0.20 The idols of scholarly publishing  (Page 3/6)

Upon reflection, most academic researchers have always disrespected those edges. Perhaps on occasion the literary scholar might receive as much insight as needed from a single poem or novel, or a historian of the ancient world a complete understanding from a single account—or a philosopher a new idea from an Ionian fragment—but for most scholars new knowledge is created through an expansive exercise of gathering texts, images, and other evidence from a variety of sources and then subjecting that ad hoc collection to an interpretive and synthetic process. For us the edges are never dry—we create our own soup of books, articles, maps, data—and in turn our works inspire, and are blended with, other sources.

This is not the loss of authorship or of canonical, bounded collections. Harold Bloom’s sense of genius need not feel threatened. But the act of immersive, singular-work obsession is only one mode of academic attention, often accompanied by other, more promiscuous behaviors. Updike seems to think that the two are polar opposites, but surely both are practiced by most scholars. Indeed, in most research processes shallow scanning leads to immersive reading, and immersive reading to new methodologies and new combinations of ideas and documents. Stewards of digital academic resources should strive to enable these processes maximally, without the assumption that viewers will spend their entire time on one site.

The idols of the tribe

When Roy Rosenzweig and I finished writing a full draft of Digital History , we sat down at a table and looked at the stack of printouts. “So, what now?” I said to Roy naively. “Couldn’t we just publish what we have on the web with the click of a button? What value does the gap between this stack and the finished product have? Isn’t it ninety-five percent done? What’s the last five percent for?” We stared at the stack some more. Roy finally broke the silence, explaining the magic of the last stage of scholarly production between the final draft and the published book: “What happens now is the creation of the social contract between the authors and the readers. We agree to spend considerable time ridding the manuscript of minor errors, and the press spends additional time on other corrections and layout, and readers respond to these signals—a lack of typos, nicely formatted footnotes, a bibliography, specialized fonts, and a high-quality physical presentation—by agreeing to give the book a serious read.”

I have frequently replayed that conversation in my mind, wondering about the constitution of this social contract in scholarly communication, which is deeply related to questions of academic value. Price’s article sparked thinking about that contract again, when he wondered what was necessary to get Civil War Washington the same respect and credit afforded non-digital work.

For the ease of conversation, let’s call the two sides of the social contract of scholarly publishing the supply side and the demand side . The supply side is the creation of scholarly works, including writing, peer review, editing, and the form of publication. The demand side is much more elusive—the mental state of the audience that leads them to “buy” what the supply side has produced. In order for the social contract to work, for engaged reading to happen and for credit to be given to the author (or editor of a scholarly collection), both sides need to be aligned properly.