This review surveys and divides the ethnographic corpus on digital media into three broad but overlapping categories: the cultural politics of digital media, the vernacular cultures of digital media, and the prosaics of digital media. Engaging these three categories of scholarship on digital media, I consider how ethnographers are exploring the complex relationships between the local practices and global implications of digital media, their materiality and politics, and their banal, as well as profound, presence in cultural life and modes of communication. I consider the way these media have become central to the articulation of cherished beliefs, ritual practices, and modes of being in the world; the fact that digital media culturally matters is undeniable but showing how, where, and why it matters is necessary to push against peculiarly narrow presumptions about the universality of digital experience.

Beyond that, there are also two excellent and up-to-date online bibliographies: Max Forte’s Cyberspace Ethnography, and danah boyd’s Bibliography of Research on Social Network Sites. Feel free to post additional resources in the comments.

So if it’s closing down, it must have failed, right? There must be no money in digital publishing of scholarly works, right? This must be proof that the only way to make money is with strong intellectual property rights held by massive conglomerates, right? Wrong Wrong Wrong. RUP’s closing is a crystal clear case of something entirely different: bad university administration. The decision, despite the claims in the various articles, had absolutely nothing to do with the viability of the ideas, or the expertise of the staff, or the realities of the marketplace. Instead, it had everything to do with short-sighted, self-important, autocratic management of a university by administrators whose interests are hard to identify though clearly at odds with any possible goal of producing high quality scholarship. (And don’t get me started about the other recent decision to sell the student-run 50K watt radio station, KTRU, one of the best in the country. Sign the petition)

As a board member of Rice University Press, a former employee, and a participant observer in the whole experiment, I’ve had a worms-eye view the fiasco as it has unfolded. I won’t detail all the ways in which RUP is innovative, but for those in the business, i’ll just say: you should all be madly copying their ideas, because RUP had and has no real competitors. Do not be deterred by the shutdown: take advantage of the fact that one less rich university is out there spending $$ on something innovative.

The first lie being circulated is that Rice University Press is being shut down. This was not the plan, in fact, through the hard work of the editor in chief and a network of people in scholarly publishing, the plan was to take RUP and turn it into a national press freed from the short-sighted penny-penching mixed up priorities of a small research university. In hindsight, they should have done this years ago.

Rather than make a careful timed announcement of this transition with the assistance of the press, however, the administration of Rice University chose to annouce that they had decided to shut down the press, in a letter sent to several foundations who were involved. Predictably the foundations were surprised, the announcement found its way onto a blog, where it was then picked up by responsible journalists doing their job and reporting what they had discovered.

And this is how I found out about the planned transition. And I’m on the board. That’s a form of autocratic leadership that belongs in a prison, not a university. Not even evil corporations get that kind of free pass when it comes to decision making.

And this is just the cherry. The whole experiment of the Press has been severely underfunded, stonewalled and victim to short-sighted, administrators’ pipe-dreams of either untold riches (huh? academic publishing is a coal mine, recall, not a gold mine) or just downright ignorance and confusion about the state of academic publishing today. None of the severe problems that face scholarly publishing today were taken seriously by the administration, and yet high… no… nigh miraculous expectations were both built up and accepted around the press. In short, Rice university gained a huge bump in reputation by launching the initiative at a time when everyone in the business agreed there are huge problems to solve, and then essentially pulled the plug on it before it even got started.

Consider this: RUP has had, for the duration of its existence (and not by design) exactly one (1) employee, the editor in chief, Fred Moody. In what turns out to have been a bad decision on probably everyone’s part, Moody was never actually located at Rice. So not only did it have only one employee, it didn’t have an office. It didn’t even have a proverbial garage. This would be fine for the start-up phase, say the first 6 months to a year, but not as a permanent business model. Despite that, Moody did superhuman amounts of work. As an external review report put it “currently the EIC is primarily a production editor who also evaluates unsolicited manuscript submissions, though he also appears to be doing everything from copy editing to distribution. ” Add to this fact that the entire subsidy for RUP from Rice (as reported in the above articles) was on the order of $150-200K. Let’s pretend Moody was paid a living wage and maybe some rudimentary benefits, and that the web designers and Connexions staff were given some peanuts to do what they do, and that Moody’s phone calls and mail costs were covered, and that there was money for all those other things from toilet paper to copyright license fees that need to be paid…and number ends up looking pretty poor. Even if the idea was to recoup that subsidy through sales (and it never was), you’d have to spend a lot more and publish a lot more books, and maybe hire someone to market them so that they might actually get bought.

If you judge the experiment in digital publishing on these facts, it’s sure to look like a failure, but the failure is not in the vision or ideas articulated by the press, but a simple failure to maintain good business judgement. It speaks volumes about how university administrators and many others (including many academics) see academic publishing: as something where no labor is required, only a great big print-a-book machine, a warehouse and some stamped envelopes. Moody, therefore, had to pick up all the slack: soliciting, reading, finding reviewers, managing the review process, communicating with authors, overseeing the website, accounting, copyediting, worrying over permissions, communicating with the board, design, marketing, promotion, distribution, as well as day to day operations. You can’t run a good press that way. You can’t even run a bad press that way for long. I said as much to the board when we started, though no one seemed to hear me.

But it gets worse. The external review report I mentioned very clearly recommended to the Rice administration that the press be continued and re-organized, and that it become more integrated with the Library, the Center for Digital Scholarship and the Humanities Research Center (all of which are well-regarded at Rice, and which mirror similar initiaives at many other universities). If it could do that, the reviewers stated “We are persuaded that, despite the deep crisis being confronted by university presses, there is indeed a niche for an innovative new model and that RUP would be well positioned to carve out a distinctive leadership position within this niche in the absence of competitors.”

So what did Rice University do? Did they consult the board? Nope. Did they have a discussion with anyone about how to move forward? Apparently not. What they did was choose to shut the press down instead. I suppose it’s the prerogative of the administration to capriciously begin and end whatever projects they see fit to, but make no mistake: it says nothing about the quality of these projects, the commitment of the people involved, the urgency of the problems that need solving; it only suggests that there is no real connection between the people in power, and the people who work for Rice.

The sad part is that all the good ideas, and all the needed experimentation are being drowned in the fiscal autocracy of university administration. And Rice is not alone here. I had good experiences there, and many of the people in administration are well-meaning, thoughtful, creative people. This case is just one small speck of dirt on the tip of an iceberg-sized problem facing scholars today as they consider not just how to publish their research (hint: press the “publish” button) but more importantly, how to get their research to have an impact (hint: this requires lots of people, money and time). In the humanities like art and architectural history, which was one of Rice’s “niche” markets, it’s even more pressing, and RUP was a beacon, and hopefully will continue to be a beacon in it’s non-Rice form. Most scholars in the humanities seem to have their heads very firmly buried in the sand when it comes to the problem of scholarly communication–even my fellow board members seemed more eager to crow about the necessity of mainting high standards of rigorous peer review than to face either the challenges or opportunities in scholarly communication. But, as they say, with friends like these…

Fortuntaly for ex_Rice University Press, Moody built up one extremely exciting series: the Literature by Design project. I for one hope that the project goes ahead, finds funding as a national press, and the Rice faculty and administration see the folly in failing to properly support and encourage this experiment.

John is writing a new novel, his fourth, called Creation Science. But he’s not independently wealthy, so writing and publishing the book is not free, regardless of its form. Fortunately, there is Kickstarter. For years I’ve been hearing people talk about alternative business plans for publishing, art, movies or music. This is it: a platform where people can pitch projects, have people pledge money to them, and if the funding level is met, the funds are released. There’s no mechanism to monitor whether the project is completed… but pledging a fistful of dollars doesn’t hurt anyone. Good old-fashioned risk-sharing. If you think John’s novel sounds like something that should be written, then pledge away. If you like Cory Doctorow’s books (who is also running a similar experiment in self-publishing), you will probably like Sundman’s as well.

But at the very least: think about what he’s doing. This isn’t vanity publishing. Well it is, but it relies on a pool of people who are willing to feed someone’s vanity. But that’s what the mainstream publishing industry is, except instead of vanity, it feeds on raw exploitative power. We have the technology, we don’t need to go back and read Marx again… just stop and think about it.

John is offering different levels of funding: you can pledge just a little ($5) and get a pdf. That’s basically a donation. Or you can pledge $17 and get a signed copy of the book. That’s a steal. Or you can pledge $750 and get “a souvenir pack of nifty stuff from my Creation Science archives, including my original notebooks, copies of correspondence with my editor, one-of-a-kind mockups, etc. After Creation Science has outsold Harry Potter, you’ll be able to sell this on Ebay for a fortune.” That’s hilarious, and not totally insane.

There are other projects like kickstarter, but none, so far as I can tell that are directed at a scholarly audience in any particular discipline. Imagine what a tool like this might look like for scholarly publishing. Imagine a journal run this way, for example. Topics or collections of research are proposed, along with a funding goal, projects that get funded have money to pay for editorial work, copyediting, promotion, maybe even on-demand publishing of the work. At the very least, it’s an easy way to go open access. Anti-OA people like the publishing staff of the AAA always wave the “pay-to-publish” bogeyman at anyone who argues that our work should be freely available (“OMG. It will cost you $9000 per article, we can’t do that!”). So bypass them. Start your own edited volume and raise what you think you’d need to pay someone to edit and manage it (hey you, yes I’m talking to you, the assistant professor trying to get tenure, you end up doing all that work FOR FREE anyways, what do you have to lose here?). Use your AAA Membership fees to contribute to other people’s edited projects that you think deserve to be published and read. It could engage the population of people who care about your work most. It’s an alternative to conventional grant-writing etc.

But even more than that, it could transform peer review and quality-monitoring. Currently Kickstarter is “invitation only” whatever that means. Imagine a scholarly version in which rather than it being “inivitation only” one has to constitute a mini-editorial board of respected scholars (for whatever value of ‘respected’) who would sign off on a project, peer review it and stamp it with a seal of approval (we do this for free already, or at most for $350 in books). My mind reels with the possibilities this has for improving the sorry state of scholarly publishing today. Kickstarter probably isn’t the right forum for this. In fact, I know it isn’t. But some enterprising people from the university press world could get together and make something like this happen right (hint hint). It could even be a consortium of existing presses, if they could solve the collective action problem of saving themselves from extinction. In fact, they might want to check into Kickstarter’s business model: they get 5% of successful projects. In other words, Step 3: Profit!

By the time I’m done adding the citation I’ve forgotten what I was researching in the first place. Or I just don’t do it because it is too much of a pain. I want to be able to save that citation right then and there – in my browser, while I’m doing whatever it was I’m doing, without missing a beat.

Up till now there were two ways I could do this. The first was to use CiteULike, a long time favorite here at SavageMinds. But then I have the problem of merging my CiteULike collection with my Sente collection. It never works quite as well as I would like. I wish there was something like what I can do with my Bank website: “download all activity since your last download.”

Another option is the wonderful Zotero plugin for Firefox. Zotero gives you full fledged citation management software built into your browser. There is even a web service where you can sync your citations and share groups etc. There are also plugins for OpenOffice to help you format your bibliography as you write. Sounds perfect, but it has never worked for me. The biggest problem is that Firefox is already a little slow and buggy, and when I’m using Zotero it is even worse. On top of that, the sync and online features never quite worked for me. But an even bigger problem is that I’d like to be able to use Safari or Chrome as my browser as well, I don’t want to be stuck in Firefox just because of Zotero.

Finally we get to the subject of this post: Mendeley. Mendeley is still in development and I can’t recommend you use it as your main bibliographic software just yet, but of all the programs I’ve looked at and tried it is the one that fits best into my actual workflow. Mendeley is both a web application and stand alone desktop software. The two stay in perfect sync. Anyone who uses Evernote (another favorite) will be familiar with this model. That means that all you need to “install” in your web browser is a single javascript bookmarklet you can click whenever you see a citation you want to save. The bookmarklet is powerful enough that on a page of Google Scholar results you can import all the items at once (similar to how Sente works). Like Zotero, Mendeley also offers an OpenOffice plugin to create bibliographies and properly formatted in-text citations. I tested it out and it works pretty well, except that you are limited in the citation formats and there is so far no way to edit them or create your own.

While Mendeley is still a work in progress, it is already a very powerful research tool, and I have a feeling that, over time, it will eclipse the competition. At least I hope it does, because it is the first software of its kind which seems to fit perfectly into my workflow. Now if we could only get the AAA to fix AnthroSource …

I came across some studies that had identified these two terrifically descriptive terms, “informavores” and “information foraging,” when you’re working online. There is this craving for information. It’s difficult to know when to stop. And you can quickly come to the conclusion that you can go on link by link by link ad infinitum… You’re always waiting to get closest to some ideal of a perfect state of information? And, you know, in a pre-digital, pre-Internet environment, you could get to that place very quickly, whereas with the Internet I do think that the horizon is much further off, and yet you still crave that. And I do think that’s the addictive nature of it.

I imagine most of you wouldn’t be reading this if they weren’t informavores as well. I use a number of tools to try to keep my information foraging at bay (i.e. Too Many Tabs, Instapaper, Sente, and Evernote), but it isn’t enough. I often feel I spend more time foraging than I do sitting down and actually reading what I’ve found. Of course, some times I find something and I know this is the thing I need to read next – but that feeling comes few and far between. So I’m turning to our readers: how do you deal with information addiction?

UPDATE: I wanted to add a further thought, which is that the nature of our discipline might make matters worse. Perhaps I am wrong, but I can imagine being an expert in a particular subbranch of neurobiology and having a pretty clear idea of what literature I need to read in order to be a master of my field. The holistic nature of our discipline, however, means that there is seemingly no limit to what we must know. In my dissertation, for instance, I discovered that the literature on land policy was particularly useful for understanding the development of Aborigine education policy. If I hadn’t been an informavore I never would have made such a discovery. But the vast amount of really interesting and potentially useful stuff is simply overwhelming me these days…

The concerns it raises are the same as always: will books in this new regime get the same editorial and peer-review attention they got in the old one. I suspect the answer is yes, because that’s what university presses do best, but part of the challenge is for these presses to convince academic audiences that this is true; that just because a new monograph is available for free online, and for a reduce price as a print-on-demand book, this does not reflect anything about its quality, does not mean it has been remaindered, and does not mean that the author paid to have it published. The difficulty of making scholars realize this should not be underestimated–as I continually discover, the majority of them are living not just in the 20th century, but in the 19th… sigh. Kudos to U Mich for joining us in the contemporary moment.

Johannes Fabian, Ethnography as Commentary: Writing from the Virtual Archive, Durham, N.C. Duke University Press, 2008. 140p.

Johannes Fabian, Memory Against Culture: Arguments and Reminders, Durham, N.C. Duke University Press, 2007. 192p.

Johannes Fabian’s contributions to anthropology are distinctive. Depending on where you start, he is an Africanist, a linguistic anthropologist, a partisan and critic of the “Writing Culture” moment in American anthropology, a folklorist and student of popular culture, a historian of drug use by colonial anthropologists, a theorist of time, memory and alterity, and now something of a hacker as well. Two books have been published recently which capture some of his heterogeneously distinctive work. The first, Memory against Culture, collects several recent talks and articles, including one called “Ethnography from the Virtual Archive” which is the germ of the second book Ethnography as Commentary, which is both a meditation on creating a “virtual archive” of ethnographic sources and a “late ethnography” of a popular ritual which Fabian experienced in 1974 in Zaire with a healer named Kahenga.

Ethnography as Commentary is a fabulous (and short!) book. It is an excellent introduction to the detailed practice of ethnographic interpretation; it is also a very thought-provoking meditation on the changing possibilities of the ethnographic monograph after the Internet, and of the possibility of ethnography as commentary. Lastly it is an experiment in “late ethnography” in which an explanation of a cultural event (Kahenga’ ritual exclusion and protection of Fabian’s house in the Katanga district) is conducted through memory, notes and sources, contrasted with the practice of writing history and used to shed light on the authority of ethnographies based in contemporary sources.

The core of the experiment proposed by Fabian is the creation of an online resource of materials: The Language and Popular Culture in Africa Archives (LPCA). The PCA includes an online open access journal started in 2001; a collection of heterogeneous transcripts and documents collected, transcribed, translated and annotated, all of which bear some rough thematic connection to popular culture in Central Africa. It includes, for instance, a Boloki perception of a visit to Europe written in 1895-1897; translated and annotated poems from a French collection of Central African songs and poems published around 1930. Several conversations that Fabian has recorded over the years (including the one which is at the center of Ethnography as Commentary). An interview with a Burundi potter discussing the history and local techniques; the “archives of popular culture” which contain letters, a local history of Zaire, a play “Power is Eaten Whole” by the “Troupe Théâtrale Mufwankolo” of Lubumbashi; a vocabulary and other texts; an extensive bibliography of related sources.

This online corpus is quite obviously more complete and detailed than anything that could previously been published in a standard ethnographic monograph. Surely everyone in Fabian’s generation can relate a story of making hard decisions about what to include and what not to include in an ethnographic monograph constrained by publishers’ page and image limits, concerns about untranslated materials, restrictions on footnotes, appendices and so forth. But this raises a new problem: what are we to do with such a beast, since the answer is certainly not “read it.” Fabian’s Aha! moment came when he realized that placing all this material online and available for experts to consult necessarily has an impact on what the subsequent monograph should look like. The archive is not the thing itself, it is just the material that was once inaccessible: the demand to write something that synthesizes it remains… but what should it look like? Should it continue to take the form we have come to recognize in an ethnography; namely, that synoptic, but selective and partial catalogue of vignettes and descriptions meant to stand in for a much richer corpus of documents and notes?

Fabian’s answer is twofold: on the one hand, no. Something new, e.g. commentary, might now be ascendant as a form of composition in which reference to a changing and growing archive of shared materials is presumed. But on the other hand, no. Memory and participation remain the complicated prolegomena to writing anything, whether or not all the sources are now available. Fabian makes this point clear in the experiment in “late ethnography” where not only documents, but his own memory and authority are on display as a kind of evidence that remains as inaccessible to others as ever. For many readers, this book may fail on both counts, but that lends it the unique distinction of being the only book so far to do so. What is at stake here is a rigorous rethinking of how research and writing in socio-cultural anthropology are conducted today, and not an attempt to invent some new mode or style. The fact that Fabian has tried this experiment should be warrant and proof enough that it is both worth doing, and a challenge worthy of intellectuals; it is not just a question of finding a research assistant who can throw some things up on the web for others to consult. It is an editorial, archival, and theoretical task at once.

Of course, Fabian seems anxious, and justly so, about whether readers of his short text will actually ever look at the archived materials. Though he mentions this fear in both the book and the precedingarticle, he can’t explain why he fears this. I did look at it. On the one hand, as someone with knowledge of popular culture in twentieth century Africa approaching the infinitesimally small, I can say that browsing the archives was no more or less compelling than browsing the stacks in my library looking for the curious, the surprising or the unfamiliar. It’s not my bag, but it’s nonetheless fascinating. However, I can much better imagine myself as that student of African popular culture for whom this archive is not only a fantastic resource that just 10 years ago would have required a trip either to Africa or to Fabian’s university to find, but also as
something to potentially contribute to: something in between a newsletter and a full-fledged journal, but with no limits on size, depth or arcana. I don’t think many people will look at it, but that doesn’t really matter to his argument that it changes the possibilities and meaning of ethnographic writing to have such a technical affordance available.

Of course, such projects will naturally confront all of the issues already familiar: copyright and privacy issues, sustainability (both in terms of personnel to run the archive and formats and software that must be updated or lost permanently) and more general ‘ethical’ concerns about the safety, sovereignty and rights of informants and subjects. Fabian doesn’t directly address these issues in the book, but that actually makes it a better read: it is carefully focused on the theoretical and methodological challenges to ethnography. The other issues can be found elsewhere.

Indeed, one of the most impressive aspects of this short book is the detail and attention with which Fabian investigates every step of the construction of this archive, the interpretations, the claims he can and cannot make about Kahenga’s work, world and thought. The interpretive method laid bare as process. His is a struggle to shore up the “regime of truth” within which this kind of ethnographic writing exists by relentlessly unfolding the process bit by bit. As such, the book might be an excellent tool for teaching in a methods class, what it means to move step by step towards one interpretation that is better than others, and towards the construction of a personal “archive” of materials out of which to make such claims.

What Fabian’s demonstration of interpretation makes especially clear is that the claims to truth he makes are not based on the act of the act of interpretation itself, but much more on the laying of groundwork necessary to get to that point. Expertise is a piecemeal, long-term, painstaking project, and one that is never complete. On this foundation alone is it possible to make claims which critics might see as “merely” interpretations of “unrepresentative” events and “partial” knowledge. It is this foundation which distinguishes a naive from an experienced observer’s interpretation of some event—it is the obsessive filling in of background and context, all of which
are quasi-interpretational, in order to give meaning to one highlighted sequence of events. Obviously this is not the only thing that ethnography can do, nor even the most widely practiced—but it is one of the most powerful; the kind of research that people recognize when they refer to ethnography as rich, detailed, thick, textured, or any of the other baroque terms of approbation that have been so important.

One might ask: what distinguishes this problem from that faced by historians? On the one hand, very little. Historians (and literary scholars and others) are being confronted by a similar challenge to rethink the historical monograph in an era when digital collections are rapidly being created and made openly available. Similarly, the question of “history as commentary” might be a useful counterpoint to Fabian’s experiment. Raising commentary from its low-status as something undistinguished and requiring little thought to something more like “debugging,” re-designing or re-mixing requires rethinking collaboration and coordination of work as well. On the other hand, ethnography of the sort Fabian proposes here does retain something distinctive, which is the manner in which expertise is constructed, pedagogically speaking, both in the training of scholars and in the necessary experience of “being there” which is presumed to be a kind of epistemological encounter necessary to the creation of ethnographic knowledge.

I’ve said almost nothing about Fabian’s companion volume, Memory against Culture published contemporaneously with Ethnography as Commentary. It is a collection of previously published articles, and Fabian will hopefully forgive me for dwelling less on the content of
these essays (which ranges across that distinctive heterogeneity I mentioned at the outset), and more on the form of the publication. The act of publishing a collection of pre-published articles has its own kind of meaning–and even more so today after the transformation of publishing by the Internet. Just as Fabian’s archive of arcane Swahili materials was unavailable before the internet, most if not all of these essays are now hyper-available for the same reason (at least those in journals, if not those in edited volumes).

On the one hand, this is a strange kind of confirmation that even though available, there is nonetheless value in collecting these essays together as an event and archive of its own kind. In some ways, the problems of memory and forgetting, and of “late” ethnography are not only features of ethnographic investigation, but of social and human sciences generally… the work of scholars can be forgotten in so many ways: published in obscure journals and expensive collected editions, gone out of print, becoming unfindable online, being disappeared from libraries due to rising costs of journal subscriptions, being remaindered, not being taught, to say nothing of simply not being read, a fate most of us are already well resigned to. So Memory against Culture is in many ways an act of memory, rather than one of publishing, and it is worthwhile to reflect on this in a Fabian-esque manner: to take seriously, theoretically and methodologically, every layer of this onion of knowledge production we engage in as contributing to the shaping of that very knowledge we desire to produce. We need constant reminders of this today, in the face of an onslaught of new forms of media, new archives, new and ever-fancier tools that both enable and constrain our desire to know ourselves and our worlds. And we need arguments for why and how to use these new things, and for how they make us forget in new ways.

Herewith, therefore, are two reports generated by Google Analytics, which is hands-down the most un-evil thing Google has ever done (General Report | Traffic Source Report). These reports are chock full of information, beautifully organized and fascinating to explore. Unfortunately, they are also pretty hard to interpret. I’m posting them now, because I think they show a few things pretty clearly, such as the initial spike of interest, the fact that 4 times as many of my readers use Firefox as do Internet explorer, the role of small communities in creating attention (savage minds, hastac, and a handful of close friends account for a significant portion of the traffic to the site).

My book is in kind of a strange space. On the one hand, it is a conventional academic book, a first book by an assistant professor (now tenured, thank you very much Duke University Press); it is accessible, but not popular; it has a large potential audience beyond academics because of its subject matter; and it is beautifully designed and people tell me it is well written. So much for the pro column. In the con column: it is long, it contains complicated theory in the first chapter, including Habermas, which is fatal to any reader even in small amounts; it doesn’t have any sound-bitable arguments and people tell me it is poorly written.

In short, it’s a pretty standard academic book, and therefore a good candidate for this experiment. People always ask what I had to do to convince Duke to let me release the book. On the one hand the subject matter made it easy: I couldn’t respect myself, or Duke, if a book about Free Software were not freely available. On the other hand, I think they were really eager to experiment, to see what would happen. I created the website, so they didn’t have to; and they agreed to use a CC (By-NC-SA) license and to give me the pdf and a very clean HTML copy (thank you Achorn) for distribution. The designer, Cherie Westmorland, used an open source font and the Boston Public Library let me use the cover image. All told, things worked out swimmingly, and the whole process has been, well, entirely normal. Duke is making as little or as much money on the book as they do on others of its ilk, and yet I am getting much more from it being open access than I might otherwise.

So what have I learned so far? A few things:

1) The Internet is dead. Well maybe it’s not that bad, but the era when simply putting something online guaranteed orders of magnitude more readers/viewers/listeners than normal is long gone. To put a finer point on it, let’s say the ‘Age of Boing Boing’ is dead. Sorry University Presses, you missed it. The place is just so saturated with everything and everybody that it now feels more like normal life and less like some special place. This amounts to saying that things have returned to normal levels of hard work. To get a book to sell, one has to invest a lot of work in marketing it, promoting it and distributing it—but all these things now include new forms of marketing promoting and distribution online. Just putting a book online means nothing unless one is going to work hard to bring attention to it (a fact Rex has noted repeatedly as well). How do I know this: because the Google reports tell the story. All the spikes in traffic correlate precisely with mentions in major and minor media outlets, ranging from Savage Minds to the New Yorker. Placing links in widely read places (print or online) increases traffic. Full Stop. But more than that, I know this because the ratio of print sales to downloads downloads to print sales has been 3 to 1 (Thanks, Cathy for the correction) . Not 1000 to 1 or even 100 to 1, but 3 to 1. That’s kind of amazing. It means that neither my outsized expectations of hordes of geeks downloading the book, nor Duke’s fears of massive numbers of lost sales have come true.

2) I have tenure. Putting my book online did not ruin my career. Having Duke publish it, as opposed to, say, some online vanity press, contributed to my tenure case, but simply having it available for free is not career suicide. Quite the opposite, I would say. I have more requests now for talks, reviews, contributed papers, conferences, interviews and projects than I can accept, and probably more than half of them come from people I don’t know from Adam, which means people who have found the book in public rather than through connections with my peers and friends. Lots of people are assigning the book in class, or bits of it, which I can only assume is facilitated by the ease of access. Duke, of course, might not like to hear this since it means people are assigning the book without ordering copies for class, but I’m ambivalent. On the one hand, I would like those people to assign the whole book and for Duke to be remunerated as a result; on the other hand, I know what creating a syllabus is like, and how great it is when something can be added just by inserting a link, as opposed to dealing with bookstores and administrative systems for ordering the book–a book students may or may not buy anyways.

3) I’ve had a pretty excellent amount of media attention. There are books it might be compared to that have done better: Jonathan Zittrain’s book came out at the same time, and he was on the Colbert Report, as was Clay Shirky. But as much as I love Colbert, that’s exactly the opposite of the kind of attention I would want. I have no “message” which I want a hundred million people to hear; I have a scholarly book which I wish Zittrain and Shirky would read, not Colbert and his audience. Nonetheless, I have had mentions in The New Yorker Blog, The Times Higher Education Supplement, Technology Review, Inside Higher Ed, and others. I’ve had conversations with people from Korea, Argentina, Brazil, and India about the book. I’ve had excellent response from European scholars interested in the book. In short, I can’t complain. According to Duke, the amount of marketing that went into my book was more intensive than most, and this may no doubt accounts for some of that attention. Frankly, it’s more than enough. I’m not quite sure what I would do with more, but I do know that with a bit more marketing, the dynamics of attention might conceivably change much more dramatically than just ten years ago. For some books that university presses publish, this fact is worth mulling over.

Another advantage is that Evernote does OCR on the text in these photos so I can actually find them by search. It isn’t perfect, but its helpful.

Did you discover any great books at this year’s AAA? Or have any thoughts about some of the books I’ve listed above? Maybe you have your own book which just came out? Let us know in the comments!

I am extremely happy to finally be able to announce its arrival. I’m also happy to announce that it is part of a series edited by Michael M.J. Fischer and Joe Dumit called “Experimental Futures” of which Jeff Juris’ excellent book Networking Futures: The Movements against Corporate Globalization is also a part. And as well to thank HASTAC for helping out in its publication and in marketing it as well.

Two Bits has taken a long time, and it’s a better book for that. In some ways, it is untimely: the moment of Free Software is over– both the media and many of the scholars who focused so much attention on it starting in about 2000 seem to have moved on to some other next big thing. This is a shame, but predictable given the drive for novelty and for being first in academia. But I think (and I will throw modesty to the wind here) that anthropology has a tack on such things that is slower, more coherent, and more concerned with a certain precision in charting historical changes. I like to think that the book isn’t only about free software, but an anthropology of knowledge circulation more generally, and I hope that it interests even those who are too cool for old school.

Obviously I hope that others think the same thing, and I expect people to read it in light of the current peak of interest in web 2.0, social networking and internet celebrities, or whatever, which might be usefully re-thought through the lens of Free Software. And maybe it might just convince a few people, scholars especially, that the moment of Free Software is definitely not over, and that there is some really incredible scholarship out there by people like Gabriella Coleman, Matt Ratto, Shay David, Casey O’Donell, Jelena Karanovic, Anita Chan, Samir Chopra and Scott Dexter, Jenny Cool, Allison Fish, David Hakken and Karl Hakken, Jeff Juris (my labelmate!), Bernhard Krieger, Karim Lakhani, James Leach, Siobhan O’Mahoney, Greg Vetter and many others on these topics. Like the scholarship emerging on gaming (with Rex representing), that on Free Software constitutes a major locus of scholarly concern and questioning that should be the basis for understanding much of the recent past and near future.

Having been through the process of publishing a book, like oneman, I wish we could publish our books faster, and try to merge some of the timely but ill-considered insight of the blog-form with the deliberate and peer-reviewed caution of the book-form… but I’m nonetheless a committed modernist in that I think the book-form has a quality that no other form of communication has, and it has taken centuries for that quality to develop. Nonetheless, nothing lasts forever, and since this is a book about software, there are a few special things that I want readers to know about this book:

• the book is licensed under a Creative Commons (by-nc-sa) license, and is therefore freely available for circulation and modulation. Duke generously permitted me to do this both because I (and the audiences of the book) expect it, and also because I think it is a good experiment (I’d have preferred to drop the non-commercial restriction, but it’s obviously understandable why Duke might want it). I’m convinced, the way Cory Doctorow is, that we can sell books and give them away. And though it is impossible to know how many copies the book might have sold without this decision, I’m convinced it will sell as many and more (and for those wondering, the reasonable expectations in our little corner of the world are more on the order of one or two thousand, not tens or hundreds of thousands in Doctorow’s case). For me, as a teacher and a scholar, openly licensing the book is primarily a way of getting it in front of people the way it used to get in front of you in a bookstore. If you are serious about the book, you’ll probably buy it, but if you aren’t you might a) read a bit anyways, and b) not be angry that you bought it and don’t like it. In either case: bottoms up to Duke University Press for taking the risk.
• The book is online in pdf form, but I also created a site using the Institute for The Future of The Book’s “comment press” template for Word Press. I think the IFB is the bionic bees knees, and I’m keen to see people use this version as a place to discuss the book, both as individual readers, and for classes (btw, Jonathan Zittrain’s book is also in IFB format, and they would make great reading together… hint hint to those organizing reading circles). I like to think that this is a first step towards producing living books, books that modify and modulate, books that respond and transform, but without sacrificing the kinds of permanence and scholarly apparatus that we value. Thanks in no small part to some work by people at Achorn International (Joel Ibarra) and IFB, the online version is correlated with the print version by page number, and includes all the notes and references as well. Adding and updating links is also something that this renders possible.
• The book is beautiful. Duke (and in particular Cherie Westmoreland) did a fantastic job. The font is an open source font (Charis SIL), the cover is combination of a painting from the Boston Public Library by the 19th century symbolist painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes depicting the telegraph (and called colloquially “Good News, Bad News”) and a Hollerith punch card. And here’s a reason to choose a short title: the spine has the title written perpendicular to, not parallel with the length of the book. Minor, I know, but how cool is that?
• Last but not least, I’ve been thinking about the meaning of “re-mixing” a scholarly work. Various works on the Internet and free software have experimented with this… Lessig’s Code V2, Benkler’s Wealth of Nations as well as others, scholarly and not. However, I’m not so sure it’s clear what remixing means in scholarly terms. I’d love it if people want to translate parts of it, or transform it for other media (anyone interested in doing a version for the Wii contact me immediately), but those are explorations of the form, and not the content of the book… so what would remixing scholarly work really mean? One thing I hope it means, in the social and human sciences especially, is that we contribute to a shared collection of conceptual tools that are refined by confrontation with empirical reality. Two Bits contains a couple such concepts (recursive publics, usable pasts) as well as contributing more generally to research on the public sphere, on the meaning of making things and making things public, as well as a substantive field of work focusing on software, networks, geeks, hackers, entrepreneurs, intellectual property and so forth. So one key aspect of the future of this book is a project I’m calling “Modulations” for short, which is an attempt to think about not just these concepts and problems in particular, but the modes and manners in which we interact as scholars around the development, refinement and co-ownership of such concepts. I don’t really know what this means yet, but I’m looking for anyone with ideas.

For me, Savage Minds has always been a place to “mess around”, anthropologically speaking. A place to try out new ideas and thin hypotheses, a wall to throw stuff onto in order to see what sticks. A place where I could try my hand at the kind of argument Yehudi Cohen makes in Disappearance of the Incest Taboo (that’s an AnthroSource link, for those with access) and string together some ideas about the end of marriage, or muse about the moral underpinnings of anthropology. A place to incubate arguments and positions — and to receive feedback from my peers both inside and outside of the field.

It’s been invaluable to have this kind of forum, away from the main channel of academic thought — the journals and academic presses that are our disciplinary mainstream, even if many of them have lower readerships than Savage Minds. So valuable, in fact, that I felt it absolutely necessary to include Savage Minds in my “Acknowledgements” when I published Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War. Here’s what I wrote:

Over the years, two online communities have proven invaluable as both a source of new ideas and a place to rehearse my own fevered anthropological imaginings. To the members of ANTHRO-L (especially Ron Kephart, John McCreery, Richard Senghas, Jacob Lee, Richard Wilsnack, Anj Petto, Ray Scupin, Robert Lawless, Wade Tarzia, Lynn Manners, Martin Cohen, Bruce Josephson, Richley Crapo, Tom Kavanagh, Scott MacEachern, Mike Pavlik, Thomas Riley, and Phil Young) and my fellow Savage Minds, (Alex Golub, Kerim Friedman, Chris Kelty, Nancy LeClerc, Kathleen Lowery, Tak Watanabe, and newbies Thomas Erikson, Maia Green, and Thomas Strong) I offer both my gratitude and respect.

In the end, I’m not sure I could have written Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War without having had this forum to develop those ideas. The other Minds and the many people who comment here not only helped me to refine my thoughts on anthropology and its role(s) in society, but to rethink myself as an anthropologist.

By way of gratitude, then, I asked my publishers if I could offer at least a little something back to this community which has offered me so much. They responded enthusiastically, providing me with a discount code to offer Savage Minds readers. So here’s the deal:

1. Order Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War from U Mich Press.
2. At checkout, enter the coupon code: WAX08UMP
3. Enjoy a 20% savings!

With the coupon code, the US price is $26.00 instead of the usual $32.50. As far as I know, this offer is not limited to US buyers, but I’m pretty sure the price of international shipping will eat up any savings over buying the book at full price locally. The coupon code expires on May 30, 2008.

For more information about the book, check out the review by Penny Howard at the Socialist Review. More reviews and information about the book will be posted at my personal site on the book page as it becomes available.

And if you’re not interested, for whatever reason (maybe your mother was cruel to you as a child?), that’s cool, too — I offer you as a member of the Savage Minds community my thanks.

But really, buy the book. Buy the book or I shall plug at you a second time! Tphptptptptp!

If you haven’t already, read these first:

Part I – In which I manage to get a publishing contract

Part Ia: Writing a Prospectus – In which I detail how I wrote my prospectus

You’d think that selling a publisher on your book idea would be the hard part.  Once you have a contract in hand, the rest should be easy, right? After all, in my case, the contributors had already presented their work, so they already had at least a draft to work from — all that’s left is for each person to clean up their draft, maybe expand a piece here and there, and tidy up their references.  Right?

Right?!

Wrong.  You’ve heard the expression “herding cats” before, right? Well, I decided that getting an edited volume put together was a lot like herding glaciers.

What I’m saying is, it goes a bit slowly.

Part of the problem is the academic schedule.  Most academics are bound to a semester-by-semester schedule that a] changes frequently, and b] puts us through periods of intense work interspersed with periods of intense inactivity. During the school session, for all our good intentions, non-teaching projects tend to fall by the wayside.  Some academics are lucky: they have tenure, 1- or 2- class per semester teaching loads, and committee work they’ve learned how to blow off.  Those are not the kind of academics one would expect to find contributing to an edited volume by an unknown grad student.

All those non-teaching projects, then, get put off for breaks — a couple weeks in the winter, a couple months in the summer, a week in the spring — which means that, for all our good intentions, non-teaching periods are over-booked and a lot of projects fall by the wayside. Some academics are lucky: they have research budgets, sabbaticals, and whole semesters to devote to writing up their research.  Those are not the kind of academics one would expect to fond contributing to an edited volume by an unknown grad student.

My contributors are brilliant scholars, committed teachers, and hectic grad students. They are busy people — the kind of academics for whom the word “deadline” isn’t all that compelling (is there another kind of academic?).  By the time the publishing deal was secured, a lot of time had passed, too.  They had moved on to other projects, other work.  Some of my original contributors published elsewhere: George Stocking was already committed to History of Anthropology, of course (and felt pretty strongly against publishing this book, anyway), Herb Lewis, our resident voice of dissent, published his piece in Darnell and Gleach’s Histories of Anthropology Annual, David Price found a place for his work in Threatening Anthropology. Others dropped out for other reasons.

So I had to fill out my roster to book-length.  Again. I had met William Peace at the AAA Annual Meetings when we held the original panel presentation, and I knew he was working on COld War topics, so I emailed him and asked if he’d like to contribute.  Later on, when another author dropped out, I emailed Susan Sperling, who had actually been recommended to me by Mitch Allen at Left Coast Press (if I’m remembering properly). Susan was writing a biography of Ashley Montagu, and I thought she could provide some interesting material on Montagu’s blacklisting.  Peace said yes; Sperling said yes.

I had also asked my commentators, Marc Pinkoski and Rob Hancock, both PhD students in Canada doing work on Julian Steward’s legacy, to contribute. SInce neither of them had written anything to present in the panel, that meant writing from scratch.  Rob’s position was especially difficult, because I asked him to write an afterword, bringing together some of the themes from the book and also suggesting avenues for further research.  Remember, the purpose of this book is not just to win me a spot on The Daily Show, but also to lay the groundwork for a thus-far understudied part of anthropology’s history. But that meant that Rob really couldn’t start until the other contributors had all finished at least a draft.

What this means is that out of six original presentations, there were two that would make it into the final book: Frank Salamone’s on the Rockefeller’s funding of research in Africa, and mine on Sol Tax’s institution-building. I had written mine as a full essay to begin with, and cut about half out for the presentation, so there was little left to do with my piece.  But I would have to write an Introduction, and like Rob, I would have to wait until the work was mostly finished to even start.

I had told Pluto I could have a manuscript ready in 180 days.  It took 14 months.

I was foolish, though. I felt, “these guys are doing me a favor, I don’t want to push them too hard.” Several people told me, way too late in the game to matter, that I should have been sending regular emails asking for their progress to keep them on track.  I also made a dumb decision to wait until I had them all in front of me before I started editing them. I wasn’t prepared for how much work that would be. 

First of all, there’s the copyediting.  Typos to correct, references to make sure line up with bibliography entries, formatting changes to conform to Pluto’s submission style.  The bibliographies had to be standardized.  Footnotes had to be converted to endnotes. The way archival sources were used had to be standardized.

Then, there’s the content editing, the curatorial part of the edited volume editor’s job. What didn’t make sense? What contradictions marred an essay? What was unclear, or could be better phrased?

Here’s what I did. I opened each document in Word, turned on “track changes”, and did all the typo correcting and reformatting and such directly.  This is messy and inefficient, but it works in the end. At the same time, I opened an email to each contributor and wrote comments, indexed by page, about every substantive change I made to their work. Where I couldn’t figure out how to fix a problem or what they were trying to say somewhere, I asked them to clarify.

What I got back was the same document with another layer of tracked changes to work through. This is even messier and more inefficient, but it works in the end.

While I was doing this, I was also writing my introduction.  I had grand plans for the introduction — it was going to be a grand, sweeping condemnation of the entanglement of anthropologists with the military and with intelligence agencies, as well as a resounding defense of academic freedom. That’s not what I wrote, though.  Some of that material made it into the final introduction, but along the way I decided to tone it down a bit, to remove myself a bit and let the collected work speak for itself more. I focused a lot on the historiography of Cold War period anthropology, and much less on the academic freedom issues.

The middle part was your standard review of each of the articles.  This part is a lot harder to write than I’d imagined! This is where the curatorial function really takes hold, because you’re really framing the work in a way that affects what it means. In fact, it was while I was doing this that I decided to tone down some of the other stuff in the introduction — I became a little bit gun-shy, I guess, about wielding that much power over other people’s work.

The last section drew the link between Then and Now, and drew heavily on the critiques of military involvement I’ve written here at Savage Minds. Of course, it all became obsolete almost the second i became too late to make any substantive changes, because the Department of Defense launched their huge publicity campaign bringing Human Terrain studies into the public eye — and freeing up a lot of information that wasn’t freely available when I wrote my introduction.

While I was writing the introduction, Rob Hancock was writing the afterword, and he, too, chose to focus a great deal on historiography.  Luckily, we don’t really cover the same material, so the two pieces end up being complimentary rather than repetitious — and in fact, Rob draws heavily on work that I’m rather dismissive of in my introduction.  Which is good — I wanted there to be some conflict in the book.  I had wanted to publish Herb Lewis’ piece for this reason — I think there’s room for a variety of perspectives. Herb, apparently, did not.

You’d think having the contributions all together, with a good introduction and afterword, would be everything.  But wait, there’s more! You still have to create the front matter — in my case, a table of contents and acknowledgements.  Check the book when it comes out — I thank all my fellow Savage Minders by name.  Because I love you guys! Then all the files have to be renamed according to their chapter numbers.

When all the pieces had been edited and cleaned up by me, the front matter written, and the files all named properly, I checked my submission guide to see how they wanted them submitted.  Pluto requires two copies: one, a zipped file of all the chapters in Word format, and two, a paper print-out.  Mailed to their offices.  In London.  I dutifully took my files on a thumb drive down to Kinkos and paid some $30-odd to have the book printed and shipped overseas.

And that’s it, right? Sit back and wait for the book to hit the bestseller lists in Belgium.

Uh, no. Actually, there’s a lot of work still left to be done.

As it turns out, I’m not a great copyeditor. That printed copy goes to the copyeditor Pluto hires to make me feel bad about my spelling skills. They pay good money for this — Pounds Sterling! None of those weak American dollars! And the copyeditor puts together a chapter-by-chapter account of my failings, which she emails to me, which I then email to my authors, who thought they were done a long time ago. But they’re troopers, so they go through and clean up their work and it’s all good.

Except, one author had moved. And had eye surgery.  And couldn’t find the missing references the copyeditor had noticed and I didn’t. And didn’t have the time to work on it.  And had bad eyes to boot. Fortunately, my publishers are British, so the long string of emails asking me where the last set of copyediting queries was were polite and gentle.  Mostly.

But he got them done, after our editor, Anne Beech, started emailing him.  As it turns out, he likes her, and responded immediately.  Me, he lets stew.  Scurrilous old bastard! (Just kidding — I love you, Eric!)

So, now are we done? Well, there’s another round of copyediting to go through, for reasons which still aren’t clear to me.  And a marketing questionnaire as long as the original manuscript, asking me which reviewers to send it to, what journals to send announcements to, what trade shows to show the book at, where to have the launch party, who my dream reviewers are (Noam Chomsky and Laura Nader — I should have put Montgomery McFate, too.  Ah, missed opportunities…).  For the US, I didn’t have much trouble — remember, I had put all this in my proposal — but they wanted to know about the UK, too. Err…

And there’s back cover copy to be done, most of which came from my proposal, too. And my bio line for the back cover. And then a cover mockup to approve. 

And a sub-title to write.  I thought “Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War ” was pretty self-explanatory: it says “this book is about anthropology during the early years of the Cold War”.  But, well, that doesn’t sell books.  What sells books is McCarthyism and the CIA. A lot of essays in the book aren’t about McCarthyism or the CIA, though.  Some are, but some aren’t.

But hey explained to me that they’d really, really, really like the words “McCarthyism” and “CIA” on the cover,and could I please, please, please come up with something.  They gave me a few suggestions, which I tweaked and added “Foundations” to, since most of the articles say something about foundations. Not all, but most.  In fact, there’s at least one which isn’t about McCarthyism, the CIA, or foundations at all.

But they know best.  When it comes to marketing, I defer entirely to their wisdom — it is their job, after all. I strongly suggest that if you write a book and they want to change the title, you do the same.  I also fought a losing battle to have a final comma added to the list.  I’m a big fan of the final comma, of “The Influence of Foundations, McCarthyism, and the CIA” rather than “”The Influence of Foundations, McCarthyism and the CIA”".  But, no.  They’ll only be pushed so far.

And then, just when you think it’s all coming together nicely, page proofs come. That’s right, it still needs to be proofread.  You might think that me reading the text and correcting typos was proofreading, or that the copyeditor doing the same was proofreading, or that the second copyeditor doing the same was proofreading, but you’d be wrong.  Proofreading is, literally, reading the proofs.  At this point, you can’t change anything but stray typos (well, you can, but it comes out of the author’s pocket).  This is the almost-final version of the book, the 1.0 Release Candidate version, and it has to be read page by page, line by line, word by word to make sure nothing bad makes its way into print.

Oh, and it has to be indexed.  Now that you know what the final pagination is going to be, you have to put what page everything is on.  And, in today’s world, you can either do it yourself or you can pay someone to do it for you.  I am poor. Can you guess what I chose to do?

So, how does one index a book? Well, turns out the library doesn’t have any books on teh subject (if it did, I’d bet the indexes would be really, really good!), and the Internet has very few resources about it.  The best advice I could find was:

• Consider the needs of your reader.
• Cross-index as much as possible — that is, think about all the diffeent ways you reader might look up the same topic, and throw those in as “see x” entries wherever possible.  And put lots of “see also” entries wherever possible.
• If you have more than 5 page references for a topic, you need to create sub-headings.
• Only put in the index significant mentions of a topic, not passing references. 

What I thought an index was is where you list all the occurrences of a word — say, “colonialism” — in a text.  Turns out,it isn’t.  What that is is a concordance. Software can do that. An index, on the other hand, is a concise guide to the book, a roadmap if you will, that tells the reader where to find out aboutwhatever it is they’re looking for.

So you read my book’s index, and you say “surely Marvin Opler is mentioned in this book somewhere,” and you’re right (I think), but whoever mentioned him didn’t say anything crucial and specific about him, so he’s not listed in the index. Morris Opler, on the other hand, plays a significant role in one of the essays, so he is listed in the index.

Now, you’d think you’d use index cards to write an index, and in olden days that’s exactly what folks did, but not me.  Instead, I used a normal letter-sized pad and listed words and page numbers I thought should go in the index as I read the proofs.  In the first run-through, I was pretty generous — if I was unsure about an entry, I kept it.  With each chapter, I started a new list, even if that meant there were duplicates.

Then, I opened an Excel spreadsheet, and copied each chapter’s list over with the page numbers.  While I did this, I referred back to the text to see if I felt the mention was significant enough to index. At the end of each chapter, I sorted alphabetically, so when I got to duplicates, one of two things would happen:

1. I’d remember there was already an entry for this heading, scroll up, and add the page numbers, or
2. I wouldn’t remember, and when I finished and went through the lsit, there would be two or more entries for the same heading, side-by-side, which I would transfer to one entry.

Pretty slick, huh? Then I just copied my final sorted list to Word, cleaned it up a bit, made sure it fit Pluto’s guidelines, and sent it off.

And that, at last, is it. As far as I know, anyway — the last thing I did was the index, and they haven’t asked me for anything else yet.  As far as I know, the book is due out this month (though I’ve seen publication dates of January, February, and May in different places, so who knows?). All that’s left is for you to buy it :-)