Finishing up the notes from yesterday’s meeting:

Session 3: New Structures

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Session 2: New “Texts”

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Notes from this morning’s first session follow. Any misrepresentations herein are solely the fault of the note taker.

Dan Greenstein, Vice Provost, University of California
“New Directions, Different Possibilities”

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I’m in Oakland for the day today, at a thoroughly exciting meeting: “New Structures, New Texts: A Summit on the Library and the Press as Partners in the Enterprise of Scholarly Publishing.” I’ll hope to post my notes either during the day today or in the coming days, as I process what’s said.

For the last year or so, I’ve been an extended faculty member of Claremont Graduate University’s School of Information Systems and Technology, though that affiliation has been mostly theoretical to this point. Today, however, I’m participating in a one-day retreat aimed at brainstorming the founding of a new institute of social entrepreneurship and design.

The opening panel, which just concluded, brought together John Seely Brown, Don Norman, and CGU’s Tom Horan to discuss the purposes of such an institute and how it might create innovative modes of scholarship and learning. JSB and Norman’s presentations both focused on the parts of design that often get overlooked, what Norman referred to as the “invisible layer”: the design not of technologies, but of institutions. I’m very happy to note that JSB pointed to MediaCommons as an example of a project that is focused on such institutional change, in our desire to redefine structures of authority in reinventing peer review.

More from the day as it progresses…

Earlier this week, I spent a couple of days on the Jersey shore with the guys from the Institute for the Future of the Book, my MediaCommons co-coordinating editor, Avi Santo, and nine-twelfths of the founding members of the editorial board. We spent all day embroiled in a series of very intense, sometimes difficult, but always exciting conversations about what the network should become and how we should take it there.

We’re of course still processing the outcomes from these conversations, but I’ve ventured a couple of posts on the MediaCommons blog that begin to capture some of the many ideas that were in circulation in New Jersey. We didn’t all agree, and so I expect that there will be more discussion in the comments; I hope you’ll pass by and join in the fray.

I should also note that MediaCommons has just published a paper of mine, drawn from a talk I’ve been giving about the background for and development of the scholarly network. This paper is meant both to be about the network and an experiment in network structure; the paper is fully commentable, at levels ranging from the paragraph to the page, by anyone with a registered MediaCommons account. We hope that this instantiation of some of our guiding principles for the network might help spread the word about what we’re up to (and why) as well as suggest some of the exciting possibilities for networked scholarly publishing into the future.

Please come by and join in the various conversations; we want your input. (One caveat, however: if you’re planning on being in Lander Auditorium at the University of Rochester this afternoon at 1 pm, you might want to hold off on reading that paper, so as to avoid a fairly intensive experience of déjà lu.)

What little time I’ve got these days, outside of teaching, preparing to teach, grading, feeling guilty about not grading, and going to meetings, is being spent getting ready for next week’s MediaCommons editorial board meeting. We’re attempting to set the agenda for this meeting in public, on the site, and would love the input of anyone interested in the project. Please join us there, and leave us your thoughts, suggestions, questions, and so forth.

Henry Jenkins has a new article in this morning’s Chronicle of Higher Education, suggesting the ways that the field of media studies needs to shift in the face of the increasing penetration of the read/write web (the link above should be good for the next few days, after which time I’ll hope that the article has been moved to the free side of the Chronicle website.)

I’ve opened the floor to reactions and discussion over at MediaCommons.  What do you make of Jenkins’s arguments?  And how might MediaCommons figure into the future that Jenkins projects? 

Incidentally, one thing that I can write about is MediaCommons, which is making fabulous progress.  We’ve migrated the site to a new, much more flexible platform (multi-user WordPress), we’ve got In Media Res going full-bore, with new posts every weekday, and we’ve just announced the founding members of our editorial board.  The new ed board members will be blogging there with us in the coming days.  Stop by and welcome them—and stay tuned for more ways to get involved…

I’ve discovered something today:  either I was a whole lot braver eight years ago, or a whole lot dumber.  I’m giving a talk in our faculty lecture series in about an hour.  The last time I did this was during my first year here at the college.  And I don’t remember being half so terrified as this.

The talk is entitled “Scholarly Publishing in the Age of the Internet,” and is a distillation of a bunch of the polemics and manifestoes I’ve written about and around MediaCommons over the last year, laying out some of the causes of the crisis in humanities publishing today and suggesting, by looking at examples including arXiv, the Nature open peer review trial, and, of course, MediaCommons, to suggest some possible futures.

One of these days, I’m planning to take the slides of the bajillion talks I’ve given this semester and turn them, with voiceover of the talks themselves, into downloadable movies.  Perhaps we could publish them on MediaCommons?