The medium is the message.--Marshall McLuhan, sage of Toronto

The medium is the massage.--McLuhan, a few minutes later, as Oracle of the Electric Age

The medium is definitely not the message.--Bruce R. Smith, scholastically, The Acoustic World of Early Modern English

The message is the message.--Northrop Frye, sage of Toronto, impatiently, in his private notebooks

morris eaves

text and medium: the crisis in scholarly publishing
english 557
tuesday 2.00-4.40, morey hall 403
guidelines
syllabus

Research and publication are the backbone of modern scholarship in English, in the humanities, and in the academy at large. Scholarly communication depends on a well-formed system of seminars, conferences, journals, and books, which are tightly coordinated with a system of peer review, tenure, and promotion—life-and-death matters in our profession. But recently there have been several cries of alarm from noted scholars and university-press editors who claim to have detected a crisis in scholarly publishing. In 2002, for example, the president of the Modern Language Association (MLA) sent anxious, urgent letters to all MLA members about the crisis as he understood it, and the MLA quickly appointed a high-level Task Force on the Evaluation of Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion to study the issues that had been raised. Its recommendations are being published in December 2006, just before our seminar convenes. Meanwhile, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) appointed a stellar commission to study the present and future of scholarly publishing from another angle, our rapidly increasing dependence on digital means of communication. (Controversies over the Google book-digitization project and Wikipedia make it clear enough, if it wasn’t clear already, that the ground is shifting under our feet.) The ACLS has published (on the Web) two drafts of its report, and the final version, Our Cultural Commonwealth, will have been published by the time our seminar convenes. We’ll use these two reports, whose recommendations will be controversial and widely discussed in the profession, along with other studies of the crossroads, if not crisis, in scholarly publishing to explore the system and the media of scholarship past, present, and future—including your personal/professional future. And to help bring the central issues home, we’ll draw on a wealth of local resources--including, for instance, the Middle English Text Series, the Camelot Project, Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, the William Blake Archive, the UR Press/Boydell & Brewer, etc. And we’ll consult with local experts and the visitors expected on campus for a symposium in March on the Future of the Book. I would also like to involve members of the seminar in the planning of future events.

department of english, university of rochester