Peer that Blog, Cite that Site

Hybridization Daze


January 23, 2008 (Computerworld) -- A professor working on a book about digital fiction and video games has launched what some are calling the first blog-based peer-review process for an academic book.

Noah Wardrip-Fruin, an assistant professor of communication at the University of California San Diego, on Tuesday announced plans to post portions of his forthcoming book, Expressive Processing, on the Grand Text Auto blog for the next 10 weeks to seek peer review. The book to be published by MIT Press.

"Given that ours is a field in which major expertise is located outside the academy (like many other fields, from 1950s cinema to Civil War history), the Grand Text Auto community has been invaluable for my work," Wardrip-Fruin wrote in a blog post. "In fact, while writing the manuscript for Expressive Processing, I found myself regularly citing blog posts and comments, both from Grand Text Auto and elsewhere. Now I'm excited to take the blog/manuscript relationship to the next level, through an open peer review of the manuscript on the blog."

Wardrip-Fruin, a regular author at Grand Text Auto, asked his blog's readers to "please let me know if I get anything wrong. The project is very interdisciplinary, and I know some of you are experts in areas where I'm still learning. More generally, please let me know what you think of the arguments."

It is the logical expression in scholarship of popular culture that the web would find this reflection of its matrix. I began to think of communication in general. How we share and express has long been the province of print and telecommunication and now abstractly like print of a virtual mind, that is a virtual mind working away 24/7 as a human mind, although as a kind of virtual Jungian collective.

The development of the CommentPress software fascinates me. Writing in the margins of virtual text like a book is like the e-book pretending to be a print book. Strange.

Chris Joseph, digital writer in residence at the Institute for Creative Technologies at De Montfort University in the U.K., noted that although a traditional peer-review process will happen alongside the blog-based process, "we believe this experiment affirms the importance and legitimacy of online communities in the development scholarship, and [it] represents a significant step forward by an academic press into possible new hybrid models of publishing and review. With this experiment, we inch a little closer to an exciting fusion of old and new forms."

We are in a flux of hybridization of technology. Fun times! There are limits to a peer process in real/virtual time however. Most folks using the web are not using it to expressly for that purpose, but more as a free for all. It is more about that bridge for the integrity of the publisher, editor and author to remain intact, a traditional peer review must be done, blog review does have a place...

I often feel a kind of schizophrenia of the print and virtual models clashing, as I try to maintain some vestige of print organization and sensibility while working in the virtual landscape. The more I work in the virtual, the more the print rules and regulations (out of poor habit on my part) slip away like crumbling mortar holding the bricks of the old print matrix. My English teachers of past years would rightly be horrified. "What happened?" they might ask, dismayed.

Any thoughts?

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9058542&intsrc=hm_list