[spectre] Book 2.0 Chronicle of Higher Education

[McKenzie Wark]

Book 2.0
Scholars turn monographs into digital conversations

By JEFFREY R. YOUNG
Chronicle of Higher Education
http://chronicle.com/free/v52/i47/47a02001.htm

New York

While most scholarly books are reviewed by a few
carefully chosen experts before publication, McKenzie
Wark's latest monograph is getting line-by-line
critiques from hundreds of strangers in cyberspace,
many of whom know absolutely nothing about his
academic field.

Mr. Wark, a professor of media and cultural studies at
The New School, has put the draft of his latest
book online in an experimental format inspired by
academic blogs and the free-for-all spirit of Wikipedia,
the popular online encyclopedia that anyone can edit.
Each paragraph of Mr. Wark's book has its own Web
page, and next to each of those paragraphs is a box
where anyone can comment — though readers are
not permitted to alter the original text.

The scholar says he looks forward to sitting down
each day to read a new batch of comments, some by
colleagues whose names he recognizes and others by
people cloaked by pseudonyms.

That input has persuaded him to sharpen the opening
section, and he says he will probably make other
changes as well. But not all the online feedback has
been helpful, or kind. "This doesn't have substance,"
wrote someone identified as "toad." "Take some time
off, and teach a little."

Mr. Wark is in the habit of responding publicly to just
about every comment, but that left him virtually
speechless. "Harsh, dude," he replied.

Welcome to what is either an expansive new future for
the book in the digital age, or a cacophonous morass
that will turn scholarship into a series of flame wars —
or both.

Scholars like Mr. Wark, who are as comfortable firing
off comments on blogs as they are pontificating at
academic conferences, are beginning to question
whether the printed book is the best format for
advancing scholarship and communicating big ideas.

In tenure and promotion, of course, the book is still
king — the whole academic enterprise often revolves
around it. But several scholars are using digital means
to challenge the current model of academic publishing.

Thanks to the Internet, they argue, the book should be
dynamic rather than fixed — not just a text, but a site
of conversation. Printouts could still be made and
bound, but the real action would be online, and the
commentary would form a new kind of peer review.

Even some publishers are experimenting, though so
far the most ambitious efforts have been at scholarly
journals. Nature, for instance, started a program this
summer in which authors can opt to have articles they
submit made available immediately as electronic pre-
prints that anyone can comment on. Those papers are
still reviewed the old-fashioned way, but the
comments by online users are also taken into
consideration.

Many academic publishers shrug off open-review e-
books as simply the latest technological fad, saying
that the time-tested peer-review process should not be
replaced by bands of volunteers.

Whether traditional publishers join in or not, there is
no doubt that academic discourse is increasingly
occurring on blogs and other online forums. So how
can that energy be channeled into accepted forms of
scholarship? Is it time for the book to get a high-tech
makeover?

Game On

Mr. Wark's book is called GAM3R 7H30RY
[http://www.futureofthebook.org/gamertheory/]
(pronounced "Gamer Theory," and rendered in a code-
like language style popular among computer geeks). It
offers a cultural critique of video games and argues
that popular culture increasingly casts life itself as a
kind of game — where you're only truly a survivor if
you can avoid being voted off the island.

Mr. Wark originally planned on sticking with the old-
fashioned peer-review model — and he has, in fact,
submitted the book for publication by a traditional
academic press (Harvard University Press). But as he
was finishing a draft, he was approached by Ben
Vershbow, a researcher at the Institute for the Future
of the Book, an unusual academic center run by the
University of Southern California but based in
Brooklyn.

Mr. Vershbow is a fan of one of Mr. Wark's previous
books, A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard University Press),
an excerpt of which the scholar placed online. So Mr.
Vershbow asked whether Mr. Wark would have been
interested in having users comment on that book
while it was under production.

"Hell, no," Mr. Wark responded — at least by his
retelling, over brunch at a Brooklyn restaurant last
month. "That's one of those books where you sit alone
on a mountaintop and not talk to anybody. ... Not
everything can be 'engage with the reader' every five
minutes."

But he agreed to turn GAM3R 7H30RY into a
conversation with his audience. So he sat down with
researchers from the center — a group whose work
ethic blends long brainstorming meetings with bouts
of hands-on multimedia production — and helped
design a format that would put both text and
comments in the foreground. In May they unveiled
their creation and opened the rhetorical floodgates.

"The first thing I figured out about this is, you
outsource the proofreading," said Mr. Wark, noting
that many of the comments have nitpicked his text's
grammar rather than confronting its substance. "I'm
loving that because I'm bad at it. I mean, structural
things I can figure out, but, particularly for a writer,
it's hard to see tiny, tiny details."

Thanks to mentions on some popular blogs, the e-
book has also attracted video gamers who have
commented on the book. The problem, though, is that
many of those gamers have dissed it. "They're saying,
This is a stereotype of what gamers are like," said Mr.
Wark. "And I'm trying to say, I flip it over, that's the
whole point of the first chapter; I start with the
stereotype and then I flip it over. But you've got to
signal that earlier on, so people aren't put off."

He plans to make that change for the published
version because he wants the book to appeal to a
broad audience. "The thing about scholarship is it
tends to create homogeneous readerships, so you
write for the new-media-theory crowd," he said. "I
don't do High Theory, as it's called. I do Low Theory,
which is, Is there a way to bring a little bit of distance
and reflection into people's everyday experiences and
lives?"

Mr. Wark admits that he is not much of a gamer
himself, though he did pick his favorite games to write
about, including the Sims, a popular simulation where
players control the social interactions of a suburban
family. He considers himself a writer foremost, and he
sports the markings of an artist — with hipster-style
sneakers and a sticker for an experimental art group
on his laptop. He says he chose to write about video
games because he thought the subject would appeal to
today's students.

"If you want to have conversations with 20-year-olds,"
he said, "one good way is to start with their own
common culture and make it unfamiliar."

Though a few of the comments on the e-book have
been cutting — one user said "Is this a textbook or a
novel? I'm confused" — Mr. Wark notes that most of
the responses have been thoughtful. (In fact, a look at
the more than 300 comments reveal that readers are
examining the book's argument closely and posting
specific suggestions.) He doesn't remove any of them,
no matter how negative, though he does delete spam,
postings similar to the ads that clutter many e-mail
boxes.

"I'm meeting new people," he said, adding that the
experiment is working. He said he had interacted
online with a range of people who had commented,
including a Derrida scholar, a fan of the video game
Civilization, and a middle-aged librarian. "To me that's
half the reason to write anyways, to meet new
people."

One of Mr. Wark's inspirations for the e-book form is
Wikipedia.

"That is the literary work of our time," he said. "It's the
Shakespeare of 2006. It took a traditional form, which
is an encyclopedia, and completely rethought it. It
rethought what authorship is. It rethought what
collaboration is. It rethought textual form."

That sentiment is likely to rile other scholars, many of
whom dismiss Wikipedia as full of inaccurate,
misleading, or otherwise flawed information
contributed by people of unknown background. But
Mr. Wark argues that Wikipedia's power is that it
brings many thinkers together. And because
Wikipedia allows anyone to see the history of who has
added what to each entry, he said, it is self-correcting
when errors do emerge.

"Wikipedia is based in sound academic practices to do
with peer review — it just changes who those peers
are," he said. "They're not people who are authorized
by Ivy League degrees or anything like that. But
there's more of them, and they work faster."

Pointing to a recent study in Nature that showed that
Wikipedia entries are about as accurate as entries in
Encyclopaedia Britannica (though Britannica disputes
those findings, and the study's methods), he said these
new knowledge-makers are "not doing too badly."

"You've really got to ask yourself," he said, "What
have I got against free knowledge produced by the
people?"

A New Kind of Publishing

The Institute for the Future of the Book, which
produced the GAM3R 7H30RY e-book, is not your
typical academic center. For one thing, it's located in a
row house in Brooklyn, just steps away from the
residence of the institute's founder and research
director, Robert Stein. A tiny, hand-scrawled label on
the building's door buzzer is the only physical
indication of its existence.

The institute's five researchers often work in the same
room, sitting with their laptops around a large, funky
conference table. If one of them needs to make a
phone call, he goes into one of two small meeting
rooms and shuts the door. If you want to know what
is on their minds on any particular day, you can visit
the institute's blog, called If:book, where the group's
members post thoughtful riffs on digital publishing.

On a recent afternoon, Mr. Stein, Mr. Vershbow, and
the three other members of the research team
gathered around a table in the institute's yard to talk
about why they think academic publishing is broken.
And, naturally, to talk about the future of the book.

Mr. Stein has been involved in e-book publishing
longer than just about anyone. He founded the
Voyager Company in the 1980s, which produced
multimedia projects on CD-ROM; he worked on
electronic-text projects for the research division of
Atari, the early video game company; and he founded
Night Kitchen, a company that developed multimedia
publishing tools in the late 1990s. At least, that's what
the Wikipedia entry about Mr. Stein says. (And those
facts check out.)

"For the first 20 years I was working in this field, I
really thought the main thing we were doing was
putting audio and video in them," he said of e-books.
"In the last couple of years it's become clear that
locating the book inside of the network is
fundamentally more important than adding
multimedia to it."

What changed his thinking was an essay by a
University of California at Berkeley historian, Carla
Hesse. The essay, "Books in Time," argued that the
idea of the author was a fairly recent invention, dating
from only about the 18th century. The implication:
Books don't have to be so lonely.

"I realized that this questioning that goes on while you
read, that that could happen sort of in real time and in
a dynamic way," he said. "And best of all would be if
readers could talk to each other, and if readers could
talk to the author, because the reason for a book is to
afford conversation across space and time, and so why
shouldn't some of that conversation take place literally
within the book itself?"

Mr. Vershbow, who is newer to the field of e-
publishing and does not yet have a Wikipedia entry
about his career, said the group is not advocating the
death of the physical book — though it is worth
noting that there aren't many printed books in the
institute's offices. "This is not a proposition that every
book should be written in this way," he said. But the
networked e-book is ideal for scholarly books, or any
work dealing with big ideas that might be difficult for
a lone author to tackle, he argued.

In a way, he said, the institute seeks to apply the
model of open-source software development to
scholarship. Open-source software, in which a
distributed group of volunteer programmers
contribute to large software projects, was also the
inspiration for Wikipedia.

"We're kind of talking about open-source
development of big-idea books — that go into more
depth than a Wikipedia article would, obviously, and
that are more perhaps original and more provocative
and are less balanced than a Wikipedia article is trying
to be."

Mr. Stein chimed back in: "We are suggesting a new
idea of peer review that is fundamentally similar, in
that it is an exchange among peers, but that is in the
open," he said. As it stands, most scholarly presses,
and journal publishers for that matter, keep the peer-
review process private and anonymous. "We think
that the way that peer review in theory enacts
scholarship is actually of value, and it's worth being
seen, and it might spark further discussion and further
critical engagement," Mr. Stein said.

But how can five guys sitting around a table in
Brooklyn revamp the peer-review process?

That's the question that is driving them lately as they
have organized a series of daylong meetings with
well-known bloggers and other prominent scholars.

The answer, they have decided, is to start their own
scholarly press. It's a relatively modest step, as it will
focus only on the discipline of media studies. The
tentative name is Media Commons, and the plan is to
publish more academic books like GAM3R 7H30RY, as
well as scholarly articles, and even blogs — all of
which will be subject to a public, open peer review.
The institute unveiled initial plans for the project last
week.

"We decided we're going to publish really fabulous
stuff, we're going to let anybody comment, and the
editorial board will take the responsibility of vetting
commenters as peers," said Mr. Stein, though he noted
that the details are still being worked out. "We think
we can do such a good job of publishing, and have
such a high level of comments and discussion, that we
think it will suddenly become prestigious to be
published here. And that's how precedent gets set."

War Over Words

For that project, the institute found another
collaborator eager to buck the publishing
establishment.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick, an associate professor of English
and media studies at Pomona College, said she started
thinking critically about academic publishing after a
maddeningly long struggle to find a publisher for her
own book, about depictions of television in literature

The short version of her story, as she tells it: Several
publishers told her that her book was great, but that
budgets were too tight to print it because it was not
seen as of broad enough interest to be a big seller.
When she finally found a willing press, and after the
book was favorably reviewed twice and accepted for
publication, the marketing department still pulled the
plug because it felt the book wouldn't sell enough
copies. Ms. Fitzpatrick wondered why she couldn't
take the book's text, and the two scholarly reviews,
and just post it all online herself. But she knew that
would not impress her tenure committee.

What she did end up publishing, on a blog, was a
series of manifestos on scholarly publishing. And even
though her book did eventually find a publisher
(Vanderbilt University Press), and she did get tenure,
she says change is needed.

"The entire system right now of academic publishing,
especially in the humanities, is broken," she said in an
interview. It should not take years for a monograph to
find an audience, she said, and too much pressure is
placed on book publishing in the tenure-and-
promotion process.

"The process of communicating one's research
through a book or through an article has become
more about markers of individual success — lines on a
CV" — than it is about convincing other scholars of
ideas or arguments, she said.

She said she hopes that the Media Commons Web-
publishing effort will bring more voices into peer
review and turn the process into a valuable
contribution to discourse.

"It will be more inclusive, and it will be basically
community-regulated rather than regulated by a small
editorial board," she said.

Though the details are still being determined, she
described one possible model: Though anyone would
be able to comment on manuscripts in the Media
Commons, some users would be chosen by the board
as official "peer reviewers." A professor whose book
has been reviewed could then take the top 10 reviews
from official reviewers and submit those to a tenure
committee.

"The promotion-and-tenure committee will have to do
a little more work — actually looking at what peer
reviewers said rather than simply at whether they
voted yes or no," Ms. Fitzpatrick said.

But leaders of traditional scholarly presses wonder
how people will know what to make of the reviews
conducted in an open-review model.

"How do you know about the quality of people doing
the peer review online?" asked Alex Holzman, director
of Temple University Press. "I'd really want to know
who's commenting, and why."

Ken Wissoker, editorial director for Duke University
Press, said the current system of peer review works
well for identifying the best books in each discipline.

"We have a very demanding peer review," he said of
his own press, and "reviewers might go through
several rounds of revision.

"You'd have a really different situation when what
someone did with the reviews was optional, or where
it was continuous — where it's more like going to a
writing group," he said.

Rice University announced this month that it would
start the first all-digital university press, focusing on
art history and other disciplines in the humanities. But
even that effort will conduct peer review in the
traditional way, said Charles J. Henry, vice provost
and university librarian at Rice. "It's extremely
important that the press establish its authority from
the start," he said, noting that many scholars are likely
to be skeptical of the quality of a book publisher that
does not actually print books.

The new Rice University Press does plan to use the
online medium to encourage discussion of the books it
publishes. Mr. Henry said it would put up something
like a blog with each of its books, where readers and
the authors could have a public dialogue, and authors
can better learn how their books are being used in
class and in research.

The idea of replacing printed books with networked
texts recently attracted the attention — and derision —
of John Updike.

"Yes, there is a ton of information on the Web, but
much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited,
unattributed, and juvenile," he said, addressing the
topic at length this summer at BookExpo America in
Washington, an event sponsored by the American
Booksellers Association and the Association of
American Publishers.

"The printed, bound, and paid-for book was — still is
for the moment — more exacting, more demanding of
its producer and consumer both," Mr. Updike said. "It
was the encounter, in silence, of two minds, one
following in the other's steps but invited to imagine, to
argue, to concur on a level of reflection beyond that of
personal encounter."

Mr. Updike essentially argued that what books
achieve transcends and improves on conversation, and
that reducing the book to simple chatter would harm
scholarship and discourse.

Ending his remarks, which were met with enthusiastic
applause, Mr. Updike urged his colleagues to resist
letting the network subsume the printed word.
"Booksellers, defend your lonely forts. ... For some of
us, books are intrinsic to our human identity."

Blogs Have the Last Word

On the Institute for the Future of the Book's blog, Mr.
Vershbow responded to Mr. Updike's much-quoted
speech.

Calling Mr. Updike a "nostalgic elitist," he said it was
unfortunate that the author was helping shape the
popular conversation about e-books, and he criticized
The New York Times for giving the remarks so much
ink.

In a comment posted on the blog in response, a user
with the nickname "renee" agreed with Mr. Vershbow.
"Regardless of what Updike thinks or wants, the new
Renaissance is under way," she wrote.

Another reader of the blog quickly jumped in to
defend Mr. Updike, however: "I think he is simply
acknowledging the changes to the book, and I think
he has an honest concern of what might [be] lost in the
transition of moving ideas to the Web, especially from
someone whose life has been about books," wrote
Eddie A. Tejeda, a computer consultant who helped
the institute build the GAM3R 7H30RY e-book. "I think
it's fair to lament what might be lost."

The discussion continues in the blogosphere.

***

GAM3R 7H30RY:
http://www.futureofthebook.org/gamertheory/

Steve Shaviro's review:
http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=506

Holly Willis/LA Weekly
http://www.laweekly.com/art+books/books/writing-in-public/13910/#Continuation

Julian Dibbell/Village Voice
http://www.villagevoice.com/screens/0623,dibbell,73428,28.html


____________________________________
McKenzie Wark     http://www.ludiccrew.org