This week’s In Media Res line-up:

Monday, September 24, 2007 – Ben Aslinger (University of Wisconsin, Madison) presents: “Playing with Peripherals”.

Tuesday, September 25, 2007 – Cynthia Chris (City University of New York, Staten Island) presents: “Life During Wartime: On 9 Scripts from a Nation at War”

Wednesday, September 26, 2007 – Hector Amaya (Southwestern University) presents: “’One language under…’; one language up”

Thursday, September 27, 2007 – Tanner Higgin (University of California, Riverside) presents: “Lrn2Play Noob: Progressive Masculinity in Games”

Friday, September 28, 2007 – Michael Lecker (George Mason University) presents: “Can Catwoman Challenge Patriarchy?”

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

From our friends at the Institute for the Future of the Book today comes the launch of Siva Vaidhyanathan’s new book-in-progress, The Googlization of Everything. Siva, who is the Institute’s first Fellow, is writing this book in public in an attempt, as he says, to open the “black box” of its production, a project that MediaCommons likewise has at its heart:

I have never tried to write a book this way. Few have. Writing has been a lonely, selfish pursuit for my so far. I tend to wall myself off from the world (and my loved ones) for days at a time in fits and spurts when I get into a writing groove. I don’t shave. I order pizza. I grumble. I ignore emails from my mother.

I tend to comb through and revise every sentence five or six times (although I am not sure that actually shows up in the quality of my prose). Only when I am sure that I have not embarrassed myself (or when the editor calls to threaten me with a cancelled contract – whichever comes first) do I show anyone what I have written. Now, this is not an uncommon process. Closed composition is the default among writers. We go to great lengths to develop trusted networks of readers and other writers with whom we can workshop – or as I prefer to call it because it’s what the jazz musicians do, woodshed our work.

Well, I am going to do my best to woodshed in public. As I compose bits and pieces of work, I will post them here. They might be very brief bits. They might never make it into the manuscript. But they will be up here for you to rip up or smooth over.

That’s the thing. For a number of years now I have made my bones in the intellectual world trumpeting the virtues of openness and the values of connectivity. I was an early proponent of applying “open source” models to scholarship, journalism, and lots of other things.

And, more to the point: One of my key concerns with Google is that it is a black box. Something that means so much to us reveals so little of itself.

So I would be a hypocrite if I wrote this book any other way. This book will not be a black box.

Join in the discussion of the text as it develops there. I hope that we can also discuss the implications of that text’s development here; what can MediaCommons learn from Siva’s experiment with writing-in-public?

Quite a long time ago, Norman Holland published The Internet Regression, an essay describing internet users’ tendencies to exhibit extreme rudeness and/or kindness. One could argue that this phenomenon no longer exists; indeed, even Holland speculates that “the Internet regression is only temporary.” However, Fark and YouTube users in 2007 would disagree, as in the following images and (NSFW) video:

I believe many scholars hear “online publishing” and think of those above representations. It may take a lot of counterexamples to dislodge those prejudices, especially since the behavior that prompts the prejudices still occurs all over the net every day.

After a brief hiatus, In Media Res is back with a full line-up from now until Christmas. In addition to some great individual contributions (such as the pieces appearing this week), we will also feature several themed-weeks, including weeks devoted to Latino media, Nordic media, fan practices, dance, pre-1960s corporate authorship, alternative media, and media interfaces.

This week’s In Media Res line-up:

Monday, September 17, 2007 – Ethan Thompson (Texas A&M, Corpus Christi) presents: “Reading the Book of John (from Cincinnati)”.

Tuesday, September 18, 2007 – Joshua Green (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) presents: “Who’s selling Digital TV?”

Wednesday, September 19, 2007 – Jonathan Gray (Fordham University) presents: “The Beauty and the Ugliness of Advertising?”

Thursday, September 20, 2007 – Derek Johnson (University of Wisconsin at Madison) presents: “The Essential Recap: Memory, Amnesia, and Anticipation in Serial Television”

Friday, September 21, 2007 – Walter Metz (Montana State University at Bozeman) presents: “It’s Not TV, It’s PeePee”

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

Also, I’d really like to take this opportunity to thank all of the curators we’ve had during our first year for generating so many thought-provoking and conversation-worthy pieces. In alphabetical order, thank you to: Kim Akkas, Hector Amaya, Tim Anderson, Mark Andrejevic, Michela Ardizzoni, Miranda Banks, Doug Battema, Ronald Becker, Marnie Binfield, Megan Boler, Chris Boulton, Patrick Burkart, Kristina Busse, Jeremy Butler, Paula Chakravrartty, Max Dawson, Richard Edwards, James Daniel Elam, Christian Erickson, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Elizabeth Franko, Cynthia Fuchs, Joy Fuqua, Radhika Gajjala, Faye Ginsburg, Jonathan Gray, Joshua Green, David Golumbia, Sangita Gopal, Hollis Griffin, Mary Beth Haralovich, Melissa Hardie, Chad Harriss, John Hartley, Amelie Hastie, Tim Havens, Dana Heller, Heather Hendershot, Sean Hockett, Jennifer Holt, Douglas Howard, Kevin Howley, Jason Jacobs, Henry Jenkins, Victoria Johnson, Jeff Jones, Vamsee Juluri, Davis Jung, Jyotsna Kapur, Christian Keathley, Kelly Kessler, Derek Kompare, Marwan Kraidy, Shanti Kumar, David Lavery, Tama Leaver, Dan Leopard, Elana Levine, Amanda Lotz, Moya Luckett, Madhavi Mallapragada, Dan Marcus, Vicki Mayer, Janet McCabe, Anna McCarthy, Allison McCraken, Alan McKee, Tara McPherson, Walter Metz, Joe Milutis, Jason Mittell, Susan Murray, Lisa Nakamura, Horace Newcomb, Michael Z. Newman, Kyle Nicholas, Brian Ott, Laurie Ouellette, Jane Park, Dave Parry, Matthew Payne, Roberta Pearson, Alisa Perren, Michael Peterson, Arvind Rajagopal, Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Ellen Rigsby, Judd Ruggill, Avi Santo, Jeff Sconce, Katherine Sender, Sharon Shahaf, Shawn Shimpach, Louisa Stein, Craig Stewart, Ethan Thompson, Serra Tinic, Chuck Tryon, Mark Vail, Ira Wagman, Betsy Weiss, Eva White, Michele White, Karin Wilkins, Maurice Yacowar and everyone else who has participated through their comments, encouragement and presence on the site.

Avi noted yesterday that news of Alex Juhasz’s course, “Learning from YouTube”, had been picked up by the New York Times. In fact, the news hit the AP wire on Thursday night, and Alex has been swamped with requests for interviews, which are appearing all over the place — USA Today and other newspapers, various radio outlets, and even CNN, which will be visiting her class next week. But Alex and her students are concerned that the full import of the class really isn’t making it through to the press:

As a couple of the students in the class commented on the above video, the reporting is pretty glib, a variant on the standard “what will those wacky academics think of next?” stories that surface each fall, and just before every MLA. Alex herself, as she has written on the blog on which she is documenting the YouTube course, the upcoming release of her documentary, SCALE, and the Media Praxis project that she’s developing for MediaCommons, is concerned to make the best use of this fleeting mainstream media access, to get the more radical, critical aspects of her work into circulation through the channel that’s been opened by the catchiness of a course on YouTube.

The question, I suppose, is whether this is possible. I can’t help but come back to my notions about the anxiety of obsolescence in seeing older media forms gleefully leaping upon any opportunity to discredit newer forms; traditional broadcast journalists would be only too happy to spread a “YouTube is shallow and only pseudo-democratic” message, as it reinforces their own sense of ownership over “true” journalistic values. But it’s hard to imagine such reporters engaging with the criticism leveled by the course in a way that acknowledges that they are implicit objects of the critique as well.

The New York Times ran a piece today on Alex Juhasz’s course, Learning from Youtube, a media studies course that is not only about the video-sharing site and how it might be used for various forms of expression, but a class set in the Youtube environment. As my colleague, Craig Stewart, pointed out, this initiative is part of a long history of distance learning efforts, though taken to another level, both because of the melding of subject matter and delivery options, but also the ways this class blurs classroom boundaries physically and conceptually. We need to acknowledge this history, both innovative and failed, if we want to see Juhasz’s efforts as more than an interesting experiment, but as one emerging out of a long tradition of redefining how learning happens. As media scholars, we are on the forefront of this redefinition, able to both teach about and through these technologies and able to use our efforts to both critique and acknowledge their uses and limitations (as well as our own). I could not do a better job describing this than Juhasz herself, so I will let her video introduction on Youtube speak for itself.

An interesting debate popped up on Slashdot yesterday that is pertinent to MediaCommons and its goals. Its headline is “Libraries Defend Open Access.” In specific, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is battling the Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine (PRISM), a PR/lobbying front for the Association of American Publishers (AAP).

ARL recently released an “Issue Brief” (in PDF format) that outlines PRISM’s campaign of disinformation about online, open-access publishing and provides justifications to counter its arguments. (Even PRISM’s name is a model of disinformation — claiming as it does to defend “research integrity”!) In sum, the ARL argues that PRISM’s talking points are:

• Public access to federally funded research and/or open access equates to the destruction of the peer review system.
• Public access equals government censorship.
• The government is trying to steal publishers’ intellectual property.

ARL responds at length to these arguments (please see this PDF for more details), but here are a few excerpts:

• Journal publishers do not create the content they publish, nor do they generally
  pay authors for that content or compensate reviewers for the time they spend ensuring the quality of published research through their contributions to the peer review process. The academy supports and provides the peer review.
• Existing and proposed policies concerning public access to federally funded research attempt to create balance between the contributions made and benefits received by publishers and allow them to continue to profit tremendously from the pool of content this funded research generates.

Much of this debate — particularly the emphasis on government grant-funded research — has less relevance to humanities research than it does to the sciences, but the arguments regarding peer review are central to all disciplines.

I highly recommend taking a look at both the Slashdot discussion and the ARL’s Issue Brief for more about this essential topic.

Kathleen writes in her In-Theory blog post…

So, the perennial question: how do we bridge the theory-practice divide? How do we translate the recognition of a need for change into actual change? How do we get those open-minded senior professors to make clear to their departments and their administrations that such changes are positive, that the quality of scholarship can in fact improve if institutions are open to innovation? And, most importantly perhaps, how do we get those institutions to convey to junior faculty — and to stand by those assurances — that new modes of publishing are not just valid, but valued?

Change that to non-academically validated modes of dissemination and we are talking about an age old issue of who controls what counts and what sorts of work counts as “Academic”. With AACU and other organizations highlighting issues of “community engagement” these past several years - similar debates around theory-practice and academic dissemination and peer review are happening in relation to service learning and community outreach based scholarship. The dilemma here is often the tension between academic audience and accountability to the community we work within and for when we engage in community partnerships. Therefore one of the issues is - when does public community based dissemination in the form of a mural or facilitation of podcasting for and within the community through organizing the production of oral histories and so on, for instance, count as a collaborative academically validated form of publishing? These are never likely to be “single-authored” or “co-authored” productions even in the sense that individually produced podcasts are - so the dilemmas and tensions are even more complex since the academic under review needs to demonstrate how and where their effort was (in addition to proving that what they were doing was “scholarly” and not “mere” community outreach or “service”)….

So there are various issues at hand - not just the issue of digital technologies. But these issues are highlighted in a certain way at the digital interface.

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A number of recent blog posts here have been discussing the issue of what blogging and other forms of online publishing “count” for in the academic system of rewards. I’m personally quite invested in these questions, as I am under review for tenure this fall - as an active blogger and member of the MediaCommons community, how will such online work matter in my tenure review?  Of course, such decisions are not easy to parcel out by portion - I’ve published a book, numerous print essays in journals & anthologies, and have another book under contract, all of which provide evidence of traditional scholarly productivity that (hopefully!) warrants promotion & tenure.

But I do want to foreground my digital publication record and make a case for its legitimacy, if not for my own case then to help establish precedents for future candidates. So I’ve excerpted below the portions from my self-evaluation where I discuss these matters - in the spirit of peer-to-peer review, what do people think about these statements? Any recommendations for revising before submitting my portfolio?

While I am certainly invested in traditional scholarship published as monographs, book chapters, and refereed journal essays, I believe strongly in writing for a variety of audiences using multiple modes of address…. I am invested in publishing online through a range of venues. I have published a refereed article for the online journal Particip@tions, and was a columnist for the influential and widely cited media studies website FlowTV.org. I believe strongly that scholarship should be made accessible to a wide audience via online dissemination, and that scholarly writing about topics of broad interest like contemporary television should be written to invite readers into sophisticated arguments, not alienate them through overly-obscure language or barriers in accessing hard-to-find scholarly publications. Since November 2006, I have been writing a blog called Just TV , which features commentary about contemporary developments in media, as well as drafts and works-in-progress for my more formal writing. The blog has been a great avenue to network with a broader community of readers, averaging almost 100 pageviews a day and generating links from a number of prominent academic bloggers—this mode of engagement is certainly not meant to replace traditional scholarly publishing, but to supplement it as a way to develop a network of readers and generate feedback and investment in my research and ideas.

My scholarly work has led to a number of editorial opportunities… Last year I was invited to be a founding member of the editorial board of MediaCommons, an emerging scholarly network and publishing venue supported by the Institute for the Future of the Book and the MacArthur Foundation—through MediaCommons we are trying to envision how scholars can publish and communicate via “digital native” techniques, taking advantage of online media to rethink the processes of peer review, interactive commentary, alternative forms of rhetoric, and the temporal nature of scholarly publishing. I am also serving as the co-editor of a MediaCommons project developing a series of Casefiles as digitally published “serialized anthologies” focused on single popular culture series, including television series, comic books, genre fiction, and film franchises—in the coming year, I plan on proposing to edit a Casefile focused on an ongoing television series, as well as pursuing pre-publishing my narrative project through MediaCommons. I believe that as scholarship develops to adapt to the practices of online publishing, scholars will find that nontraditional models of academic presentation will become more valued and central to our profession—I am hoping to be an active participant in helping to shape these developments, providing a model of how to engage with a broad range of scholarly practices.

I’ve been thinking recently about the lingering reasons that online scholarship still does not enjoy the same level of status as print scholarship, and I wanted to float a few free associations past you to see what you think.

In the history of scholarship, there have been landmark books, such as The Origin of Species, The Interpretation of Dreams, and Capital; these books generated disciplines and set who knows how many important projects in motion. Okay, so what there were one online, multimodal work that made such an Undeniable Major Impact and Contribution to the future of scholarship? Would that increase the legitimacy of what we’re doing in universities’ eyes? I suppose that implied in this question is another question: in the current culture, can the contribution of a piece of scholarship ever be assessed independently of whatever press or venue publishes it? Is the cachet of the press going to trump other data, such as number of citations and testimonials of other scholars?

I’m reminded of what Tyler Cowen says in a 2003 interview; though it’s not the same thing, I’m still interested in sharing it:

I think blogs, or something like blogs, are the wave of the future in academia. Right now the lower-tier journals and presses don’t perform much of a certifying function, the material in them simply doesn’t get read. At the same time the best journals and presses are worth more than ever.

I envision a world where people compete intensely for some “home runs” in the top scholarly outlets. That provides their initial certification. They then use their names to present ideas in a variety of forms, including blogs. Eugene Volokh and Brad DeLong already operate this way, they are ahead of the curve. Academic name and academic celebrity will become increasingly important. Academic “home runs” will matter more and more. Why should anyone pay $75 for a book that will sell only 600 copies? Why should anyone publish in a lower-tier journal for a handful of readers? Internet publishing, in one form or another, will sweep this earlier world away. Research home runs, followed up by blogs, will become increasingly important.

It’s a viewpoint. Anyway, I also recall something Kathleen said, which is that we are “creating new models of authority, and new modes of determining authority, for a
networked academy.” I agree that this effort is very important.

I guess I’ll end with some questions. Have there been groundbreaking (for more than one discipline) works of scholarship published exclusively online? If not, would these types of home runs help us to “[create] new models of authority, and new modes of determining authority, for a networked academy”? Do you have any other responses to my admittedly light on the sense-making post?