17.245 critical reflections on publishing

From: Humanist Discussion Group (by way of Willard McCarty willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk)
Date: Fri Sep 12 2003 - 01:38:41 EDT

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                   Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 17, No. 245.
           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

       [1] From: Claire Warwick <c.warwick@ucl.ac.uk> (53)
             Subject: Re: 17.240 critical reflections on publishing

       [2] From: lachance@origin.chass.utoronto.ca (Francois (17)
                     Lachance)
             Subject: Typos and Research

    --[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
             Date: Fri, 12 Sep 2003 06:21:29 +0100
             From: Claire Warwick <c.warwick@ucl.ac.uk>
             Subject: Re: 17.240 critical reflections on publishing

    I came back from my holiday to find a great deal of interesting discussion
    on this thread, but I hope you will forgive me for taking it back a little
    to the original post, as I have read them all in one go.

    The original author, Professor Corre, it seems was referring to the
    problems of academic acceptance of scholarly publishing which takes place
    only in an electronic form. How fortunate Prof Corre is not to have to be
    part of the British academic culture of the Research Assessment Exercise.
    (For those happy enough not to know about this, it means that every
    research active academic must submit the details of their best four
    publications over a given period of years for periodic review of
    departments, the results of which determine how much government funding we
    receive).

    Despite the fact that electronic publication, or the creation or a digital
    resource is officially recognized by the RAE as an academic endeavour, in
    practice print still carries much more kudos. In the last exercise I
    referred to the URL of an article that I had produced in an electronic only
    journal, only to be advised that this was not sufficiently prestigious and
    please would I offer page numbers for the printed version, so that these
    might be photocopied and sent to the panel. Since there was no printed
    version I chose instead to offer a link to the long abstract of a paper
    given at ACH-ALLC 99. This would of course be easy to access for the
    reviewers. Still no good, page numbers were absent. So, driven that the
    journal version of the article had yet to appear I had to ask John
    Unsworth, the conference chair, to snail mail me a copy of the proceedings
    volume so that the printed version could be photocopied and sent off. This
    was exactly the same text as the electronic version, but despite the fact
    that it was clearly part of an official conference website I was advised
    that the authority of print would confer more gravitas on my words. The
    assessment panel was Library and Information Studies, so could hardly have
    been seen as ignorant of electronic delivery of information.

    This serves to demonstrate how slowly academic culture changes in response
    to technology, and is part of the reason, I think, why journal publishers
    are shy of producing content solely in electronic form, despite that fact
    that some libraries now have switched to electronic only journal delivery.

    So at least for the foreseeable suture and for British academics the option
    of solely producing our research in electronic form is not one that appears
    to be open to us, at least when one is relatively junior. As in so many
    things if money follows what we do, then we are nervous of bucking trends
    or questioning cultural norms. So despite the face that I received very
    interesting feedback on my article in an electronic only journal
    (Information Research), and despite the fact that it is run by a respected
    academic (Tom Wilson) I have not yet repeated the experience.

    Ironic, isn't it?

    Claire

    *************************************************************
    Claire Warwick MA PhD
    Programme Director and Lecturer
    Electronic Communication and Publishing
    School of Library Archive and Information Studies
    University College London
    Gower Street, WC1E 6BT
    020 7679 2548, c.warwick@ucl.ac.uk

    *************************************************************

    --[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
             Date: Fri, 12 Sep 2003 06:29:01 +0100
             From: lachance@origin.chass.utoronto.ca (Francois Lachance)
             Subject: Typos and Research

    Willard,

    The recent does/dopes typo uncovered through
    http://lists.village.virginia.edu/lists_archive/Humanist/v17/0240.html
    leads me to wonder
    if QWERTY and Dvorak keyboards produce typos of differnt import and if
    touch typists are prone to making different keyboard infelicities than
    two finger typists. Multilingual writers?
    Any research?

    There is of course automatic text funging on MOOs of which note
    Katherine Parrish's work MOOLIPO
    http://www.meadow4.com/moolipo/
    and her paper on automatic poetry generation
    http://www.meadow4.com/cybertext/autopres.html

    curious

    --
    Francois Lachance, Scholar-at-large
    http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance
    



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