Yesterday Dan Cohen, the director of the Center for History and New Media and my colleague at George Mason University, posted a thoughtful piece describing a major problem of scholarly publishing (and of book publishing more generally). Dan suggests that while the “supply” of written work has changed with the advent of digital collaborations, academic blogging, and interactive projects, the “demand” side—what readers, publishers, and rank and promotion committees expect—remains stubbornly resistant to change. To illustrate the dominant attitude of “most humanities scholars and tenure committees” toward digital work, Dan quotes a fantastic quip from John Updike:
The printed, bound and paid-for book was—still is, for the moment—more exacting, more demanding, of its producer and consumer both. It is the site of an 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, with all its merely social conventions, its merciful padding of blather and mutual forgiveness.
I love this Updike passage. It’s so perfectly stated that I find myself nodding in agreement even as I recoil on the inside. We need go no further than the second sentence to see some of most pernicious misconceptions influencing what Dan calls the demand side of the publishing. Continue reading “Loud, Crowded, and Out of Control: A New Model for Scholarly Publishing”→
We in the humanities are in love with the archive.
My readers already know that I am obsessed with archiving otherwise ephemeral social media. I’ve got multiple redundant systems for preserving my Twitter activity. I rely on the Firefox plugins Scrapbook and Zotero to capture any online document that poses even the slightest flight risk. I routinely backup emails that date back to 1996. Even my recent grumbles about the Modern Language Association’s new citation guidelines were born of an almost frantic need to preserve our digital cultural heritage.
I don’t think I am alone in this will to archive, what Jacques Derrida called archive fever. Derrida spoke about the “compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive” way back in 1994, long before the question of digital impermanence became an issue for historians and librarians. And the issue is more pressing than ever.
Consider the case of a Hari Kunzru short story that Paul Benzon described in an MLA presentation last month. As Julie Meloni recently recounted, Kunzru had published “A Story Full of Fail” online. Then, deciding instead to find a print home for his piece, Kunzru removed the story from the web. Julie notes that there’s no Wayback Machine version of it, nor is the document in a Google cache. The story has disappeared from the digital world. It’s gone.
Yet I imagine some Kunzru fans are clamoring for the story, and might actually be upset that the rightful copyright holder (i.e. Kunzru) has removed it from their easy digital grasp. The web has trained us to want everything and to want it now. We have been conditioned to expect that if we can’t possess the legitimate object itself, we’ll be able to torrent it, download it, or stream it through any number of digital channels.
We are archivists, all of us.
But must everything be permanent?
Must we insist that every cultural object be subjected to the archive?
What about the fine art of disappearance? Whether for aesthetic reasons, marketing tactics, or sheer perversity, there’s a long history of producing cultural artifacts that consume themselves, fade into ruin, or simply disappear. It might be a limited issue LP, the short run of a Fiestaware color, or a collectible Cabbage Patch kid. And these are just examples from mass culture.
Must everything be permanent?
In the literary world perhaps the most well-known example is William Gibson’s Agrippa (A Book of the Dead), a 300-line poem published on a 3.5″ floppy in 1992 that was supposed to erase itself after one use. Of course, as Matthew Kirschenbaum has masterfully demonstrated, Gibson’s attempt at textual disintegration failed for a number of reasons. (Indeed, Matt’s research has convinced me that Kunzru’s story hasn’t entirely disappeared from the digital world either. It’s somewhere, on some backup tape or hard drive or series of screen shots, and it would take only a few clicks for it to escape back into everyday circulation).
I have written before about the fugitive as the dominant symbolic figure of the 21st century, precisely because fugitivity is nearly impossible anymore. The same is now true of texts. Fugitive texts, or rather, the fantasy of fugitive texts, will become a dominant trope in literature, film, art, and videogames, precisely because every text is archived permanently some place, and usually, in many places.
We already see fantasies of fugitive texts everywhere, both high and low: House of Leaves, The Raw Shark Texts, Cathy’s Book, The Da Vinci Code, and so on. But what we need are not just stories about fugitive texts. We need actual texts that are actual fugitives, fading away before our eyes, slipping away in the dark, texts we apprehend only in glimpses and glances. Texts that remind us what it means to disappear completely forever.
The fugitive text stands in defiant opposition to the archive. The fugitive text exists only as (forgive me as I invoke Derrida once more) a trace, a lingering presence that confirms the absence of a presence. I am reminded of the novelist Bill Gray’s lumbering manuscript in DeLillo’s Mao II. Perpetually under revision, an object sought after by his editor and readers alike, Gray’s unfinished novel is a fugitive text.
Mao II is an extended meditation on textual availability and figurative and literal disappearance, but it’s in DeLillo’s handwritten notes for the novel — found ironically enough in the Don DeLillo Papers archive at the University of Texas at Austin — that DeLillo most succinctly expresses what’s at stake:
Reclusive Writer: In the world of glut + bloat, the withheld work of art becomes the only meaningful object. (Spiral Notebook, Don DeLillo Papers, Box 38, Folder 1)
Bill Gray’s ultimate fate suggests that DeLillo himself questions Gray’s strategy of withdrawal and withholding. Yet, DeLillo nonetheless sees value in a work of art that challenges the always-available logic of the marketplace — and of that place where cultural objects go, if not to die, then at least to exist on a kind of extended cultural life support, the archive.
Years ago Bruce Sterling began the Dead Media Project, and I now propose a similar effort, the Fugitive Text Collective. Unlike the Dead Media Project, however, we don’t seek to capture fleeting texts before they disappear. This is not a project of preservation. There shall be no archives allowed. The collective are observers, nothing more, logging sightings of impermanent texts. We record the metadata but not the data. We celebrate the trace, and bid farewell to texts that by accident or design fade, decay, or simply cease to be.
Let the archive be loved. But fugitive texts will become legend.
Julie Meloni over at Prof. Hacker has a good rundown of the kinds of questions a professor should think through when he or she integrates a blog into the classroom. I’ve been using blogs in my teaching for several years now, so I wanted to share a few ideas that have worked for me. I’m no expert and I’m still casting about for solutions to some of the more nagging problems, but after thirteen course blogs spread across seven semesters (I just counted!), I have obtained a small measure of experience. In other words, I keep making mistakes, but at least not the same ones over and over.
My university has bought into the Blackboard machine and does not offer any non-proprietary online platform. Since I refuse to restrict access to my content (and by extension, my students’ content), I host all of my class blogs right here, on samplereality.com, using WordPress. Of course not everyone is geeky enough to own their own domain name (although you should, you really, really should), but there are dozens of places where you can host a class blog for free — so don’t feel like you have to use whatever “online educational solution” your campus throws at you. One advantage of hosting everything myself is guaranteed permanency — I have a persistent archive of my online class conversation that I will never lose, because nobody else controls it. And in fact, former students have told me how valuable it is to be able to revisit half-forgotten blog posts long after they’ve finished the class.
I’ve always used group blogs in my classes: one central, collaborative blog where every students posts. I prefer this format over the hub model, in which an official class site links out to individual student blogs spread across the students’ own preferred blogging platforms. If nothing else, the group blog makes my job easier. I can read all the posts in one place. It also makes it more likely that students will read each other’s posts, generating a sense of momentum that is so important to the students’ buy-in of class blogging.
But what about that momentum? How do you get students to post?
How do you get students to do anything?
You grade it.
I don’t mean to sound cynical so much as realistic. It’s a fact: students need to know that what they’re spending their limited time doing is valued by us, their professors. And how do we show we value something in the classroom? At the most superficial level, by grades. So I typically make the blogging a substantial part of the semester grade. For example, in my most recent graduate class on postmodernism, I required once-a-week postings that would add up to 20 percent of the final grade:
Each student will contribute to the weekly class blog, posting an approximately 500-word response to the week’s readings. There are a number of ways to approach these open-ended posts: consider the reading in relation to its historical or theoretical context; write about an aspect of the day’s reading that you don’t understand, or something that jars you; formulate an insightful question or two about the reading and then attempt to answer your own questions; or respond to another student’s post, building upon it, disagreeing with it, or re-thinking it. In any case, strive for thoughtfulness and nuance. To ensure that everyone has a chance to read the blog before class, post your response by midnight the evening before class.
But how do you grade blog posts? Over time I devised a simple five-point rubric, ranging from 0 (no credit) to 4 (exceptional). It’s quick and in roughly 1-2 minutes I know what to rate any given blog post:
Rating
Characteristics
4
Exceptional. The journal entry is focused and coherently integrates examples with explanations or analysis. The entry demonstrates awareness of its own limitations or implications, and it considers multiple perspectives when appropriate. The entry reflects in-depth engagement with the topic.
3
Satisfactory. The journal entry is reasonably focused, and explanations or analysis are mostly based on examples or other evidence. Fewer connections are made between ideas, and though new insights are offered, they are not fully developed. The entry reflects moderate engagement with the topic.
2
Underdeveloped. The journal entry is mostly description or summary, without consideration of alternative perspectives, and few connections are made between ideas. The entry reflects passing engagement with the topic.
1
Limited. The journal entry is unfocused, or simply rehashes previous comments, and displays no evidence of student engagement with the topic.
0
No Credit. The journal entry is missing or consists of one or two disconnected sentences.
I strive for as much transparency as possible, so it’s essential that your expectations (i.e. the rubric) are explained to the students early on, and always available for them to review later. Once I have a few exemplary posts on the blog, I like to walk the class through what makes those posts exceptional (with the authors’ permission).
I mentioned that grades are a superficial way of showing students what we value. Direct and immediate descriptive feedback does more than a single letter or number can. So to deepen students’ understanding of their own work, I comment on every student’s blogging at least twice throughout the semester. These are public comments, posted below the blog post, again contributing to the collaborative and transparent ecosystem of the blog.
So we have grades, and we have comments, but these alone aren’t enough to make students realize the value of blogging for a class. What we need is some reflection upon the part of the student. To this end, about halfway through the semester I assign students a version of what Sheridan Blau in The Literature Workshop calls an “audit” of their own work. I go meta with this audit, making it a blog post on blogging:
Begin by printing and reading all of your posts and comments (you can access a list of your posts from the Archive menu at the top of the site). As you reread them, take notes, critically reading your entries as if they were written by somebody else (or at the very least, recognizing that they were written by a different you at a different time).
Compose a short analysis and reflection of your posts. This meta-post is open-ended and the exact content is up to you, although it should be thoughtful and directed. Feel free to quote briefly from your own posts or to refer to specific ideas from the readings we’ve studied so far.
Some questions to consider might include: What do you usually write about in your posts? Are there broad themes or specific concerns that reoccur in your writing? Has the nature of your posts changed in the past five or six weeks? What changes do you notice, and how might you account for those changes? What surprised you as you reread your work? What ideas or threads in your posts do you see as worth revisiting? What else do you notice? What aspects of the weekly blogging do you value most, and how does it show up in your posts?
This blogging about blogging invariably ends up being a pivotal moment in the students’ relationship to the class blog. It’s when they begin to have a sense of ownership over their ideas, a kind of accountability that carries over into their class discussion and other written work. It’s also when they truly realize that they’re engaged in a thoughtful, thought-provoking endeavor. It’s when the blog becomes more than a blog.
A few weeks ago I was interviewed by the Chronicle of Higher Education for a story about the fake David Foster Wallace review in Modernism/Modernity. The Chronicle story is online and at least for the first week, not behind a paywall. I was in Spain at the time, so for the interview I had to negotiate the nine hour time difference with Peter Monaghan, the Chronicle reporter. Peter graciously stayed up late, interviewing me at 1:30am his time in Seattle.
Also, the folks over at HTMLGIANT have the original email exchange between myself and the graduate student who inadvertently alerted me to the fake review by citing it as real. (They published the emails with both my and the graduate student’s permission.)
I recently wrote about why I’m making even the earliest scraps of my research public. It’s a move, in theory, that most academics would not object to. Nobody is going to give me funny looks for suggesting we share our research problems. After all, scholarly collaboration is something we’re almost all willing to profess a belief in.
So here’s something that may send a few strange looks my way. In addition to my research, I believe the other half of my job — teaching undergraduate and graduate students — should be as public as possible. Even if I weren’t an employee of the Commonwealth of Virginia, working in a publicly funded state university, I would still argue that virtually all aspects of my job — what I earn, what I teach, what my students think about my teaching — should be transparent.
One of these areas — what I teach — has long been public, as all my syllabi, reading lists, and assignments are online. In the latest version of my videogame studies course I even used the class wiki to document and explain any changes I made to the syllabus during the semester.
RateMyProfessor.com tells us what a few self-selected students think about a professor, not what they think about a professor’s teaching.
Finding out how effective a teacher I am proves to be more difficult. Many professors and most students know about the informal ratings out there. MTV’s RateMyProfessor.com (I bet you didn’t know MTV was so dedicated to pedagogy) is the most popular site, but there are others. More often than not, though, these ratings are based upon a professor’s charisma or workload, rather than any kind of systematic statistical data. (Is a chili pepper statistically significant?) These sites tell us what a few self-selected students think about a professor, not what they think about a professor’s teaching.
My university’s own course evaluation system — salmon-colored forms students fill out anonymously at the end of every semester — is rigorous, qualitative, archived, and — happily for many faculty — almost completely invisible. I get these evaluations back, of course, and I have to share them with my salary and reappointment committees. But after that? In theory, George Mason makes the numerical score sheet for each set of teaching evaluations available to a wider audience.
In theory.
Good luck going to the university website and finding out information about the score sheets. Tracking down these evaluations reminds me of the scene early in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, when Arthur Dent discovers the plans to build a highway bypass through his property. Dent eventually uncovers the designs on public “display” in the cellar of the local planning office, “in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.'”
Here is George Mason’s own equivalent of the “Beware of Leopard” sign:
The above message is what any off-campus visitor sees when he or she attempts to access the database of teaching evaluations. On campus, the wiew [sic] isn’t much better:
To be fair, I’m hoping that the typo has been corrected since I captured this screen shot in May. But I wouldn’t know for sure. You see, it’s August and I’m off-campus right now, as are most faculty and students, and Ican’t even electronically access my own teaching evaluations, let alone those of other professors, unless I’m physically there.
In short, my teaching evaluations are all but hidden to the world. Off campus they are firewalled. On campus, you might be able to find them, but only if you know where to look (and have a Mason ID and password). And once you get past those hurdles, the university only provides the numerical scores — not the written comments students may have left.
So I’m moving beyond my professions of faith in scholarly transparency into clear, deliberate action. And this is where I start getting funny looks, if not totally horrified ones. I’m releasing all of my teaching evaluations, complete with every single enthusiastic or blistering or apathetic student comment, to the public under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license.
I’ve begun with the most recent set of evaluations I have, from Fall 2008, and as soon as I have the Spring 2009 batch, I will upload those as well. And I’ll begin working my way backwards in time, adding teaching evaluations from every semester I’ve been at George Mason University. You’ll find the evaluations online at Scribd (“The YouTube for Documents”), but since they are embeddable, I’ll post them here as well.
Below are the evaluations for ENGL 343, a new media class dear to me but which encounters resistance from students who discount electronic literature. By the end of the semester I have many stragglers, evidenced in the thirteen students missing from class the day I distributed the evaluations.
[scribd id=14082871 key=key-4usnb5zi533ttsszn7a]
And here are evaluations for ENGL 414, a small seminar for exemplary undergraduate majors that focused on American Postmodernism.
[scribd id=18105809 key=key-1v0xyubce27t7fphkerc]
I’ve discussed the lofty minded “why” I’m doing this, and I want to end with the more practical “what” — What can someone do with these evaluations?
There are obvious answers: prospective students may find them valuable, other teachers of similar material might learn what works and what doesn’t, and my own colleagues may gain a better sense of what goes on in my classroom. But I’m interested in the less obvious answers. For instance, I can use the evaluations as the basis for a teaching portfolio, in which I perform my own reflective analysis of the students’ feedback. Or, more experimentally, because the evaluations are under a Share Alike license, they can be remixed. I have no idea what remixed teaching evaluations might look like, but I would love to see what someone comes up with.
Such transparency can be intimidating at first, as I am surrendering control over what many professors dread reading themselves when the forms are returned in their sealed envelopes weeks after classes are over. But it is also liberating. Both the public and myself can only gain from the availability of my teaching evaluations. Think of it as open source teaching.
Many of my readers in the humanities already know about Zotero, the free open-source citation manager that works within Firefox and scares the hell out of Endnote’s makers. If you are a student or professor and haven’t tried Zotero, then you are missing out on an essential tool. I use it daily, both for my research and in my teaching. [Full disclosure: I am not an entirely impartial evangelist for Zotero, as its developers are colleagues at George Mason University, in the incomparable Center for History and New Media.]
The latest version of Zotero allows you to “publish” your library, so that anybody can see your collection of sources (and your notes about those sources, if you choose). In my case, I’ve not only published my library on the zotero.org site, I’ve updated the main sidebar on this very blog with a news feed of my “Recently Zoteroed” books and articles. As I gather and annotate sources for my teaching and research, the newest additions will always appear here, with links back to the full bibliographic information in the online version of my library.
How did I do this?
Why did I do this?
What follows is an attempt to answer these two questions. Before I address the how-to, though, I’ll explain the why-to: why I’m making the sources I use for my teaching and research public in the first place.
Sharing my Library in theory
Like many scholars in the humanities (I imagine), I initially had qualms about sharing my library online — checking that little box in my Zotero privacy settings that would “make all items in your library viewable by anyone.” Emphasizing the gravity of the decision, zotero.org adds this warning: “Be very sure you want to do this.”
I do want to do this, I do, I do.
But why? We are accustomed, in the humanities, to being very secretive about our research. Oh sure, we go to conferences and share not-yet-published work. But these conference papers, even if they’re finished the morning of the presentation with penciled-in edits, they’re still addressed to an audience, meant to be shared. But imagine publishing your research notes and only the notes, shorn of context or rhetoric or (especially or) the sense of a conclusion we like to build into our papers. Imagine sharing only your Works Cited. Or, imagine sharing the loosest, most chaotic collection of sources, expanded way beyond the shallows of Works Cited, past the nebulous Works Consulted, deep into the fathomless Works Out There.
Proprietary software like Endnote reinforces the notion that the engine of scholarship is competition.
A paranoid academic (and most of us are paranoid) might worry that by sharing our pre-publication sources, whether they’re primary or secondary sources, we are exposing our research before its time. My sense is that we like to keep our collection of sources private as long as possible, holding them close to our chest as if we were gamblers in the great poker game of academia. And in this game, our colleagues are not colleagues, but opponents sitting across the table from us, bluffing perhaps, or maybe holding a royal flush. Proprietary software like Endnote, which by default encloses research libraries within a walled garden, reinforces this notion, that the engine of scholarship is competition rather than collaboration.
Or, to switch metaphors, sharing our sources in advance of the final product is like sharing the blueprints to a house we haven’t yet built — a house we may not even have the money to build, and meanwhile you just know there’s somebody out there, more clever or less scrupulous or just damn faster, who can take those blueprints and erect an edifice that should have been ours while we’re still at town hall getting zoning permits. We’ve all had that experience of reading a journal article or — damn it! — a mother effing blog in which the author tackles clearly, succinctly and without pause some deep research concern that we’ve been pondering for years, waiting for it to blossom into a Beautiful Idea in our writing before going public with it. And POOF! somebody else says it first, and says it better.
Keeping our sources private is the talisman against such deadly blows to our research, akin to some superstitious taboo against revealing first names. We academics are true believers in occult knowledge.
To put it in the starkest terms possible: before I published my library I was concerned that someone might take a look at my sources and somehow reverse engineer my research.
Let’s face it, I’m an English professor. It’s not as if I’m working on the Manhattan Project.
Are we in the humanities really that ridiculous and self-important? Let’s face it, I’m an English professor. It’s not as if I’m working on the Manhattan Project. My teaching and research adds only infinitesimally incrementally to the storehouse of human knowledge. I don’t mean to belittle what scholars in the humanities do à la Mark Bauerlein. On the contrary, I think that what we do — striving to understand human experience in a chaotic world — is so crucial that we need to share what we learn, every step along the way. Only then do all the lonely hours we spend tracing sources, reading, and writing make sense.
Looked at prosaically, public Zotero libraries may be the equivalent of a give-a-penny, take-a-penny bowl at a local store. This convenience alone would be useful, but the creators of Zotero are much more inspired than that. They know that sharing a library is crowdsourcing a library. The more people who know what we’re researching before we’re done with the research, the better. Better for the researchers, better for the research. Collaboration begins at the source, literally. And as more researchers share their libraries, we’re going to achieve what the visionaries in the Center for History and New Media call the Zotero Commons, a collective, networked repository of shareable, annotatable material that will facilitate collaboration and the discovery of hidden connections across disciplines, fields, genres, and periods.
And that is why I’m sharing my library.
Sharing my Library in Practice
Now, how am I sharing it? I’ve taken what seems to be an unnecessarily complicated route in order to incorporate my library into my blog. There is an easy way to do what I’ve done: Zotero has native RSS feeds for users’ collections, and all you need is to subscribe to that feed using a widget on your blog. In my case I could have used the default WordPress RSS sidebar widget. But I didn’t. I wound up working with both Dapper and Yahoo Pipes, and here’s why.
I didn’t like how the RSS feed built into zotero.org included everything I added, including duplicate citations, snapshots that I later categorized as something else, and PDFs unattached to metadata (even if I retrieved that metadata later). In short, the default RSS stream looked messy in WordPress (but it looks great in Google Reader). [UPDATE: Patrick Murray-John’s awesome Zotero WordPress plugin solves these problems and makes the Pipes solution below unnecessary—though still cool.]
The online mash-up tool Yahoo Pipes is perfect for combining and filtering RSS feeds and that’s what I wanted to use. I can’t program my way out of a paper bag, but Pipes is simple enough that even I can use it. So why did I also use Dapper, another online tool that lets you do fun things with RSS feeds? Because Pipes for some reason would not accept the Zotero RSS feed as valid. I haven’t been able to confirm this, but I’m guessing it has something to do with Zotero’s API using a secure HTTPS rather than HTTP. Or maybe it’s because the Zotero feed is actually XML rather than RSS. Again, I’m not a programmer and I’m just fumbling my way around this hack. In any case I ran my Zotero feed through the Dapp Factory, which did accept it.
Next I dumped the Dapper feed into Yahoo Pipes, using several of Pipe’s operators to filter duplicates and attachment file names that were cluttering the RSS feed. Here’s is a map of my Pipe.
Using Yahoo Pipes to filter a Zotero library
It’s quite simple, and with some experimentation I may improve my hack (for example, I’m toying with Feedburner as a substitute for Dapper, which may preserve more of the original XML, giving Pipes more raw data to manipulate and mash). But even right now in its kludged form, the result is exactly what I set out to do.
In addition to its simplicity, one of the advantages of Yahoo Pipes is the variety of output formats available. For my blog’s sidebar I have Pipes generate an RSS feed, but I could just as easily create an interactive Flash “badge” with it:
I find the possibilities of a portable, embeddable version of my Zotero library extremely evocative. It’s a kind of artifact from the future that our methodological and pedagogical approaches haven’t caught up with yet. Here is where the theory and practice of a collaborative library have yet to meet — and I want to end my manifesto/guide with a simple appeal: let’s begin thinking about the untapped power of this intersection and what we can do with it, for ourselves, our students, and our scholarship.
One of the more brilliant works of electronic literature I savor teaching is Brian Kim Stefan’s Star Wars, One Letter at a Time, which is exactly what it sounds like. Aside what’s going on in the piece itself (which deserves its own separate blog post), what I enjoy is the almost violent reaction it provokes in students. Undergraduate and graduate students alike are incredibly resistant to SWOLAAT, in most cases flat-out denying any claims Stefan’s reworking of Star Wars might make toward literariness.
The dismissive response of my students to SWOLAAT is only the most extreme example of what happens with many pieces of electronic literature, both in my classroom and in the wider world. For example, I’ve been reading through Johanna Drucker’s review of Matthew Kirschenbaum’s groundbreaking Mechanisms, as well as the e-lit community’s reaction to her statement that no works have “appeared in digital media whose interest goes beyond novelty value.” A bit aghast at Drucker’s remark, Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Scott Rettberg have both responded, and I was struck by Rettberg’s observation that
ELO [The Electronic Literature Organization] has submitted a number of very good digital humanities grant proposals to the NEH, and we have had the same response nearly every time — on a panel of three reviewers, two will find the proposal worth funding, and one of whom will state flatly that it has no merit, not on the basis of the proposal itself or its relevance to the call, but because they find electronic literature itself to be without merit.
It occurred to me recently that the denial of electronic literature’s literary merit — whether it’s coming from my students or a distinguished NEH panel — is not due to a misplaced desire to preserve the sanctity of what counts as literature as it is sheer xenophobia.
Electronic literature is a foreign land.
Electronic literature might as well be the national literature of Moldavia. To the uninitiated student or scholar, e-lit is at worst strange, incomprehensible, and inscrutable, and at best, simply silly.
So, I’m wondering, would the same process by which a stranger in a strange land grows accustomed to foreignness and even appreciates and incorporates cultural difference into his or her own life — could that process apply to e-lit?
Below (larger image) is a six stage model of intercultural sensitivity, designed by Milton J. Bennett in the late eighties and early nineties to describe the progress of individuals as they experience greater and more frequent cultural difference. And I think this model could help us introduce students to the foreign world of electronic literature.
In the early ethnocentric stages of Bennett’s model, individuals begin by first denying that cultural difference exists in the first place, either because of their own isolation or because of willful ignorance. Greater exposure to cultural difference next prompts a defensive posture, an us-versus-them mentality in which existing cognitive categories are reinforced and any comment directed toward one’s own culture is perceived as an attack. The last ethnocentric stage is characterized by a minimization of difference. Individuals tell themselves that “people are the same everywhere,” a superficially benign attitude that in fact masks uniqueness and still evaluates other cultures from a reference point within one’s own culture. The final three stages are marked by an understanding that behaviors, norms, beliefs and so on are all relative. The first ethnorelative stage is acceptance, genuinely acknowledging cultural difference and seeing that difference within its own cultural context. Next comes adaptation, when individuals change their own attitudes, behaviors, and even language to match their surroundings in an attempt to communicate and empathize. Finally, integration occurs when individuals move freely between cultures, practicing what Bennett calls “constructive marginality,” that is, seeing identity construction as an ongoing process that is always marginal to any specific social group.
If we think of electronic literature as a foreign land, then I propose we use this developmental model to accurately chart a stranger’s encounter with the genre. As my experience with Star Wars, One Letter at a Time illustrates, students first begin reading electronic literature in either the denial or defense stages (meaning they’ve either never experienced e-lit before or they have and they hate it). I can imagine an entire syllabus structured around the goal of moving students from denial to integration. Just as educators and sociologists have come up with practical strategies to facilitate the progress of study abroad students along Bennett’s continuum, so too can we design specific assignments that develop students’ competencies in each of these stages: from a total inability to read the differences between traditional literature and born digital literature to an integration of those very differences into their non-e-lit lives. And with each point in between, we target stage-appropriate skills and practices, meeting the students where they are, rather than expecting them to reflexively appreciate the virtues of something as alien as Reiner Strasser and M.D Coverley’s ii: in the white darkness or something as unsettling as Jason Nelson’s This Is How You Will Die. This type of approach to teaching electronic literature would be far more rewarding (to both the professor and the students) than the kind of sink-or-swim model in Katherine Hayle’s theoretically dense (and unteachable, as I’ve discovered) introduction to Electronic Literature.
Imagine too that we begin writing grant and publishing proposals with these stages in mind, understanding that committees and panels and editors are likely stuck in the ethnocentric stages, judging literature from what we might call the “Great Works” perspective. E-lit challenges this perspective, but not on grounds of literariness; it challenges existing notions of literature simply because it’s different. We can teach sensitivity to difference to our students, and we should model sensitivity in our own writings as well. Teachers and researchers of electronic literature are its ambassadors, and it is up to us to introduce strangers to the medium in a firm, but welcoming, guiding way.
And finally, the wink and nod I’ve been looking for. Laurence Rainey, the editor of Modernism/Modernity, and Nicole Devarenne, the former managing editor of Modernism/Modernity, sent me this open letter today:
An Open Letter to Mark Sample,
We appreciate your recent remarks concerning a review essay about David Foster Wallace, one that appeared in late 2004 in the pages of Modernism/Modernity and was assigned to one Jay Murray Siskind, also the name of a character in Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise. It is saddening indeed to see the review being cited with po-faced earnestness, and surely you are right that this turns “a fun fake review into something much more telling about the state of academia.” All too plainly, the time has come to set the record straight.
As the journal’s book review editors at the time, we were at first disconcerted to receive an email from Jay Murray Siskind. Our suspicions were heightened when we noted that his email address read “blacksmith.edu,” rather than the better known College-on-the-Hill, where Murray was last seen working. But research soon revealed that his change in academic affiliation was the result of a bitter tenure decision fight, in which Alfonse Stompanato had played an especially unsavoury role. Still, Murray’s homepage is available to anyone who wishes to imagine it. And his competence in popular culture is amply documented by his essays in publications such as the American Transvestite and Ufology, not to mention Brüno. Who were we to reject the offer of a review from a respected and even popular colleague? Who but a fictional character could be better qualified to review . . . well, new fiction? Isn’t that the very essence of peer reviewing? It should also have come as no surprise to anyone that Jay Murray Siskind’s writing should have sounded like Jay Murray Siskind’s writing, in much the same way we might expect that the writing of Pierre Menard, author of the Quijote, to sound much like Don Quijote. Of course we took seriously our role as editors. We toned down a fawning reference (“the most important study since Das Kapital”) to the book that Murray co-authored with J.A.K. Gladney, Adolph and Elvis: Two Twentieth-Century Men and Their Mothers. We also removed a plainly vengeful mention of Alphonse Stompanato’s book, Crunching Granola: The Semiotics of the Cereal Box (“drivel that positively drivels”). But apart from that, the essay stands as Murray wrote it–perhaps the impish product of an impish mood that relieved the tedium of editing the turgid, academic prose that appears in Ufology, where he serves on the Advisory Board.
Yes, we agree that further investigation is urgently required to clarify the entire affair. Perhaps help can be sought from Daniel Quinn, the noted employee of the Auster Detective Agency. If so, he should get to work, or Max Work, immediately. If not, the affair will remain shrouded in a cloud of unknowing.
Finally, in one of the posts to your piece, you highlighted “the fact that Modernism/Modernity doesn’t concern itself with someone like Wallace.” Alas, M/M was the first academic journal anywhere to publish an extended tribute to Wallace after his untimely death, which included pieces by Dave Eggers, Michael North, and Marshall Boswell. (See Modernism/Modernity 16.1, January 2009: 1-24.) The alleged rupture between modernism and postmodernism is one urged only by the simple-, not to be confused with the Sample-, minded.
Sincerely yours,
Lawrence Rainey, Editor of Modernism/Modernity
Nicole Devarenne, former Managing Editor of Modernism/Modernity
And here is a copy of the actual letter:
[scribd id=17482549 key=key-1u543771oh25lc02uw0a]
Obviously, then, the whole review was written with — and continues to generate — a sense of humor, something that is sadly lacking from most academic publishing venues. “Hoax” was probably too strong of a word to use to describe the bogus review — until, that is, inexpert readers began taking it seriously.
Here is my response to Professor Rainey:
Dear Professor Rainey,
I appreciate the insider’s perspective, as well as the full details of Siskind’s rocky tenure process. I had heard Stompanato was difficult to work with, but I had no idea. And of course, I’m pleased to see Siskind branching out beyond the stagnant confines of Ufology. When Siskind left Manhattan for College-on-the-Hill, we lost a wonderful sportswriter, but gained a marvelous intellect. And his beard. What an incredibly important beard.
All the best,
Mark Sample
I have to rethink my characterization of the journal as an inscrutable monolith (I just love the phrase, though). In the meantime, if we can only get unsuspecting undergraduate and graduate students to distinguish between serious scholarly conversations and playful ones. (Or even better, is there a way that we can all learn better to mix the two, and use both at once?)
An Open Letter to Mark Sample,
We appreciate your recent remarks concerning a review essay about David Foster Wallace, one that appeared in late 2004 in the pages of Modernism/Modernity and was assigned to one Jay Murray Siskind, also the name of a character in Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise. It is saddening indeed to see the review being cited with po-faced earnestness, and surely you are right that this turns “a fun fake review into something much more telling about the state of academia.” All too plainly, the time has come to set the record straight.
As the journal’s book review editors at the time, we were at first disconcerted to receive an email from Jay Murray Siskind. Our suspicions were heightened when we noted that his email address read “blacksmith.edu,” rather than the better known College-on-the-Hill, where Murray was last seen working. But research soon revealed that his change in academic affiliation was the result of a bitter tenure decision fight, in which Alfonse Stompanato had played an especially unsavoury role. Still, Murray’s homepage is available to anyone who wishes to imagine it. And his competence in popular culture is amply documented by his essays in publications such as the American Transvestite and Ufology, not to mention Brüno. Who were we to reject the offer of a review from a respected and even popular colleague?Who but a fictional character could be better qualified to review . . . well, new fiction? Isn’t that the very essence of peer reviewing? It should also have come as no surprise to anyone that Jay Murray Siskind’s writing should have sounded like Jay Murray Siskind’s writing, in much the same way we might expect that the writing of Pierre Menard, author of the Quijote, to sound much like Don Quijote. Of course we took seriously our role as editors. We toned down a fawning reference (“the most important study since Das Kapital”) to the book that Murray co-authored with J.A.K. Gladney, Adolph and Elvis: Two Twentieth-Century Men and Their Mothers. We also removed a plainly vengeful mention of Alphonse Stompanato’s book, Crunching Granola: The Semiotics of the Cereal Box (“drivel that positively drivels”). But apart from that, the essay stands as Murray wrote it–perhaps the impish product of an impish mood that relieved the tedium of editing the turgid, academic prose that appears in Ufology, where he serves on the Advisory Board.
Yes, we agree that further investigation is urgently required to clarify the entire affair. Perhaps help can be sought from Daniel Quinn, the noted employee of the Auster Detective Agency. If so, he should get to work, or Max Work, immediately. If not, the affair will remain shrouded in a cloud of unknowing.
Finally, in one of the posts to your piece, you highlighted “the fact that Modernism/Modernity doesn’t concern itself with someone like Wallace.” Alas, M/M was the first academic journal anywhere to publish an extended tribute to Wallace after his untimely death, which included pieces by Dave Eggers, Michael North, and Marshall Boswell. (See Modernism/Modernity 16.1, January 2009: 1-24.) The alleged rupture between modernism and postmodernism is one urged only by the simple-, not to be confused with the Sample-, minded.
Sincerely yours,
Lawrence Rainey, Editor of Modernism/Modernity
Nicole Devarenne, former Managing Editor of Modernism/Modernity
Jay Murray Siskind is Don DeLillo’s only recurring character, having first appeared in DeLillo’s pseudonymous Amazons and later as a kind of Mephistopheles character in White Noise. Now, Siskind has broken out of the realm of fiction and entered the real world.
I am referring to “An Undeniably Controversial and Perhaps Even Repulsive Talent,” a review of David Foster Wallace’s work that appeared in the prestigious journal Modernism/Modernity, published by The Johns Hopkins University Press. Found in the Volume 11, Number 4 issue (2004) of Modernism/Modernity, the review focuses on Wallace’s last collection of short stories, Oblivion, and is attributed to a certain Jay Murray Siskind, Department of Popular Culture, Blacksmith College.
Anyone familiar with White Noise should recognize the clues that the supposed reviewer is DeLillo’s character and not some real live scholar with the same name: there’s the fictional Blacksmith College (which, while not the college portrayed in White Noise, is a name of one of the neighboring towns); there are the fake footnotes in the review referring to other characters and details from White Noise, including narrator Jack Gladney and thuggish Alfonse Stompanato); and finally, there are the decidedly non-reviewish interjections by Siskind in the middle of the seemingly serious review:
It is at this point that I must confess to missing something in Wallace, namely the presence of women nearer the center of the narration (setting aside Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman, Jr., the protagonist in Wallace’s first novel, The Broom of the System). I admit that I’ve always been partial to them, i.e. women. I fall apart at the sight of long legs, striding, briskly, as a breeze carries up from the river, on a weekday, in the play of morning light. And what fun it is to talk to an intelligent woman wearing nylon stockings as she crosses her legs. Wallace, I suspect, shares these predilections and could write wonderfully complicated women.
This is pure Siskind as DeLillo imagined him (and for some reason it reminds me of the hilarious scene in White Noise where Siskind pays a prostitute to perform the Heimlich maneuver on him).
I first noticed the fake review in 2005, when one of my students unwittingly cited the review as real research. I had puzzled over it and decided that if I waited long enough, somebody (in Modernism/Modernity circles, in Wallace circles, in DeLillo circles) would come forward and take credit for something I’m sure they thought nobody would be fooled by. Time passed and I forgot about the fake review. Until recently. I’ve done some digging around and discovered that the hoax has gone unnoticed, though the review hasn’t. The review is only ever considered as serious, peer-reviewed research. For example, in addition to my embarrassed student, I’ve found the review cited in several graduate theses, with no acknowledgment that the review is fake. The troubling blindness to contextuality and intertextuality (how could any 20th century Americanist, whether modernist or postmodernist, fail to see the references to perhaps one of the most important novels of the past fifty years) — this troubling blindness on both students and their advisors’ part turns a fun fake review into something much more telling about the state of academia.
This isn’t a hoax on the same level as the Alan Sokal/Social Text affair, nor is it obviously parody, as when The Onion attributes a blog to DeLillo. It is somewhere in between, minor, but noteworthy. I am 100 percent certain that DeLillo was not involved and 95 percent certain that Wallace was not involved; DeLillo is much too subtle and Wallace was far too clever. So I wonder on what level was the hoax perpetrated? Who was in on it? Were the editors of Modernism/Modernity aware? Did some sly book review editor slip it in? Did any regular readers of the journal ever even read, really read, the review? At what point will the real writer blink? Or wink? And what can “An Undeniably Controversial and Perhaps Even Repulsive Talent” teach us about scholarship, publishing, peer-review, and mentoring?
UPDATE (23 July 2009): The editors of Modernism/Modernity have responded.
To be fair, I’m hoping that the typo has been corrected since I captured this screen shot in May. But I wouldn’t know for sure. You see, it’s August and I’m off-campus right now, as are most faculty and students, and I can’t even electronically access my own teaching evaluations, let alone those of other professors, unless I’m physically there. 
