about open-source development of big-idea books
that go into more depth than a Wikipedia article would, obviously, and that
are more perhaps original and more provocative and are less balanced than a
Wikipedia article is trying to be."
Mr. Stein chimed back in: "We are suggesting a new idea of peer review that
is fundamentally similar, in that it is an exchange among peers, but that is
in the open," he said. As it stands, most scholarly presses, and journal
publishers for that matter, keep the peer-review process private and
anonymous. "We think that the way that peer review in theory enacts
scholarship is actually of value, and it's worth being seen, and it might
spark further discussion and further critical engagement," Mr. Stein said.
But how can five guys sitting around a table in Brooklyn revamp the
peer-review process?
That's the question that is driving them lately as they have organized a
series of daylong meetings with well-known bloggers and other prominent
scholars.
The answer, they have decided, is to start their own scholarly press. It's a
relatively modest step, as it will focus only on the discipline of media
studies. The tentative name is Media Commons, and the plan is to publish more
academic books like GAM3R 7H30RY, as well as scholarly articles, and even
blogs
all of which will be subject to a public, open peer review. The institute
unveiled initial plans for the project last week.
"We decided we're going to publish really fabulous stuff, we're going to let
anybody comment, and the editorial board will take the responsibility of
vetting commenters as peers," said Mr. Stein, though he noted that the
details are still being worked out. "We think we can do such a good job of
publishing, and have such a high level of comments and discussion, that we
think it will suddenly become prestigious to be published here. And that's
how precedent gets set."
War Over Words
For that project, the institute found another collaborator eager to buck the
publishing establishment.
Kathleen Fitzpatrick, an associate professor of English and media studies at
Pomona College, said she started thinking critically about academic
publishing after a maddeningly long struggle to find a publisher for her own
book, about depictions of television in literature
The short version of her story, as she tells it: Several publishers told her
that her book was great, but that budgets were too tight to print it because
it was not seen as of broad enough interest to be a big seller. When she
finally found a willing press, and after the book was favorably reviewed
twice and nearly accepted for publication, the marketing department still
pulled the plug because it felt the book wouldn't sell enough copies. Ms.
Fitzpatrick wondered why she couldn't take the book's text, and the two
scholarly reviews, and just post it all online herself. But she knew that
would not impress her tenure committee.
What she did end up publishing, on a blog, was a series of manifestos on
scholarly publishing. And even though her book did eventually find a
publisher (Vanderbilt University Press), and she did get tenure, she says
change is needed.
"The entire system right now of academic publishing, especially in the
humanities, is broken," she said in an interview. It should not take years
for a monograph to find an audience, she said, and too much pressure is
placed on book publishing in the tenure-and-promotion process.
"The process of communicating one's research through a book or through an
article has become more about markers of individual success
lines on a CV"
than it is about convincing other scholars of ideas or arguments, she said.
She said she hopes that the Media Commons Web-publishing effort will bring
more voices into peer review and turn the process into a valuable
contribution to discourse.
"It will be more inclusive, and it will be basically community-regulated
rather than regulated by a small editorial board," she said.
Though the details are still being determined, she described one possible
model: Though anyone would be able to comment on manuscripts in the Media
Commons, some users would be chosen by the board as official "peer
reviewers." A professor whose book has been reviewed could then take the top
10 reviews from official reviewers and submit those to a tenure committee.
"The promotion-and-tenure committee will have to do a little more work
actually looking at what peer reviewers said rather than simply at whether
they voted yes or no," Ms. Fitzpatrick said.
But leaders of traditional scholarly presses wonder how people will know what
to make of the reviews conducted in an open-review model.
"How do you know about the quality of people doing the peer review online?"
asked Alex Holzman, director of Temple University Press. "I'd really want to
know who's commenting, and why."
Ken Wissoker, editorial director for Duke University Press, said the current
system of peer review works well for identifying the best books in each
discipline.
"We have a very demanding peer review," he said of his own press, and
"reviewers might go through several rounds of revision.
"You'd have a really different situation when what someone did with the
reviews was optional, or where it was continuous
where it's more like going to a writing group," he said.
Rice University announced this month that it would start the first
all-digital university press, focusing on art history and other disciplines
in the humanities. But even that effort will conduct peer review in the
traditional way, said Charles J. Henry, vice provost and university librarian
at Rice. "It's extremely important that the press establish its authority
from the start," he said, noting that many scholars are likely to be
skeptical of the quality of a book publisher that does not actually print
books.
The new Rice University Press does plan to use the online medium to encourage
discussion of the books it publishes. Mr. Henry said it would put up
something like a blog with each of its books, where readers and the authors
could have a public dialogue, and authors can better learn how their books
are being used in class and in research.
The idea of replacing printed books with networked texts recently attracted
the attention
and derision
of John Updike.
"Yes, there is a ton of information on the Web, but much of it is egregiously
inaccurate, unedited, unattributed, and juvenile," he said, addressing the
topic at length this summer at BookExpo America in Washington, an event
sponsored by the American Booksellers Association and the Association of
American Publishers.
"The printed, bound, and paid-for book was
still is for the moment
more exacting, more demanding of its producer and consumer both," Mr. Updike
said. "It was the encounter, in silence, of two minds, one following in the
other's steps but invited to imagine, to argue, to concur on a level of
reflection beyond that of personal encounter."
Mr. Updike essentially argued that what books achieve transcends and improves
on conversation, and that reducing the book to simple chatter would harm
scholarship and discourse.
Ending his remarks, which were met with enthusiastic applause, Mr. Updike
urged his colleagues to resist letting the network subsume the printed word.
"Booksellers, defend your lonely forts. ... For some of us, books are
intrinsic to our human identity."
Blogs Have the Last Word
On the Institute for the Future of the Book's blog, Mr. Vershbow responded to
Mr. Updike's much-quoted speech.
Calling Mr. Updike a "nostalgic elitist," he said it was unfortunate that the
author was helping shape the popular conversation about e-books, and he
criticized The New York Times for giving the remarks so much ink.
In a comment posted on the blog in response, a user with the nickname "renee"
agreed with Mr. Vershbow. "Regardless of what Updike thinks or wants, the new
Renaissance is under way," she wrote.
Another reader of the blog quickly jumped in to defend Mr. Updike, however:
"I think he is simply acknowledging the changes to the book, and I think he
has an honest concern of what might [be] lost in the transition of moving
ideas to the Web, especially from someone whose life has been about books,"
wrote Eddie A. Tejeda, a computer consultant who helped the institute build
the GAM3R 7H30RY e-book. "I think it's fair to lament what might be lost."
The discussion continues in the blogosphere.
WEB RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS ARTICLE
GAM3R 7H30RY, an e-book by McKenzie Wark, a professor of media and cultural
studies at New School University, in which readers are invited to comment on
every paragraph.
http://www.futureofthebook.org/gamertheory
If:book, a blog run by researchers at the Institute for the Future of the
Book.
http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog
An online essay, "On the Future of Academic Publishing, Peer Review, and
Tenure Requirements," by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, an associate professor of
English and media studies at Pomona College, arguing that academic publishing
needs major changes.
http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/on_the_future_of_academic_publishing_peer_review_and_tenure_requirements_or
An audio recording of a speech by John Updike criticizing aspects of the
shift from printed to networked books.
http://www.bookexpocast.com/wp-podcasts/JohnUpdikePodcast.mp3
Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia to which anyone can contribute.
http://en.wikipedia.org
http://chronicle.com
Section: Information Technology
Volume 52, Issue 47, Page A20
