THE FUTURE OF ACADEMIC PUBLISHING ON THE WEB

By Jorn Barger

Reading room of the British Museum

This essay is based on my experiences building a very elaborate website [qv] about James Joyce. [history of site]

I expect the following factors to have an enormous effect on academic publishing in the very near future:

• longterm costs proportional to readership
• always under construction
• offsite links add value
• feedback on popularity of individual pages

Longterm costs proportional to readership

The biggest change is that publication is suddenly cheap. Academics have always had much more opportunity to write than they've had sponsorship for publication so books and articles have had to be concisely focused -- optimised -- to deliver the most information using the fewest words.

The Web allows an entirely new, discursive style of presentation, where an author can take however much space she needs to be as clear as possible. Ignoring the cost of creating the webpages, the longterm costs of publishing them will be exactly proportional to how often they're read -- even (especially!) if your topic is infinitely esoteric you can still publish hundreds of megabytes and it will cost you almost nothing. (Harddrive storage-costs for text are effectively zero.)

Graphics are a bit more expensive, but even large, colorful maps and charts -- if done as GIF images -- can easily be kept under 30k each. [20k example] [map key]

More Joyce examples:

In 1988, the NY Review of Books [qv] devoted dozens of columns to a debate between John Kidd, Hans Gabler, and others, mostly about the spelling of the name 'Conolly Norman' in Ulysses. Similar editorial debates might be required for thousands of other Ulysses 'cruxnuts' but the Web makes this painless -- a gigabyte of debate (200 million words!) would be trivially manageable.

I'm also building up a huge image-bank of Joyce trivia by grabbing every passing jpeg off eBay [my daily search] of obscure Joyceana [eg magazine covers] and even though these start to add up in terms of megabytes on the harddrive, so long as they're obscure they'll be viewed only rarely, so the expense is negligible.

Always under construction

The second biggest change is that you don't have to dot every i and cross every t before you publish, because as soon as someone points out an error you can fix it.

In fact, in a few years I expect the standard practice for academics will be to do all their editing online, because their readers will be gaining a benefit even from the rough drafts, and the authors will gain a great benefit from their feedback.

In the past, one of the primary career-strategies of academics has been to attack predecessors' errors, but on the Web this just backfires -- they can immediately fix the error and move along.

The psychological impact of this for academic authors is enormous -- anyone bold enough to do so can now throw their every thought out onto the Web, instead of having to review and censor and doublecheck everything. (There's an emotional parallel here to the boldness of the early 24/7 webcam sites like JenniCam.)

In particular, academics can post the full text of their lectures, and can create new lectures on any topic that interests them.

Readers will link what they like, and the most useful material will 'rise to the top'.

Offsite links add value

In general, if another page already does a decent job of covering one of your subtopics, you can just link it (with a brief summary, ideally) rather than having to cover it again yourself. This implies a new composition-strategy that starts with a Web survey of available resources, shaping each new topic-page first as a framework for these links... plus whatever special value you can add.

But this also implies that your pages will go out of date if you don't keep an eye out for new resources. At the moment, the skills to do efficiently this sort of Web-survey-and-maintenance are quite rare, even among Internet people, much less academics. So whoever gets there first wins a sort of 'Amazon.com advantage' whereby the runners-up all look like pale imitations. [basic skills]

This process of survey-and-maintenance also has a huge serendipity-factor that favors very large, discursive websites-- if I'm searching for mentions of, eg, 'Lucia Joyce' I may run across a page on her relationship to Samuel Beckett that turns out to be part of a valuable website on Beckett and Irish lit, which then supplies other links for many of my other pages.

(And even if one hasn't mastered this skill, it's now trivially easy for a beginner to link all the Encyclopedia Britannica articles needed to supply background for her topic.) [EB on Joyce]

Feedback on popularity of individual pages

It's uncannily useful to read your server logs every morning and see what pages people have been reading-- you can focus your improvements on those and related pages, and leave the less-popular topics for later.

This feedback will very quickly drive home the truth that Web readers want clarity and simplicity -- complexity and jargon will always, immediately, unambiguously drive them away.

Jorn Barger is the creator of RobotWisdom.com, where this essay first appeared. Reprinted by permission.