Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 16, No. 244.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
[1] From: Patricia Galloway <galloway@gslis.utexas.edu> (19)
Subject: Re: 16.241styles of publication
[2] From: lachance@chass.utoronto.ca (Francois Lachance) (47)
Subject: ways of reading publishing
[3] From: "Nancy Weitz" <nancy.weitz@computing- (6)
services.oxford.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: 16.241styles of publication
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri, 04 Oct 2002 06:22:13 +0100
From: Patricia Galloway <galloway@gslis.utexas.edu>
Subject: Re: 16.241styles of publication
Trust me, not all the sciences produce little bitty papers consisting of
one perspicuous equation, and scientists like holding things in their
hands and scribbling on them as well as we do (alas I hear echoes of the
return of the two cultures...). I can only say: everyone go read Homo
Academicus! This is about people other than academics holding the keys
to the gate--and holding them to ransom. Another thing this is
importantly about is allowing academic libraries to stay afloat--soon
they won't be able to buy anything except a cable-television-like bundle
of whatever the publishers are willing to give them. Additionally, as
the journal publishers lose their stranglehold on the sciences, they
will begin asking us for page fees (page fees! I hear everyone crying in
horror) for everything we publish too (as well as charging ridiculous
subscription fees for our work), and then maybe we will decide that it's
worth a little rebellion. Further: people who have tenure may be happy
with the gentlemanly leisure of humanities publication cycles, but those
of us who don't may not have time to wait.
Pat Galloway
GSLIS
University of Texas-Austin
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri, 04 Oct 2002 06:23:14 +0100
From: lachance@chass.utoronto.ca (Francois Lachance)
Subject: ways of reading publishing
Willard,
A salty response to your elaboration of your
> offhand remark about publishing in the humanities vs in physics
> [which] provoked
> peppery & puzzled responses.
I take it that some responses were peppery, others puzzled and
still others both peppery and puzzled. I raise the stylistice question of
the disjunctive conjunction because I believe it relates to the
permutations of discursive practices at which you hint in your outline how
genre and reading :
> things usually meant to be read slowly, whose "content" cannot easily or
> satisfactorily be extracted from the continuous prose with which it is
> presented, is not ideal because a screen-image is not (at least not yet)
> good for sustained, careful reading. Therefore, I argue, the Ginsparg
> mechanism is not such a good fit.>
Wendell in the same bundle of postings reminds us that
> A cynic might argue this by asserting that articles in the humanities are
> written to be printed, not to be read.
Now I ask how does the act of producing printouts depend upon genre? You
seem to make a distinction between the book review and the edition that
echoes some interesting discussions from the last century about the
relation of paraliterature to the literary.
Some Humanists work off screen regularly. And indeed use multiple windows
to work more than one document at a time.
I would suggest that the "library-mode" of reading is a more generalized
form of the expert being abreast of the literature. It is a type of
hunter-gatherer activity that informs the the exchange between experts.
That an amateur can read in the same mode and "publish" i.e. participate
in some fashion in the exchanges enriches the intellectual enterprise. It
reminds me that the best pedagoges and researchers model a behaviour
in their encounters that exhibits an intellectual and cultural openness.
The best breathe and act by a simple value : there are
no naive questions, no stupid questions. (especially if participants are
willing to "go meta" and ask -- is this time to ask this particular
question?).
Why the science versus humanities formulation of this thread on publishing
mechanisms? Why map it out on a dichotomy of intermittent versus
sustained? By analogy one can imagine the peppered and puzzled expressions
of those that would argue that the advent of television destroyed
attention spans when asked to consider how channel surfing does not
require vast amounts of attention (following several narrative lines at
once).
Your sometimes slow reader,
--
Francois Lachance, Scholar-at-large
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance/ivt.htm
per Interactivity ad Virtuality via Textuality
--[3]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri, 04 Oct 2002 06:23:38 +0100
From: "Nancy Weitz" <nancy.weitz@computing-services.oxford.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: 16.241styles of publication
> Wendell Piez quips:
> A cynic might argue this by asserting that articles in the humanities are
> written to be printed, not to be read.
I thought articles in the Humanities (at least literary criticism) were written
to be cited and not read.
Nancy
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