Technological revolutions are hard to live through (or they wouldn't deserve their name). Grasping the totality of change they bring -- the balance of pain and gain -- is hard too, except in long retrospect. An historian of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries might look back and grasp, in our case (and with apologies for the anachronism), “Mechanical Publishing and the Classics Profession.” But Electronic Publishing, as one component of the overall computer revolution, has come in the adult lifetime of most people here, and its import is still emerging. Should we invoke Cornford's principle of Unripe Time and declare the topic premature, for 2004? When issues are complex, temporizing looks attractive. Particularly so when inertia (whether of individuals or institutions) is reinforced by vested interests, unwilling to concede the need for change and its disturbing corollaries. Once open discussion begins here, vested interests -- conventional academic publishers and the rest -- will perhaps have their say. And if so, good: we do want to know how imaginatively they are facing the changing environment they share with us.
Still, I have the privilege of being up first, and must give my own response. I am (in your terms) a Full Professor, of 11 years standing. I use computer hardware and software with scant understanding of how, below screen level, they work. I find them, even so, an almost unqualified boon, both on my own desk-top and more widely -- and whichever mode (Transmit or Receive) I'm in. I therefore strive to enlarge my awareness of what's going on in the electronic media, and my “comfort zone” in using it.
With that much autobiography as preface (or disclaimer), what our speakers have said -- and what I've been thinking on this issue, since my invitation to come here -- prompts me to the following (inevitably summary) observations. There are eight of them in all:
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Though “we are who we are” (Classicists), I can't see any significant facet of this issue which is genuinely peculiar to ourselves. A decade or so ago it might have been different, when (e.g.) the gremlins in Greek fonts and other non-standard characters were more troublesome. But nowadays misgivings about electronic publication -- on that sort of score -- have lost their force, surely. Instead, in the distinction that Peter Suber used, Classics is simply one SSH field amongst many -- albeit one which, as he notes, rates low in “public demand.”
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Another way in which “the Classics Profession” is no different from many others -- including others outside academic life -- is that it's a gerontocracy. And that's bad, because where the present crisis bites most sharply is in the middle and lower reaches of the profession, the HTP (Hiring, Tenure and Promotion) zones. We the gerontocrats simply must ensure that Jeff Rydberg-Cox and others like him do not suffer, in their professional and working environment, in ways we ourselves never had to.
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How we do this obviously entails support for (and involvement in) collective enterprises and reforms, of the kinds our speakers have described; but as context for it all there is our own personal mind-set. People like me have enjoyed the fetishistic pleasure of (literally) holding books, expensively produced in Princeton or Oxford or wherever, which bear our names. If that is a vanishing luxury, we must not loftily declare that nothing else will do. Rather, learn to relish web-based monographs (or other projects) no less. Or there's the ongoing, reciprocal exchange we have all taken for granted: sending friends and colleagues offprints of a latest article. I recently “published” a piece in an on-line journal (Electronic Antiquity), and it seemed wrong to be unable to do this. Inviting people, instead, to consult a website sounded meanspirited (and presumptuous). Nevertheless, if one can set aside such sentimental -- and ultimately trivial -- attachments to the past (or the status quo), who can rationally disparage a properly-refereed piece in an electronic medium?
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Just as the old should be alive to the plight of the young (2 above), so other inequalities of distribution deserve recognition. Those able to stroll into the Widener or the Bodleian and know that they will find there every book and periodical under the sun need to remember that most of us can't. Libraries which didn't buy the book (or subscribe to the journal) in the first place, or have not replaced it if lost or defaced. Libraries which lend (long), or mis-shelve. Cuts in budgets; cuts in opening hours. Publishers -- even university presses -- who take books out of print. All such frustrations remind us to Stay Real and compare like with like. There is no point in juxtaposing an idealized past-and-present with an apocalyptic, dystopian nightmare of the emerging future (where uncontrolled domains proliferate, URLs die out, etc., etc.).
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Beyond what we individually feel, our institutions do need to mend their ways. Universities, most obviously, must pick up speed in abandoning the notion that the traditional monograph is (as Ron Musto put it) the only acceptable “coin of the realm;” or more generally, that effort put into web-based scholarship counts by definition for less than hard-copy publications. It cannot be right that, in the Suda-On-Line project, senior contributors like me work happily away, while colleagues in the HTP zone know (or fear) that their employers won't see this as time well-spent. If universities have genuine worries about electronic media, let us hear them, so that they can be addressed. Call me biased, but the Stoa Consortium is surely something that could (and should) be replicated elsewhere; an enterprise robust on every level -- intellectual, technical and (crucially) financial.
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The Stoa illustrates one creative way forward: an enterprise funded by a mix of philanthropic bodies and universities, and housed in one of the latter. Gardiner and Musto, with their (admirable) ACLS E-Book project, describe an alternative: the Mellon Foundation (in their instance) puts up pump-priming cash, to induce learned societies and (especially) university presses to venture into something innovatory. As a visitor here I don't feel well-placed to judge the relative merits of these procedures, let alone other possibilities. But besides what we have heard this evening, many of you will be familiar with the analysis that has been devoted to such issues in recent editions of D-Lib and elsewhere. And if classicists are not yet paying much attention to this, it's high time they were -- because, as Cathy Davidson, a vice-provost at Duke, warned in the Chronicle last October, one must progress beyond interminable analysis of the problem and decide what to do about it.
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Davidson declared herself motivated “to find ways to save the kind of scholarship that academics are trained to write, and that is the basis of teaching and research at colleges and universities.” An aim we would all agree on, presumably. She herself proffered some ideas for redistributing the economic burdens of academic publishing within, overall, the traditional university-press model. But any novelty there pales into insignificance by the side of Peter Suber's manifesto for the open-access movement: journal articles in “Phase 1” and monographs in a potential “Phase 2.” Very persuasive, to my mind. But far more controversial (from economic, legal and political standpoints) than something like the E-Book project, clearly. Also, an approach which blurs the facile distinction I have so far been using here, between institutions and individuals. Suber does want change on the collective level, as he has explained (open-access archiving in every university), for example; but his scenario also requires us to change.
Take the vexed question of copyright. In one's heart of hearts one may like the idea of unfettered access to other people's material but not, or not so much, its obverse: that they have comparable access to one's own. And since such doublethink is no basis for reputable academic life and planning, something else that is does have to be found. Suber outlines several possibilities. One he did not explicitly mention -- but others have, such as Geneva Henry of Rice University, in last October's D-Lib -- is Creative Commons Licensing of on-line material. This concept, devised by a group of legal scholars, has been in existence since 2001. Its range of eleven (machine-readable) variants allow both individual authors and consortia who don't want to go as far as to place their work, unlicensed, in the public domain to stipulate the limits on its use: whether attribution is required, whether commercial purposes are permissible, and on what terms the work may be modified. (One of these licences has recently been installed in The Suda On-Line project.)
- What I have had time to say in these miserly ten minutes will have disappointed anyone who came here expecting at least one of the respondents to voice a Luddite point of view. (I take the liberty, in saying this, of anticipating the general tenor of Ross Scaife's comments; but it's a liberty without a risk, as anyone here who knows him will know.) For my own part, anyway, I have endeavoured to appreciate the particular urgency surrounding this issue here on your side of the Atlantic. Here, both appreciation of the crisis and possible solutions to it are furthest advanced. And here too, the structure of academic careers -- something that you perhaps think of as an absolute, whereas in truth it's merely a relative, however well-entrenched -- exacerbates the problem. Tenure comes at a stage when it has been customary to demand, of the candidates, publication in extenso. Well, I say: let the demand continue (because it is a perfectly reasonable one); and let all classicists go on aspiring to broadcast their views and share their ideas (because a great set-piece conference like this proclaims what we all know anyway: things worth saying about the ancient world are never exhausted). Both as individual scholars and as a profession we have a Message; what we (and others) are struggling to get right, in the early 21st century, is the appropriate Medium -- or Media -- for it.
If there is anyone here, younger than me, who protests that s/he wants the same opportunities I had (to produce glossy books with top university presses), I recommend a look at my most recent three university-press books. Two of them are out of print (from 1986 and 1990). The third (from 2000) is on sale at a price that makes me squirm with embarrassment. That can't be the way forward, can it? Rather, whether it is books, or articles, or indeed any of the newer-fangled formats that the Web itself has made possible, let us for heavens' sake bring to bear the intellectual rigor upon which we classicists love to pride ourselves and see electronic publishing for the exciting, liberating opportunity it is.
David Whitehead
Professor of Ancient History, Queen's University, Belfast
Managing Editor of The Suda On-Line
d.whitehead@qub.ac.uk
Return to Electronic Publication and the Classics Profession
May 2004