Among the kinds of texts that we’ve repeatedly noted as potential forms for MediaCommons to explore is what I’ve previously referred to as the “digital casebook,” an evolution of the anthology that allows scholars working on a single text, such as a television series, to produce an organically developing repository of scholarly materials about and around their subject of interest. This idea has developed into a proposal for what we’re now thinking of as the MediaCommons Series Casefiles (”files” here intended as a means of escaping the confines of the “book”). The proposal itself is below; we’d very much like to hear your comments, questions, and other responses, in order to further develop the idea as we proceed.

MediaCommons Series Casefiles

One of the challenges of studying contemporary culture is its contemporaneity — the cultural objects of analysis shift even as scholars fix their gaze upon them. This is especially true for one of the most interesting and robust areas of popular culture, the ongoing series. Ongoing television, comic book, videogame, and film series have grown more elaborate and complex in recent years, inviting new modes of analysis and continuing examination. Yet the process of scholarly publishing often works against the serialized tendencies of today’s cultural forms, as new textual material is generated faster than journals and anthologies can bring out academic essays — anthologies on television series, for instance, often seem to be stuck in previous seasons rather than reflecting the latest developments that might deepen, undermine, or transform scholarly arguments.

MediaCommons Series Casefiles offer an alternative publishing opportunity that takes advantage of the temporal immediacy and robust community basis of digital publishing to address an ongoing series through a contemporary mode of address. Each Casefile will explore a popular culture series within or across any medium, whether still ongoing or recently ended, serving as a “serialized anthology” that will build a body of scholarship appropriate to the series form itself. Rather than seeking the fixed format of a book or journal article, a Casefile will grow and shift over time, accumulating new pieces of scholarship that address ongoing developments in the series under scrutiny, as well as creating dialogue among essays in an organic discussion unavailable in print. Casefiles are never to be seen as closed, but as sites of continuing serialized scholarship, as long as interest in any series continues.

Procedures:
The Casefiles are overseen by project co-editors Kathleen Fitzpatrick and Jason Mittell. Proposals for new Casefiles will be considered and approved by the project co-editors and the MediaCommons editorial board, with the understanding that each casefile should strive to take advantage of the digital mode of publication, including potential multimedia work, and MediaCommons’s system of peer-to-peer review. Each Casefile will be overseen by an editor or group of co-editors who will work directly with authors and readers to build the Casefile. We invite proposed Casefiles to cover any contemporary medium or cross-media franchise featuring series format. Casefiles may include material that cannot be produced or reproduced in print, such as video essays, wikis, and other digital native formats, or they may mirror traditional print essays of varying length. The flexibility of Casefiles will allow them to begin with a smaller collection of pieces than a journal issue or book might contain, and to grow well beyond the constraints of such printed artifacts.

All submissions will be reviewed by that Casefile’s editor(s) and a project co-editor; this first review process will strive to be inclusive of a wide range of scholarship, considering a variety of theoretical approaches, methodologies, and modes of presentation. The basic goal of any contribution should be to present an academic argument around the Casefile’s topic; if the Casefile editors feel that a piece succeeds in offering an interesting argument, they will post the piece to the In-Process section of the Casefile. Works deemed In-Process will undergo a 6-week period of public peer-to-peer review, during which any registered member of MediaCommons can offer non-anonymous feedback on the piece and make recommendations for its publication future. Casefile editors will be responsible for soliciting and encouraging reviews from scholars and other members of the community with relevant expertise. During this period, authors are strongly encouraged to engage in public dialogue with their reviewers.

After the 6-week period has concluded, Casefile editors will review the comments, metrics suggesting the online circulation of a piece, and conversations with the author, working to designate the piece within one of four categories: “Ready for Publication” designates a text that requires no further revision. “Revise for Publication” will follow from positive reviews where the author agrees to any suggested minor changes as necessary. “Revise and Resubmit” indicates comments suggesting major revisions that the author agrees to undertake; such a piece will be resubmitted to the In-Process section and undergo another peer-to-peer review. “Dormant” categorization occurs when the peer-to-peer review suggests that the piece does not meet criteria for publication, or the author is not able or willing to make changes necessary to work toward publication. A Dormant piece and its associated reviews and commentary will remain publicly available in a Casefile, and subsequent discussion or activity on the piece may result in its recategorization.

Pieces that are designated as Published will be featured on the Casefile’s site with a clear indication and public record of the project’s peer review status, and will allow for continued commentary, review, and measurement of broader circulation (citation statistics, digital references, etc.). While an author may continue to revise and update a published piece, any major revisions will need to be resubmitted to the In-Process review. Authors are free to submit works published with MediaCommons to other publication venues, though MediaCommons reserves the non-exclusive right to continue to host and publish any submitted work.

Welcome to a special CSI-themed week from In Media Res.

This week’s selection of pieces will also serve as a preamble for MediaCommons next project, a series of scholarly “Casefiles,” or digital anthologies that will focus on on-going series across a range of media forms. The Casefiles will be overseen by project co-editors Kathleen Fitzpatrick and Jason Mittell. CSI will be our first ongoing Casefile series. These casefiles will be our initial foray into rethinking long-form academic publishing in a digital environment as well as a testing ground for a new form of peer-to-peer review. Please stay tuned for a forthcoming announcement on our website.

So, without further ado, this week’s In Media Res line-up:

Monday, July 30, 2007 – Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Pomona College) presents: “It’s Our Job to Know Stuff”: The Epistemology of CSI”

Tuesday, July 31, 2007 – Derek Kompare (Southern Methodist University) presents: “What Happens in Vegas”

Wednesday, August 1, 2007 – Eva White (Indiana University Kokomo) presents: “Double Voyeurism in CSI Las Vegas: The Scientist under the Microscope”

Thursday, August 2, 2007 – Chad Harriss (Alfred University) presents: “CSI’s State of Denial”

Friday, August 3, 2007 – Jason Mittell (Middlebury College) presents: “The Painful Pleasures of CSI: Miami”

Please check out these wonderful contributions and offer your thoughts via a comment.

In Media Res Call for Curators

MediaCommons is currently seeking curators for In Media Res for the period of September 11, 2007 through December 18, 2007.

Individual suggestions are welcome. We are also interested in continuing our themed weeks in which all five curators comment on a particular topic (ex: satire and politics, media representations of New Orleans), television series (ex: Battlestar Galactica, CSI), or medium (ex: videogames) and participate in a networked conversations with one another.

If you are interested in curating for IMR or have an idea for a themed week, please contact Avi Santo for more information.

I haven’t gotten to read the full report yet, but the Chronicle’s article today on the release of the Ithaka report, University Publishing in a Digital Age, is extremely promising. The report calls universities to task for their failures to recognize the ways that digital modes of communication are reshaping the ways that scholarly communication takes place, resulting in, as they say, “a scholarly publishing industry that many in the university community find to be increasingly out of step with the important values of the academy.”

Perhaps I’ll find this when I read the full report, but it seems to me that the inverse is perversely true as well, that the stated “important values of the academy” — those that have us clinging to established models of authority as embodied in traditional publishing structures — are increasingly out of step with the ways scholarly communication actually takes place today, and the new modes of authority that the digital makes possible. This is the gap that MediaCommons hopes to bridge, not just updating the scholarly publishing industry, but updating the ways that academic assessments of authority are conducted.

The Institute for the Future of the Book has today announced the release of its open source WordPress theme, CommentPress, which allows for easy online publication and discussion of a wide range of documents. My article on scholarly publishing, released earlier this spring by MediaCommons, was published in an early draft of CommentPress, and I’ve now put the finished release into use on a paper-in-development that’s, appropriately, about CommentPress.

Stop by if:book, download CommentPress, and read (and discuss) all about it…

Welcome to a special television, satire and politics-themed week from In Media Res.

All the pieces this week are being curated by folks involved in a book project tentatively titled The State of Satire and the Politics of TV Parody, which will hopefully be out just in time for the 2008 elections. The book is being co-edited by Jonathan Gray, Jeffrey P. Jones and Ethan Thompson.

Please feel free to respond to their comments and add your own thoughts and ideas about the topic as well.

So, without further ado, this week’s In Media Res line-up:

Monday, July 23, 2007 – Jonathan Gray (Fordham University) presents: “Throwing Out the Welcome Mat: Guests and Victims on Television Satire”

Tuesday, July 24, 2007 – Jeffrey P. Jones (Old Dominion University) presents: “On Political Satire: ‘Ha-Ha’ Funny or Contemptuously So?”

Wednesday, July 25, 2007 – Serra Tinic (University of Alberta) presents: “Apology to Americans: The Borders of Television Satire”

Thursday, July 26, 2007 – Ethan Thompson (University of Texas at Corpus Christi) presents: “Making Sense of South Park, or Is a Snuke in a Sniz more than a Snuke in a Sniz?”

Friday, July 27, 2007 – Avi Santo (Old Dominion University) presents: “Of Niggas and Citizens: Mobilizing Strategies on The Boondocks and the Rhetoric of Blame”

Please check out these wonderful contributions and offer your thoughts via a comment.

Welcome to a special new media/video games-themed week from In Media Res

All of our curators this week broadly address questions of emerging and converging digital technologies, gaming and virtual simulation initiatives, while approaching these topics from multiple perspectives, including community ethics, expertise, fandom, globalization, marketing, post-colonialism, and second-life virtual communities. Four of our pieces are brand new, while our fifth, by David Parry, was previously published back in June and is now being repurposed to situate it within a larger networked conversation.

Please feel free to respond to their comments and add your own thoughts and ideas about the series as well.

So, without further adieu, this week’s In Media Res line-up:

Monday, July 16, 2007 – Radhika Gajjala (Bowling Green State University) presents: “Global Machinima: Pros and Cons?”

Tuesday, July 17, 2007 – Judd Ruggill (University of Arizona) presents: “Geek Love: Technical Expertise as a Source of Computer Game Pleasure”

Wednesday, July 18, 2007 – Richard Edwards (Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis) presents: “Do Agent-avatars Dream of Embodied Sheep? Subjectivity and Subjugation in the Virtual World of Prometeus – The Media Revolution”

Thursday, July 19, 2007 – Matthew Payne (University of Texas, Austin) presents: “Video Game Wii-ealism”

Friday, July 20, 2007 – David Parry (University of Albany) presents: “Virtual Funeral Crashing”

Please check out these wonderful contributions and offer your thoughts via a comment.

Welcome to a special Battlestar Galactica-themed week from In Media Res

While four of our curators will be approaching Battlestar Galactica through the lens of racial and representational politics, our fifth piece positions the series’ controversial and potentially subversive content in relation to its cable-based economics and demographics.

This fifth piece, by Roberta Pearson, is also a bit of an experiment for us at IMR because it was previously published back in June and is now being re-purposed to complement/complicate the other posts this week as well as situate it within a larger networked conversation about Battlestar Galactica.

So, without further adieu, this week’s In Media Res line-up:

Monday, July 9, 2007 – Lisa Nakamura (University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign) presents: “Yellow Fever: Born Digital on Battlestar Galactica”

Tuesday, July 10, 2007 – Ellen Rigsby (Saint Mary’s College of California) presents: “A New Reconstruction Narrative: Race and BSG”

Wednesday, July 11, 2007 – Birgit Brander Rasmussen (University of Wisconsin, Madison) presents: “Multiracial Battlestar Galactica ”

Thursday, July 12, 2007 – Michael Peterson (University of Wisconsin, Madison) presents: “The Human Rights of Cylons as a Race”

Friday, July 13, 2007 – Roberta Pearson (Institute of Film and Television Studies, University of Nottingham) presents: “Battlestar Galactica: Subversive Sci-Fi?”

Please check out these wonderful contributions and offer your thoughts via a comment.

(crossposted from Planned Obsolescence)

One of the speakers at the “New Structures, New Texts” summit in early June was Michael Jensen, the director of web communication for the National Academies, as well as the director of publishing technologies for the National Academies Press. His talk was the one that most captured my attention of the course of the day, intersecting as it did with MediaCommons’s key interest in redefining the processes and purposes of peer review.

The talk was based in part on two articles of his, one in the Journal of Electronic Publishing and one that was published shortly after the summit in the Chronicle of Higher Education. It’s this latter piece that I’m most interested in, at the moment, as Jensen here lays side by side the authority models of traditional scholarship (which are based, as he points out, on an assumption of information scarcity) and of “web 2.0″ (which are based on information abundance), and attempts to project what the values of “authority 3.0″ might be, how it might be computed, and, most crucially, what scholars and institutions need to start thinking about in order to be ready to participate — as authors, as researchers, as evaluators — in such a model.

As Jensen points out, most people talking about things “3.0″ today are focused on creating modes of algorithmic filtration and other forms of artificial intelligence in order to cope with increasing information abundance; these technologies will no doubt have powerful effects on the ways that authority — whether scholarly or otherwise — is measured. Included amongst the factors that “authority 3.0″ algorithms will likely take into consideration, Jensen indicates, are:

- Prestige of the publisher (if any).
- Prestige of peer prereviewers (if any).
- Prestige of commenters and other participants.
- Percentage of a document quoted in other documents.
- Raw links to the document.
- Valued links, in which the values of the linker and all his or her other links are also considered.
- Obvious attention: discussions in blogspace, comments in posts, reclarification, and continued discussion.
- Nature of the language in comments: positive, negative, interconnective, expanded, clarified, reinterpreted.
- Quality of the context: What else is on the site that holds the document, and what’s its authority status?
- Percentage of phrases that are valued by a disciplinary community.
- Quality of author’s institutional affiliation(s).
- Significance of author’s other work.
- Amount of author’s participation in other valued projects, as commenter, editor, etc.
- Reference network: the significance rating of all the texts the author has touched, viewed, read.
- Length of time a document has existed.
- Inclusion of a document in lists of “best of,” in syllabi, indexes, and other human-selected distillations.
- Types of tags assigned to it, the terms used, the authority of the taggers, the authority of the tagging system.

I’m particularly interested in the inclusion of “peer prereviewers” — and in particular the specification of “pre” in that designation — as only one in a long list of other metrics, and a caveated one (”if any”), at that. MediaCommons is, as we discussed at some length at this spring’s editorial board meeting, interested in the development of a mode of “peer-to-peer review” that would take into account both a qualitative assessment of the comments made on a scholarly text and more web-native metrics such as links, downloads, tagging, and so forth. Implicit in this model, however, is a sense that the most important thing we’ll be working on, in developing peer-to-peer review, is a schema for “reviewing the reviewers,” for determining not just the authority of a text but the authority of the commentary on that text.

As MediaCommons moves forward, we’re hoping to provide the tools for scholars to have a hand in developing such systems. Right now, we’ve got a number of “sociable” bookmarking buttons that appear beneath both blog posts and In Media Res entries, and we’re working on ensuring that various forms of metadata (including COinS) that will be important to tracking the life of electronic documents will be embedded in everything we publish. As with everything, however, we need significant user input, to ensure that the technological network we’re building develops in concert with the human network that it will serve. So: what are the metrics we need to include both in the review of texts and in the review of the reviewers? How should those metrics themselves be evaluated? What is at stake for members of the network (whether authors, researchers, or more casual readers) in the inclusion and contextualization of those metrics? And what do we need to do, now, to communicate to our institutions that this is, in fact, the future of scholarly authority, and is thus a model of assessment that must be taken seriously by hiring, retention, and promotion committees?