Planned Obsolescence (book)

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Planned Obsolescence
Cover of Planned Obsolescence.jpg
Original 1st edition cover
Author Kathleen Fitzpatrick
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
PublisherNYU Press
Publication date
2011
Media typePrint (Paperback)
Pages245
ISBN 978-0-814-72787-4

Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy is a book by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Director of Scholarly Communication at the Modern Language Association and Visiting Research Professor of English at New York University, published by NYU Press on November 1, 2011. [1] The book provides an overview of issues facing contemporary academic publishing, including the closing of academic presses [2] and the increased pressure on faculty to publish to achieve tenure. [3] Fitzpatrick's central argument is that academia should embrace the possibilities of digital publishing, which will in turn change the culture of academic writing and publishing.

Contents

Major Themes

The book is divided into five chapters, not including the introduction and conclusion: Peer Review, Authorship, Texts, Preservation, and The University.

Toward a New Form of Peer Review

Fitzpatrick starts the book by deconstructing one of the most important steps in the academic publication process - peer review. Drawing on a wide-ranging history of and problems in the process of academic peer review, she argues that much of the peer review process is about credentialing rather than about encouraging good ideas. [4] Digital technologies allow for a review process that is more in-line with promoting good ideas: "putting them on the digital table, welcoming diverse attitudes toward them, selecting, shaping and reconfiguring them “curatorially” in imaginative response to freely offered and serious opinions". [5] Keeping this in mind, Fitzpatrick offers a new model for peer review - 'peer-to-peer review'. She uses MediaCommons as an example of a community-filtered web platform that can function as a site to comment on a draft of scholarly work. [4] On such an online platform, authors can post a draft manuscript and invite comments from their peers or the public, or both. [6] Planned Obsolescence itself was posted on MediaCommons Press as a draft and comments were invited from the general public. [7]

Changing Conceptions of Authorship

With digital publishing, Fitzpatrick envisions a shift in the accepted conception of authorship from a solitary enterprise with a definite endpoint in the creation of the text to one of writing within a community as part of an ongoing process. This change is a result of the capabilities of word processing, which allows for the swift and simple revision of text, and the digital networking, which enables linking, reader commentary, and version control. By releasing text to be read and commented upon online authorship becomes ongoing, process-oriented work taking place in a community of interested readers.

Another aspect of community or collective authorship that Fitzpatrick explores is related to remix culture. She proposes a possible model of scholarly writing that collects and compiles work in illuminating ways. To be viable, this would require institutional acknowledgement that this kind of work is as valuable as the traditional scholarly monograph, and also the participation of the scholarly community in a gift economy with their work. She suggests that scholars use a Creative Commons license for scholarly work to facilitate the use and reuse of material for the collective benefit of the community.

Fitzpatrick acknowledges that online writing, and particularly the use of platforms that enable reader comments, will require authors to develop a different relationship to their work. They must be committed to supporting online discussions without dominating them, and they must accept that this will increase the amount of time that they must invest in their writing, both because online discussions require regular participation and because their duration is indeterminate. [8]

New Textual Forms

For Fitzpatrick, blogs, hypertext, and databases suggest directions in which digital scholarly publishing might move. She sees early attempts at hypertext writing as ultimately about the thought process of the author rather than the reader, but locates a possible future in the use of databases as platforms to create works by pulling together writing and media elements to create “new forms of networked arguments driven by the juxtaposition of digital objects and their analysis.” [9] Such texts might be multimodal, Fitzpatrick's term for texts that do not simply include media objects but instead incorporate media into their analysis or use media as analysis.

The Social Roots of Technical Problems

Fitzpatrick continues to develop her ideas of the importance of community with an analysis of digital text preservation in which she proposes that current technical issues with digital text preservation will require social solutions. This proposal is based on Fitzpatrick's reasoning that difficulties in the preservation of digital texts are not caused by any quality inherent to digital artifacts but, rather, stem from our understanding of digital products and our social practices concerning their use. It is often assumed that issues with digital preservation are due to the ephemeral quality of digital artifacts. Fitzpatrick points out that this is not entirely correct, illustrating that print text is by no means permanent and digital text is far more permanent than is commonly thought. The loss of access to digital texts or their interpretability, sometimes due to incompatibility between older media formats and newer platforms, is mistakenly perceived as the loss of digital texts themselves. [10] Establishing this fact, Fitzpatrick argues that digital preservation efforts should not focus entirely on technical solutions to technical issues, but instead should concentrate on developing socially organized preservation systems. In addition to focusing on the development of preservation practices through community organization, Fitzpatrick argues that creators of digital artifacts must take steps to ensure the compatibility of their work with preservation efforts, stating: “…planning for the persistent availability of digital resources as part of the process of their creation will provide the greatest stability of the resources themselves at the least possible cost”. [11]

In addition to community cooperation and coordination, Fitzpatrick shows that the incorporation of open standards and built-in extensibility are crucial to the development of successful digital text preservation practices. Included in these practices are three key components: the development of standards for text markup, so that digital texts can be read across a variety of platforms; the inclusion of rich metadata, so that digital texts can be located reliably; and the preservation of access to digital texts themselves. To support her argument for social solutions, Fitzpatrick examines several successful projects concerned with the development of text markup, metadata, and access standards and practices (including TEI, DOI, and LOCKSS) and shows that each is based in the creation of a community organization that values openness and extensibility.

Rethinking and Repurposing for Sustainable Scholarly Publishing

At the heart of scholarly text production, preservation, and dissemination lies the university. In a time of unfavorable economic conditions, Fitzpatrick suggests that the university may continue to fulfill its role in these endeavors only by rethinking its mission and repurposing its operational units. While the university press may have originally functioned to disseminate the work of an institution's faculty to the larger community, in recent years, the university press has become a market-driven entity that is separate from the academic core of the university. [12] Though university presses typically do not turn a profit and must depend on university subsidies to operate, they are often expected to be financially self-sustaining and, driven by this expectation, function to fulfill a mission much different from that of the university. Fitzpatrick attributes the recent trend of shuttering university presses to shrinking university budgets and the unsustainable business models in which many presses are forced to operate.

For Fitzpatrick, the key to establishing financially viable models for university presses and modes of scholarly publishing more generally is the reconceptualization of the university's mission. Universities must recognize that their mission is, in addition to the production of knowledge, the communication of knowledge. Fitzpatrick conceptualizes scholarship as an ongoing conversation between scholars that can only continue if participants have the means to contribute to it. Publishing and disseminating information via the university press is one possible mode of communication. This reconceptualization of the university's mission is part and parcel to the restructuring of its press's functioning. If the university is reimagined as a center of communication, rather than principally as a credential-bestowing organization, its central mission becomes the production and dissemination of scholarly work. In this rethinking, the press has a future as the knowledge-disseminating organ of the university. For this to happen, the press must be integrated within the university and be provided sufficient funding so that its mission is not financially based but, rather, aligns with that of the university.

Following this restructuring, Fitzpatrick suggests that the mission of the university may be further strengthened by creating new partnerships and modes of operation between the university library, the IT department, and the university press. As argued throughout the book, scholarly publishing in its current as well as future forms stands to benefit from various forms of cooperation and each of these units may contribute something unique to enhance the production of scholarly work. These new interactions may lead to roles for the library, the press, and IT as service units that provide guidance during and add value to the scholarly production process.

Lastly, Fitzpatrick suggests that these shifting locations and roles of the university press may remove the financial concerns previously restricting their abilities to experiment with new modes of publishing, perhaps allowing presses to explore alternative, more sustainable and open publishing models, including open access publishing.

Peer-review process

Two years before publication Planned Obsolescence was openly peer-reviewed online at MediaCommons Press. [13] The manuscript is still available for open discussion on the website. Putting up a draft manuscript of the book up for open public review and debate allowed Fitzpatrick to demonstrate one of the key points of the book - that scholars have a lot to gain from openly sharing their work on digital platforms, and that open debates should become a part of the publishing process itself. [6]

Reception

Planned Obsolescence has been reviewed or discussed in a number of publications by a range of writers.

Critics have written positively on Fitzpatrick's treatment of authorship. Houman Barekat in the Los Angeles Review of Books described Fitzpatrick's reluctance to understand authorship as an effect of technologies and processes of production as "a sobering antidote to the vulgar technological determinism that characterizes so much of the hype around the digital revolution." [14] Alex Halavais notes that Fitzpatrick "masterfully" threads history, questions, and practical implications of technologies for writers, while neither ignoring nor relying too heavily on the theoretical concept of "the death of the author". [4]

Fitzpatrick's exploration of academic peer review has received less favorable criticism. In particular, her critique of the traditional mores of academic publication, whereby texts are first reviewed by colleagues and only published if they meet certain criteria, lacks clear "requirements for a proposed alternative system". [4] Fitzpatrick's outline of post-publication peer review, the suggested alternative to pre-publication peer review, has been met with mixed appraisal: One reviewer deemed her proposal "riddled with flaws", [14] while another reviewer commended the public scholarship potential of such an open method. [5]

Planned Obsolescence has also been listed as required reading for courses on the digital humanities, new media, and/or interactive technology and pedagogy in institutions such as the University of Maryland, [15] Emory University, [16] the CUNY Graduate Center, [17] [18] and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. [19]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Academic publishing</span> Subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship

Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or theses. The part of academic written output that is not formally published but merely printed up or posted on the Internet is often called "grey literature". Most scientific and scholarly journals, and many academic and scholarly books, though not all, are based on some form of peer review or editorial refereeing to qualify texts for publication. Peer review quality and selectivity standards vary greatly from journal to journal, publisher to publisher, and field to field.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open access</span> Research publications distributed freely online

Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. Under some models of open access publishing, barriers to copying or reuse are also reduced or removed by applying an open license for copyright.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digital obsolescence</span>

Digital obsolescence is the risk of data loss because of inabilities to access digital assets, due to the hardware or software required for information retrieval being repeatedly replaced by newer devices and systems, resulting in increasingly incompatible formats. While the threat of an eventual "digital dark age" was initially met with little concern until the 1990s, modern digital preservation efforts in the information and archival fields have implemented protocols and strategies such as data migration and technical audits, while the salvage and emulation of antiquated hardware and software address digital obsolescence to limit the potential damage to long-term information access.

An institutional repository is an archive for collecting, preserving, and disseminating digital copies of the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution. Academics also utilize their IRs for archiving published works to increase their visibility and collaboration with other academics However, most of these outputs produced by universities are not effectively accessed and shared by researchers and other stakeholders As a result Academics should be involved in the implementation and development of an IR project so that they can learn the benefits and purpose of building an IR.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digital humanities</span> Area of scholarly activity

Digital humanities (DH) is an area of scholarly activity at the intersection of computing or digital technologies and the disciplines of the humanities. It includes the systematic use of digital resources in the humanities, as well as the analysis of their application. DH can be defined as new ways of doing scholarship that involve collaborative, transdisciplinary, and computationally engaged research, teaching, and publishing. It brings digital tools and methods to the study of the humanities with the recognition that the printed word is no longer the main medium for knowledge production and distribution.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Project MUSE</span> Online database of journals and ebooks

Project MUSE, a non-profit collaboration between libraries and publishers, is an online database of peer-reviewed academic journals and electronic books. Project MUSE contains digital humanities and social science content from over 250 university presses and scholarly societies around the world. It is an aggregator of digital versions of academic journals, all of which are free of digital rights management (DRM). It operates as a third-party acquisition service like EBSCO, JSTOR, OverDrive, and ProQuest.

Scholarly communication involves the creation, publication, dissemination and discovery of academic research, primarily in peer-reviewed journals and books. It is “the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use." This primarily involves the publication of peer-reviewed academic journals, books and conference papers.

DPubS, developed by Cornell University Library and Penn State University Libraries, is a free open access publication management software. DPubS arose out of Project Euclid, an electronic publishing platform for journals in mathematics and statistics. DPubS is free software released under Educational Community License.

MDPI is a publisher of open access scientific journals. Founded by Shu-Kun Lin as a chemical sample archive, it now publishes over 390 peer-reviewed, open access journals. MDPI is among the largest publishers in the world in terms of journal article output, and is the largest publisher of open access articles.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">University press</span> Publisher associated with a university

A university press is an academic publishing house specializing in monographs and scholarly journals. Most are nonprofit organizations and an integral component of a large research university. They publish work that has been reviewed by scholars in the field. They produce mainly academic works but also often have trade books for a lay audience. These trade books also get peer reviewed.

Digital curation is the selection, preservation, maintenance, collection, and archiving of digital assets. Digital curation establishes, maintains, and adds value to repositories of digital data for present and future use. This is often accomplished by archivists, librarians, scientists, historians, and scholars. Enterprises are starting to use digital curation to improve the quality of information and data within their operational and strategic processes. Successful digital curation will mitigate digital obsolescence, keeping the information accessible to users indefinitely. Digital curation includes digital asset management, data curation, digital preservation, and electronic records management.

MediaCommons is an in-development all-electronic scholarly publishing network in media studies, being created in partnership with the Institute for the Future of the Book and with the support of New York University and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick is an American scholar of digital humanities and media studies. She is the Director of Digital Humanities and Professor of English at Michigan State University.

Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular was a peer-reviewed online academic journal published by the USC School of Cinematic Arts. It was established in March 2005 and covers the digital humanities, publishing work that "cannot exist in print". Vectors is recognized as an experimental precursor to the digital humanities, producing and publishing a range of highly interactive works of multimedia scholarship. Comparing Vectors with more traditional digital humanities publications, Patrick Svensson notes that, "Vectors, on the other hand, is clearly invested in the digital as an expressive medium in an experimental and creative way". The journal's last issue was published in 2013.

The Center for Digital Research and Scholarship (CDRS) at Columbia University was a unit of the University Libraries that partnered with researchers and scholars at Columbia to share their research broadly with the world. Using innovative new media and digital technologies, CDRS sought to empower the Columbia research community with online tools and services to enable them to make the most of scholarly communication, collaboration, data sharing, and preservation. CDRS was part of Columbia University Libraries/Information Services (CUL/IS).

Scholarly peer review or academic peer review is the process of having a draft version of a researcher's methods and findings reviewed by experts in the same field. Peer review is widely used for helping the academic publisher decide whether the work should be accepted, considered acceptable with revisions, or rejected for official publication in an academic journal, a monograph or in the proceedings of an academic conference. If the identities of authors are not revealed to each other, the procedure is called dual-anonymous peer review.

Amy Brand is an American academic. Brand is the current Director and Publisher of the MIT Press, a position she assumed in July 2015. Previously, Brand served as the assistant provost of faculty appointments and information at Harvard University, and as a vice president at Digital Science.

ANU Press is new university press (NUP) that publishes open-access books, textbooks and journals. It was established in 2004 to explore and enable new modes of scholarly publishing. In 2014, ANU E Press changed its name to ANU Press to reflect the changes the publication industry had seen since its foundation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Diamond open access</span>

Diamond open access refers to academic texts published/distributed/preserved with no fees to either reader or author. Alternative labels include platinum open access, non-commercial open access, cooperative open access or, more recently, open access commons. While these terms were first coined in the 2000s and the 2010s, they have been retroactively applied to a variety of structures and forms of publishing, from subsidized university publishers to volunteer-run cooperatives that existed in prior decades.

Kenneth Francis Thibodeau is an American specialist in electronic records management who worked for many years at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). He was responsible for development of the pioneering DoD 5015.03 standard for electronic records management and for creation of NARA's Electronic Records Archives System (ERA).

References

  1. ↑ Fitzpatrick, Kathleen (2011), Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology and the Future of the Academy (1st ed.), New York, NY: NYU Press, p. 245, ISBN   978-0-814-72787-4
  2. ↑ Howard, Jennifer (2012-05-25). "Planned Shutdown of U. of Missouri Press Underscores Shift in Traditional Publishing". Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved 2014-03-17.
  3. ↑ MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion (2007). "Report of the MLA Task Force on Evaluating" (PDF). Profession: 9–70.
  4. 1 2 3 4 Halavais, Alex (12 April 2012). "Review: Planned Obsolescence". A Thaumaturgical Compendium. Retrieved 16 March 2014.
  5. 1 2 Baldwin, Neil. "Kathleen Fitzpatrick's Essential New Book – Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy. The CRC December 2011 Spotlight Review – by Neil Baldwin; and a Letter in Response from Gary Hall About a Revolutionary Open-Access e-Book Project". Montclair State University. Retrieved 16 March 2014.
  6. 1 2 Tosi, Alessandra (17 November 2011). "Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy". Times Higher Education. Retrieved 16 March 2014.
  7. ↑ Fitzpatrick, Kathleen (15 September 2009). "How to Read this Text - Planned Obsolescence" . Retrieved 16 March 2014.
  8. ↑ Fitzpatrick, Kathleen (2011). "Authorship". Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy. New York: NYU Press.
  9. ↑ Fitzpatrick, Kathleen (2011). Planned Obsolescence. New York: NYU Press. p. 103.
  10. ↑ Fitzpatrick, Kathleen (2011). "Preservation". Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy. New York: NYU Press.
  11. ↑ Fitzpatrick, Kathleen (2011). Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy. New York: NYU Press. p. 125.
  12. ↑ Fitzpatrick, Kathleen (2011). Planned obsolescence: Publishing, technology, and the future of the academy. New York: NYU Press. pp. 157–166. ISBN   978-0-8147-2896-3.
  13. ↑ Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. "Planned Obsolescence". Kathleen Fitzpatrick. Retrieved 16 March 2014.
  14. 1 2 Barekat, Houman (2 June 2012). "The Read-Write Generation" . Retrieved 19 March 2014.
  15. ↑ "Introduction to Digital Humanities" . Retrieved 2 April 2014.
  16. ↑ "Intro to Digital Scholarship and Media Studies" . Retrieved 2 April 2014.
  17. ↑ "Fall 2012 Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Core 1" . Retrieved 2 April 2014.
  18. ↑ "Digital Praxis Seminar" . Retrieved 2 April 2014.
  19. ↑ "The Future of Print" . Retrieved 2 April 2014.
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