A “Consumer Reports” for Academic Journals? (and wouldn’t a Wiki work?)
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In today’s Chronicle of Higher Education, Robert Deaner, associate professor of psychology at Grand Valley State University, makes a suggestion that seems so obviously right that you can’t believe it hasn’t been realized already, let alone proposed.

Academics in every field will know the annoyance and agony of submitting to journals that take six months or more to respond to submissions–and, when they do, offer nothing specific as justification for rejection. Other journals don’t provide reader reports, but you have to read the fine print ahead of time to know this. Still others, by contrast, respond promptly and provide reader reports for virtually all submissions, whether accepted, rejected, or recommended for revision and resubmission.

But how are we (and, more importantly, our students and junior colleagues) supposed to know how particular journals operate? Wouldn’t it be great to have some kind of clearinghouse of information on and reviews of all the journals in your field, with both specific data (on turnaround time, acceptance rate, etc.) and anecdotal observations (“The Cotton Mather Review is pretty slow this year. Any thoughts on why?” “Editorial turnover is what I’ve heard”)?

Here is Deaner’s proposal, outlined in a piece called “It’s Time for Journals to Be Author-Reviewed”:

I suggest the development of a crowdsourced, “author reviewed” journal-evaluation Web site. The idea is that authors from various disciplines would share their experiences with particular journals, both negative and positive. There would be quantitative information such as time until receiving notice of being reviewed, time until receiving first review, total time from initial submission until final publication, and, of course, acceptance or rejection. And there would also be opportunities for rating or commenting on key issues, like the fairness and constructiveness of editors and reviewers and the efficiency of the journal’s production staff.

As reviews accumulated, it would be possible to make better decisions about where we would and would not submit our work. Authors would be able, if they chose, to eliminate journals with exceptionally high or low acceptance rates. They could forgo journals with slow turnarounds or predominantly negative editor or reviewer ratings. Ideally, this Web site would allow journal searches by many other criteria too, including subject area(s), impact factor,  publication fees, open-access options, database indexing, publisher, review process (e.g., blind or not), etc. This platform would also allow our colleagues, including librarians and administrators, to better evaluate where we are publishing and what journals we most need access to.

Now, you can see the obvious downsides here: under-compensated editors resigning after a bit of on-line snark, the difficulty of maintaining anonymity in the case of a smaller journal, the potential for abuse, etc. And the proposal risks promoting a kind of Consumer Reports-like stance toward the means of academic publication. Scholarly journals aren’t vacuum cleaners, after all; they’re nonprofit entities run in large part by fellow academics relying on the labor of their colleagues to review submissions and make sound decisions (there are lots of exceptions to this rule, but you know what I mean). Deaner anticipates this objection; as he puts it, “If you are trying to decide where to go for the best tacos in town, you have Urbanspoon and TripAdvisor to provide hundreds of ratings, many with rich descriptions. But if you want to find the best journal for your manuscript, you may have virtually no information. And, although I like tacos as much as anyone, I hope we agree the journal decision is far more important.”

Yet academia is already doing this kind of thing on a seasonal basis anyway. Just look at the Academic Jobs Wiki, a series of linked pages that report on positions in every field under the sun, with crowd-sourced data on interview requests, flyback invitations, even writing sample requests, as well as lots of anecdotes about departments’ treatment of applicants. Deaner could start such a Wiki tomorrow if he wanted to, beginning with journals in his own field and expanding outward, with folks in other disciplines adding fields, subfields, categories, and individual journals as the site expanded. (There’s already an Academic Journals WikiProject that could easily be hijacked to this purpose.)

University presses could also come in for review. How many of us have a colleague who’s submitted a book proposal to an editor, only to hear back nine months later that the proposal got lost in the shuffle, or never seriously considered? This is the kind of information that would be invaluable to scholars in many fields, helping guide their decisions about where to submit book proposals as they navigate the ever-changing world of scholarly publishing. In a related vein, such a resource would give those promoting new forms of academic publication (open access, print-on-demand, etc.: in my own field, punctum books comes to mind) a place to advocate for submissions from those scholars who might be contemplating conventional publication for a book that might be more suitable for, say, a born-digital platform from a non-university press.

An interesting and timely proposal, in any case.

Books that feel? Tactile feedback and prosthetic skin
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As someone who’s been studying animal skin rather intensively over the last few years (for a thought book on the natural and cultural history of parchment; see here and here for related essays), I’m intrigued by some new haptic technology that seems to be as sensitive as human skin. Through an amazing combination of nanoelectrics, heightened sensor density, and increased spatial resolution, scientists at Georgia Tech (led by materials engineer Zhong Lin Wang) have been developing a synthetic membrane that acts almost like mammalian skin, with all kinds of potential applications in medicine, computer technology, and other domains. The paper announcing the development, pithily titled “Taxel-Addressable Matrix of Vertical-Nanowire Piezotronic Transistors for Active/Adaptive Tactile Imaging” and appearing in a recent issue of Science, is summarized in a recent piece over at SingularityHub (h/t to Burnable Books follower Sorou Houngbo for the link):

Wang thinks the array could eventually be used to enable prosthetics to transmit a realistic sense of touch. They also think it could be used to improve touchscreen devices, give robots a finer touch for handling objects, or could be placed under the skin of burn victims. By connecting to intact nerves beneath the damaged skin, the sensor could replace actual skin and return sensation to the burn victim. With the many needs to sense our environment, possible applications for the artificial skin are endless.

Source: Georgia Tech, courtesy singularityhub.com

The technology obviously has extraordinary potential for treating burn victims, and I don’t mean to trivialize these applications. But as someone obsessed with historical interests in the intimate relation of skin to page, I can’t help thinking about the implications of virtual skin for the study of book history. The technology is sparking all kinds of Helen Marshall-like neo-Gothic images in my mind of sensing parchment and feeling books–though without the inconvenient need for human or animal skin as the interface.

What would it look like to trace, compute, and visualize the felt effects of writing on the surface of a page? More practically or empirically, could the physical inscription of a Latin Bible on synthetic skin somehow be quantified to measure the amount of energy and effort it took a medieval scribe (or a collective of scribes) to write such a massive volume over many months or years? And could this then be compared to the quantity of energy expended in typing a work of equal length on a MacBook? Would this give us a more intimately biological account of the transition from manuscript to print, or allow us to appreciate in new ways what it meant–physiologically, kinetically, biochemically, etc.–to write in a scribal culture?

Idle speculations on a rainy day…

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Graham Harman on “Object-Oriented Mythography”
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Well that was quick!

We could all learn a lot about intellectual generosity and rhetorical tone from Graham Harman, who has responded with lightning speed to the three essays engaging Object-Oriented Ontology, speculative realism, etc. that appear in the current issue of The Minnesota Review. The cluster edited by Andrew Cole, “The Medieval Turn in Theory,” includes pieces by Kathleen Biddick (“What Does ‘Deconstructing Christianity’ Want?”), Amy Hollywood (“Derrida’s Noble Unfaith”), Andrew (“The Call of Things”), D. Vance Smith (“Death and Texts”), me (“Object-Oriented Ontology”), and Maura Nolan (“Medieval Sensation and Modern Aesthetics”). The cluster represents a diverse blend of approaches and perspectives, though a common strand across several of them is an engagement with OOO and those other modes of vitalism, new materialism, etc. that have made a discernible impact in medieval studies in recent years (in the work of Kellie Robertson, Jeffrey Cohen, Eileen Joy, Karl Steel, Myra Seaman, Anna Klosowska, J. Allan Mitchell, and others; check out the collection Speculative Medievalisms: Discography for a sampling of this work).

Andrew’s essay, “The Call of Things: A Critique of Object-Oriented Ontologies,” is the most directly critical of the bunch and provokes the lengthiest response from Harman, who generally liked the essay but disputes Cole on a few points (e.g. on Fichte and Latour, and around various questions of historical exclusion). Harman also responds to Vance Smith’s essay, objecting to his supposed conflation of human and objective finitude and correcting him on some of the finer points of meta-OOO-speculative-realist-intellectual-historical periodization that I won’t pretend to comprehend.

Harman’s response to “Object-Oriented Mythography” takes up a strand of my essay that pointed to the mythographic mode as a kind of rhetorical dodge around difficult questions of theology and faith. Why should we believe the new philosophical/speculative myths that OOO asks us to embrace? And given their reliance on mythography as an argumentative mode, why don’t Harman and others talk more frankly about their investment in their readers’ beliefs and faith rather than in their own logic and argument? (Bennett, I think, does talk about these implications of her work, especially in a few passages I flagged in the essay.) I didn’t really put it that way, but I suppose that’s part of what I meant, and Harman rightly seizes on this aspect of my argument:

Holsinger mentions a possible tension between myth on the one hand and both secularism and realism on the other. I don’t see it that way. The point of myth and metaphor (for me at least) is not to move towards the realm of theology or of creative inner ideas at the expense of reality, but to indicate that reality itself fundamentally cannot be expressed in discursive terms. This is no artsy-fartsy turn away from mathematism and scientism, but simply an attempt to revive Socrates, who adamantly resisted both claims to wisdom and claims to reduce virtue, friendship, whatever to bundles of discursively accessible qualities. (“But Meno, how can I know the qualities of virtue before I know what virtue is?”)

And further on:

Plato wrote myths because Plato like his teacher was a lover of wisdom (not primarily a mathematician, a knower). There is a cognitive value to myth that is too often overlooked. It is ironic that, as Holsinger mentions, analytic philosophy has done a much better job of producing myths in recent decades than the continental tradition, since one might have expected precisely the opposite.

The point I would make in (counter-)response is that myth is so often an unacknowledged inflection of reality in this work, and that yes, while there may be a cognitive value to myth, it would be interesting and useful to see Harman and others outline precisely how this value functions at the level of argument and example. In a private response on Twitter to “Object-Oriented Mythography,” Ian Bogost tells me his next book (the follow-up to Alien Phenomenology) will be explicitly mythographical, so it could be that we’ll see similar issues taken up there.

The irony flagged by Harman above may also be a bit dubious. I didn’t suggest that analytic philosophy has done a better job of creating or engaging with myth. I suspect the opposite, in fact: to take the French tradition, the writings of Derrida, Irigaray, Barthes, and so on are positively saturated in the language of myth. Aside from the obvious case of Barthes’ Mythologies (on which see this balanced reassessment by Richard Brody from last year’s New Yorker), Kristeva’s Tales of Love sought to create new myths of maternity and embodiment while revising inherited mythographies of the feminine, and Monique Wittig’s Le Corps Lesbien elaborated a new carnal mythology around an idiom of lesbian desire. My point in drawing this contrast, rather, was that you often find analytic philosophy proposing new myths as thought experiments, or constructing alternative worlds for the sake of a circumscribed argument–but analytic philosophy seems to know why and with what limitations it’s doing so, and is quite forthright about the provisional and rhetorical character of myth in its disciplinary idiom.

I also don’t understand Harman’s “cannot,” as in “reality itself fundamentally cannot be expressed in discursive terms.” Cannot is a serious modal, and the flat-footed pedant in me wants to object on the simplest of terms. Of course reality itself can be expressed in discursive terms: read the latest issue of Science, Nature, or Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and you’ll see many examples of reality being expressed in the discursive terms of genetics, biochemistry, interstellar physics, and what have you. (I know, I know: I cannot reduce OOO’s version of “reality” in this way; but you know what I mean.) When a contemporary philosopher (whether analytic or continental) turns to myth as a way of limning her particular version of reality, she is making a discursive choice: one among many she might make, and I suppose one of the motivations behind my article was the desire to prompt OOO/SR to elaborate on the implications of its choice of myth as a dominant or at least prevalent mode in its own discursive vision of reality.

In any case, I appreciated the thoughtful reaction to the TMR piece. It was a pleasure to read such an immediate but serious response.

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Getting Victorian: Poetry, Song…and a Few Bugs
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One of the pleasures of teaching in a large Ph.D. program is the frequent opportunity to serve on dissertation committees outside my immediate field of expertise. For various reasons I’ve found myself on numerous Victorianist committees over the last eight years, working with students on topics from liturgical antiquarianism to nineteenth-century opera. One of these students is Joanna (Annie) Swafford, who’s writing a wonderful dissertation on poetry and music in the Victorian era supervised by my colleagues Chip Tucker and Andy Stauffer.

As an integral part of her thesis work, Annie has been developing over the past several years a remarkable digital archive called Songs of the Victorians, which brings together a number of Victorian poems with their nineteenth-century musical settings as art or parlor songs. Aside from its inherent interest to those in the field, the project also represents a sophisticated tool for the study of musical-literary relations with broad applicability and teachability across many periods and specialties. Going beyond the digitization of old scores, the interface allows the viewer/listener to hear and see these works simultaneously, integrating audio files with high-res images of first edition scores to create a seamless experience of both mediums at once. Once it’s completed (the pre-release was on March 11), this will be a particularly welcome resource for literary scholars who want to work with musical language and terminology, which can feel intimidating for those who haven’t been formally trained in music theory, a highly technical idiom at its best.

Annie describes the project in a thoughtful piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education just posted this morning. Touching on issues of design, platform compatibility, “browser hell,” and so on, she also recognizes the support of the University of Virginia’s staff, faculty, and infrastructure in digital humanities, particularly the Scholars’ Lab, directed by Bethany Nowviskie, and NINES, headed by Andy Stauffer–and she asks for readers’ help in resolving a few remaining technical issues, so if you know your DH stuff please submit a comment or two.

Just to give you a taste of what Annie is doing with Songs of the Victorians, here is a screen shot taken from the site’s presentation of “Juanita,” by Caroline Norton (1808-1877). The brown rectangle hovers over each measure as it’s performed (in this case by Anthony Rolfe Johnson and Graham Johnson), allowing you to see the music and words that you’re also hearing in real time. The screen shot is live, so you can click through to get to the song on the actual site.

Caroline Norton, “Juanita,” from “Songs of the Victorians”

You really have to see and hear Songs of the Victorians to believe it. The site will be a real model for innovative integration of multiple media in the study of the literary and musical past. Kudos to Annie on creating such a remarkable digital tool, and to her collaborators on grounds for supporting the effort. (You can also visit Annie’s blog, Anglophile in Academia, and follower her on Twitter @annieswafford)

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Thirteen (Medieval) Ways of Looking at the Curia
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“Entrenched Troubles at the Vatican Await a New Pope,” reads the headline in today’s New York Times–though when have they not? As any historian of the papacy will tell you, the curia has always been characterized by a certain degree of bureaucratic infighting, financial chicanery, and moral compromise hardly limited to the papacy of Benedict.

During the Middle Ages, the curia (whether in Rome or, during the Great Schism, in Avignon) provided readily available and highly nutritious fodder for polemic, satire, and condemnation at the hands of poets and theologians, moralists and sermonizers. To mark the ascendancy of Pope Francis, I thought I’d compile a number of medieval perspectives (both positive and negative) on the nature and justification of the papal curia. Some of these passages (such as the words of St. Peter from Dante’s Paradiso) are justly famous, while others are more obscure (see Robert Grosseteste’s intriguing complaint to the papal legate back in England about being backstabbed by his own dean and chapter). Sex, violence, bribery, cheating: it’s all here.

You might also enjoy the contrast between Bernard of Clairvaux’s kissing up to his fellow Cistercian, Pope Eugenius III, and the equally fervent condemnation of Bernard’s Frenchy influence in the curia by his unnamed opponents. Again, not all the passages are negative, though even defenders like Lapo da Castiglionchio, author of De Curiae Commodis, are uncomfortably aware of the potential for hypocrisy and moral compromise inherent to the institution. I’ve also included a number of more directly theological justifications of the papacy and its ancillary offices–passages that contrast nicely with the more jaundiced views. Few bureaucracies have been invested with so much idealism yet tainted by so much corruption as the papal curia. The new pontiff will have his work cut out for him, as all of his apostolic predecessors have as well. Post some additional passages in the Comments and I’ll update.

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§

“The Bride of Christ was never nurtured by
my blood, and blood of Linus and of Cletus,
to be employed in gaining greater riches;
but to acquire this life of joyousness,
Sixtus and Pius, Urban and Calixtus,
after much lamentation, shed their blood.
We did not want one portion of Christ’s people
to sit at the right side of our successors,
while, on the left, the other portion sat,
nor did we want the keys that were consigned
to me, to serve as an escutcheon on
a banner that waged war against the baptized;
nor did we want my form upon a seal
for trafficking in lying privileges–
for which I often blush and flash with anger.
From here on high one sees rapacious wolves
clothed in the cloaks of shepherds. You, the vengeance
of God, oh, why do you still lie concealed?
The Gascons and the Cahorsines–they both
prepare to drink our blood: o good beginning,
to what a miserable end you fall!
But that high Providence which once preserved,
with Scipio, the glory of the world
for Rome, will soon bring help, as I conceive…”

-St. Peter to Dante, Paradiso 27

§

Come, let us investigate even more diligently who you are; that is, what part you play in the Church of God at this time. Who are you? The high priest, the Supreme Pontiff. You are the prince of the bishops, you are the heir of the Apostles; in primacy you are Abel, in governing you are Noah, in patriarchate you are Abraham, in orders you are Melchisedech, in dignity you are Aaron, in authority you are Moses, in judgment you are Samuel, in power you are Peter, by anointing you are Christ. You are the one to whom the keys have been given, to whom the sheep have been entrusted.

-Bernard of Clairvaux, De consideratione (ca. 1149)

§

[I]t is necessary from now on that you belong not just to yourself but to us [the cardinals]; that you do not rank particular and recent friendships before those which are general and of ancient standing. You must look to the welfare of all and care for and watch over the dignity of the Roman court, as an obligation of your office. But what has this abbot of yours done, and the French church with him? With what insolence, what daring, has he raised his head against the primacy and the supremacy of the Roman see? For it is this alone that shuts and no man opens, opens and no man shuts. These Frenchmen, despising us to our very faces, have presumed to write down their profession of faith relative to the articles which we have been discussing these past few days as though they were putting the last touch to a final definition without consulting us… How then do these men dare in our presence to usurp what in our absence is not permitted to those more distant and more distinguished? We want you therefore to stand up against this rash novelty, and punish their insolence without delay.

-Otto of Freising (d. 1158), Deeds of Frederick Barbarossa, reporting on the Synod of Rheims (1148) and the corrupting influence of Bernard of Clairvaux

§

What about it, then? Let us satisfy our stomachs, let us indulge our appetites! For it is written: “If ye be willing and obedient to Urban, ye shall eat the good fo the land.” Therefore, my cardinals, devour salmon, eat carp, fill yourselves on perch, gorge on dolphin, swallow down sturgeon, break open mussels, fillet congers, wrap yourselves around the lampreys. What more can I say? Bring everything that inhabits air, sea, land, rivers, springs, swamps, lakes streams; consume them, swallow them down, devour them; drink, drink, my blessed cardinals, truly blessed, for you understand the use of Silver and Gold. Drink, I say, perfumed wine, Massican, Falernian, flavoured, unmixed, hyssop, Aluntin. What more? Fill yourselves with every honeyed drink and nectarean liquor.

-Anonymous satire, Garcineida (circa 1100)

§

O nummi privilegium!
Vix invocatur alius
Propitius
Deus in adiutorium.
O nummo tributoriam
Ecclesiam.
Non hec in nostra curia
Contagia:
Nam confidenter ambulant,
Qui Curious non simulant
Nec vivunt Bachanalia.

[O the privilege of money! Scarcely more propitious is the cry, "Make haste, O God, to deliver me!" O to money we assign a tribute Church! In our curia these are not contagions: For they walk confidently who do not ape the Curii, nor live like Baccanals.]

-“Qui seminant in loculis,” anonymous twelfth-century conductus from the Magnus liber organi

§

It is fitting that the pope receive from his brethren, the cardinals of the holy Roman church, who assist him as coadjutors in the execution of his priestly office, counsel freely given. It is fitting that he not vacillate in his judgment in any way, so that the fear of no secular power frighten them, no momentary passion absorb them, no alarm threaten them, nothing restrain them from giving real, solid advice.

-Pope Nicholas III (1277-80)

§

Ad loculos oculos dirigunt
Et manus porrigunt
Manipulos parvulos negligunt
Qui gestant anulos.

[To pockets they direct their eyes, and as they stretch forth their hands, they neglect the little bundles, they who wear rings.]

-“Non habes auditum,” polyphonic conductus from the Magnus liber organ

§

Let the city of Rome, then, rejoice and exult all the more, which has been worthy to serve the law of his kingdom. So many men with sweat and blood obtained the common name for the ancient city [Urbs], but for this alone did it acquire the rule of the whole world, that within its breast it retains the first of the apostles and was made the head of all churches. Romulus the founder raised her, but Peter established her more excellently and raised her up. The former built with stones, but the latter consecrated with martyrdom. This one painstakingly crowned the circle of walls, but taht one established the foundation of morals. The one built palaces which would perish, the other the merits of piety which will remain. The former made the city blush through its origins in fratricide, the latter spread Christianity from the outset through fraternity. Romulus burnt in pursuit of his singular dignity, but Peter freely surrounded himself in order to have sweet companionship…So Peter decorated the city more magnificently with his morals than Romulus girded it with his walls. The ornament of the merits of these two is as different as their monuments are dissimilar. For all  the power of Romulus has passed and decayed, but the piety of Peter has endured and lives.

-Lucian of St. Werburgh, Liber luciani de laude Cestrie (ca. 1195)

§

Sole head of the world, O Rome,
you who’ve caused us to stray far from home
and plunged all your pastors
in stormy disasters,
greet Walter, who comes here on loan,
of women a wretched despiser.
Let the Curia now be the wiser:
to speak truth unriddled,
his fair lord he diddled
not once, as the young lad’s adviser,
while still Homer’s verses brought tears
to his eyes, but long since, in those years
when a beard full and rough
made him far tougher stuff,
and the long march of days stilled his fears.

-thirteenth-century manuscript gloss to Walter of Chatillon’s Alexandreis

§

In your discretion and love you should also know that, in accord with your warning, I would gladly have restrained myself, until your arrival in these parts, from any involvement in the affairs that I know are a source of annoyance, justly or not, to my chapter, did I not firmly believe that any delay in performing the duties of my office would be prejudicial to me. For after your departure from these parts I was told as a certainty that my dean and chapter had, since the feast of Pentecost just past, a proctor at the curia, whose duty was to obtain against me, for the use of judges of whom I am with good reason suspicious, a letter whose purpose was to prevent me from performing the duties of my office. There is reason to believe that this action is intended by some, not to say all, members of the chapter to obstruct me from ever doing my duty be preoccupying me with unending lawsuits.

-Robert Grosseteste, letter 79, to Otto of Tonengo, cardinal deacon and papal legate in England (1239)

§

The sun in its travels sees nothing more hideous than this place on the shores of the wild Rhone, which suggests the hellish streams of Cocytus and Acheron. Here reign the successors of the poor fishermen of Galilee; they have strangely forgotten their origin. I am astounded, as I recall their predecessors, to see these men loaded with gold and clad in purple, boasting of the spoils of princes and nations; to see luxurious palaces and heights crowned with fortifications, intsead of a boat turned downwards for shelter…One is stupefied nowadays to hear the lying tongues, and to see worthless parchments turned by a leaden seal into nets which are used, in Christ’s name, but by the arts of Belial, to catch hordes of unwary Christians.

Petrarch, Epistolae Sine Titulo V

§

I am deeply concerned indeed by an attack that I have often heard made by many: that in the Roman curia influence, bribery, and corruption provide easier access in attaining office and rank than do learning, uprightness, and purity. Really, you have to look not at what is done there but rather at what was intended. After all, our honored elders wanted these things to be not incitement to vice but rather ornaments of virtue. If sometimes fortunes are handed over to the unworthy or to those who are not so worthy as they might be, the whole business has to be ascribed to the age and the men, not to the vice of the curia.

Lapo da Castiglionchio, De Curiae Commodis (1438)

§

The supreme pontiffs, as I know, are elected through avarice and simony, and likewise the other bishops are ordained for gold. These, in turn, will not ordain those below them, the priests, deacons, subdeacons, and acolytes, except a strict agreement be first drawn up. Of this mammon of unrighteousness the bishops, the real rulers, and the chapters, each has his part. The once accepted proverb, “Freely given for freely ye have received,” is now most vilely perverted: “Freely I have not received, nor will I freely give, for I have bought my bishopric for a great price, and must indemnify myself impiously for my untoward outlay. I will not ordain you as priest except for money. I purchased the sacrament of ordination when I became a bishop and I propose to sell you teh same sacred sign and seal of ordination. By beseeching and by gold, I have gained my office, for beseeing and for gold do I sell you your place. Refuse the amount I demand and you shall not become a priest.”

Dietrich Vrie, History of the Council of Constance (ca. 1420) 

“Hair Side, Flesh Side”: A Conversation with Helen Marshall
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A close-up from the cover of “Hair Side, Flesh Side”

Flayed skin, a mangled saint come to life, cannibalism in Croatia, a gruesome birthday gift, a lost manuscript of Jane Austen written on a young woman’s flesh: these are just some of the themes taken up in Helen Marshall’s remarkable collection of short stories, Hair Side, Flesh Side (recently out from ChiZine). In addition to her considerable gifts as a writer of dark and thought-provoking fiction, Marshall is a Ph.D. student in medieval English literature at the University of Toronto, where she’s writing a dissertation (directed by Alexandra Gillespie) on the culture of Middle English literary production from 1300-1360, focusing on the development of the South English Legendary, Mannyng’s Chronicle of England, the Auchinleck manuscript, and the Pricke of Conscience. Helen’s fiction brings her historical interests to bear in fascinating ways, exploring, in her words, “the physicality of memory and the way things imprint themselves us”–all speaking to what she describes as “the geeky medieval part of me that likes the conflation of books and bodies.” While dedicated to rigorous work in medieval manuscript culture, she also believes that fiction can help us see the past differently (a theme taken up as well in my conversations with fellow academic-fiction writers Katherine Howe and Ian Mortimer).

You can purchase Hair Side, Flesh Side here and read the great review in Publishers Weekly here. Enjoy!

 

Dealing with Open Access
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Editor’s Note
This is the second guest post on the topic “Open Access and Scholarly Publishing.” The first post, “The Humanities and Permission Barriers: Please Use CC-BY,” was written by Martin Paul Eve and can be found here. Today’s post comes to us from Rebecca Curtin, who teaches in the law school at Suffolk University. In addition to her legal work and teaching on issues of copyright and intellectual property, Rebecca (full bio below) has published on William Langland, print culture, and the pre-history of copyright. 

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***

The history of copyright is shot through with contractual maneuvering.  No sooner was the nascent form of copyright conceived out of that unhappy union of censorship and monopoly in the Stationer’s Company, than the parties concerned started to contract around it.  Members of the Stationer’s Company sliced and diced the rights that were recorded by entry in the Stationer’s Register. They broke their copy into shares, transferred it amongst themselves, and left it to their widows. Most astonishingly, as a few conditional entries in the Stationer’s Register suggest, some stationers even struck deals that gave a kind of right to authors in their copy by requiring the author’s consent for a second printing.  For those few stationers and authors, the usual sixteenth-century arrangement, in which authors sold their manuscripts to printers outright, and only the printer or bookseller as a member of the Stationer’s Company could control the right to print the manuscript, simply wasn’t the best conceivable deal.  Even in a regime in which author’s copyright did not exist as a legal concept, authors with sufficient leverage could negotiate to limit the printer to a single print run.  These deals were the thin edge of the wedge that would eventually break open the stationers’ hold on copyright, when new cultural and legal norms recognized authors’ rights in literary property.

Under modern regimes, copyright begins in the hands of the author, but, as the open access movement indicates, current norms in which the author assigns copyright to a publisher, which in turn reserves all such rights to itself, no longer offer the best conceivable deal for all authors, publishers, and readers.  In the space I have here, I would like to encourage scholars in the humanities to view the open access movement as an opportunity to negotiate a copyright arrangement that better fits their own goals for their research and their readers.

Below are a few options that the open access movement has opened up as “conceivable” deals and some thoughts on the benefits they offer to scholars.  Incorporating any of these options into your publishing process serves the noble public interest goals of the open access movement.  Authors with strong leverage may be able to mix and match open access distribution streams with traditional print publication.

1)   Open Access Repositories (OARs).  I began my academic career as a medievalist prior to attending law school.  I had never heard of an open access repository at that time.   Partly because of my comfort level with the technology, but more because of the cultural norms in the community of scholars to which I belonged, I would not have dreamed of posting a draft paper on the Web or of negotiating with a print journal to allow my article to be posted in an online repository with open access, making the article freely downloadable.  It is now very common for legal scholars to do both.  OARs like the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) [http://www.ssrn.com] make it very easy for scholars to gather their full body of work in one place, maximizing not only the dissemination of each paper, but also the cross-referencing of each work with the others.  Your email signature can include a link to your OAR page, putting all of your work just a click away.  It is, needless to say, a powerful tool for academics on the market.  Some OARs will even track the number of times your paper is viewed and then downloaded (or not). Not all print journals may be willing to allow you to retain the right to link your paper to an OAR page after publication in the journal, but it is a benefit worth negotiating for, and, with proper citation to the print journal, you may find that some journals will allow it.

2)   Creative Commons Licenses (CC licenses).  You may consider publishing your work under a CC license yourself or negotiating the use of a CC license by your publisher.  The licenses drafted by the Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/) clearly communicate with your readers what you are willing to allow and what you aren’t.   Hundreds of millions of works have been published under CC licenses, making those licenses familiar templates that cut through any confusion about the status of a work.  The CC licenses not only lower permission barriers, by making the permissions you are giving clear, they also put a stop to the chilling effect that uncertain application of the fair use standards may have on behavior that you have no desire to chill.  The license should be chosen from the array of CC licenses according to the needs of the author and the publisher, if any, for each individual work.  For instance, those who would like to release a work in tandem through a print publisher and through open access on the Web may find that releasing the Web version under the CC BY-NC-ND license (requiring attribution, prohibiting commercial use, and restricting derivative works) is the license most congenial to their print publishing partner while still increasing dissemination of their work.  Though I admire the drive to publish everything under a CC-BY license in order to maximize open access benefits, in my view such arguments miss the central point that the open access movement serves a diversity of needs that the norms of copyright in traditional publishing venues do not.

3)   “Print Plus.”  Finally, in recent years, there have been some exciting experiments in publishing monographs in print alongside open access releases in non-traditional media.  For instance, Yale University Press has proven itself open to such experimentation, publishing Harvard Law School Professor Jonathan Zittrain’s book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, in print while allowing Prof. Zittrain to make it available as a pdf and as an HTML site that allows visitors to the site to annotate the book. Similarly, Yale UP published Yale Law School Professor Yochai Benkler’s book, The Wealth of Networks, which was also made available in an online wiki. In both cases the books were published under CC licenses. Even if your press is not willing to allow simultaneous release of a print and free online version of your monograph, consider asking for the right to make a pdf available five or more years after the initial print publication. This would allow the press time to recoup the costs of print publication and give the press the “first mover” advantage, while allowing your work a second life online, where it can be made searchable, easy to find and easy to disseminate–all qualities that raise the profile of the work.

These are just a few of the new deals that scholars are making within the open access movement.  Will the open access movement, like authors’ negotiations of old, indicate the direction of new cultural and legal norms?  It might be too early to predict the full effect of the open access movement, but it isn’t too early to acknowledge that open access publishing is serving a present need by offering deals that may well benefit your work and your readers, if your research goals include increasing dissemination of your work, raising the profile of your scholarly reputation, communicating clearly with your readers, and lowering the barriers to joining in scholarly pursuits for all.

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Rebecca Curtin, Assistant Professor of Law at Suffolk University Law School, received a JD from the University of Virginia and a PhD in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard University. Before joining the faculty at Suffolk Law, she worked as an associate in the IP Transactional practice group at Ropes & Gray LLP, where her practice focused on licensing, collaboration and other commercial agreements involving intellectual property. Her research interests currently include the evolution of intellectual property regimes under the influence of new technologies and licensing transactions. “Piers Plowman and Tudor Regulation of the Press,” on Piers, print culture, and the prehistory of copyright, appeared in the Yearbook of Langland Studies in 2006.