rhetoric, writing, and technology

The New Academic Press

Just after posting on this issue, I heard about the changes happening over at University of Michigan Press that are long overdue: see the Press Release. The press is shifting from a print model to a digital model to procude "primarily digital monographs." This is the Parlor Press model and is way more cost effective and takes the pressure off of niche disicplinary publishing.

They are not only moving to print-on-demand, but are working to digitze their entire library. Instead of being an isolated entity with its own budget, the Press will be moved under the library's administration, which makes a lot of sense too, if you are after a broader sense of digital publishing beyond the monograph. (Apparently MIT and NYU have made similar moves.) The press would be able to include different genre such as conference presentations and various media including images, video, and I assume tagging and archiving capabilities.

Rather than reducing the number of authors that can publish books, such a model (especially if implemented by more and more universities) would actually increase the number of books that can be published. Rather than printing up a batch of books that have to be sold or scrapped, they can print a book when it is ordered. This means that they can make all of the Press's backlist available as well. No more going out of print! So if everything in their library and Press is ultimately digitized, then you can go to the library and check a book out, or view it online, and if you like it you can order a print-on-demand copy. Genius. I would spend so much more money on books if our library had that!

I have to disagree, then, with this Higher Ed article: Farewell to the Printed Monograph. The printed monograph doesn't go away. It just becomes printed on demand. David at Parlor saw the writing on the wall 7-8 years ago. Finally the UP's are catching up.

Posted by: bhawk at 13:35 | link | comments (2)
university, publishing, new media

Journal Identity

I just came across this article from the Chronicle: Humanities Journals Confront Identity Crisis. It brings up issues as a teacher and an editor.

As I teacher, I've just come off of about a month where I've had students to an extensive (and quirky) bibliography assignment that, in part, works to teach them the differences between databases, print journals, online journals, web sites, blogs, and journal articles. Until you ask students to break out these differences you don't really see how much a) this is really getting confusing and complicated today, and b) students really don't know about these background contexts and distinctions. Journals *really are* losing their traditional, coherent identities. There are good things about this new distributed identity--more readers and different kinds of readers will find the articles than before--and bad things--the scholarly conversations get lost in the mix of isolated articles. I have to talk to my students about how to piece together the scholarly conversations from the discreet bits and nodes they find. There's something I like, though, about helping them piece this stuff together.

As a journal editor, it seems clear to me that: a) more journals will ultimately become online only (for obvious economic reasons); b) with their own web sites (rather than relying on databases only for electronic distribution) they can carry on their missions of disciplinary identity work; c) the print journals that will remain are the ones tied to disciplinary organizations and will be funded by dues and continue to serve a particular disciplinary communal function; d) the rest will be online, open access, with many also being included in databases along with the flagship disciplinary journals.

Much of what has been done by Collin over a CCC Online will ultimately become the norm as major organizations control their own archives and learn to negotiate the levels of distributedness of their materials and identities. We're still in a weird liminal phase where we haven't reach ed a tipping point yet, but it is coming.

Posted by: bhawk at 16:38 | link | comments
thoughts, university, publishing, new media, institutions

CCCC 2009

Just now coming up for air a little bit and thought I'd blog a quick note about Cs. It was a really good Cs this year: saw a number of good panels, had some great conversations, reinforced some long-standing connections, and worked on enhancing some new ones.

I've been skimming Collin's and Alex's posts on Cs. Two interesting perspectives: one as a non-attendee the other as attendee. I think there is something to Collin's discussion of the shifting of conferencing purposes at about a five year plateau. At one level of scale more participants in a network is better—it increases the power and scope of the network and your participation in it. But at a certain point the counter-move comes, when what you really need is a smaller network that reinforces more particular scholarly interests and connections rather than the broad sweeps. Alex's riff on regurgitating the same questions and level of generality jacks in here. Even at more specific levels of disciplinary scale, similar questions seem to be asked.

One of the big topics of conversation, in the afternoon RNF plenary speeches and in the hallways and bars, was the ever-returning but now new again crisis in publication. R/C has about four University Presses that publish scholarly books: Pitt, SIUP, SUNY, and Utah State. SUNY has just cut all R/C works and Utah is on the chopping block for the state budget. Word is that even for profit presses are moving away from publishing scholarly monographs on specific disciplinary work. Heinneman/Boyton/Cook apparently got bought out by Houghton/Mifflin, who will cut HBC's series on R/C to focus on textbooks, which is a money making rather than loosing proposition.

In terms of scale, these are similar problems/issues. The larger and more interdisciplinary the conference gets, the more likely it is that we'll repeat the same general questions and issues. The more money is at the heart of publication, the more general the work will need to be to be publishable/profitable. While there is something to be lost in these shifts (as Collin notes about the shift from blogging to twittering the conference), I still come away from this Cs with positive vibs—which if you know me is a strange thing indeed. After a few years of going to fewer panels and finding fewer panels of specific interest, I seem to have found panels of interest this year and a sense that even though more general discussions will always have a larger pull or force, there will be new conversations and technologies or practices to fill those ecological niches. It was interesting to see complexity come around as a focal point in a number of sessions, so maybe there is a basis for some new questions there. And sooner or later newer approaches to conferencing and publication will come in to fill the void—Parlor Press seems to be doing fine, and may in the end be the last press standing.

So, I'm planning to submit something for next year as I always do. Maybe there is a third plateau after about 10 years of going to Cs, where new purposes emerge and you develop a different relation to the conference. For me, Cs is one of the few chances for f2f networking I have, and there is still something important about that in the ecology of academic life and thought. So, I continue in the face of monetary and physical drawbacks. At least Louisville isn't as far away. Redeyes from the West coast aren't good for the aging body.

Posted by: bhawk at 16:28 | link | comments
thoughts, university, publishing

Is Aristotle on Twitter?

Gotta give props to some friends at UT. Their panel was this morning at SXSW. Creates that little pang of longing for home to see the Dog and Duck :)

Here's a Twitter Feed from their session.

Posted by: bhawk at 17:33 | link | comments (2)
video, rhetoric, documentaries, texas, new media