Digital Bibliography

In a desperate effort to get back on the blogging horse, I’ve decided to post my Computers and Writing Conference Proposal for this summer:

This presentation will explore how traditional tables of contents operate as active systems of navigation. Specifically, TOCs and indexes are direct results of historical developments in the physical form of the book. For instance, the codex supplanted the scroll as the dominant form of the book, and codexes began to be sewn together into much larger volumes. These developments fostered numerical systems of textual notation and navigation such as page and paragraph numbers, which are central to the operation of traditionally structured TOCs and indexes. The codex is now being supplanted by emerging digital forms which lack the inherent linearity of numerical navigation systems. However, scholars must have tools at their disposal to find and navigate to relevant content.

Through a demonstration and analysis of the TOC and index of a forthcoming collection of born-digital scholarship, this presentation will demonstrate the importance of an historical understanding of the contexts and technologies out of which these conventions developed. That is, I plan on demonstrating the design impacts of understanding these textual conventions as functional responses to the practices of scholarly production. In this sense scholars can effectively recognize the affordances of current technologies for academic work. Furthermore, without these sorts of understandings, it will be difficult for scholars to shape these technologies for their own purposes, or to work together to develop their own. The presentation will conclude with an audience invitation to ask questions or offer input regarding alternative solutions to the design challenges addressed in the presentation.

Picture of the room where we began the conference with a planning session.

Wow. That was pretty amazing. My first unconference. THATCamp PNW. If you’ve never attended an unconference… you should. Really. You should. This is how most of the conferences in the Digital Humanities and Rhet/Comp should be conducted.

[Before I get too far into this post... thank you, Jentery Sayers (@jenterysayers), Paige Morgan (@paigecmorgan), and Julie Meloni (@jcmeloni) for putting on a great conference. And a special thanks to Jentery and Brooken for putting me up in their soon-to-be-occupied nursery for the weekend.]

Here’s the premise of an “unconference” as I understand it: instead of speakers presenting papers to an audience of listeners, with limited time for Q&A, unconferences are organized as informal conversations around topics selected by audience members. No discussion leaders. No presentations. It’s really an amazing thing to take part in. Basically, the conference started with a theme (Digital Humanities Scholarship, both nationally and locally to the Pacific Northwest), and anyone interested in the topic can apply for the conference. Not sure how competitive the application process was, but I know there was a waiting list, so there must have been some selection process. For this conference, everyone showed up on Saturday morning to a common room (see pic above). We brainstormed ideas for session topics (i.e. mobile learning, digital storytelling, curating digital collections), then setup a schedule of different sessions in different rooms over the next day and a half. At the same time, there were “boot camps” going on, too. The bootcamp sessions were more presentations, with a certain practical bent, than conversations, but they were still much more informal/conversational than traditional conference presentations. The bootcamp on “multimodal scholarship” was particularly rewarding, I think. (Thanks, Will, John, and Dene).

Not only did I get to meet one of my favorite scholars, Johanna Drucker, but I also found myself invigorated by the sessions I attended. I don’t think I’m alone is suggesting that too often at more traditional conferences, I find myself sitting through a less-than-inspired delivery of a scholarly paper, often read rather than presented, and often written for scholarly reading instead of oral delivery. It’s not that there’s anything inherently wrong with the traditional conference model, it’s just that it’s sometimes executed poorly.

On the other hand, I found unconference conversations to be fluid, lively, and smart. Usually most of the people in the room contributed to the conversation in some fashion. People mentioned their own projects, and contextualized them in terms of the ongoing-immediate conversation. We were able to ask questions about details and background. We just sat around for the past couple of days, talking with each other about the things that move us or the thing about which we’re passionate. People met scholars they’ll work with on other projects. Graduate students met mentors. Senior scholars and graduate student both continually encountered new ideas.

Sure, it’s not a perfect format, but it doesn’t purport to be. It’s a conference form that’s emerging. And it’s the sort of conference format that I hope to encounter much more often.

Here’s another response to Joe Harris’s blog. To this post. I have no opposition to Harris’s position. Instead, I offer another way of considering the origins of the extraordinarily long delays in the scholarly publications process, as well as pointing to a possible avenue of addressing them.

…

I’m curious about your associating publication lag time with paper-publishing. I agree that the physicality of printing certainly contributes to the delays about which you’re writing. But I’m not sure that going digital in lieu of paper would reduce the lag time. Having worked on several born-digital publications, both as author and editor, it’s been my impression that the “sending to the printer” component of the process usually comes at the end and involves a few extra weeks (or a few months, at most). Given the timelines you work out here, that doesn’t seem to be the primary cause of the delays, right?

Do you think that these delays might be due more to the nature of the scholarly model of publication? Multiple peer-reviews, multiple revisions, and highly complex and variable labor models? I’m thinking graduate student and faculty who are often paid only in “experience” or “vitae capital.” And because of this sort of compensation, the turnover is high with a constant atmosphere of on-the-job learning. So much variation and turnover result in unpredictability and inefficiency. And the only way the academic publishing model has seemed to respond is to work with relatively long deadlines for different parts of the publication process in order to accommodate all of this unpredictability.

These are the factors that I’ve always understood to be the driving force behind the extended deadlines for scholarly publication. And that’s why I’m not sure it’s a realistic expectation for digital publication to address this significant problem.

One possible way to address this problem is through better systems of coordinating this complex system of labor and textual distribution. For instance, Kairos was just awarded a grant toward implementing an Open Journal System which has been developed to address these very problems. Instead of an editor serving as a clearinghouse for work associated with a publication where he/she receives work, processes it, and sends it back out to the appropriate people or entities, OJS works to automate those relationships in a way that allows editorial collaborators and co-workers to communicate and work together more directly. Not only does it speed up the process, but it reduces certain types of mundane tasks traditionally relegated editors-as-editorial-hubs.

In this way, I could see digital publication models as a potentially effective response to the lag time associated with more traditional editorial models.

(and it might even be a way of increasing the pace of print publication, too!)

image: “Stopped Watch” by practicalowl via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic license.