In the category of things that I used to post to the blog that now land on Twitter instead: the link. In an effort to maintain a better archive for myself, I’m experimenting with moving these things back here again.

Today, Chris Kelty’s post on Savage Minds, “How Not to Run a University Press (or How Sausage Is Made)”. In this post, Kelty thinks through the reported demise — or, more accurately, the institutional doing-in — of Rice University Press. Among the issues he raises, perhaps the most significant is the university’s refusal to understand that publishing requires actual labor and financial support:

If you judge the experiment in digital publishing on these facts, it’s sure to look like a failure, but the failure is not in the vision or ideas articulated by the press, but a simple failure to maintain good business judgement. It speaks volumes about how university administrators and many others (including many academics) see academic publishing: as something where no labor is required, only a great big print-a-book machine, a warehouse and some stamped envelopes.

This assessment resonates strongly for me, as in chapter 5 of Planned Obsolescence I focus on the role of publishing within the university, and the university’s responsibilities with respect to publishing. My fear is that universities will take on this responsibility without committing resources to it, assuming (as Rice appears to have done) that because the new mode of publishing is digital, it must be cheap.

The fact is that while the costs involved in publishing can be reduced in some areas, the costs of labor cannot — and, if anything, digital publishing requires more, and more kinds of labor.

This is perhaps not the moment at which institutions want to hear that they have to make additional investments in something that feels optional, but they really need to hear this:

• If you expect your faculty to publish, you must provide the means for them to do so.
• If you expect scholarly publishing to turn a profit, or even break even, you may want to stop holding your breath.
• If you allow commercial entities to take over scholarly publishing, because they can afford to do so, you must expect their predatory, monopolistic practices to encroach on the access you have to your own faculty’s work, and to diminish the impact that their work can have both inside and outside the academy.

There is no solution to this conundrum except for institutions to recognize that they must become responsible for supporting scholarly communication, and that this support will require treating the technologies and the labor involved in publishing as part of the institution’s infrastructure.

For the next few days, my “Five Years Ago” block at right will be filled with post-Katrina posts. After all these years with the blog, it still feels very odd to have such a record of past trauma, the detail of what was going through my head in those days when I desperately needed someone around me to understand how bad things were in New Orleans.

The power of this kind of record is part of what makes me agree with Paul Carr’s assessment: what I’ve gained in immediacy and community via Twitter, I’ve lost in preservation, longevity, even permanence.

It’s this kind of thing that has me torn between the precious little time I have for this kind of writing and the desire to keep those thoughts somewhere I might get back at them five years from now.

[Crossposted from MediaCommons.]

The open review experiment conducted by MediaCommons on behalf of Shakespeare Quarterly continues to make a splash. Previously covered by Jennifer Howard in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the experiment has now led to a front page story in the New York Times looking broadly at the ways that peer review is being opened up through projects such as ours and the Center for History and New Media’s Hacking the Academy.

We’re ecstatic to have gotten this attention. Now we hope to follow through. If you have an account here, you can already create a scholarly profile, publish your own blog, and build a research network. We’re taking proposals for projects that our network members want to develop under our auspices, and we’re also looking for submissions for MediaCommons Press. Get involved with us here, and help us build the future of scholarly publishing.

Where to begin? I’ve spent the last month getting myself moved across the country and settled into a small studio in New York, where I’m spending a year on sabbatical as a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU and as an honorary fellow at NYU’s Humanities Initiative. The semester here doesn’t crank up for another couple of weeks, so I’m cooling my heels a bit, catching up on some reading and trying to figure out what the year holds for me.

Much of what the year holds is MediaCommons. After two-plus years of only being able to give the project little bits of time squeezed inbetween classes, chairing, writing, and other responsibilities, MediaCommons this year gets to occupy the center of my schedule. What that means is as yet a bit amorphous: we have several projects in the pipeline that I’m looking forward to getting launched, and I’m talking with a few people about some other new projects. But a big part of what I hope to do for MediaCommons this year has to do with raising awareness of the possibilities that the platform presents for media scholars who want to get their own work out there themselves, who want to build working groups with whom they share that work, who want to experiment with new digital forms and new open modes of review.

Very likely, the question of open review will get a lot of attention from me this year, as we seem to be approaching some kind of tipping point; the experiment we conducted on behalf of Shakespeare Quarterly has received a lot of attention, and has an increasing number of scholars in the humanities thinking about how to build both a viable open review process and a community capable of sustaining that process. For all the obvious reasons, I want to participate in those conversations, and to see how I can help guide the development of our thinking about the relationship between social media and peer review over the course of the year.

Aside from that, I have an article focusing on social media and literary reading that I’m working on (which is running a little behinder than I’d like), and am beginning to think about what comes next, writing-wise. It’s a little unnerving but also quite freeing not to know what the next project is yet; I’ve got some ideas and issues that I’m interested in, but no thoughts as yet about how I’ll come at them. I’ll look forward to getting to work through some of those ideas here, on the road to wherever this year takes me.

REMEDIES

Plaintiffs have demonstrated by overwhelming evidence that Proposition 8 violates their due process and equal protection rights and that they will continue to suffer these constitutional violations until state officials cease enforcement of Proposition 8. California is able to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, as it has already issued 18,000 marriage licenses to same-sex couples and has not suffered any demonstrated harm as a result,see FF 64-66; moreover, California officials have chosen not to defend Proposition 8 in these proceedings.

Because Proposition 8 is unconstitutional under both the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses, the court orders entry of judgment permanently enjoining its enforcement; prohibiting the official defendants from applying or enforcing Proposition 8 and directing the official defendants that all persons under their control or supervision shall not apply or enforce Proposition 8. The clerk is DIRECTED to enter judgment without bond in favor of plaintiffs and plaintiff-intervenors and against defendants and defendant-intervenors pursuant to FRCP 58.

IT IS SO ORDERED.

I’m way more pressed for time than I’d like right now, finishing up a bajillion details involved in moving myself and a subset of my stuff across the country for the next ten months, but I want to be sure to take a second to note the absolute awesomeness of Anthologize, the new WordPress 3.0 plugin developed by the One Week | One Tool workshop, sponsored by the NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities. The plugin is designed to take you from blog to book — or, even better, from many blogs to many kinds of book-like outputs. I’ve only just begun playing with it, but can easily imagine it become a key part of my Intro to Digital Media Studies class, and I can also see its utility in repurposing thematically-linked blog posts in more permanent, more “official” form.

Huge congratulations to the Anthologize team, and I look forward to watching — and participating in — the project’s further development.

[Crossposted from MediaCommons.]

Today’s Chronicle of Higher Education brings us a wonderful article from Jennifer Howard, exploring our recent experiment in open peer review, conducted on behalf of the eminent journal, Shakespeare Quarterly. This review process, which is at the heart of MediaCommons Press’s experiments in new modes of publishing for scholarship, has been so successful for SQ that, as the article notes, the journal’s editors plan to use it again for future special issues.

One interesting point in the article is the comparison between the Nature experiment with open review conducted in 2006 — an experiment declared by its editors to have been a “failure,” and used by many in scholarly publishing since then as evidence that open review can’t work — and the SQ review. Howard notes one participant’s sense the “the humanities’ subjective, conversational tendencies may make them well suited to open review — better suited, perhaps, than the sciences,” and yet, of course, the humanities have in general been very slow to such experimentation.

We at MediaCommons are extremely proud to be taking the lead in developing new models for transforming scholarly communication in the humanities, and we’re thrilled to have had the opportunity to work with a journal as important as Shakespeare Quarterly, modifying the open review process that we used (and advocated for) with my own Planned Obsolescence for the journal’s needs. Thanks to SQ‘s editors, and especially special issue editor Katherine Rowe, for making such a successful experiment possible.

We very much look forward to collaborating with scholars, journals, and presses on future such projects!

The Library of Congress has just this morning issued its statement of exemptions to the portions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that forbid the circumvention of DRM and other technological measures intended to prevent access to or copying of digital materials. These exemptions are issued every three years; last time out, the exemptions allowed film and media studies professors to crack the content scrambling system (a.k.a. CSS) on DVDs in order to rip short clips to make compilations for classroom use. This seemed at the time like an awfully restricted exemption — literally only film and media studies profs (no profs in other fields, and no students), literally only in order to create compilations of clips for use in the classroom (not for use in critical writing) — but it struck me then that the statement might be the thin end of the wedge.

And so it appears to have been. The exemption on the cracking of CSS now extends to all instructors and students [Correction: see Timothy Yenter's comment below; the extension includes all instructors but only students in film and media studies courses], and the “educational uses” now include critical commentary and documentary production, as well as the exceptionally broad category of “non-commercial videos.” Whether this gets taken to mean that fan vids will be recognized as falling under the exemption remains to be seen, but the chances seem to me to be high.

This is already pretty amazing, and yet, as they say on late-night infomercials, “but wait! There’s more!” The LOC has also declared that programs that allow the jailbreaking of a cell phone in order to install “lawfully obtained” applications is legal, as is the following:

Computer programs, in the form of firmware or software, that enable used wireless telephone handsets to connect to a wireless telecommunications network, when circumvention is initiated by the owner of the copy of the computer program solely in order to connect to a wireless telecommunications network and access to the network is authorized by the operator of the network.

If I’m reading that correctly, I think that unlocking a “used” phone has now just been made legal as well. The question of what constitutes “used” here is open, I think — is the iPhone I purchased new but have now had for a year “used”? — but I think the way has been paved for users to connect their handsets to their network of choice. Ars Technica correctly, I think, understands these two provisions as a direct kick in the teeth to Apple; it will be interesting to see how the company responds.

And, as if that weren’t enough, the LOC has also declared that circumventing DRM in order to activate the text-to-speech function of e-books for which the function has been disabled is now permitted, as is circumventing DRM in order to make e-books usable by “screen readers that render the text into a specialized format.” I’m not exactly sure what that last means — is it now legal for me to crack DRM on my Kindle app books in order to port them into iBooks? — but there seems to be at least a recognition that lawfully obtained digital texts should be readable in the purchaser’s choice of formats.

All of these provisions come with the caveat that where there are other means of accomplishing the same thing (getting video clips; getting e-books with the audio component enabled), consumers must take the route that does not require circumventing DRM, but where there is no other way, the position seems to be that those who have legally purchased texts and objects protected by DRM have the right to break those systems for purposes that would otherwise fall under the category of fair use.

These exemptions promise to have an extraordinary impact on the kinds of media scholarship that can be published over the next few years; projects like In Media Res, which has long led with its jaw on the fair-use front, now have a certain measure of legal protection working in their favor. But these exemptions will be up for review in three years, so media scholars, students, and practitioners who care about their ability to access and use the legally-obtained media texts with which they work need to make wise use of the time, demonstrating to the LOC what can be done with such free access. And we need to continue to lobby for further expansions in our rights to access the primary sources with which we work.

So I’ve managed to survive all of the bullet points on my insane itinerary of June and July travel, and am happily ensconced once again in my very own home, madly catching up on work items that I promised people months ago and as yet have failed to deliver.

I’m also doing a little running around town, taking care of the myriad items that either have been let slide for a while now (get the oil changed! make that followup vet appointment!) or that come due each year in August (get the car smogged! get the registration and insurance renewed!). All that stuff has to be done now, as I’ve got 2.5 weeks and counting before I need to get myself and some subset of my stuff to New York for the year.

And that’s leaving aside the process of culling that subset of my stuff that goes to New York from that subset that needs to be packed up and stored here in Claremont and that subset that can remain right where it is for the folks who will be renting my condo from me. (True confessions: the first time I wrote that sentence, I wrote “rending.” This move does not come without some ambivalence, apparently.)

So I’ve settled myself on a program of mornings in front of the computer and afternoons running errands/taking care of life stuff. We’re on day 2; so far, it’s working okay.

But the bottom line remains that I haven’t had one blessed moment for the kind of leisurely summer thinking-and-blogging that I was hoping I’d have long since settled into by now. Little wonder that most of what I’ve got to say has headed out through the Twitter stream; after 140 characters, I start thinking “should I really be doing this right now? Look at that list!”

Oh, but once I get to New York… I’m having fantasies about the time I’ll have for reading, and writing, and thinking.

Here’s hoping it’s not just fantasies.

My “five years ago today” feature reminds me that the aforementioned time has spanned since the uproar over Ivan Tribble’s infamous screed hit the Chron (now available at a new URL). There are certainly many more academic bloggers than there were in 2005, and there are even some whose blogs are taken seriously as the key venues in which they’re publishing their work. But I’m curious about the degree to which attitudes about blogs have changed — both whether they have, and why. Is it only the rise of social networking systems that privilege immediacy (c.f. Facebook, Twitter) that have lent the relative leisureliness of blogs a kind of seriousness? Is it that we’re using blogs differently, now that we’ve got other outlets for the top-of-the-head thoughts that used to land in venues like this one?