Paper-publishing as a model for electronic publishing
For centuries, scholarship in the western tradition has centred on printed books as the
defining medium by which it expresses and preserves knowledge. Ask in the rare-books
library for a source of scholarly understanding about Stonehenge which is a full five
centuries old, Caxton's Chronicle of England of 1482, and you find a printed volume
which as a physical object astonishingly resembles a book about Stonehenge of 1982 or of
1998 -- in its alphabet of standardized letters adapted from hand-written forms, in its
black ink on folded paper, in its binding, in the size, the shape and the number of pages,
in the type-size, the line spacing and the margins to the page, in the divisions by
paragraphs and chapters, in the ordering, indexing and conventions of its contents.
Already old in the 15th century -- for these conventions derived from the habits of the
copied manuscripts -- that standard format shapes scholarly knowledge to this day. We call
a spoken communication at a meeting 'a paper' for the material on which it would be
printed if it were to be printed -- even when its words were never written down on paper,
but extemporized. We question whether a form of knowledge impossible to convey in print,
such as a mathematical proof existing as an immense iterative computer program, actually
amounts to a proper demonstration to be valued equally with a printed-paper proof. We
worry if data existing only electronically and nowhere in book form are sufficiently
proper or secure to count as real knowledge. When it comes to assessments, those of us who
work in electronic media fear that those outputs will not be respected equally with
printed media because they are not 'proper' publications. These habits run so deep that
they shape the names of the concepts involved: the word 'publication' means the making of
something public, but we narrow it to mean the making of something public in printed-book
format.
No wonder, then, that electronic publication uses metaphors drawn rom the world of printed paper: what appears on the computer screen is structured as if it were a desktop covered with paper documents, and the electronic information itself resides in 'files' as paper documents do. That metaphor and parallel with paper publishing structures the World Wide Web, where the basic unit is called a 'page' -- even though the technical concerns which shape a printed page and make it a unit of quantity in the print do not apply to that electronic medium. (Most sites -- 'home pages' -- contain a whole series of 'sub-pages', the separate parts of an individual home-page each existing in different files. A better convention if one must ape the printed-paper model would be to call the whole site not a 'page' but a 'book', and those small units within it successively 'parts', 'sections' and 'chapters'. In a printed book, a page is the arbitrary unit into which chapters are divided according to how the layout falls, and its electronic equivalent is perhaps the screen-full.)
Many of the evolving and established conventions of print are being transferred into the electronic media. Some are not: most printed scholarly publication is monochrome, nearly all electronic publishing is colour. Other habits, especially those by which the nature of the knowledge conveyed is signalled by print conventions, are being transformed in the transferring.
Print conventions and the nature of knowledge in printed form
A consistent feature of print publishing has been and is the separation of the roles taken
by the author and by the editor/publisher, whose job is to select from what is written and
might be published that smaller portion which comes to be published. That separation
removes the decision as to whether to publish, and the exact form it takes, from the
domain of the self-publishing author alone into that of the editor/publisher, who has the
benefit of being distanced from the intimacy of its creation. Publishing at an author's
expense and request, without any independence of editorial view, is called 'vanity
publishing' because it is seen to flatter the author without regard to the actual merit of
the work issued.
Generally, more -- often much more -- is or might be written than is published; typically, scholarly book and journal publishers turn down much of what is offered to them. This is a first filtering process, which reduces how much is published.
That selection process is, or is intended to be, systematic: the editor/publisher chooses the better amongst what is available. A journal editor prefers (or hould prefer) those contributions which appear novel, striking, secure and well-presented over those which are stale, unremarkable, uncertain and obscure. This is a second filtering process, which improves the quality of what is published: hence the increasing emphasis in the scholarly community that publications should be peer-reviewed, seen as a guarantee of controlled good quality.
Since this whole process of selection is uncertain and haphazard, all these generalities have many and large exceptions. The great Pitt-Rivers publications of his Cranborne Chase excavations were self-published (188798: one can imagine a commercial publisher would have slimmed down their magnificent quality). Desktop production has brought a resurgence in self-publishing: Antiquity is itself an independent self-publisher, which seeks to maintain the same high standards as would apply to a large scholarly press. Many good books in archaeology have struggled to find publishers, and others one does not know of because they never found a publisher. Each of us could name a published book -- which may come from a publisher otherwise of a 'good' reputation -- that we think incompetent or useless. This is as well, since any judgement contributing to what is or is not published may be wrong. Diversity is important alongside the narrowing of the filtering mechanisms; peer review can lead to a restricting down towards a consensus of agreed knowledge, which is not the same as that totality of knowledge which may be true and useful!
What is better, what is quality? It depends who you ask. There are many onsiderations, which differ with the individual circumstances of the editor/publisher; they run from simple commercial advantage -- without regard to whether a work of 'non-fiction' actually is even true -- to the long-standing commitment of university presses (commonly non-profit concerns) to publish good scholarship even if the costs are high and the potential income small. Insofar as scholars in a field share common values and judgements, these selections express those values and improve the quality of knowledge. Insofar as scholars do not share common values, or a field of study attracts interest of varied kinds, different kinds of printed publications exist, each of good or of poor quality by reference to the viewpoint of whichever interest or fraction judges quality: hence the Fortean Times, with its very different vision of the ancient and other world from that evident in Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society. When crop-circles were briefly the rage, books theorizing from them came not from the Smithsonian Institution Press but from Souvenir Press, as their previous profiles would lead one to expect. Each press gains its profile and personality, known to the small world of the concerned research community, and with subtle distinctions: 'It's a perfectly reasonable paper, but with those attitudes it really does belong in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology rather than Archaeological Dialogues.'
The design of printed books offers the reader important clues: a British Archaeological Report has a different look from a Thames & Hudson production. The apparatus of scholarly publishing, with its referencing, footnotes and citing of good authority, expresses values as well as having a functional purpose.
Finally, the long craft and professional traditions of continuity which direct the world of print publishing lead -- it is hoped -- to a consistency in these several matters. A book which is scrupulously correct in its factual statements, well-written, handsomely manufactured, free of mis-spellings and misprints, consistent in its treatment of the details thereby conveys authority when it comes to persuading the reader of its good judgement in less certainly defined matters. A publication ragged in one aspect makes itself weaker in other aspects.
Electronic conventions and the nature of knowledge in electronic form
In key ways , electronic publication on the Web is shaped by different fundamentals. (CD
publishing, with its high fixed costs and often created by established print publishers
such as Scientific American or Dorling Kindersley, more closely follows the model of the
print world.)
Most electronic publishing is self-publishing; an editor is only engaged if the author chooses. The equivalents of print publishers on the Web are the hosts which support Web pages; these concern themselves only with minimal requirements of legality and decency (if that), and do not attempt the role of an independent filter. Electronic publishing is cheap and accessible, whereas paper publishing remains expensive and obscure to those unfamiliar with it. In consequence, the filters that squeeze down the quantity of paper publishing apply weakly to electronics; one sees this from the hundreds, often thousands of sites which turn up if one searches for a broad archaeological subject or celebrated ancient place. The noticed benefit of electronic ease of access is that deserving but uncommercial material is thereby made publicly available; the unnoticed cost is that there is so much more for the reader to cope with and to find their way through. Last year (Chippindale 1996: 23840), I reported what a struggle follows if one seeks a certain kind of knowledge -- good archaeological knowledge -- about that most famous ancient place, Stonehenge. Despite the search engines which seek to order for surfers the unorder of the Web, it is often the case that one anticipates the information is out there on the Web somewhere (likely in many places), but one does not know just where to find it: a contour map of a named Cycladic island should be findable hrough searching for maps and under its name, and the opening hours of the National Museum in Athens should be easy; high-quality illustrations of fine Solutrean blades are surely there -- but just where? (but see Champion above, p. 1037).
Many individual web pages, in our view, are bigger than they need be and usefully should be; the author's wish to put more in is not restricted as it is in print by an editor's pressure to keep the length of the publication down.
By the same cause of unedited self-publication, selection by quality is much weaker than in print.
Print publication is concentrated in publishing houses and journals which generally attempt some self-consistency in their value-judgements. The emissions of electronic publications from innumerable self-published individual sites transfer to the reader the task of grasping what the value judgements are which guide the page, and the kind of knowledge it offers. It is hard to discern each profile when there are so many.
Finally, the conventions of printed books only weakly apply: some expert Web publishers echo the print conventions, while others devise designs instead motivated by the different character of electronic production; many inexpert and amateur web publishers do not work to well-understood conventions. The implicit signalling of print conventions is lost in the variety of Web practice. (Oddly, the most celebrated publication of the new electronic attitude is Wired -- which exists mostly asa conventional magazine, rather than a Web site! Its design only half-tries to express in print the Web conventions: themselves restrictive in design terms rather than otherwise.)
Much of what is on the Web is clearly identified by reference to criteria its audience community are accustomed to understand. An electronic journal from Oxford University Press declares itself, explicitly and implicitly, as having the standing of a paper publication from the same publisher. Some electronic-only ventures like Internet Archaeology take much care to show themselves, explicitly and implicitly, as maintaining their quality by using the procedures and showing the signs of good practice commonplace in print. These ventures extend on to the Web the structures of print publishing: separation of author from publisher, a distinct editorial role on the paper model, consistent and familiar signals as to the standing of the knowledge offers. Most of what is on the Web does not follow those conventional structures. Electronic communications by their nature offer fewer clues than does print: an email message is just a character-string, without the signals of envelope, paper, type, layout, signature which convey information alongside the self-same character-string conveyed as a conventional letter. In fact, the ideal of a coherent text, with a clear structure of beginning, middle and end reflects print technology. In principle, the electronic text is not coherent and has no obvious narrative structure and in telewriting there is only middle, between, inter (Taylor & Saarinen 1994).
Previous new media -- printed books when they took the place of hand-copied manuscripts, radio, TV -- have each discovered how much their structures are particular to the emerging technology, how much common across means of human communication. On the Net, I see some of the same issues (authority and quality control) and some of the same roles emerging under different names -- webmaster for publisher, moderator for editor. Others, like the habit of self-publishing and the opennness of tone, when they endure will mean another new medium has found another new character in how humans choose to react to yet another technology of talk.
References
Caxton, W. 1482. Chronicle of England. 2nd edition. Westminster.
Chippindale, C.R. 1996. Editorial, Antiquity 70 (268): 23744.
Pitt-Rivers, W.H.L.F. 188798. Excavations in Cranborne Chase, near Rushmore, on the borders of Dorset and Wilts. London. Privately published.
Taylor, M.C. & E. Saarinen. 1994. Imagologies. London: Routledge.