Willard McCarty <MCCARTY@vm.epas.utoronto.ca> (01/12/90)
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 3, No. 926. Thursday, 11 Jan 1990. (1) Date: Thu, 11 Jan 90 01:43 CST (47 lines) From: <ASNIDEPD@UIAMVS> Subject: Books and Reproduction (2) Date: Thu, 11 Jan 90 12:01:00 EST (17 lines) From: EIEB360@UTXVM Subject: 3.921 electronic communications (3) Date: Thu 11 Jan 90 09:21:48 (27 lines) From: dusknox@skipspc.idbsu.edu (Skip_Knox) (1) -------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 11 Jan 90 01:43 CST From: <ASNIDEPD@UIAMVS> Subject: Books and Reproduction Chet Grycz's recent contribution suggests that print culture after Gutenberg and before the electronic seminar provided us with material "clues," no longer available, to help us discern quality. In future, we will have to cast aside these crutches since "defining a canon of markers similar to those of print is apt to be difficult. There seems little chance that the homogeneity and formality that characterizes print will be readily transferred to the new medium." I wonder, though, if this interesting argument doesn't elide a distinction between two sets of textual markers, one bibliographical and the other authorial. The academic book, as aesthetic object, has already lost ground, and will probably continue to in the future. (Look closely--but not too closely-- at the paper and "type" of some recent volumes under British imprints.) But I'm not convinced the electronic medium will, by itself, deliver the death blow to book culture in its current form. Say what we will about liberating textuality or the death of the author, the institutional and authorial markings that accompany academic discourse condition our reading of it. Such signs disclose far more meaning than paper quality or design. One example: _PMLA_, despite recent changes, is aesthetically unequal to other journals, but no less authoritative for all that. The electronic medium can, and probably will, replicate a network of institutional validations already in place. It is no accident that Bitnet transmissions appear under a barrage of names, institutions, and official encodings. By contrast, undergraduates in the university where I teach often contribute BBS messages pseudonymously or collaboratively, and thus perpetuate, I suppose, a scribal tradition. It seems to me that scholarly exchange is institutionalized and self-regulated in ways that may unify our writing across the electronic-paper boundary. I don't mean on the surface, where the fissure remains visible, but at the level where difference really counts. Alvin Snider Univ. of Iowa (2) --------------------------------------------------------------28---- Date: Thu, 11 Jan 90 12:01:00 EST From: EIEB360@UTXVM Subject: 3.921 electronic communications Among the "things" being created by electronic conferences like Humanist, ENGLISH, Megabyte U, et al., it seems to me, is a body of material about the nature of work (and the material conditions of work) in the humanities as it's being conducted right now. As Chet Grycz and others have noted, there's a range of "styles" (for want of a better word right now) from very casual to quite formal, but a good deal of what's communicated has to do with the writer's sense of the discipline s/he practices, and of his/her relation to the humanities and the academy more generally. Such a meta-discussion is potentially of great value, as scholarship redefines itself under the impact of the new technology and the new media that emerge from it. John Slatin University of Texas at Austin (eieb360@utxvm) (3) --------------------------------------------------------------38---- Date: Thu 11 Jan 90 09:21:48 From: dusknox@skipspc.idbsu.edu (Skip_Knox) Chet Grycz mentions "critical mass" as a factor in the success of a forum. I have run a PC-based BBS at my university for three years now. Both on the board itself, and in each of its conferences, I have watched the phenomenon of critical mass at work. With too few members, a forum simply doesn't generate enough dialogue to make the forum immediately interesting to the new member. So the new members tend to visit infrequently and the number of messages stay low. At some point, the forum reaches critical mass, and suddenly seems to take on a life of its own. Perhaps that helps account for the liveliness of this forum over ENGLISH. By way of supporting this, I would point out that the HISTORY list is likewise quiescent most of the time. Very simply, humanism is a broader topic than history or english. It gathers in all of us, whereas the individual topics gather only a subset, in part because talk about the profession _does_ form a significant portion of the talk and such talk really is boring to outsiders. Since people in the humanities are rather behind in their acquisition of both computer technology and computer skills, it's not surprising that the specialty lists have yet to reach critical mass. In short, I'm not convinced that any great philosophical matter is at issue here. -= Skip =-