The Riches of Hypertext for Scholarly Journals
By ROY ROSENZWEIG
Change comes slowly in academic life. Place The American Historical Review from 1899 next to the current, late-1999 issue, and you'll discover a reassuring continuity. To be sure, the content of the articles has been transformed, with "Creole Bodies in Colonial South Africa" displacing "Connecticut Loyalists." The selections have also gotten a bit longer, but not drastically so. But the form of the journal and the articles remain largely unchanged -- monographic articles are at the front of the journal, book reviews at the back; footnotes at the bottom of the page; about 500 words to the page; articles put their thesis statement at the front, conclusions at the end. If the journal's J. Franklin Jameson were to rise from the dead (I'm told that someone once called the American Historical Association to report that she was channeling the former editor), he would be able to resume his duties without too much trouble.
Conventional wisdom tells us that computers and the Internet will rapidly change all that. But just how will scholars and, in particular, scholarly journals "digest" the new technology? That is what colleagues and I from the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and two leading humanities journals -- The Journal of American History and American Quarterly -- have been wrestling with over the past year or two. In a Mickey Rooneyesque spirit of "Let's put on a show," we decided to try out some things in electronic publishing, rather than simply sponsor more theorizing about what the cyberfuture might look like. I'd like to look back on what we learned, as a way of looking forward to where we go next.
Our efforts, of course, built on considerable (and better-financed) experimentation that has already taken place. Not surprisingly, the most rapid changes have come in journals of science and technology, where it looks as though electronic-only publication will become increasingly common. Here, the model of instant publication pioneered by Paul H. Ginsparg, a physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, whose database of scientific papers is growing at the rate of 25,000 per year, has been particularly influential. Last year, for example, the National Institutes of Health announced plans for PubMed Central, a similar online archive of scholarly papers in the life sciences.
Cyberjournals -- covering such diverse topics as textual criticism of the Bible and postmodern culture -- have emerged in the humanities as well. But print humanities journals are likely to survive, in part because of the importance of narrative or discursive articles (as opposed to reports on research findings), which are often consumed at a leisurely pace, away from the computer screen. Nor do humanists care about scholarly currency in quite the same way that physicists or doctors do. Last year's reflection on Jane Austen remains a good deal more compelling to humanists than last year's study of adverse drug reactions is to scientists. At least until breakthroughs in screen display make onscreen reading easier, the most important experiments are likely to be hybrids in which digital publication supplements print versions.
Before long, it seems likely, every print journal will have its electronic clone. Indeed, such clones already exist, even for many journals that have not created them explicitly. Commercial operations like Bell & Howell's ProQuest and Northern Light offer electronic versions of articles, on a per-article basis, from hundreds of scholarly journals -- thereby "unbundling" the carefully bound products that journal editors have crafted. Ostensibly, no electronic edition of the Journal of Modern History exists, but you can, in fact, read it online through ProQuest.
Such changes, however, do not alter the essential intellectual product offered by the journals. Do electronic media allow us to do anything different from what journals have done for the past century?
One obvious opportunity is for what I would call the "digital supplement," in which we take advantage of the cheapness of digital storage to make available materials that are of interest to specialized audiences, but cannot be provided economically in print. Most scholarly work involves the creation of an "archive" of some sort, although generally that archive remains stowed away in an individual scholar's file cabinet or computer.
The Journal of American History's March 1999 roundtable on interpreting the Declaration of Independence through translation was a natural candidate for exploring the possibilities of the digital supplement. Although the print journal was able to devote a substantial number of pages to the roundtable, it could not also include the many versions of the Declaration of Independence, translated into different languages at different times, that the journal's authors had assembled in the process of writing their articles. On the World Wide Web (http://chnm.gmu.edu/declaration), we were able to include that richer documentation. Where possible, we also included retranslations back into English, so that readers who didn't know the various languages could get a sense of how some key concepts and words had been rendered in translation.
Two other features of the project also recommended it for online publication. First, we wanted it to be an open-ended and evolving effort, and welcomed contributions of other translations, along with commentary about them. Versions of the Declaration of Independence in Bulgarian, Turkish, and Estonian now seem to be in the offing. Second, given the international character of the project, it seemed particularly appropriate to use the Web, a medium that has allowed us to attract significant readership over the past year from outside the United States.
We have also gotten an unanticipated -- but quite significant -- result: A broader audience for a journal that has traditionally reached professional historians. While nonprofessionals surely wander across print copies of the journal in large public libraries, it seems, anecdotally, that our open-publication format has attracted a greater share of nonacademic readers. Indeed, all of the e-mail I have received about the issue has come from nonhistorians. A high-school English teacher from Texas, for example, wrote to say that he was going to use the translations in a class exercise on the Declaration as literature.
Such projects easily establish the way that we can do more online -- offer fuller documentation, reach larger audiences. But can we do anything different? That is the distinction drawn by the scholar Janet H. Murray, in her book Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, between "additive" and "expressive" features of new media. She makes the useful analogy to early films, which were initially called "photoplays" and were thought of as additions that combined photography with theater. Only when filmmakers learned to use such techniques as montage, close-ups, and zooms as a part of storytelling did photoplays give way to the new, expressive form of movies.
What would a scholarship that made expressive rather than just additive use of new media look like? That was the goal of a more ambitious project that we undertook with American Quarterly (http://chnm.gmu.edu/aq). In setting up the project, we wanted to encourage unconventional departures in form, while retaining the conventional validation and peer review that characterize scholarly publication. But we soon realized that it would be unfair to ask people to submit hypertext essays on speculation. If, as would normally be the case, we rejected many of them, the authors would have almost no other journals to which they could send their work. Our compromise was to invite people to submit proposals for online scholarly articles. Out of 20 proposals, we gave a go-ahead to four.
The authors took differing approaches to putting scholarship online. Thomas Thurston's "Hearsay of the Sun: Photography, Identity, and the Law of Evidence in Nineteenth-Century American Courts" does something that, at first glance, seems straightforward -- but is rarely, if ever, accomplished in print scholarship. It presents not just an argument about the legal status of photography in the 19th century, but also virtually all of the evidence that underlies (or even undercuts) the argument. One can read Thurston and one can read 42 court decisions, articles, and excerpts from various novels and legal treatises. Of course, given enough pages (not a small matter), that might be done as well in a print journal.
But Thurston also offers us something else: a system for seamlessly linking argument and evidence, a new scholarly technology, if you will. He does that by taking advantage of two simple features of Web browsers: the "anchor" tag, which makes it possible to move the reader directly from one reference to the paragraph from which it originated, and the "frame," which enables Thurston to keep all of the pieces (argument, footnotes, sources, illustrations) of his article on a single screen.
James Castonguay's "The Spanish-American War in U.S. Media Culture" also provides us with a scholarly innovation in the way that it connects evidence and argument. The "illustrations" include actual films rather than just film stills.
For a scholar of comics, as well, the Web offers the opportunity to transcend the limits of print publication. A print journal would find it prohibitively expensive to include the more than 50 color illustrations that accompany David Westbrook's "From Hogan's Alley to Coconino County." Moreover, Westbrook enables a kind of simple interactivity that print cannot easily replicate -- he encourages the reader to interact with the evidence and test his or her ability to see what the seasoned scholar notices.
Take a look at Richard F. Outcault's September 20, 1896 "Hogan's Alley" strip, which depicts a chaotic scene of dozens of people and pets packed into an urban back street. Westbrook's caption, "The Kid as Anti-Authoritarian," provokes you to consider the cartoon and think for yourself about why he gave it that label. But when you click on the caption, a red square highlights the section of the cartoon that Westbrook finds most revealing -- the working-class residents of the alley beating up the dogcatcher, who is seen as a symbol of public authority. A second level of caption leads you to a more detailed analysis of class relations in Outcault's strips.
With such interactivity and hypertextuality, Westbrook goes beyond providing a richer body of evidence than in print, to offering a different mode of argumentation. Considered from a linear perspective, his essay consists of three sections, on "The Business of the Strips," "The Culture of the Marketplace in the Early Comic Strip," and "Spectatorship and Framing in the Early Comic Strip" -- with an "appendix" presenting all of the illustrations used in the essay. But conceptually, Westbrook argues that he is doing something else entirely. Each of the three sections, he writes, "approaches the subject matter from a different direction and defends a distinct analysis." Still, the three threads add up to a single essay, "because none of the threads can stand alone," he maintains. "Each depends on concepts and observations built up in the other threads" to make a general argument about the ways that comics "work through vital cultural conflicts."
In the case of Louise Krasniewicz and Michael Blitz's "Dreaming Arnold Schwarzenegger," the additional online offerings add up to quite a bit more. The essay deliberately defies easy summary. It is, in part, an exploration of our celebrity culture and Schwarzenegger's iconic place in it and, in part, a discussion of the problem of representation, in dreams and hypertext. As the authors self-reflexively admit, the ultimate "subject matter is us." Such disparate goals explain why the site includes -- among other things -- descriptions of Krasniewicz's and Blitz's 154 dreams about Arnold; brief comments on at least 18 of his films; detailed essays on two films; 15 magazine covers featuring Arnold; and dozens of 1995 e-mails between Krasniewicz and Blitz discussing love, life, and Arnold. But such an exhaustive (and perhaps exhausting) archive does not exhaust the site, which also contains dozens of links to other Web sites, from Harvard University's Laboratory of Neurophysiology to the Arnold Schwarzenegger Classic Body Building Competition, along with multiple modes of navigation.
If all that seems a bit chaotic, that is, according to Krasniewicz and Blitz, precisely the point. They were attracted to hypertext, they tell us, because the conventional scholarly forms (book, article, conference paper) did not seem to meet the needs of their subject and their analysis. "We needed a medium, a forum," they write, "that would allow us to incorporate not just the more formal components of investigative research, but also the kinds of discoveries and reflections that are more traditionally relegated to the margins of qualitative research." They find in hypertext "a mechanism for connecting disparate information in the same way that a dream does." At least for Krasniewicz and Blitz, hypertext doesn't merely allow them to do a better job of representing the fullness of their work on Schwarzenegger; it is the only way of representing it.
Collectively, then, these four essays point up the potential advantages of the new medium for the presentation of scholarship. Still, they are, in the end, more successful as additive than as expressive uses of new media. They give us more. But have they transformed the nature or quality of scholarly argumentation? Castonguay's essay, for example, is rich in multimedia evidence, but it still advances the kind of scholarly argument familiar to readers of film and American-studies journals -- an argument about how race, gender, and imperialism were inscribed in film.
Nevertheless, perhaps at some level more does become different. As Randy Bass points out in one of the three commentaries on the experiment that we published in the print version of American Quarterly, the articles alter the traditional scholarly relationship between argument and evidence, between story and archive (particularly in the work of Krasniewicz and Blitz, where it could be said that the archive is the article). For those of us thinking about the future of electronic publication, what may be most important about these essays is that they provoke us to think about the intellectual and practical problems of doing scholarship in cyberspace.
Unless we attend to those practical problems, the "digestion" of new technology is likely to cause considerable indigestion.
One issue is the way that the unsettled state of the technology expands the job of Web authors. They must, for example, become software testers, since pages designed for Netscape on a Wintel machine will look different when viewed with Internet Explorer or on a Macintosh. Authors for the print version of American Quarterly are not expected to know page-layout software, while electronic authors must know considerably more than that. They need to become programmers and designers, with technical expertise rarely learned in humanities doctoral programs, and the judgment to create an attractive site.
These problems -- technical, production, design -- do not bother print authors in scholarly journals, chiefly because such journals operate according to a conventional set of standards in layout, typography, and format that were already well established by 1899. In the end, it is the absence of clear standards that makes scholarly work in hypertext both exciting and problematic. Standards are inherently conservative; they are, in part, what make conventional scholarly articles so conventional. But while standards can be deadening, they can also make scholarly articles easy to read, at least by those who know the "codes." Most academics can quickly get the main points of a scholarly article -- they can rapidly find the thesis in the first few pages; the conclusions on the last two pages; and a sense of the sources used through a quick scan of the footnotes.
Such reading skills are worthless in confronting the hypertext essays we published. Not only is the thesis hard to find quickly, but it is not always clear that there is a thesis. Where is the beginning? The end? Reader expectations about the investment of time required to master an essay are entirely disrupted. Do you need to read about Krasniewicz's and Blitz's 154 dreams or view all 64 film clips in Castonguay's essay to have "read" their articles? In effect, those works undercut the unwritten social contract that exists between readers and writers of scholarly essays -- a social contract in which the author agrees to follow conventions of argumentation, organization, and documentation, and the reader agrees to devote a certain amount of time to give the article a fair reading.
And that suggests another issue for electronic publishing. Our innovative hypertexts have been read (or at least visited) substantially less than the more conventional digital supplements that we posted on the Declaration of Independence. Are readers afraid of them?
Evolving new standards and conventions -- creating a new scholarly social contract -- is not going to be easy. But if we are serious about trying to find ways to do something genuinely expressive with the new media -- to create a scholarship that would unsettle J. Franklin Jameson -- then we need to attend seriously to developing the next generation of writers (and readers) of scholarly hypertexts.
Roy Rosenzweig is a professor of history and director of the Center for History and New Media (http://chnm.gmu.edu) at George Mason University.
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