Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 17, No. 218.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
www.princeton.edu/humanist/
Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
Date: Thu, 04 Sep 2003 09:30:59 +0100
From: corre@uwm.edu
Subject: re 17.208 web publishing
The wise King Solomon advised us to consider the ways of the ants and
be wise, so it is appropriate that the travails of the formicologists
in respect of book and web publishing should make us consider the
wider issue of scholarly publication on the World Wide Web. I for
one now publish the results of my researches exclusively on the Web,
and make no attempt to publish in hard copy, unless I accede to the
express request of a publisher to write some particular item. My reason
for this is twofold. First, the materials get out much quicker, and are
more widely received. Second, while it would be unfair to generalise,
I feel that publishers frequently treat authors quite
shabbily. Farmers seem to develop some rapport with the animals which
provide them with their livelihoods, but many publishers are quite
unfeeling with regard to authors. I can count half a dozen occasions
when publishers have held a manuscript for an excessively long time,
or completely lost it, and my impression is that other authors can
tell similar horror stories. Lately publishers have developed the
habit of going bankrupt, which has caused great grief on the part of
young scholars relying on them to help along their tenure, and
annoyance to others who have waited in vain to see their work in
print.
It is hardly surprising that we have not yet caught up with the
changes brought about by the Web, for they are indeed great, and new
technology constantly changes their nature. Publishing houses are
entrenched institutions, which resist change, especially those that
threaten their profits. Britannica was carried kicking and screaming
into the online world. The main argument that is made against online
publishing is that it undergoes no scholarly review. I question this,
because I have seen so many books come out of well-regarded presses
which have numerous errors, typographical and substantive. My
impression is that since the cost of printing has become so high, many
presses save money by dispensing with appropriate editing; and this is
particularly true of university presses, since rarely do they publish
bestsellers. The result is many books of questionable value, despite
their supposedly being monitored. In premodern times writers of books
in Hebrew would submit their manuscripts to an acknowledged authority,
and request an approbation which would be published at the beginning
of the book, and was often composed in a florid style. I copied this
practice in my website on Lingua Franca by asking the late Professor
Cyrus Cordon to write an approbation; but I do not feel that such a
thing is really necessary. The motto should always be caveat emptor --
let the buyer beware. Just because something exists in printers' ink
on paper, or is on the Web, it does not mean that it is of value. The
user must pass his own judgment.
Advances in technology are constantly improving the Web. The
remarkable Acrobat software makes possible publication of works in
scripts other than the Roman script without requiring the user to have
any special software, other than the free Acrobat Reader which is
usually bundled with most browsers these days in any case. Moreover,
texts can be marked up and annotated in a way that is easy for the
writer and the reader. I am using this technology for publishing
annotated texts in Judeo-Arabic on my website, which would probably be
prohibitively expensive to print and publish by traditional
methods. Preparing a text for the Web is now quite simple, and
compares favourably with the labour that must be expended to prepare a
printed text. The scholar can learn simple HTML, since he probably
does not need the complex bells and whistles which grace commercial
websites.
There are of course disadvantages to online publishing. In an article
that I wrote for a printed book, I cited an article that I had
published online. The editor told me that although he felt that the
online article was quite relevant, the publishers had instructed him
not to include any references to websites in the
bibliographies. Similarly, I suggested to the near eastern editor of
JAOS that he might like to have my Lingua Franca website reviewed in
his journal. He put this to the editorial board, and they decided not
to review websites. There are probably turf issues in decisions like
this, but it is quite true that websites can be evanescent, like the
valuable site on creolistics which formerly existed on the website of
Stockholm University, and disappeared without notice. I found
myself wondering if six months after my death an employee of
Information Services at my university will find my name on the grim
reapers's list, and with a few keystrokes blow away all my hard
work. I raised this matter with the appropriate committee at my
university, but they have been unable to come to any conclusion as to
how and when material should be deleted if the author graduates,
resigns or dies.
I have no pat answer to these questions, which are, I know, being
widely debated. But it seems to me that we must keep these issues
before us, in the hope that before too long we shall find some
satisfactory solutions.
Alan D. Corre
Emeritus Professor of Hebrew Studies
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
http://www.uwm.edu/~corre/
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