Issues of Validity and Technology: Publishing Scholarship on the Web
Susan Kattwinkel
Paper presented at ATHE conference 2001 in Chicago
Introduction - theatre is behind, as usual
Why the web is in fact an excellent site for scholarship
by both feminist and performance scholars.
Issues of difficulty:
Introduction - theatre is behind, as usual, although women in general are not.
The internet is, if not the future, than at least a significant part
of the future of academic publishing. And although theatrical scholarship is
running behind in this area, women in general most assuredly are not. The briefest
of internet searches will turn up thousands of female-oriented websites, many
of high quality and covering topics from women's health issues and societal
concerns to deep feminist theory and homage pages to favorite feminist activists,
performers and authors. Women have embraced the new technology and are working
not only to make their own spaces within it, but to help define cyberspace as
a whole while it is still in its developmental stage.
According to a Reuters news report, women make up 52% of the internet surfers
in the U.S. and Canada, the same percentage as that in the overall population,
and the percentage in Asia is quickly catching up: "Women are much more
efficient in their Web usage, they spend less time online as they generally
know what they're looking for and leave once they achieve their goal."
(Reuters) (www.msnbc.com/news/596540.asp)
The same is not yet true for theatrical scholarship. Most of the attempts to
get theatrical scholarship online has taken the form of putting journals online
in more or less their original form, although there have been some fascinating
projects like Frank Mohler's Scenic Spectacle (www1.appstate.edu/orgs/spectacle/)
site and the York cycle simulator (www.uwec.edu/jerzdg/psim/).
Why the web is in fact an excellent site for scholarship
by both feminist and performance scholars.
Online publishing is particularly relevant for feminist and performance research
and scholarship because of the very nature of web publishing. The available
formats and structures support the interdisciplinary and fluid impulses of both
feminist and performance scholarship. Hypertext, and the more advanced markup
languages related to it, allow readers to receive information in the manner
that suits them best, and intertextually.
Susan Hockey, in her online article "Electronic Texts:
The Promise and the Reality" (in American Council of Learned Societies
Newsletter, Volume 4, Number 4 (February 1997) www.acls.org/n44hock.htm)
notes: "For publication in electronic form, it is no longer necessary to
write in a single linear sequence, as is the case for publication in print form.
Hyper-text permits links between associated, yet randomly distributed, items
of information (Note 9). It has become very popular in the humanities largely
because it can model the way scholars follow a thread from one source document
to another." She also describes the Model Editions Partnership (MEP), which
is developing a set of models for electronic historical editions which, besides
addressing questions of access to information and scholarship (a concern important
to many feminists, as I will discuss in a moment)
and the problem of maintaining current standards of scholarly editorial excellence,
also exploits the technology's characteristic of providing readers with an organizational
reading power not afforded by traditional publishing methods: "Instead
of being limited to a single organizing principle like chronology, an edition
can allow readers to dynamically organize documents into subsets relating to
their own interests. Annotation can be linked to many documents and indexes
prepared cumulatively."
This structure, or lack thereof, echoes that of feminist theatre history, which
began as inherently interdisciplinary - using methodologies and theories from
theatre, women's studies, cultural studies, performance studies, and traditional
feminist theory.
Another benefit of internet scholarship is its inherent multimedial form. Online
scholarship can include sound, images, animations and video, as well as live
chat spaces and bulletin boards for immediate feedback available to everyone
who accesses the original material. Rather than the permanent nature implied
by the publication in hard form of scholarship, theory on the net retains its
fluidity, inviting revision and rebuttal. Publication on the net is not irrevocable,
but can be updated and responded to. Subsequent users may view not only the
original work, but the responses of other readers. And the internet offers a
semblance of live engagement, and more and more frequently actual live interaction,
that echoes the subject of performance scholarship more closely than traditional
publication methods.
One of the bases of feminist scholarship is its questioning of assumptions and
traditional power structures. This tendency is echoed on the web not only in
the possibility for comment and amendment, but by the very nature of the web,
which is a new form of media, creating its own structures and rules, being formed
by no central power structure, but by anyone with access. Women have been instrumental
in creating the way the web works and talks to itself. Its intertextuality and
fluidity are inherently feminine, especially if one believes the theory that
women naturally make multiple connections better than men, and can take in multimedia
more efficiently.
Issues of difficulty:
Of course, these characteristics that make the net a valuable scholastic tool
also pose difficulties for the both the original producer and the reader of
those materials. Some of these problems are relatively minor or solvable: The
ability to change a publication means that a record of progressive thought can
be lost or obscured; The facility to respond to a work online means continuous
editing by the site owner to remove inappropriate and unsubstantiated responses.
Other difficulties are internet-wide and are being tackled by internet advocates
of all disciplines. One of the most basic problems is the issue of accessibility.
Women, often linked socially to underprivileged groups like the poor and disabled,
are concerned with design on the web that leaves people out of the communication
loop. People working on older computers ("Designs
that don't Work: Tangles in the World Wide Web" - Tanis Doe www.womenspace.ca/magazine/51ws/vol51a.html),
a group that includes many women, often must surf the web from text-only environments.
That prevents them from seeing graphics and movies and hearing many sound files,
as well as from responding on online bulletin boards or filling out online forms.
Web designers conscious of these problems must walk a fine line between making
their material as accessible as possible and using all of the netís capabilities.
Another internet problem facing more women than men is harassment.
Just as in the physical world, women face hostility and violence in greater
numbers than men. It is much easier for someone to stumble across a feminist
website than a feminist academic journal and the convenience and perceived anonymity
of the net means that people will send hate email very quickly when in the physical
world they wouldnít bother sending a letter or making a phone call. Organizations
such as Women Halting Online Abuse (www.haltabuse.org)
and www.hatewatch.org
use publication of such hatemail and pressure on service providers to keep such
behavior in check, but women in particular online must be careful
("Safety Issues on the Net" - Robyn Kalda - www.womenspace.ca/magazine/51ws/vol51b.html)
about providing any physical world information about themselves.
Sustainability is
also a concern. The same fluidity that is a boon to theorists is also dangerous,
as work can be erased, and may disappear with the capriciousness of network
providers. Work may not be irrevocable, but it may not be available either.
Anyone who has tried to maintain a list of weblinks or even surfed for any period
of time knows how frustrating it is when a site that you were excited about
is nowhere to be found. Site owners change service providers (a common problem
in academia where a job change means a new server), neglect to update material,
or don't keep up with their own broken links. Small institutions and service
providers may not be willing to continue housing a project once it starts to
take up a great deal of room. Just like in traditional publishing, where authors
are given word limits, web publishers are faced with byte limits, which can
easily be exceeded when one includes many graphics or movies on their site.
Large projects with many creators have less of a problem in this area because
an institution that agrees to house a site will often have its own computer
programmers and librarians working on the site, generally leading to greater
space allowances and meaning that as personnel changes, the site can continue.
This last problem leads of course to the problem of credit.
If a professor conceives of a site and enlists the help of their institution
and the site is successful, what happens when the professor leaves for another
institution? Sometimes the site moves with them, but more often it remains behind,
and the professor has little or no control over what happens with it. Intellectual
property issues are very different for a publication that is essentially in
a constant state of release. Schools that have provided resources for a site
may want to continue to receive credit for it. This problem is bound to increase
as the quality of usefulness of and respect for such projects rise, and as more
and more institutions begin to recognize web publication as a legitimate form
of scholarship, acceptable for the purposes of promotion and tenure.
academic credit
Online publishing will eventually be recognized as scholarship and standards
will need to be implemented to ensure quality, just as in print journals. Administrators
will have to come around. Projects like the ones discussed here today are doing
exactly what journal articles and books are intended to do: to increase knowledge
in the field and to encourage collaboration and shared research among scholars.
In fact, there are those who believe that electronic publishing will increase
quality. One of the founders of Social Science Electronic Publishing says "We
are changing the academic landscape. People used to publish to get tenure. Now
there will be less junk because they will be writing for public consumption.
People have to focus on good topics." (http://gort.ucsd.edu/newjour/s/msg00519.html,
originally in Business Week 5/8/95 p.28) The scholar who has perhaps
written the most on the topic, Stevan Harnad, believes that there will be a
trend towards author self-archiving and the job of publishers will be for peer
referring. Copyright and publication rights will remain with the author, and
the publishers will be responsible for arranging for peer review and rating,
as well as publicity and accessibility. (See Stevan Harnad,
"E-KNOWLEDGE: FREEING THE REFEREED JOURNAL CORPUS ONLINE: Rebuttal to F.
Bloom Editorial in Science and A. Relman Editorial in New England Journal of
Medicine")
Another scholar, John W. T. Smith, agrees and has come with a model for what
he calls the deconstructed journal. What it offers for both women and theatre
scholars is that it doesnít mimic print journals, and allows for more freedom
of movement and expression, appealing to both groups. Rather than an online
journal being owned by a publisher, it would serve as a gateway. Made up of
experts in the field, the articles could then be both refereed and given a sort
of ëstamp of approvalí for credit purposes. There would also be links to relevant
works. (See "The Deconstructed Journal - a new model
for Academic Publishing" - http://library.ukc.ac.uk/library/papers/jwts/d-journal.htm
Originally published in Learned Publishing, Vol. 12, No.
2, April 1999.)
There are now over 10,000 ejournals and newsletters online, many of an academic
nature and peer reviewed. ("Midnight in the Garden
of Good and Evil: Academic Publishing, Copyright, and other Miasmas" by
Ann Okerson - www.amacad.org/publications/trans11.htm)
Online publishing is a significant part of our publishing future - theatre studies
will have to catch up. The Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities (www.ceth.rutgers.edu/)
has created a set of Guidelines for Evaluation for electronic texts to help
administrators judge this work. (www.ceth.rutgers.edu/intromat/E-TEXTS.htm)
These guidelines mention nothing about content, but rather offer tips
for determining if a document is technologically sound. It is still up to the
author to provide documentation of adequate peer review.
Specific projects
The following projects are among the best sites on the internet. They are not
simply lists of other sites or electronically published articles, but use the
resources of the net to their fullest. They represent early strides towards
the new form of scholarship and research the web affords.
Orlando Project (www.ualberta.ca/ORLANDO/) "The Orlando Project aims to provide the first integrated history of British women's writing (integrated, that is, with political, social, and cultural developments and with writing by male and international authors). The history will focus critically on gender and emphasize the intellectual, material, political, and social conditions which help to shape women's writing. It will be produced both as an extensive information base on the World Wide Web and as a series of four printed volumes."
Native American Women Playwright's Archive - has directory, bibliographies, authors' discussions, newsletters and a newsgroup. http://staff.lib.muohio.edu/nawpa/
The Magdalena Project: international network of women in contemporary theatre (www.magdalenaproject.org)
Women and Performance (www.echonyc.com/~women/) journal has a nice online space with not only excerpts from most articles, but a good set of links to women-oriented databases, newsgroups, and websites.
Playworks: Women Performance Writers Network (http://members.ozemail.com.au/~playwks/)
Womens Theatre and Creativity Center "We
believe that to connect women with their creativity is an empowering and significant
action and that theatre and other art expressions need to be based in community
in order to be an integral part of
our lives and our choices." www.chebucto.ns.ca/Culture/WTCC/WTCC-Home.html
This site appears to be defunct.
The following pages have nice links or textual work.
A nice page by an individual with information on individual historical women and women theatre's groups. www.geocities.com/Broadway/Alley/5379/
International Centre for Women Playwrights has a set of links. www.cadvision.com/sdempsey/weblinx.htm
Aphra Behn Society has a limited online presence. prometheus.cc.emory.edu/behn/index.html
Women in Performance Art has some nice but simple pages. http://music.dartmouth.edu/~wowem/electronmedia/visual/performanceart.html
These sites are again more expansive and use the net's resources nicely, and are related either to women's issues or to general theatre.
Womenspace (www.womenspace.ca/) - Campaign - For equal access, equal participation, and an equal voice in communication technologies. Womenspace Magazine - Women activists sharing Internet guides, stories and analyses. The Magazine is most useful, with dozens of articles related to women and the internet.
Academic On-line Publishing (carbon.cudenver.edu/~mryder/epublishing.html) by Martin Ryder at the Univ. of Denver has links to articles and other web sites on the topic, including to sites on copyright law.
Dramatic Exchange - www.dramex.org - where playwrights can post their plays. Not updated in the last year.
Italian plays online - www.drama.it
French Medieval Plays and Mysteries - www.uhb.fr/alc/medieval/THac.htm
Spanish Golden Age Plays www.coh.arizona.edu/spanish/comedia/
Shakespeare: Old Spelling Transcripts of the Plays web.uvic.ca/shakespeare/Annex/Drafttxt/
Didaskalia: Ancient Theatre Today www.didaskalia.net
A print resource!
Cyberfeminism: Connectivity, Critique and Creativity - Susan Hawthorne, Renate Klein
Online publishing offers new formats that will prove useful to feminist
theatre scholars. The projects discussed here today are examples of the
new publishing - offering much more than the traditional journal article
or even book. It is interactive, the information is organized more to how
the user wants it (within boundaries), it can be continuously updated,
and directly linked to other resources. It can include sound and video
as well as text and images. As publishing becomes more international, electronic
publication will make the transition easily. Cyberspace offers women and
performance scholars the opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a
new medium and prevent the replicating of power structures in the physical
world. Not only is it the future of academia, but it is a future particularly
suited to us.
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