August 24, 2010
Posted at 2:38 PM in Academe
Today's New York Times has a front-page story about scholars challenging the old-school system of peer review ("Scholars Test Web Alterntive to Peer Review"). The story focuses on an experiment at Shakespeare Quarterly, the leading journal of Shakespeare studies. The journal put some submitted articles online and opened them up for public comment before deciding whether to publish them.
I'm happy to see this subject getting front-page treatment in the NYT. I'm even happier to say that I wrote a story about SQ and open peer review for the Chronicle a month ago ("Leading Humanities Journal Debuts 'Open' Peer Review and Likes It"). I'm biased, of course, but let me suggest that you'll get a more nuanced picture from my story. Which ran first. A month ago. Did I mention that?
Two of the scholars mentioned in the NYT story, Dan Cohen (@dancohen) of George Mason University's Center for History and New Media and Kathleen Fitzpatrick (@kfitz) of Pomona College, are worth following on Twitter for their thoughts on transforming how scholarship is published and shared. You'll find more on open peer review at the MediaCommons site; MediaCommons hosted and advised the SQ experiment. Claire Potter, a k a Tenured Radical, has a post on her blog about the SQ venture and what it would take to reform scholarly publishing.
If you have thoughts on open peer review--or come across other experiments with it--please share them in the comments section. I expect this is a subject I will be writing about again soon.
July 19, 2010
Posted at 3:53 PM in The Way We Live Now
There's a stack of publishers' catalogs on my desk at work nearly a foot high. There are 5, 645 messages in my mail inbox. My family's digital photo archives contain about 13,000 pictures--and my kids are only in elementary school. You don't want to know how many scraps of paper I have on my desk at home, waiting for me to sort through and file or (more likely) recycle them. I have far more ideas for stories, fiction and non, than I've made time for yet. The list goes on.
Welcome to my personal version of hyperabundance. It's been a personal preoccupation lately but also a professional one, as the term has been turning up a lot lately in conversations I have and conferences I go to. Hyperabundance was front and center at the Association of American University Presses conference I covered in June in Salt Lake City, where Michael Jensen, director of strategic web communication for the National Academies Press, led a brainstorming session on hyperabundance and publishing. Scholarly publishers, who specialize in material that has a small target audience to begin with, feel especially vulnerable to hyperabundance these days. If the world is drowning in too much information, your monograph stands even less chance of finding an audience and a market.
I thought about hyperabundance as I was reviewing Nicholas Carr's The Shallows and William Powers's Hamlet's BlackBerry for the Washington Post. (Read the review here.) Both books confront the digital overload a lot of us deal with every time we switch on our computers or power up our iPhones. There's too much information and chatter out there, the argument goes, and we spend too much time getting distracted by it, which means we're not spending enough time concentrating on the skills and activities that really matter: deep reading, sustained focus, creative thinking. Partly as a result of Carr's book, there has been a hyperabundance of commentary about what the internet is doing to our brains.
If you read my Post review, you'll see that I have some serious reservations about Carr's argument, how he makes it, and just how much of the world it really applies to. I also think it's an important conversation to have, especially for those of us who spend a lot of time navigating digital seas of information.
Here's a proposal. I am not going to recommend that you unplug or de-digitize your life. If you're feeling overwhelmed by the intellectual and digital clutter, the hyperabundance of commentary about hyperabundance, try thinking of the problem in terms of scarcity, the antimatter to hyperabundance's matter. Don't list, as I tend to do, all the things you have too much of (tasks, email, ideas, obligations, articles and stories and blog posts to write and to read). What do you wish you had more of? Is it time, the most precious of mortal commodities? Patience? Readers? Money? Satisfying reads? Books with your name on them? If you have time, let me know what's underwhelming you--what you don't have enough of. But I'll understand if you decide to go read a book instead, even if it's The Shallows.
Now, if I can just get to Inbox 0.
May 28, 2010
Posted at 11:20 PM in Academe
There's an intriguing project under way right now called Hacking the Academy. The basic idea is to crowd-source a book in a week. The topic? How to overhaul/undo/redo/reshape the mechanisms that govern scholarship and how it is created, taught, and shared. Read the details here. It's not my place to suggest answers but I can ask questions. Here are a few.
To: The forces of change
From: JHoward
So you want to hack the academy? I can’t tell you how to do it. I can ask you a few well-intentioned questions, though, because journalists ask questions. These are a few that have occurred to me as I do what I do: write about academic publishing, go to conferences, talk to scholars and editors and publishers and librarians, and generally get my feet wet in the fast-flowing, ever-shifting river of scholarly communication. These are questions lobbed at you from the sidelines, not from the trenches. I’m an observer, not a specialist, which may make these useful or may not. Either way, I'm curious to see the results of your experiment. [N.B. All this represents my own views, not those of the Chronicle of Higher Education, which I’m grateful to for hiring me to think and write about all this in the first place.]
1) What do you mean by that? Or: Beware the language of the oppressor. I keep a running list in my head of phrases I hear so often they no longer mean anything. For instance, can you break down “adding value” for me? If you’re not an employee of NORAD or a grain farmer, do you really need to talk about “silos”? And on and on. Every field has its vocabulary and a rhetoric by which it recognizes itself; every discipline and every trade, including mine, has a shorthand. That’s useful. And limiting. It’s good to keep an eye on when useful has given way to limiting, especially if you’re trying to remake the world. A fresh message requires a fresh vocabulary—or a freshening up of the old one. If you come up with a handy alternative to the phrase “the dissemination of research” please let me know, because I sure could use one.
2) How do you keep crowd-sourcing from becoming another in crowd? This is tricky. A revolution does not succeed without like-minded souls, compadres, comrades in arms working together. How do you create alternative forms of authority without creating an alternative regime? Are you opening the gates or shutting them? Storming the barricades or erecting new ones? Will the next generation (or those who feel excluded from the conversation) be tempted to bring out the tumbrels for you?
3) Have you looked for friends in the enemy camp lately? Or: Maybe you will find allies where you don’t expect any. As a journalist, I’m no stranger to generalizations. Still, it’s disconcerting to go to different conferences and hear Entire Category X-- administrators/university presses/librarians/journal editors/fill in the blank--written off as part of the problem when at least a few daring souls might not mind being part of a solution. It may not be *your* solution. You might have to venture a closer look to find out. I can’t say what you will discover. It may not be at all what you expect. It might be exactly what you expect. Let me know.
May 12, 2010
Posted at 3:30 PM in Freedom of Expression
My kids had a lemonade stand a couple of weeks ago. They made a little money--enough to clear a profit and pad their piggybanks a little. Neighbors and passers-by stopped to chat and have a cup of lemonade and a freshly baked gingersnap. It was a pleasant scene--who doesn't love lemonade on a hot day, especially when it's peddled by two cute kids?--and it left us feeling pretty good about the neighborhood and about humanity in general. The willingness of people to support junior entrepreneurialism is truly nice to see.
I mention this because I've been writing a lot about libel lately, and libel is not a subject that makes you feel good about your fellow human beings. You could say that libel is the antithesis of neighborliness. Now the internet has made neighbors of us all, it's easier than ever to give offense--and easier than ever to decide to be offended, sometimes enough to take it to court instead of working it out over the fence or in the letters column.
Americans are used to sheltering under the First Amendment. We sometimes forget that other countries do not recognize that standard. My coverage lately has focused on libel beyond U.S. borders. In the U.K., which has a reputation in the States as a haven for libel tourists, there's momentum behind a movement to reform libel laws. In France next month, the editor of an academic journal will face criminal-libel charges over a review he published on a book-review website he also edits.
The French case is so unusual it may not set any kind of worrisome precedent. But it could, and that makes other editors and reviewers nervous. As well it should. In a publishing environment that does not conform to national boundaries, more writers and editors are vulnerable to legal actions no matter where they and potential plaintiffs live and work.
After my two latest stories about libel ran, I traded emails with Joe Sharkey, an American writer whose work appears in the New York Times and elsewhere. Sharkey has been a passionate campaigner against libel tourism, in part because he has been on the receiving end of a libel action brought against him in Brazil. That case involves an air crash in Brazil that Sharkey survived and went on to write about. (I won't rehash the details here, but see this post on his blog.) Sharkey feels strongly that the MSM has not given this issue enough attention. He says that all of us ought to be worried. Here's what he told me:
"So much of the libel tourism attention has been on the UK, but a huge part of the issue is the creep of these cases in other countries, not just Brazil in my case but Canada and Ireland and who knows where else. Also, I think it is crucial that Americans understand the threat is broad, and the implications are not just for authors and journalists, but for scholars, scientists, reviewers and even users of social networks. The libel case in France over a book review is still another important example. In my opinion, and given the Internet, this is the most grave threat to free speech in the U.S. in my lifetime."
Here's a mini-roundup of libel links that might be handy if you want to read further. I will add to this list as I think of more links that might be useful.
LIBEL LINKS AND RESOURCES:
The Libel Reform Campaign (U.K.). Petition and website maintained by the coalition of the Index on Censorship, English PEN, and Sense About Science that's lobbying for reform of U.K. libel laws.
"London: The Capital of Libel Tourism?" by Gavin Phillipson. An English legal scholar argues that the media has overstated how big a threat libel tourism is.
"Something Rotten in the State of English Libel Law?" by Alastair Mullis and Andrew Scott. Two legal scholars, one at the University of East Anglia and one at the LSE, argue that some of the criticisms of English libel law are "misjudged."
The Association of American Publishers has been lobbying for federal protection for American authors and publishers against foreign libel judgments. This AAP statement given to the House Judiciary Committee in February 2009 lays out their position.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has compiled a bloggers' guide to online defamation law.
April 16, 2010
Posted at 5:02 PM in Net Life
Counting this entry, I have managed to turn up on four blogs this week. I've been guest-blogging at Bookslut, which I always get a kick out of. Bookslut ought to be part of your regular lit-net rounds if it's not already.
For the Chronicle's Wired Campus blog, I wrote about "Collector in Chief," a new blog launched by AOTUS, a k a David S. Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States. His call for "citizen archivists" to get involved in helping the Archives do its work provoked some interesting reax over at ArchivesNext, a site that's well worth keeping an eye on if you groove on archives. (And who doesn't?) On Wired Campus I also noted the kinda mind-bending news that the Library of Congress will archive every public tweet every sent forth on Twitter since it went live in March 2006. That, too, provoked some fascinating commentary around the Twitterverse and blogosphere and even in the old MSM about the wisdom and risks of the move. When I have time, I'll compile a roundup of the better posts/articles I've seen on the topic.
And--ta da--the Chronicle debuted its blog on scholarly publishing today. Called PageView, it will have posts by yours truly and several other book-loving Chronicle folk, so please swing by and take a look.
Fiction-writing got a little lost in the shuffle this week, but I did get good news on the fiction front. The Smoking Poet will publish some short fiction of mine in its summer issue. I'll post that link when I have it.
Shameless plea: If you don't already follow me on Twitter (@JenHoward), I'd love it if you would. When I have 1K followers, I get to drink beer on the roof with my colleagues, and it's getting to be that season in DC when it is very pleasant to do things like that. So help me out, because beer really does taste better when you drink it on the roof (safely--safety first, always).
April 5, 2010
Posted at 2:33 PM in Lost in the Stacks
On a wet Saturday a couple of weeks ago, my 7-year-old daughter reminded me that our local library was having its book sale. So she, her younger brother, and I piled in the car and headed over. After about 20 minutes, the kids settled themselves in a corner with a stack of books more than a foot high. I kept browsing. By the time we were ready to settle up, we had picked out 14 books, which set us back a whopping $9.
None of what we bought was rare: some Magic Treehouse adventures , a few Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mysteries, H.A. Rey's The Stars: A New Way to See Them. My daughter turned up a relic from the 1960s: a book on Indian crafts and how to make them, which turned out to be perfect, 40 years later, for her 2nd-grade class's study of Native Americans. The serendipitous joy of finding it was worth every modest penny. The point is that there was readers' gold to be found on all those tables of random paperbacks and obscure hardcovers.
The prize of the day was a 2,000-page Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary (unabridged) from the 1950s, which I found for a buck on the "Last Chance" table. The words "Last Chance" brought out the side of me that wants to adopt every dog and cat at the animal shelter every time I visit. Luckily for my household, a massive dictionary is a lot easier to care for than a mastiff or a mongrel. The Webster's has been living on our coffee table, delighting the children and their elders with its heft and erudition. And I got it for a buck. A buck! Time was you'd have shelled out a lot more than that for such a thing. Sure, everybody looks everything up online now, but there's still a lot of joy to be had from browsing a 10-inch-thick guide to the weird wonders of English. So many words one never knew and will never have occasion to use. And those thumbnail sketches have a certain whimsy to them.
Who knows what gems and rarities we will find at the library sales of the next few years? My friend Jim and I traded a few thoughts about this via Twitter. We agreed that it could be a golden age, as the bound book loses some of its luster and libraries shuffle old tomes out to make room for...whatever the libraries of the future consider essential. There will be some good stuff to be snapped up. "For a while, there will be a boom, as everyone offloads their old books," Jim said. "But eventually, will there be cardboard boxes full of cracked and yellowed old Kindles and iPads, for a buck each?" And after that? "A hellish Mad Max existence where gangs of savages burn old copies of Harry Potter to run their cars in the outback," Jim said.
Last chance! Get 'em while they last!
March 11, 2010
Posted at 4:10 PM in Reading and Writing
So I'm reading Michael Slater's new biography of Charles Dickens. (It has very, very small print, but that's neither here nor there for the purposes of this post. It is a little trying on the eyes, though.) Slater focuses on Dickens as a working writer. The guy worked, then worked some more, then did some work. Nothing but work, work, work like the proverbial dog--from his youth until he worked himself to death in his 50s. As Simon Callow put it a tad more gracefully in his Guardian review of the book,
There are times in Michael Slater's indispensable new biography when one simply has to close the book from sheer exhaustion at its subject's expenditure of energy. It's like being sprayed by the ocean. Even Dickens was astonished at it: "How strange it is," he said, "to be never at rest!"
I have been thinking about what a working writer can learn from Dickens. In some ways, he exists outside the ring of people whom you can usefully emulate. First of all, he's Charles Dickens. Nobody else can be Charles Dickens, just like nobody else can be Shakespeare or Tolstoy.
How about Dickens as a cautionary tale, then? You could learn a thing or two from Mr. D. about the dangers of overwork (e.g., exhaustion, death) and about how not to treat wives and publishers. (Dickens was not always fair or kind to either.) Then there's story Slater tells of the artist who had the original idea for what became the Pickwick Papers, which helped launch Dickens into the literary stratosphere of Victorian England. The illustrator, whose name eludes me at the moment, struggled all night over an illustration that Dickens didn't like, then walked out into his garden in the morning and shot himself through the heart.
And yet, and still--Dickens knew how to sit down and write, and he must have loved it to do as much of it as he did. He was never content to have one project in hand; he needed two, or three, or seven. Journalism, sketches, novels, plays, operettas: He wrote them all and could rotate among genres as he liked or needed to. He always had room for another idea, and another, and another, and he made room in his schedule for a staggering number of them. Dickens's energy and his commitment to the act of writing, his ability and desire to do it over and over again, every way he could think of--these are things that a writer can take heart in. Why not love your ideas? Why not spin them into stories the best way you know how? Why not try to do more instead of less? Just be nice to your publishers and your loved ones in the process. And get some rest, for heaven's sake. No need to work yourself to death. But you do have to do the work. And that's part of the joy.
February 17, 2010
Posted at 4:39 PM in Q&A
Ever since my children brought home a copy of Oliver Jeffers's picture book The Incredible Book Eating Boy, it's been a family favorite. It's about a boy named Henry who devours book--really eats them, bindings and all. (The back cover has a big chomp taken out of it.) We sent Oliver a fan note, which he very kindly replied to. So I asked him if he'd mind answering a few questions, and he was kind enough to do that too. Look for his new picture book, The Heart in the Bottle, in March. Oliver does a lot of things besides picture books, all of them very cool. You can watch a neat video of Oliver at work in his studio here.
Q. From Lela, age 7: What was the first book you wrote?
A. My first book was How to Catch a Star.
Q. From Finn, age 5: How did you take that bite out of the back of The Incredible Book Eating Boy?
A. With a lot of difficulty. I went through lots of toothpaste and missed dinners.
Q. Do you first think of a story in pictures or in words?
A. Actually, I do the words and pictures at around the same time. I don't write something that is clear in the drawing, and I don't draw something that is clear in the writing.
Q. How different is writing and drawing picture books from the other kinds of art (paintings, objects) that you make?
A. Picture books are very different, because I have to think about each page and how it fits in with the whole book. With everything else, it's just a single image that stands on its own.
Q. In The Incredible Book Eating Boy, some of the illustrations feature pages or maps from old books. Where did you find them?
A. I collected all the old maps and books from library sales, second-hand book shops and my Granny's attic.
Q. What can you tell us about your next book, The Heart and the Bottle?
A. I can tell you the new book is about a girl who puts her heart in a safe place after loosing something important to her.
Q. What books/stories did you love as a kid?
A. I loved anything by Roald Dahl when I was a kid.
Q. You grew up in Belfast and now live in Brooklyn. What do you miss about Ireland? What do you like about living in the States?
A. I miss my family, friends, the greenery and much of the cooking in Northern Ireland, and I love a whole range of new and different foods in America, how big and busy everything is, and my new friends here.
Q. Do you have any advice for writers or illustrators who want to write/draw for kids?
A. My advice is to keep drawing and to not take no for an answer.
Q. Are you a dog person or a cat person? (Sorry, had to ask.)
A. I'm a dog person.
February 15, 2010
Posted at 10:37 AM in Net Life
My adventures in podcasting continue. First, I joined Dan Cohen, Mills Kelly, and Tom Scheinfeldt on their "Digital Campus" podcast (Episode 51, "The Inevitable iPad," Jan. 28, 2010). We recorded the podcast the day after Apple's big iPad announcement, so we talked a lot about what the iPad might or might not do for teaching and publishing. We also dug into Cornell's decision to ask other institutions to help pay for arXiv, the repository where physicists, computer scientists, and others in related disciplines share pre-print copies of articles about the latest research in their fields.
Side note: If you care at all about the digital humanities--and why wouldn't you?--you should be following Dan and Tom on Twitter (@dancohen and @foundhistory). Mills doesn't do Twitter, but you can follow him at his blog, Edwired (linked above).
Second, The Collagist posted a podcast of me reading my short fictions "Twenty Questions," "It's Me," and "It's You" from the December issue. I love that the mag asks writers to do this. Not only do the recordings give readers another way to experience stories, they give the writer a chance to play with how the words fit together, where the emotional stresses and emphases are. I liked thinking about how much to act out the stories in how I read them, and how much to let the words alone carry. Hope you enjoy it. I had fun making it.
'
Another side note: Matt Bell, the amazingly energetic and talented editor of The Collagist, just had his story "Dredge" chosen for Best American Mystery Stories 2010. The collection will be out this fall, which is also when his next book, How They Were Found, will appear.
January 26, 2010
Posted at 12:18 PM in Mother Tongues
As I write in my latest feature for the Chronicle (UPDATE: the link is now free), translation is "having a moment, or a series of moments." It was the presidential theme of the Modern Language Association's most recent convention. Two university-affiliated publishing ventures, Dalkey Archive at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Open Letter Books at the University of Rochester, have been working overtime to get more translated literature into the hands of American readers.
One of Dalkey's recent titles, Best European Fiction 2010, edited by Aleksandar Hemon, has gotten some nice mainstream attention. The WSJ wrote about the book, and the NYT interviewed Hemon on its Paper Cuts blog.
If you pay attention to what's written about literature in translation, though, you'll notice that the people doing the translating are rarely named. (Props to Michael Schaub at Bookslut, whose review of Best European Fiction 2010 made sure to mention the stories' translators.) For my Chronicle story, I spent a lot of time talking to literary translators about what Lawrence Venuti has called the translator's invisibility. This is a particular problem for translators working in the academic world, where, as Esther Allen put it, being a translator "actively works against you."
In an attempt to broaden my horizons, I'm working my way through Best European Fiction 2010 now. So far it's a little heavy on Kafkaesque influences for my taste, and I don't know whether that truly reflects a lot of European writers' leanings--I'm willing to believe that but nervous about jumping to continent-wide generalizations--or whether it's a result of editorial taste. And maybe I'll change my mind by the time I get to the end of the book. In any case, it's fun to be taking "a whistle-stop tour of European fiction," as Tibor Fischer called the book in his Financial Times review. (He calls it "an appealing and applause-worthy project" but complains that it has "a slight bureaucratic stiffness about it" and hopes that future volumes will show "less deference to territories and more to talent.")
For more on how Americans deal with literature that isn't home-grown, read Jessa Crispin's astute take on the anthology, American insularity, and foreign influences at the Smart Set. To keep tabs on literature in translation and what's happening on literary fronts outside the United States, bookmark the excellent Literary Saloon blog, run by Michael Orthofer (@MAOrthofer on Twitter). Another great source for news and thoughts on literature and translation is Three Percent, a blog run by Open Letter's Chad Post.
Do you read literature in translation? Where do you go for good advice on what's available? Do you think U.S. publishers should get more translations into the market?
