For Shakespeare critics and scholars, among the most significant consequences of media change will be transformations in how we communicate with each other about our work and publish new research. In keeping with the topic of its special issue, 61:3, “Shakespeare and New Media,” Shakespeare Quarterly conducted an experiment in open peer review, for this issue, which ran from 1o March to 5 May 2010.
See “From the Editor: Gentle Numbers” for an introduction to the issue and summary of the experiment.
This site archives the experiment itself: the exchanges that took place around four essays under consideration for possible publication in SQ 61:3 and three scholarly reviews that had (unlike the essays) already been accepted for publication. The editors invited thoughtful feedback from Shakespeare scholars and other readers on any essay that fell within their areas of expertise — in terms of its originality, accuracy, and stylistic and rhetorical merits. Because scholars whose work is being reviewed may need to show that experts in the field participated in this process, we asked readers to register in their own names.
Comments on the essays are now closed but the site is still open for general conversation about the experiment and reactions to it. You may find these at the guest editor’s blog and at the general comments page.
Reading the essays and comments: Select a title at right, then page forward or back by clicking the arrows at the top of the reading window. Read comments by clicking the bubble at the upper left of each paragraph to open the comment window for that paragraph, or clicking the respective comment bar at right.
The Process: After the initial editorial evaluation, authors were invited to opt into the open review process. The essays of those who opted in were posted here for public commentary and feedback by the journal’s readers. Authors have been invited to respond to this feedback in revision, before submitting their revised essays for final selection. The publication decision was based on the revised essays. (Declining the open review and opting for a traditional review would not negatively affect the selection process — it simply established a different review path.) For further details see “About” and FAQs.
Our hosts: this open-review period was hosted by MediaCommons, a digital network dedicated to promoting scholarly discourse about media studies and the digital humanities. In preparation for this experiment, the SQ editors consulted Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s history of peer review and assessment of its possibilities in digital platforms. See Chapter One of Planned Obsolescence.
– Katherine Rowe, Guest Editor
Recent Comments in this Document
25 April 2012 at 8.51 pm
[...] mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/mcpress/ShakespeareQuarterly_NewMedia/hope-witmore-the-hundredth-ps… [...]
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9 January 2012 at 1.12 pm
[...] by Laura Stevens as Editor of the Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. Stevens weighs the crowd-sourcing experiment of Shakespeare Quarterly against maintaining a double-blind review process, and wonders whether it is even possible for [...]
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14 November 2011 at 8.28 pm
[...] been perusing an issue of Shakespeare Quarterly (SQ) called “Shakespeare and New Media.” In her introduction, the guest editor (Katherine Rowe) references Katherine Hayle’s comment regarding new media’s [...]
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10 October 2010 at 9.58 pm
[...] Witmore’s similar clustering studies using Docuscope. See also this draft version of Witmore and Hope’s forthcoming piece in Shakespeare [...]
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7 September 2010 at 2.16 pm
[...] experimental peer review fits nicely into broader efforts to change the peer review process (see this chart of other peer review approaches prepared by MediaCommons) and scholarly publishing in general. Groups like MediaCommons see [...]
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3 September 2010 at 10.58 pm
[...] In this case, we learn that Docuscope is sensitive to human editorial intervention in texts. So sensitive, in fact, that it produced an almost complete clustering of Shakespeare’s plays in the larger group of 320 that we profiled in the online draft of our “Hundredth Psalm” article. [...]
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25 August 2010 at 5.06 pm
[...] Hope and I participated in. We received some terrific feedback, mostly from Shakespeareans, on the article that was posted to Media Commons–feedback that helped us rewrite the essay for the print [...]
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29 July 2010 at 2.34 pm
[...] that are, in a sense, built into the physical system of writing? I think people who are doing iterative criticism need to have an intelligent answer to this question and analysis of its underlying analogy. My [...]
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17 May 2010 at 3.06 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Wynken de Worde. Wynken de Worde said: @colinclout12 Btw, if you want to read abt online Shk, good article by Andrew Murphy for SQ in draft at http://bit.ly/aXOKYc [...]
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10 May 2010 at 8.50 am
This comment is from Adele Seeff, Director of the Center for Renaissance & Baroque Studies, University of Maryland
http://www.crbs.umd.edu/about/seeff/seeffcv.shtml
Hi Katherine,
I tried to post to the blog and kept getting an error message but I
wanted to get my observations to you and perhaps they could be posted to
the site.
I know that emailing you defeats the real purpose here but I wanted to
applaud SQ for the experiment, which, in my view, demands courage
because the reviewers are in turn being reviewed by readers, authors,
and other reviewers. This egalitarian process thus flattens out the
usual hierarchic process of peer review followed by rejection or
acceptance to an academic print journal, and mirrors the creative
anarchy of the web. As the Fitzpatrick piece points out, the nature of
authority is shifting (has shifted?) but the nature of ownership is also
shifting, and we could argue that we, the online collectivity of
readers/reviewers, jointly own these essays with their authors.
A final more personal comment: I have always preferred the delivery of a
paper that is a work-in-progress because it is open, unfinished, and in
process of becoming to the finished paper in print because it is closed.
This online review reminds our students that writing is revising.
All best,
Adele Seeff
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