AMODERN 1: THE FUTURE OF THE SCHOLARLY JOURNAL

Scott Pound

The emergence of online scholarship is a momentous development and an occasion for some serious rethinking of the scholarly knowledge system. This serious rethinking has been happening in earnest for some time, but it isn’t just about technology. It extends deep into our conceptions of the historical, social, and institutional dimensions of scholarly practice.

The scholarly knowledge system we have today originated in the seventeenth century. It sanctifies the individuality, originality, objectivity, and intellectual property of scholars working alone (or in small groups) within a knowledge system defined by the fixity, uniformity, and proprietary status of print. Now, networked IT proffers an apparatus in which information and knowledge no longer tend to be fixed and proprietary; where cultural breakthroughs occur as the result of exercises in collective intelligence, large-scale collaboration, assemblage, and continuous revision; and where authorship and authority are increasingly established communally and anonymously rather than individually.

What constitutes knowledge, publication, research, peer review, authorship, and authority is quickly changing. Each of these sites of epistemic disruption raises stubborn questions. How will scholars harness the capabilities of networked media and still maintain rigorous standards of scholarly literacy and authority? How will institutions of higher learning integrate new forms of scholarly productivity into their review and reward structures? What will it take for peer-reviewed online scholarship to achieve a comparable status to print forms?

WE HAVE NEVER DONE IT THAT WAY BEFORE

An Interview with Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Michael Nardone, Kathleen Fitzpatrick

“We are entrenched in systems that no longer serve our needs,” argues Kathleen Fitzpatrick. From notions of authorship and the traditional peer review process to the role of the university press and library, Fitzpatrick scrutinizes specific points in the network of research production, evaluation, preservation, and circulation. Acknowledging the “wholly unsustainable economic model” under which scholarly publishing operates, she sets her focus on “the technological changes that many believe are necessary to allow academic publishing to flourish into the future.”

THE AMODERNS: TOWARDS PHILOLOGY IN A NEW KEY

A Feature Interview with Jerome J. McGann

Jerome J. McGann, Scott Pound

No scholar has done more than Jerome McGann to expand our understanding of the nature of print and digital media. His experience as an editor of print media during the 70s and the 80s resulted in a drive to rehistoricize editorial practice that has revolutionized textual scholarship. In the early 90s, he began to survey a digital future that would involve the colossal task of reconstructing the entirety of our cultural inheritance for display on digital networks. For McGann, the question we face is not so much how we get on with the future, but “What kind of research and educational program can integrate the preservation and study of these two radically different media?”

SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING

Micro Units and the Macro Scale

Johanna Drucker

The forms of scholarly work create a kind of currency in the academic world, with credit for books, articles, peer-reviewed projects, and other traditional forms each garnering value according to established protocols. As networked formats of scholarly activity enabled by social media platforms begin to create new, distributed, fragmented, micro-units of discourse, how will this change the academic system of accounting? This article suggests some of the ways the credit system for scholarly work will or might change in these circumstances.

THE GRAMMATIZATION OF SCHOLARSHIP

Benjamin J. Robertson

To understand the future of scholarly writing and publication, we must understand that it came to be in the world under specific circumstances and might no longer be adequate to new circumstances as they arise. We can understand such historical circumstances according to Bernard Stiegler’s organology, which describes confluences of technical organs, human organs, and organizations. By describing the contemporary organology of scholarship and differentiating it from past organologies, we can work to produce new research and publication methods appropriate to changing cultural, political, social, and technical landscapes.

THE “UNKNOWN” EXPLORATIONS

Gary Genosko

This paper focuses on the famous journal Explorations, co-edited by Marshall McLuhan and Edmund Carpenter in the 1950s with, however, an important exception. After the initial 9 issues, the journal was reborn as an insert in the University of Toronto alumni and public relations department's journal Varsity Graduate in 1964 and boasted a run of another 8 years. This article examines this period of Explorations, the other supplements that were published alongside it, the relationships between the editors and the institutional constraints within the University of Toronto, and theorizes about the significance of this serial for the vicissitudes of scholarly publishing today.

BEYOND THE JOURNAL AND THE BLOG

The Technical Report for Communication in the Humanities

Nick Montfort

The technical report is a low-profile but important format for the dissemination of information to expert readers. Developed in the 20th century, it became widespread after World War II. Thanks to the Web, it is now widely accessible. This article relates the experience of starting a technical report series for humanistic scholarship. It assesses the rigorous technical report, which is not "officially" published, in the context of the contemporary ecology of scholarship (books, journals, conferences, websites, tweets, etc.), raising the question of how journals should focus their efforts to best contribute to scholarly communication.