But it is as useful for the field to ask ourselves how we behave just like everyone else  on the web: puttering or sprinting or wandering along heterogeneous paths of habit, exploration, or avoidance that we share with others outside academia. Many of the essays posted here raise this issue, expressly or implicitly. Whitney Trettien broaches it explicitly in a comment thread on her critical review of digital resources for the field.

Take this post as an invitation to expand on the question.

Will SQ ever want to compete in the intellectual world of critical essays that make arguments in (as opposed to about) new media formats? The decision made for this special issue was no, the grounds practical: at this point in time, the journal doesn’t have the resources or expertise to host such publication formats. Yet resources follow scholarly priorities: should a traditional journal cede this territory to innovative online journals? Are there kinds of arguments that cannot be made in traditional formats, that we (defined as the readership of SQ) need to make?

I’ll leave that question out there for readers to respond to. Let me turn to the specific case of video fair use to explain why this is now a live issue, in a way it might not have been just a few years ago.

Shakespeare scholars working with screen media have long been hampered by the difficulty and expense of obtaining reproduction rights to the screen texts we wish to quote in our scholarship and classrooms. Our sense of frustration, shared by film scholars before us, harks back to Raymond Bellour’s account of film as an “unattainable text”: unattainable because “textuality” itself consists in a writer’s ability to quote, handle, and engage a work in its own medium, something that (at the time he wrote) was not possible with film.[i] As Bellour so eloquently explains, this ability is foundational to the critical discourse of teachers and scholars.

The discontent among those of us working in visual media has risen in recent years. Tools for quoting, analyzing, and publishing scholarship on audiovisual works have become ever more ubiquitous, elegant, accessible, and easy to use. The exceptional status of audio-visual art – the lack of parallelism with print as regards to fair use – felt ever more acutely problematic.

Significant progress was achieved by Peter Decherney and his colleagues, who in 2006 successfully petitioned for an educational exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, allowing media professors to make and use of clips for teaching (including traditional classrooms and distance environments).

An equally important experiment in video fair use is being conducted now, in at least two places:

The collaborative blog In Media Res, a MediaCommons project, hosts a different scholar or group of scholars every day, each of whom curates a short clip or slideshow “accompanied by a 300-350-word impressionistic response.” As the founders write, “we use the title ‘curator’ because, like a curator in a museum, you are repurposing a media object that already exists and providing context through your commentary, which frames the object in a particular way.” A key goal here is to create scholarly community as well as a crowd-sourced, curated resource of clips. The site makes for fruitful comparison with Bardbox and Shakespeare Performance in Asia (SPIA), both described in Whitney Trettien’s critical review on this site.

The reading of fair use that informs In Media Res is framed in general terms and conforms to what most scholars I know would see as sound practice in any medium.

Critical Commons, a collaboration out of USC, offers a more ambitious platform, as they indicate:

Critical Commons is a non-profit advocacy coalition that supports the use of media for teaching, learning and creativity, providing resources, information and tools for scholars, students, educators and creators. Critical Commons provides information about current copyright law and its alternatives in order to facilitate the writing and dissemination of best practices and fair use guidelines for scholarly and creative communities. Critical Commons also functions as a showcase for innovative forms of electronic scholarship and creative production that are transformative, culturally enriching and both legally and ethically defensible. At the heart of Critical Commons is an online tool for viewing, tagging, sharing, annotating and curating media within the guidelines established by a given community.

This site’s format and topics are more heterogeneous than In Media Res. They include curated clips, lecture outlines, a blog tracking what’s new in the world of fair use, and an annotated list of fair use guidelines established by organizations such as the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. The goal here seems to be a comprehensive repository of resources, rather than a focal community.

As active scholars and citizens in a mediated society it behooves Shakespeareans to attend to and participate in these experiments. The editorial boards of any serious journal ought to take note, because fairly soon  journals with the capacity to publish not only essays with embedded, playable clips — but also essays in new media formats — will be poaching some portion of our most innovative contributors.

I’ve posted some queries about the underlying assumptions behind this idea in my comments to the post. It prompts some larger thoughts for me about the opportunities for crowd-sourcing in our field and our potential platforms for broaching it. That’s for another post.

I should add that the editors of Shakespeare Quarterly are agnostic as to what we will discover in this process. All reactions are meaningful, all will be valuable for the journal’s conversations about the future of new media formats.

As a context for the conversations we hope will take place here, see the thumbnail sketches below of the review and gatekeeping processes in an array of scholarly resources online.  If you know of other useful models for discussion, please comment and I’ll add them to the table.

More properly, the transformations registered by “Web 2.0” are first behaviors and only secondarily media or formats. The phase denotes the collaborative, creative, socially networked practices of humans interacting with each other through sharable, dynamic content online. It was coined by the web entrepreneur and publisher Tim O’Reilly, developed over a series of exchanges and collaborations described in his essay “What is Web. 2.0.” A moderately technical read, the essay analyzes the concept by way of an historical account of the transformations of web platforms over the past 15 years.

The labor and play that take place in this mode in virtual environments constitute an increasingly important kind of public engagement with Shakespeare, and promise to change our basic activities as scholars, teachers, readers and writers, So it’s worth our thinking systematically about the basic principles that are driving development of the media and delivery systems that enable and shape these activities.

What follows is the set of principles and practices O’Reilly identifies as the set that comprise “Web 2.0 Design Patterns”, excerpted from the right-hand sidebar of his essay. I leave it untranslated, still in business-speak, since the work of translation it to the academic humanities and then testing the soundness of these principles here is properly collective work. Post your thoughts.

Web 2.0 Design Patterns

In his book, A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander prescribes a format for the concise description of the solution to architectural problems. He writes: “Each pattern describes a problem that occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice.”

1. The Long Tail Small sites make up the bulk of the internet’s content; narrow niches make up the bulk of internet’s the possible applications. Therefore: Leverage customer-self service and algorithmic data management to reach out to the entire web, to the edges and not just the center, to the long tail and not just the head.
2. Data is the Next Intel Inside Applications are increasingly data-driven. Therefore: For competitive advantage, seek to own a unique, hard-to-recreate source of data.
3. Users Add Value The key to competitive advantage in internet applications is the extent to which users add their own data to that which you provide. Therefore: Don’t restrict your “architecture of participation” to software development. Involve your users both implicitly and explicitly in adding value to your application.
4. Network Effects by Default Only a small percentage of users will go to the trouble of adding value to your application. Therefore: Set inclusive defaults for aggregating user data as a side-effect of their use of the application.
5. Some Rights Reserved. Intellectual property protection limits re-use and prevents experimentation. Therefore: When benefits come from collective adoption, not private restriction, make sure that barriers to adoption are low. Follow existing standards, and use licenses with as few restrictions as possible. Design for “hackability” and “remixability.”
6. The Perpetual Beta When devices and programs are connected to the internet, applications are no longer software artifacts, they are ongoing services. Therefore: Don’t package up new features into monolithic releases, but instead add them on a regular basis as part of the normal user experience. Engage your users as real-time testers, and instrument the service so that you know how people use the new features.
7. Cooperate, Don’t Control Web 2.0 applications are built of a network of cooperating data services. Therefore: Offer web services interfaces and content syndication, and re-use the data services of others. Support lightweight programming models that allow for loosely-coupled systems.
8. Software Above the Level of a Single Device The PC is no longer the only access device for internet applications, and applications that are limited to a single device are less valuable than those that are connected. Therefore: Design your application from the get-go to integrate services across handheld devices, PCs, and internet servers.

This project began with an invitation from the Editorial Board to guest edit an issue on New Media. At the close of the conversation Val Traub (I think it was) offered an open-ended question. “Should we be thinking about ways to use new media in the publication process of the issue itself?” Over the next six months the senior editorial team –  David Schalkwyk, Gail Kern Paster, Mimi Godfrey, Sarah Werner, Gil Harris, Bill Sherman — helped me wrestle with this invitation and challenge. A number of long, thoughtful, and ultimately very interesting conversations led to this experiment in partial open review.

The stops along the way included:

• some sustained thinking about the different experiences and interests of tenured and non-tenured faculty in various models of open and traditional review. We owe thanks to junior colleagues and graduate students around the country for identifying key concerns. Their feedback led to several refinements in our thinking and to two key features of the current process. 1) authors whose submissions are deemed appropriate for expert review for this issue have the option of either a traditional or open process; 2) the open process will be fully transparent — those posting are asked to post as themselves, providing short bios describing their expertise, thus establishing the credentials of reviewers if that proves necessary in any reappointment process;
• a great deal of self-education and reading around in the work of digital humanities scholars. Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s monograph and her own experiences with open review were tremendously valuable resources to us;
• the discovery of a generous partner in the MediaCommons editorial team, lead by Fitzpatrick, who volunteered their expertise and space on this innovative website;
• the support of Johns Hopkins Press, the publisher of SQ.

Perhaps most importantly, this experiment also depends on the generosity of the contributors who are willing to open their work for public commentary and the reviewers who have undertaken to contribute frank and thoughtful comments.

In posts to come: definitions of “partial open review”, “web 2.0″ and other terms of art; goals of this experiment; and more…