While I certainly agree that reports of the ‘death of the novel’ have been greatly exaggerated, and anxieties about new media technologies and the threats they allegedly pose to literature may reflect fears about larger societal changes, it is difficult to accept the conclusion that critiques of technology always function as covert attacks against identity politics. (Enns)

When I first read Anthony Enns’ extremely long review of my book, published early in March on electronic book review, my initial thought was that he just hadn’t read it very closely, and therefore mistook carefully qualified claims for gross generalizations. But gradually it began to dawn on me: his review may be less a misreading than an enactment of precisely the anxious response that I outline in the book. It’s the best explanation I can come up with for the many conflations, reductions, and misinterpretations in the review: I think I touched a nerve.

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Transformative Works and Cultures, an exciting new electronic journal (whose board I’m on) published by the Organization for Transformative Works, has just released its first CFP:

New Journal Announcement/CFP

Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) is a Gold Open Access international peer-reviewed journal published by the Organization for Transformative Works edited by Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson.

TWC publishes articles about popular media, fan communities, and transformative works, broadly conceived. We invite papers on all related topics, including but not limited to fan fiction, fan vids, mashups, machinima, film, TV, anime, comic books, video games, and any and all aspects of the communities of practice that surround them. TWC’s aim is twofold: to provide a publishing outlet that welcomes fan-related topics, and to promote dialogue between the academic community and the fan community.

We encourage innovative works that situate these topics within contemporary culture via a variety of critical approaches, including but not limited to feminism, queer theory, critical race studies, political economy, ethnography, reception theory, literary criticism, film studies, and media studies. We also encourage authors to consider writing personal essays integrated with scholarship, hypertext articles, or other forms that embrace the technical possibilities of the Web and test the limits of the genre of academic writing. TWC copyrights under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Theory accepts blind peer-reviewed essays that are often interdisciplinary, with a conceptual focus and a theoretical frame that offers expansive interventions in the field of fan studies (5,000-8,000 words).

Praxis analyzes the particular, in contrast to Theory’s broader vantage. Essays are blind peer reviewed and may apply a specific theory to a formation or artifact; explicate fan practice; perform a detailed reading of a specific text; or otherwise relate transformative phenomena to social, literary, technological, and/or historical frameworks (4,000-7,000 words).

Symposium is a section of editorially reviewed concise, thematically contained short essays that provide insight into current developments and debates surrounding any topic related to fandom or transformative media and cultures (1,500-2,500 words).

Reviews offer critical summaries of items of interest in the fields of fan and media studies, including books, new journals, and Web sites. Reviews incorporate a description of the item’s content, an assessment of its likely audience, and an evaluation of its importance in a larger context (1,500-2,500 words). Review submissions undergo editorial review; submit inquiries first to review@transformativeworks.org.

TWC has rolling submissions. Contributors should submit online through the Web site (http://journal.transformativeworks.org). Inquiries may be sent to the editors (editor@transformativeworks.org).

The call for papers is available as a .pdf download sized for U.S. Letter (http://journal.transformativeworks.org/docs/twc-flyer-US-letter.pdf) or European A4 (http://journal.transformativeworks.org/docs/twc-flyer-A4.pdf).

Yesterday morning, as part of the new regime, I sat down and did half an hour of uninterrupted, undistracted writing, beginning the process of blocking out the new article I’m working on, focusing on the history and future of peer review. And not a moment too soon, apparently. This morning, via the Chronicle (and if:book) comes the announcement of Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s peer-review experiment: Noah’s publishing his book manuscript, Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies, in a modified version of CommentPress on the Grand Text Auto blog, at the same time his editor, Doug Sery, sends it out for traditional peer review.

Noah’s interest in this experiment has its origins in his desire to have as his primary peer reviewers the social network that has developed around his blog, feeling certain that those readers are the ones who will provide the greatest insight into his project. Doug Sery, for his part, agreed, while remaining somewhat skeptical:

He insisted on running the manuscript through the traditional peer-review process as well. “We are a peer-review press—we’re always going to want to have an honest peer review,” says Mr. Sery, senior editor for new media and game studies. “The reputation of MIT Press, or any good academic press, is based on a peer-review model.”

The origins of that “traditional” model of peer review, its presumptions of honesty, and the lock that it has on current models of academic authority are precisely the subject of the article I’m now working on, so I’m looking forward to watching Noah’s experiment develop. I’m also watching with great anticipation to see what this experiment bodes for MediaCommons, where we hope to develop a new model of “peer-to-peer review” that might not simply exist alongside traditional blind peer review but in fact augment and surpass it as a mode of creating and measuring authority in the age of the network.

So a pal of mine has just drawn my attention to an interesting article in the L.A. Times from about ten days or so ago on responses to the Kindle. The article attempts to look fairly neutrally at the object itself, what it gets right and what it gets wrong, as well as at the responses to the object.

The most interesting parts of the article, for my purposes, are the anti-Kindle screeds on the part of those who would defend the print-on-paper codex from all apparent technological threats. And the absolute best part of that is the response by Jonathan Franzen.

You’d think Franzen would have learned to keep his mouth shut (and email unsent) around reporters.

As Aunt B. has already pointed out, he manages to make an utter fool of himself by insisting that the only way to truly experience Shakespeare is to read it in print, as was originally intended. But my favorite line of Franzen’s is this one:

“Am I fetishizing ink and paper? Sure, and I’m fetishizing truth and integrity too.”

Because pixels are some sneaky lying little bastards.

Sigh,
KF

I’ve just found out that The Anxiety of Obsolescence has been named an Outstanding Academic Title for 2007 by CHOICE, the publication of the Association of College and Research Libraries.

Now that is a nice note to end the semester on.

Amazon Kindle: My Writing Machines class spent a fair chunk of the week of its release discussing the Kindle, the things that make it cooler than the Sony Reader (wireless connectivity; rudimentary search and annotations), the things that make it as dumb as if not dumber than the Sony Reader (boneheaded DRM; a device so single-use that its EVDO can only be used to interact with one website; very restricted ability to interact with/comment upon/discuss texts; a pay model for delivery of material freely available on the web; and perhaps most superficially, but extremely important, an ugly design with counter-intuitive button placement that leaves no way to casually hold and interact with the device), and what we’d like to see in the future.

On that last, I’ve heard whisperings about of a sub-notebook Apple computer, to be announced at MacWorld in January; some of those whispers have even used the word “tablet.” A super-portable machine such as that with the full spectrum of network capabilities seems to me far more likely than the Kindle to be the preferred digital reading device of the future. Amazon may well have wanted to emulate the iPod in releasing a dedicated book-player, but they might have done better to consider the ways that the iPod has developed into the iPhone and the iPod Touch, and the ways that the highly wired users that they’re after have responded.

My friends at the University of California Press and the California Digital Library project last week launched a beta version of the Mark Twain Project, an astonishing archive bringing together more than 2300 of Twain’s letters, painstakingly edited and catalogued, all searchable, with a robust citation-saving feature. The project will in the future include editions of Twain’s published writing as well.

From the press release:

Mark Twain Project Online (MTPO) applies innovative technology to more than four decades of archival research by expert editors at the Mark Twain Project. It offers unfettered, intuitive access to reliable texts, accurate and exhaustive notes, and the most recently discovered letters and documents.

MTPO is a joint undertaking of the Mark Twain Papers and Project, the California Digital Library, and University of California Press. It is funded in part by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to the Mark Twain Project, and is supported by a number of institutions and individuals. The Mark Twain Foundation, a perpetual charitable trust that possesses the publication rights to all of Mark Twain’s writings, has given UC Press and Mark Twain Project Online exclusive rights to publish copyright-protected writings by Mark Twain, both in print and electronically.

At beta launch, the site will include more than twenty-three hundred letters written between 1853 and 1880, including nearly 100 facsimiles of originals. Users will also be able to search for information about Mark Twain’s complete correspondence across his entire life, including letters to him and his family. In future years, the site will release more of the nearly ten thousand known letters, including many never-before published; electronic editions of many of Mark Twain’s most famous literary works; the most complete catalog of Mark Twain’s writings currently available; and, in 2010, Mark Twain’s Autobiography, never before published in its complete form…

The customizable interface provides a powerful reading and research experience. The site offers users unprecedented access to authoritative transcriptions of Mark Twain’s writings and to compare those transcriptions side by side with facsimiles when available. Researchers can gather and store digital citations and links to selected documents, images, and other resources. These features are supported, in large part, by the California Digital Library’s eXtensible Text Framework (XTF) and the ongoing work of The Textual Encoding Initiative (TEI).

This project is of a kind that seems to me ideally suited for digital publishing; the costs of producing this kind of reference material in print couldn’t be justified by many presses, resulting in a multi-volume library-oriented set that would be much too expensive for most individual readers. Beyond that, however, the material itself becomes much more useful when it’s manipulable by the researcher (see, for instance, Scott Eric Kaufman’s early experience of the archive), and when the archive itself can grow as such research continues. I’ll be looking forward to seeing how the project develops from here.

Apparently this is the week when everything I’ve done for the last four months hits the metaphorical stands: today, the newest issue of Vectors was released; I served as peer-reviewer on a project called “ThoughtMesh” by Jon Ippolito and Craig Dietrich. (My response has also been published.) ThoughtMesh is a dynamic tag-based system of interlinking multiple online scholarly publications, and thus provides an interesting complement to CommentPress, so it’s nice that my article and this peer-review so closely coincide.

The other thing I’ve been meaning to post about: my friend Bill Tipper has for the last several months been overseeing the rebirth of editorial content at Barnes & Noble online, in the form of the new Barnes & Noble Review, an editorially-independent book review of the sort that has of late been disappearing from most major newspapers.

This is particularly exciting to me for two reasons: first, because my last job during grad school was as a reviewer for the early Barnes & Noble website, before the competition they were facing from Amazon led them to eschew the editorial in favor of the marketing; I’ve felt for years that they’d made the wrong choice, that readers might be led to make purchases through B&N rather than Amazon if they focused on original content rather than neutral, database-driven volume.

And second, because I’ve got a review up there today, of Daniel Solove’s The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet. It’s awfully nice to get back to a bit of mainstream book-reviewing; I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed it.

Late last spring, I attended “New Structures, New Texts,” a very exciting one-day meeting of folks from various academic publishing units, both press-affiliated and library-affiliated, who are all engaged in attempting to think through the problems and opportunities that the digital poses for scholarly communication. After that meeting, I began work on an article inspired in part by our discussions there, and in part by the Institute for the Future of the Book’s release of CommentPress, a WordPress-based publishing structure for finely commentable texts. I published the article in CommentPress as a draft and revised it based on the discussion there.

I’m happy to announce that the article is now being published simultaneously by the Journal of Electronic Publishing and by MediaCommons. The latter version is in CommentPress, and is thus open for comments and discussion.

I’m particularly interested in beginning a discussion in the “general comments” area of the article about the look-and-feel of the document; CommentPress is one of the primary technologies that MediaCommons currently has at its disposal, and it would be great for us to spend some time thinking about how the technology might work for us, what possibilities we can imagine for it, and what kinds of future development we’d like to see.