Carleton Palmer

December 06, 2006

NY, USA

Claiming a certain antiquity (please read vintage if you’re generous), I recollect that my first paperback book cost me twenty-five cents. A paperback now costs twenty-five dollars. I know that the text of the entire canon of Western literature will fit on one CD with space left over, because ten years ago I correlated the contents of the Great Books, Bloom’s Canon, Harvard Classics and others, located text versions in places online like Gutenberg, and burned them to a CD for my convenience as a reference tool. A CD costs about twenty-five cents. It makes one think.

This is a good opportunity to rethink publication in the context of a collegial art organization whose purpose is scholarship. Money is not an issue, because there isn’t any, so we can quickly move on to questions concerning what might be the best forms within the available technology to achieve the objectives of the creation and dissemination of knowledge. Magazines, scholarly and popular, monographs, books, reference works and other print forms were transported directly into online text as soon as the technology made it possible. This was easily accomplished, because digital typesetting had long preceded the Internet, and everything in words and images was already digitized before it met the photo-lithographer’s plate. A next step was to make the material searchable, and then interactive, as with maps, and then to move on to multi-media.

The Wikipedia concept redefined, democratized, and possibly eliminated encyclopedic expertise; sacrificing authority for immediacy by opening the work’s development to every reader-editor-participant. It is an unparalleled metaphor for the constructive role of the reader, and such a good idea that a version of the Wiki software drives the Encyclopedia of Living Traditions in Art. To balance populism with scholarship, however, the original idea for a scholarly journal, The Journal of Living Traditions in Art, and a more studio or shop oriented magazine, The Artist Researcher, has been locked into a Table-of-Contents print model which may be unnecessarily restrictive.

If all articles are retrievable from online databases by key word or phrase, then packaging becomes irrelevant. One piece of information that customarily identifies a print package that would not necessarily pursue a free-floating electronic article is its date of first publication. Every piece of work should therefore be dated individually, and properly identified as to author(s), editor(s) and origin. Another issue is copyright. The Internet does not respect national boundaries, and copyright laws are national. In the United States one is assumed to have a copyright to one’s work by common law upon its publication, and if that publication is a book or journal a person has a physical, dated document to take to court to establish precedence. Considering that anything that is digitized seems to be instantly pilfered (just as I pilfered the cream of Western literature), there doesn’t seem to be a satisfactory answer to that question.

As to ownership of intellectual property from the point of view of this collegial organization: the authors retain all rights with a cheer when a colleague publishes another book or article in print media. It is easier to read paper, libraries are not going to disappear, and some thousands of years of systematically organizing knowledge within bindings is a tradition we celebrate, applaud, love and cherish.

It is easier to read paper. I read the canon and much more on screens, and although it requires adjustment it is possible to do so. Part of the craft of print media designers, bookmakers, involves balancing a beautiful and readably weighted typeface of appropriate size in a composition on a suitable finished and contrasting paper. You do not have their help when reading the average piece of text online. Screens are transmitted light events of far greater contrast than the reflected event of reading words on a page, so one must learn to adjust text, size, sharpness, background color and contrast for readability. The computer screen is held at a different distance from that at which you hold a book. I have different eyeglasses designed for each activity (and different glasses for watching television and for driving as well, but I admit to some small peculiarity). The irony of returning to the scroll after millennia between bindings is rich.

There are e-book programs that are some help, but an implication for our publications is that it is improbable that readers will stare at the computer screen for enough time to devour a dozen articles delivered in a magazine-like package, and so smaller groupings would be preferable. Rather than a Journal with a dozen research studies delivered quarterly, and a separate newsletter and studio journal, perhaps works should be delivered intermixed and with whatever irregular frequency is appropriate, and stored in no particular order. Since everything is retrievable by keyword that is archived in the wiki encyclopedia, and in a variety of ways through software and site search engines, the reader can at any time compose a unique topical collection appropriate to individual purposes which is as changeable as those purposes themselves.

This newsletter/Journal/Magazine/email is a first step toward that objective, and your opinion would be welcome since this article has been placed on the ISALTA weblog.

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