Resistance to allowing scholarly production to take non-textual form runs deeply in many fields, and particularly in those that have long reinforced the divide between criticism (art history, literature, media studies) and practice (studio art, creative writing, media production). But one of the explicit goals of many media studies programs over the last ten years has been finding a way within the curriculum to bridge the theory-practice divide: to give our production students a rigorously critical standpoint from which to understand what they’re doing when they’re making media; to give our critical studies students a hands-on understanding of how the forms about which they’re writing come into being. And yet it remains only the rare scholar who brings criticism and production together in his or her own work – and for no small reason: faculty hired as conventional scholars are only rarely given credit toward promotion for production work; faculty hired to teach production are not always taken seriously as scholars. In fields such as media studies, we are being forced to recognize, one tenure case at a time, that the means of conducting scholarship is changing, and that the boundary between the “critical” and the “creative” is arbitrary, if it exists at all. My colleague Alex Juhasz, for instance, has written critically about YouTube but has also done a tremendous amount of work on YouTube, work that is inseparable from the critical analysis. Eric Faden, in a slightly different vein, is a film scholar working almost exclusively in the form of the video essay. In the coming years, more and more scholars in fields across the humanities will be taking up such unorthodox means of producing scholarship, in order to make arguments in forms other than the textual. Other scholars, including Tim Anderson and Tom Porcello, are working on audio in audio form, and in digital media studies, the list of scholars both writing about and producing interactive work includes Ian Bogost, Mary Flanagan, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, and too many others to name here.

Numerous possibilities exist for these future argument forms across the humanities: exciting historical work is already being done in digital form, through the production of interactive archives and exhibits; visual anthropology has long used documentary film production in ways that other scholars in the field might adopt. Scholarly analysis, in other words, can take the form of video, producing a visual response to a cultural object or phenomenon; it might take the form of audio, layering sound in order to focus our attention on that which we ordinarily miss in the world around us; it might take the form of an interactive game, in which we encounter an interpretation of a scenario in the rules that govern it. It’s not too much of a stretch, after all, to argue that if authorship practices have changed, the very nature of writing itself has changed as well – not just our practices, but the result of those practices.

What other examples of specific scholars or more general scholarly methods might I include here? I need to keep this section fairly tight, but I don’t want to overlook anything that would make the point that much more clear.

you should consider turning up the volume even further in this section, suggesting that the crisis is not just around scholarly communication, but more generally around higher education in general and liberal arts education in particular. By making this link, you are more apt to capture the attention of presidents and trustees who worry about such things, while not necessarily worrying so much about the details of the tenure system. But the problem is not something that a single college can solve all by itself; there is a way in which you need to differentiate between individual schools that are institutions, and the industry/institution of higher ed. The issues you are grappling with are industry issues that no school all by itself can come to grips with.

So I’ve attempted to do that as I revise, moving from the local issues to that larger significance:

In the end, what I am arguing is that we in the humanities, and in the academy more broadly, face what is less a material obsolescence than an institutional one; we are caught in entrenched systems that no longer serve our needs. But because we are, by and large, our institutions, or rather, because they are us, the greatest challenge we face is not that obsolescence, but our response to it. Like the novelists I studied in my first book, who may feel their cultural centrality threatened by the rise of newer media forms, we can shore up the boundaries between ourselves and the open spaces of intellectual exchange on the internet; we can extol the virtues of the ways things have always been done; we can bemoan our marginalization in a culture that continues marching forward into the digital future – and in so doing, we can further undermine our influence on the main threads of intellectual discussion in contemporary public life. The crisis we face, after all, does not stop with the book, but rather extends to the valuation of the humanities within the university, and of institutions of higher education within the culture at large. We tend to dismiss the public disdain for our work and our institutions as a manifestation of the ingrained anti-intellectualism in U.S. culture, and perhaps understandably so, but until we take responsibility for our culture’s sense of our irrelevance, we cannot hope to convince it otherwise. Unless we can find ways to speak with that culture, to demonstrate the vibrancy and the value of the liberal arts, we run the risk of being silenced altogether.

And we will be silenced, unless we can find a way to create new ways of speaking with that culture, and amongst ourselves. We can build institutional supports for the current undead system of scholarly publishing, and we can watch as the profession itself continues its decline. Or we can work to change the ways we communicate and the systems through which we attribute value to such communication, opening ourselves to the possibility that new modes of publishing might enable not just more texts but better texts, not just an evasion of obsolescence but a new life for scholarship. The point, finally, is not whether any one particular technology can provide a viable future for scholarly publishing, but whether we have the institutional will to commit to the development of the systems that will make such technologies viable, and keep them viable into the future.

One of the most-commented paragraphs in the project is the zombie paragraph, which several people urged me to go a bit further with. Accordingly, I’ve moved the appropriate parts of the footnote into the main text, and have pressed a bit harder on the main point, such that the paragraph — now two — reads like this:

The suggestion that one particular type of book might be thought of as undead indicates that we need to rethink, in a broad sense, the relationship between old media and new, and ask what that relationship bodes for the academy. If the traditional model of academic publishing is not dead, but undead – again, not viable, but still required – how should we approach our work, and the publishing systems that bring it into being? There’s of course a real question to be asked about how far we want to carry this metaphor; the suggestion that contemporary academic publishing is governed by a kind of zombie logic, for instance, might be read as indicating that these old forms refuse to stay put in their graves, but instead walk the earth, rotting and putrescent, wholly devoid of consciousness, eating the brains of the living and susceptible to nothing but decapitation – and this might seem a bit of an over-response. On the other hand, it’s worth considering the extensive scholarship in media studies on the figure of the zombie, which is often understood to act as a stand-in for the narcotized subject of capitalism, particularly at those moments when capitalism’s contradictions become most apparent.[5] And, of course, there’s been a serious recent uptick in broad cultural interest in zombies, perhaps exemplified by the Spring 2009 release of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.[6] If there is a relationship between the zombie and the subject of late capitalism, the cultural anxiety that figure marks is currently, with reason, off the charts – and not least within the academy, as we not only find our ways of communicating increasingly threatened with a sort of death-in-life, but also find our livelihoods themselves decreasingly lively, as the liberal arts are overtaken by the teaching of supposedly more pragmatic fields, as tenure-track faculty lines are rapidly being replaced with more contingent forms of labor, and as too many newly-minted PhDs find themselves without the job opportunities they need to survive. The relationship between the zombie status of the scholarly book and the perilous state of the profession isn’t, of course, causal, but nor is it unrelated, and until we develop the individual and institutional will to transform our ways of communicating, we’re unlikely to be able to transform our broader ways of working, either.

But just to be clear: I am not suggesting that the future survival of the academy requires us to put academic publishing safely in its grave. I’m not being wholly facetious either, though, as I do want to indicate that certain aspects of the academic publishing process are neither quite as alive as we’d like them to be, nor quite as dead as might be most convenient. It’s likely that we could get along fine, for the most part, with the undead of academic publishing, as studies of forms like radio and the vinyl LP indicate that obsolete media forms have always had curious afterlives.[7] There are important differences between those cases and the case of academic publishing, however: we don’t yet have a good replacement for the scholarly monograph, nor do we seem particularly inclined to allow the book to become a “niche” technology within humanities discourse. It’s thus important for us to consider the work that the book is and isn’t doing for us, the ways that it remains vibrant and vital, and the ways that it has become undead, haunting the living from beyond the grave.

I’d love to know what you think!

Monica McCormick:

I welcomed this project as a chance for NYU Press to pragmatically test new methods of scholarly communication. We are invested in exploring new ways to sustain scholarly publishing as our authors and their practices evolve. Admittedly, the evolution of print book publishing can seem very slow. Even as we maintain our current cost-recovery business model, because that is what we’re paid to do and because our products have real cultural value, we must also begin to test new tools and implement procedures that will help us gain the skills to work with new technologies, develop new business models, and support scholars who are committed to working in new ways.

Working in new ways will require some new tools. It’s also worth considering the virtues and affordances of previous practices. Most serious readers I know often read with pencil in hand, to engage directly with the text — one reason that paper continues to be a satisfying medium. In CommentPress we have a fascinating new-media tool that enables the age-old practice of marginalia. It supports communal annotation and discussion in a very practical way, and is an excellent tool for the kind of open, vigorous conversation that Kathleen wants to have with her readers. We will continue to assess how it worked for this project, how else it might be implemented, and how CommentPress and other tools for networked reading and commentary might be developed.

This dual mode of review also encouraged me to reflect on the multiple reasons for peer review–not only to help publishers decide whether to invest in it and mark it with their imprint, but also to give the author useful advice and suggest improvements, and to support the system by which scholars are rewarded (or not). What would happen, I wondered, if the Press’s readers (and possibly the editor) disagreed with the self-nominated readers (and perhaps the author)? Peer review, like any mode of scholarly engagement, often engenders at least a few contentious questions, and the author/editor/reviewer relationship can be complex, as Kathleen’s work makes clear. And the stakes are high–if disagreements are not resolved, the work may not be published or the search for a publisher begins anew. In this case, we were confident in the quality of Kathleen’s work, and welcomed the potential for improvements that multiple readers might offer, so this was not a significant cause for concern. But it seems clear that adding more voices to the mix risks more opportunities for disagreement, and we have few existing models for resolving them, beyond the good will of the parties involved. The up side is that the debate can be conducted with great transparency and the work is already available — albeit in a form that may not be deemed worthy of tenure.

In short, we are all engaged in a long transformative period, as technology and scholarship and our measures for evaluating it evolve. I appreciate the opportunity to take a small evolutionary step with these colleagues.

As it turns out, however, this CommentPress installation runs in this nifty software package called multi-user WordPress — you may have heard of it! — which allows blogs to have as many authors as the blog’s owner (that would be me) would like. And those authors can create posts themselves, can organize discussion themselves, can tag their ideas themselves, and so on.

Boy, it’s amazing what these blogs can do!

(Ahem.)

So… the short of it is that the developers have woken me the rest of the way up and shown me how to provide a much more free-form space for open discussion of the book. All you have to do is register for an account by clicking “Log In” in the toolbar, and then clicking “Register” under the login form. Those of you who’ve already created accounts have been made authors, so you now have full posting privileges; I’ll add those privileges for other registered users as they appear.

I hope you’ll use the blog however you would like, to have any discussions around the book that you’d like. I’ll be interested to follow along!

This time, things are different; I’ve had my hands in the manuscript (and in the code for this site) since I finished it, and I’m hoping to be actively involved in discussion of it for a while.

Breaking that silence could be really useful, I think.

In addition to participating in conversations in the margins of the text, I’ll be posting some here as well, more meta-thoughts about the process, as well as larger thoughts about revisions and the road from here.

I look forward to seeing how things go; may there be lots of chatter!