by Kathleen Fitzpatrick — Modern Language Association
November 10, 2009 – 09:34
Over the last several years, as we’ve worked to establish MediaCommons as a new kind of publisher for scholars in media studies, we’ve been very conscious that what we’ve been building is not, or at least not wholly, a new form of scholarly press. There are good reasons to build such new kinds of presses; the publishers that have served the academy in recent decades find themselves in grave fiscal danger in the current economy, and at least in part due to that danger, they haven’t been able to take on the kinds of experimentation that new fields such as media studies require. The academy desperately needs new forms of publishers, and new publishing models, in order to ensure the ongoing ability of scholars to communicate their research with one another, and in order to ensure the ability of our scholars to access the artifacts produced by that communication.
But we’re also aware that, in the age of digital social networks, we have to varying extents become our own publishers; we blog, we text, we tweet, and in so doing we communicate with one another through an increasing variety of channels, and with an increasing immediacy and ubiquity. Given this proliferation, what we need as scholars may be less a system that will manage our communication for us than a system that will allow us to manage our communication, a system than recognizes that the key aspect of scholarly communication into the future may be less the distribution of the products of our research than the management of the social networks through which our research is distributed. ... read more »
