Essay #2: The Advantage of Online Publishing

I propose the department take advantage of and teach the pros (and cons) of online publishing. With digital culture there is an awareness and availability to criticize and create content in new forms unavailable in traditional formats of publishing literature. Traditional publishing happens through submitting a scholarly article to a print journal which takes months, maybe even years to get to publication. There is reviewing, maybe getting accepted, then waiting for publication, and all of this to only have a few libraries hold the journal you have submitted to. Online publishing takes the waiting out of the process and allows for anyone to publish anything, and there are ways to keep it scholarly and academic.

Outlets online have continued traditional scholarly outlets of academic journals, but they are faster because submission is all electronic. It cuts costs. There is a wider availability. Using curation tools such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, an author can announce their intent to research and publish on a topic. Then they use crowdsourcing and social proofing to gather information from friends, peers, enthusiasts, and scholars to contribute to their research. Then as the author publishes their work and continue to curate their researched content, they get more feedback or information on their topic by comments or reviews or submissions from others interested in the field. Even if someone was publishing something nonacademic, personal blogs or websites can claim authority in a field by amount of views, responses, gatekeepers, and/or following.

Digital culture makes publishing an accessible to anyone, which leaves a lot of room for amateur or unedited publications. In these cases people must be aware of the sources they get their information from as well as where they intend to publish. Websites with .gov or .edu are usually more reliable than .com sites. The more times an item or article has been reviewed, the more chances you have of reading accurate reviews of a piece. Goodreads and Amazon for example has rating systems for book reviews that can help narrow down the academic reviews from the more emotional-based ones. In the end, there are ways to find scholarly and authoritative sources of information from the freelance works.

With online publishing, students can be successful quickly. Fellow students Paul and Greg have proven that social proofing gets their works recognized and/or published (see here and here for their successes in social proof and digital publication, respectively). In a world with digital opportunities to get ideas curated and published, the humanities department should be taking advantage of these opportunities to promote their own work as well as teach students how to enter the digital world with their own writing.

Essay #1: Collaboration and Community of Moby Dick and Digital Culture

When we read literature, it is an individual action. It is between the reader and the text. Sure there are ways to discuss a piece of literature such as publishing an anthology or writing a research paper, but these avenues take time. Digital culture makes it bigger. With literature, we are able to see the world through one book’s perspective and as a critically thinking community, interpret the book’s ideas and either agree or disagree with them. In digital culture we do the same, but now on a massive scale where people from all different backgrounds come together to collaboration and give feedback on literature. It turns an independent reading to a global one.

In the introduction of Moby Dick it reveals that “Melville himself certainly believed that all men are united by the bond of reciprocal dependence, by a community of function and responsibility” (xv). The book itself is an example of this “community of function.” We have discussed in class how the book functions under different genres: epic, fiction, prose, allegory, play. The compilation of all these genres makes it impossible to identify it as one genre. In digital culture, people are represented by the different social media sites they use. As Aleesha demonstrates in her research, Pinterest is a way for pinners to repin a variety of pictures, outfits, recipes, etc. Identifying a person by one pin will not be a full representation of who that person is or their pin board. It would be like identifying Ishmael as only a sailor and ignoring his obvious knowledge of cetology, his background in teaching, and the fact that he is the narrator.

As a community, men “united by the bond of reciprocal dependence” create subcultures in which members mutually depend on one another to not only consume content, but to create and curate it as well. In Lizy’s research on fandom collaboration, crowdsourcing materials such as memes or articles on a particular show or book creates a wider fan base in which content can be remixed and shared to an even larger crowd. Information is shared and spread through curation tools such as Tumblr or Facebook or Twitter. Captain Ahab gathered his crew together, all of them dependent upon finding Moby Dick to complete their whaling mission, and together they sailed in search for the great white whale. Ahab used "every means at his disposal to find and kill the white whale" (30), including sea charts, books, and logs to determine where to find Moby Dick. He was crowdsourcing information when he spoke to fellow captains on the Rachel for example to get spotting information. It was a community effort for one common goal. The subcultures within digital culture come together as a community to read, review, comment, and remix content found in literature. Reading is no longer independent, or at least it doesn't have to be.