Two weeks back, Alex Reid argued that humanities journals don’t always benefit from peer review, and might be better served by Web 2.0-style filters à la Amazon’s reader reviews.
It’s not hard to see scholarship taking this turn: open-access journals (Reid again) and academic blogging are becoming decreasingly rare. By inviting scholars from multiple fields to evaluate an article, post-publication critique would follow the interdisciplinary direction the humanities are taking.
An open-access Web of Knowledge could act as a clearinghouse for articles scored in relation to tags: 2.1 in literary modernism, 2.9 in fascism, 4.1 in Ezra Pound—I’m sure tenure committees would love having more statistics to process.
Attractive as Reid’s idea is, there are two conceptual obstacles.
Problem 1: Breaking through. If I sent an unusually strong paper to Modernism/Modernity there is a chance my work might be published, even though I am a scholarly nonentity.
But what would happen if I posted the same paper on our imaginary open-access scholarly database? I’d tag it carefully so that it would appear on the feeds of readers watching those tags, but how would I persuade the strongest reviewers—experts in the field who have never met me—to leave feedback and score my work? The process of hunting down reviews becomes something like trying to get Michiko Kakatuni to write about your first novel.
Problem 2: Watching the watchmen. And how do you know you can trust the reviewers? The anonymous peer reviewer of an academic journal has limited power to shape public opinion—only the editor and the author see the reviewer’s remarks, and when it comes to publication the odds are on the author’s side. But when reviews are public, even bad reviewers can shape opinion.
In the comments to Reid’s post, Amanda French suggests that there would need to be a way to score reviews, but there isn’t an obvious mechanism for separating bad reviewers from good. (mistrusting Amazon’s Top Reviewer system.)
Where would such watchmen-watching stop? Over on The Reading Experience there’s a commenter reviewing Daniel Green’s review of Sam Anderson’s review of Richard Price’s Lush Life, and after reading all of these levels of critique I have no idea whether or not I should read the book.
The solution to the expertise question, I think, would be to create accreditation systems to confer authority on reviewers, although the basis of accreditation would have to be defined within each discipline. (Reid writes that “editorial-reviewer communities might emerge within disciplines, but this could happen now”—that such communities have not emerged suggests that academics don’t want to add another step to the already attenuated publication process.)
Solution: Blog it out. Reid suggests a four-step process beginning with the back-and-forth of blogging and ending with submission to an open-access article database. Yesterday I linked to Karl Steel’s meditation on “The Phoenix and the Turtle” as an example of how a community of scholars could recreate the seminar room online.
Why not use blogs in the same way to accomplish peer review work? There are plenty of bloggers out there who have written out peer-ish reviews of scholarly publications in their field, but I’ve rarely seen it happen in a community.
This, it seems to me, is one thing a modblogging community could do well.
Update: Crooked Timber hosts an interesting discussion on open-access publishing.
I don’t know; I’m very suspicious of using blogging and the web to replicate research and community structures, for several reasons:
1) it currently is not valued in a way that will help grad students get jobs or new faculty get tenure —- unless perhaps you are studying digital literature or something web-related —- and thus could hurt people more than it helps,
2) time. Blogging and web research can turn into a huge time-suck; right now I use them as a way of relaxing and letting off steam and have to always be careful not to let reading and commenting on blogs (Hi!) get substituted for my real work. Likewise, I only have a couple good hours in the morning when I’m really really sharp and at my best on revising; if I’m not disciplined I waste my morning energy on reading blogs and playing scrabble on Facebook and then try to write later when I’m sleepy and grumpy,
3) how useful are these discussions to outside viewers anyway? I bet writing a post on one’s diss topic helps clarify one to oneself immensely, but to one’s readers…? I have a bunch of dense and difficult theory blogs bookmarked but I never read them because, really, if I have the energy to think my way through Das Kapital or of Grammatology, shouldn’t I spend that energy going back to the source rather than read the sketchings of someone who may be no more knowledgeable about these things than I am?
4) for me, the advantage to blogs is the ability to play with aspects of voice and creativity that are pretty much not accepted within mainstream academic work, and the more fun it is, the less I want my blog actually associated with “me.” Currently, “Sisyphus” is more like my academic id than the scholarly image I’d want to present, and I could see people liking the persona but getting turned off by this behavior —- whining, venting, snarking, playing memes on the internet —- in an “actual person.” Considering I still don’t have a job, I’m very conscious of this, and glad that if you were to google me you wouldn’t be able to find all sorts of random ramblings I had tossed off one night while drinking wine. (and life would be no fun if I wasn’t allowed to do that _somewhere_)
You ask in an earlier post why there’s such a large community of medieval bloggers and don’t seem to be many modernist bloggers (aren’t they all about paranoia and surveillance? Maybe that’s why. Or is that the pomo-ists?) I was going to point out that for most medievalists I know, they are the only one of “them” at their institution and are the most likely, from what I’ve seen, to have their courses not fill. I think the inability to talk to people in your department about your work is what drives people to do scholarly work in online communities; maybe the modernists don’t need that because they are not so isolated? (Or maybe it’s because no one, not even a modernist, sits down at 10:30 pm with a glass of wine and says, “hey, I know! I’ll bust out a brand-new theory on Finnegans Wake! — heh, sorry.)
And with that, I’ll just say I need to stop avoiding my chapter. Back to the salt mines…
Sisyphus!
You know, I link to all these bloggers I love, but even after 10 years of this I’m surprised when you people come back to read mine.
About 30 minutes after I posted this blather I read Adam Kotsko’s critique of academic blogging, and although I have trouble imagining you and Adam getting along he certainly agrees with your point 3. This appeal to form is the most damning argument, I think: we don’t write dissertations on construction paper, so why write scholarly inquiries on blogs?
You’re right, of course, but I wonder if that’s the fault of blogs or the fault of academics. Is there a case to be made that we should be able to write out critical ideas in fewer than 300 words? Fewer than 200? I know we’re not Gawker, but is that inherently a good thing?
Well, okay, yes. But that doesn’t mean we can’t afford to write more tersely.
Points 1, 2, 4: I’m totally with you. Well, partially.
1: I think the scene is changing. When I started co-teaching a course on academic blogging for my Writing Center a year or two ago we sent around emails to faculty on hiring committees. The chair of the history department said, basically, “We’re interested in an applicant we have this year because he keeps a good blog. Actually, the blog is how he came to our attention.” Certainly that’s not representative of every department everywhere, but it suggests that the stigma is fading.
2: If not blogs then World of Warcraft, or heroin, or reading the New Yorker—we ABDs are world champion procrastinators.
Your theory about medievalists makes a lot of sense to me, but I guess I don’t know the relative populations of medievalists and modernists. Does English lit follow a bell curve? A few meds, a few mods, mostly Shakespeareans?
Our Finnegans Wake group used to meet at a bar—it would take two pints before it began to make sense.
I think I’m going to go link you to my blogroll, if that’s okay.
The same is true of comp/rhet people at small institutions. Sometimes they are the only comp/rhet person at that college. But, in terms of talking about teaching and the work we do as comp/rhet folks, that is built into some areas of comp/rhet research, so I think it is more common for us to have these conversations anyway.
As for peer-review on blogs, I’m not sure how to work out the logistics. Like you, I like the idea of blind peer review – especially as a newbie. Would an article up for review online be kept anonymous for a certain period of time?
Katy, that’s an attractive idea, but I wonder how it would play out. At least among younger scholars much of the motive for publication involves getting their names out there to begin with: scholarly anonymity, even if for only a month, might be a significant sacrifice.
The bloggers over at Crooked Timber have been focused on problems of credentialing and of compelling/rewarding targeted critique. Henry Farrell seems to suggest that reviewing is ultimately a karmic force, difficult to police or reward. But it seems that keeping the reviewees (as well as the reviewers) anonymous, at least for a time, would be in keeping with the blindness of karma…
Hi Mike,
I’ve found that commenting on other people’s posts is the biggest way of attracting more readers. (Relevant comments, of course.)
I am now inspired to write (part of) my dissertation on construction paper. I’ve also thought about using lipstick, fingerpaint or interpretive dance, though. Maybe all of the above would make it go faster.
You’re definitely right with your riposte to #2 — I don’t know if there is any benefit to work-related instead of completely unrelated procrastination —- I’m still wasting time when I reread Boice’s advice for new faculty members — I was thinking that the _feeling_ one has of having gotten work done was somehow a trap. But I use that excuse when I do my dishes to, so maybe it all evens out.
I was recently told that maybe 80% of all grad students study 20th C lit. That’s definitely the case at my program. I dunno about, say, faculty breakdown at small colleges, which was actually what I was picturing with my comment.
The anonymity in reviewing is another interesting topic. I would just point out now that “regular” print publishing is wayyy slow and delays of only a month or two are the lucky breaks. I’d be interested in thinking more about reviewing in “good faith” mentioned somewhere earlier; I’ll go look at the Crooked Timber stuff later when I’m not so tired.