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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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!

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.

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.

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.

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?

Even though a new year is supposed to be a clean slate, a fresh start, there's always some lingering business from the old year to wrap up. I finished the year, as I have for the last 5 years, at the Modern Language Association's annual conference. The 2007 conference nearly broke my spirit. The 2008 confab, held in San Francisco, was better, even if I did blow out my knee climbing up Nob Hill in the wrong pair of shoes.

And the 2009 gathering, held in Philadelphia? The humanities job market gets gloomier all the time, but the meeting was a good one. Happy, even, in its hyper-theorized way. The official theme this year was translation, but the digital humanities made a robust showing. The unlikely star of the conference was a visiting assistant professor who couldn't afford to attend in person but whose paper on contingent-faculty hell, read in absentia, rocked the academic Twittersphere and provoked a lively conversation that's still going on, mostly on blogs now, a week after the conference ended. And Twitter itself, and the way it and other social media added layers of conviviality and interaction to the proceedings, added another story line to the narrative arc of the conference.

All in all, a good MLA, maybe even a very good one, and one that marked a turning point in scholarly communication, at least from where I stand. There won't be an MLA meeting in 2010, because the conference is moving to January. Thank god. Something to look forward to next year.

Meanwhile, enjoy 2010, everybody. I hope it treats you and yours well.

The December Collagist has a bunch of flash fiction on offer, and it's worth checking out if you're a fan of the short-short form or want a good introduction to it. In his editor's note, Matt Bell argues that flash fiction asks more, not less, of the reader:

In my opinion the best examples of the form are stories where the shortness of the pieces denies the straightforward plot, where the road to success often lies parallel to those of the prose poem and the micro-essay, with their heavily-laden language, their lyric structures, their emphasis not on the closing down of the epiphany but the opening up of the ending and its meaning. How could such a form be the right choice for attention-stunted readers and writers?

My message was simple, obvious, and worth repeating: Journalists are not necessarily the problem. We can be a channel by which ideas make their way to a larger audience.

To make the expert-journalist interaction as smooth as possible, though, it helps to understand the constraints we work under, what we're looking for when we ask you to share your expertise, what you should know before you talk to someone like me, and how you can help me and my colleagues find you. (We can't interview you if we don't know you're out there.) I'm jotting a few pointers down here in hopes they might come in handy for some of you. This is not a complete list by any means, just some basics to think about.

First, the constraints:

--time. Deadlines, deadlines, dealines. In the trade, we call this feeding the beast, and it's a hungry one.
--space and story length. I might love to write a 5,000 word story about your work. The paper may only have room for 500 words. I don't like it any better than you do, but that's life.
--editors. I like to tell my editors that it's my job to get as much material into the story as possible and their job to take it out again. They love that. They're higher up the food chain than I am, though.
--a general audience. You write for your peers; I write for the senior scholar in the history department and the guy in the chem lab and the grad student in comp lit and the secretary in the provost's office and some random neighbor of mine who might pick up the newspaper or find an article online.
--ourselves. It's not quite fair to say that journalists are generalists; we have our own forms of expertise. But I have a better grounding in some subjects than in others, and that may be reflected in the questions I ask you.

Second, what a journalist is looking for when she/he approaches you. Sometimes I want an overview of a subject. Sometimes I want an informed reaction to an event, discovery, or idea. Sometimes I'm after context: How important is this event, really? What does it mean, how much does it matter? What do we need to know to understand it? Always appreciated: lively quotes, enthusiasm, passion for the work or the idea.

Third, what you should know before you talk to a journalist.
--What kind of story is she/he working on? Is it a scene-setting overview, a quick-turnaround news story, an in-depth analysis? It's fair to ask if you don't know.
--What kind of media outlet is the journalist working for? Do you know the publication or show? Again, ask or do some research of your own so that you have a sense of what kind of venue you're being asked to appear in. Don't make the mistake of treating "the media" as one animal; there are many species of us, and we function in some very different ways.
--Be prepared to have a long and complex conversation reduced to a handful of quotes (accurate and in context, we hope). See note about space and length constraints, above.
--Stay away from jargon or theory-speak. This is not the same as dumbing it down. Just remember you're not talking to a roomful of fellow experts in your field. A caveat: Terms of art and expert detail are necessary and welcome--anything that gives the story context and flavor.
--The journalist's reputation is on the line too. I don't want to get it wrong any more than you do.
--Most journalists do not pay for interviews, nor will we show you the story before it runs/airs.

Fourth, how can journalists find you?
--Think about what aspects of your work may be newsworthy or of interest to an audience beyond your field. Be honest, now. Not every journal article merits a universal press release.
--Make friends with your campus news service. The good ones know when to pitch, whom to pitch, and how often.
--Look to book and journal editors you work with to help spread the word about nifty ideas/monographs/special issues/reports/exciting debates and controversies/what have you.
--Make use of Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc. as a way to share news (selectively) about what you're doing or to flag new twists and developments in your field.
--If you have a good tip or idea, get in touch with a journalist directly, but be judicious about it. None of us is lacking for email to read these days, and I have come to dread the epic voicemail pitches I sometimes get.

The Tiger Woods non-story
The White House party crashers barely-a-story story
Malcolm Gladwell-bashing
Kindle sales-figure updates
Pronouncements about The Future of News
The rise of the memoir genre
"The Nutracker" already (and it's only Dec. 1)
The word "provocative" applied to claims or assertions made by authors or essayists
Most of my wardrobe
Tofurkey

So. What's bugging *you* this week? Tell me all about it.