Saturday, January 26, 2008

THAT podcast

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Blogging vs. Peer-Review

An interesting article in today's Chronicle asks details Noah Wardrip-Fruin's attempts to couple the peer review process with comments from a blog where he will be posting excerpts of the book. His editor at MIT is (probably wisely) not allowing the book to go without a typical peer review process, but that this experiment is taking place at all suggests how far we've come in digital scholarship.

Friday, January 04, 2008

Making an edited collection

Dustin Wax, an anthropologist, has written a detailed series of posts about all the steps involved in publishing an edited collection. Though the topic of the book isn't likely to be of interest to many literary types (and you won't realize the significance of some of the names he mentions), it's a very good blow-by-blow account of his experience. He calls it a "non-experts guide." It's in three parts: 1) getting the contract; 1a) writing the prospectus; and 2) the road to publication.

Wednesday, January 02, 2008

More reading about reading

Welcome to 2008.

To pick up where this blog left off, I recommend Caleb Crain's New Yorker article on the "Twilight of the Books." One of the many things that recommends Crain's articles is that he will post background information and further research on his blog. In this case, he has a whole series of posts that discuss recent research on the decline of literacy, the effect of television, the effect of Internet use, and reading online. Crain is even-handed, and there's not a lot of chest-beating here. As a result, you cannot not only get a measured index to a lot of research, but you can also get a kind of sketch of the kind of work that goes into a New Yorker essay like Crain's. (There are other things that recommend Caleb Crain as well, including the fact that he's a nineteenth-century Americanist.)

When you are done reading about reading, you can read (as I am) Crain's novella "Sweet Grafton" in the latest issue of n+1.