 The Personal Route
After I wrote a review
of Richard Lanham's The Electronic Word, I tried to find
other reviews. I tried using 'gopher' for an hour using my
computer account with the university to help me locate some. I
connected to several libraries in California. Either I was
disallowed from logging on, not having a userid and password for
these library data-bases, or the connection was of no help in
tracking down reviews of Lanham's book. I also tried to find
reviews of Lanham's book through other means using gopher. One
service I found would fax me articles (at a price of about
$10/article!) and this was useful in locating articles by but not
reviews of Lanham.
An extremely thoughtful Research Grants brochure issued by
the Council on Library Resources points to the problem.
"Despite many claims and assertions, the information
structure of the future has not yet taken shape, but the pace
of change is such that it is imperative that 'architects' of
great skill, who are concerned with the well-being of
universities, scholarship, and libraries, go to work with
some sense of co-ordination before a structure is imposed by
default. [1]
I was finally able to locate a review by getting Lanham's
Email address from gopher and sending a note to him that asked
about reviews. An interesting solution: go straight to the author
himself. [2]
Infra-structure, the World Wide Web,
and Publishing
Lanham's book, unlike
Heim's Electric Language: a philosophical investigation of
word processing, does speculate extensively on the
consequences for the Humanities of the development of an
electronic infra-structure. Certainly it seems to me that the
more global changes to the Humanities and, more particularly,
within the art of writing, will be more strongly related to
changes in the infra structure of publishing and
dissemination than to the less general phenomenon of word
processing. Heim had some interesting things to say about word
processing as a phenomenon, but the ways in which the infra
structure, the market of ideas, will be changed by computer
technology will be more significant than changes brought about by
the phenomenon of word processing.
For instance, if it was possible for me to access
electronically (for a price, no doubt) articles and books
relating to the subject of Lanham's and Heim's books, I might be
a bit more eloquent on the subject. More generally, such a
structuring of texts would make learning easier--provided that
the reader isn't a total rookie in the particular field or topic.
I'm interested in participating in making my texts available
on-line in what is called the World Wide Web. Html (hypertext
mark-up language) allows you to insert 'hot spots' within a text
that, when the reader clicks on them, take the reader to another
file. The file can be in Japan or wherever. You could make the
bibliography full of hot spots that allow the reader to
immediately reference the books in the bibliography. Assuming
that the authors in the bibliography are willing to participate
in this way and make their texts available.
Better yet, allow the reader to first jump to reviews or
summaries of the books and then they can jump or not to the main
text.
Were Lanham to participate by making his own such structure
on the world wide web, you can see how we would begin to form a
web. Eventually the web would become hopelessly circuitous and
the reader would not feel comfortable navigating this spider's
web of discourse. In such case, there would need to be roadmaps
set up along the way. But who writes the roadmaps? I suppose that
would be up to each person participating in the web i.e., the
bibliographies they site largely determine their power in forming
the routes through which readers navigate.
You can imagine a group of fifty writers, for instance, who
site one another and no others. If you happen to enter the web
through those writer's texts, you will not find references to the
other 100 writers who are, in fact, in the same web. The other
100 writers may site the original 50. So if you enter the web
through the 100 writers' texts, you may access the 50. And so
forth.
Also, the software used to view the texts could allow readers
in Japan to 'annotate' my text. They could click on a particular
line and type in an annotation. I could choose to include the
annotation in my text or not. If I were to accept the annotation,
the next reader would see an asterisk or some such mark beside
the line. Should the reader click on the asterisk, a list of
annotations would appear (by author, presumably) and the reader
could then click on the author's name and the annotation would
appear on the screen beside the main text. Readers could add
footnotes consisting both of commentary and links to other
writings. [3]
Libraries and Publishing
A library's 'card
catalogue' might be very much like it is now except that it would
also list ways to access a writer's web site and might list the
author's publications available on the web site. Perhaps the
'card catalogue' would be on-line and could actually connect to
the writer's web site. Also, I note that libraries already
subscribe to various services that update them on periodical
indexes. This is often done via cdroms mailed to the libraries.
The available such services, from what I gather, are disparate
and incomplete.
Part of the goal, I suppose, is to supply some sort of
centrality while allowing the sort of opportunities available via
the world wide web. Centrality that remains connected to the
periphery.
You can see that if we could essentially give people access
to an Internet site via world wide web that housed our
publications and contained bibliographies of other works of
interest, then publishing would be very different indeed. The
screens of information are attractive as computer screens get
these days. Not ugly ASCII. If it were possible (and it is) to
set up the system so that if someone accesses my web site, they
are given a list of things that they can download (together with
reviews, etc.) and also prices associated with each item (perhaps
some are free, some are not) and a method whereby the reader,
should she choose to 'purchase' one of my writings, would not
give me her credit card number but would be billed anyway (so
that she doesn't need to tell me her number) that would change
publishing quite a bit.
And the buyer could have the option of buying either print
editions or electronic versions of the work. If the files were
formatted in Adobe Acrobat format and/or postscript, the buyer
could print out a handsome volume.
Would this put publishers out of business? I doubt it. The
situation reminds me of the conversation I had recently with a
librarian who said that he was "terrified" about the
threat (as he perceived it) of computer communications to
libraries and the quality of information libraries can offer. My
own feeling is that libraries will not diminish in their
importance and will not disappear but, rather, will grow more
important within the entire economy of the market of ideas. Or
they may, should they choose to do so.
The University of Victoria library, try as it may, cannot
possibly collect all the journals and books that it needs to in
order to remain current and useful. It's terribly out-dated on
most topics. The literary journals it has access to are usually
dull and predictable. The library has to depend too much on its
staff and the English and Creative Writing departments for its
expertise on what to buy. Regardless of how well informed they
are, they will not be aware of most of the publications
available.
How much better for the library if it had access to literary
information brokers who could supply them with structured indices
of periodicals and other information brokerage companies and
publishers. The index would allow the user to connect to the
world wide web site of each of these indexed entities. And the
user could obtain the periodicals, recordings, etc., directly
through the ether in this fashion.
The library thus becomes not a primary site for texts (each
library could specialise, perhaps and gather a world reputation
for a particular subject) but a supplier of access to texts and
other information.
Hence the library will continue to play a crucial (and
expanding) role making information available. Librarians will
realise that they are not in the business of supplying primary
texts but of supplying access to those texts. Also, they will be
in the business of supplying other sorts of information as well.
Libraries will be in the business of supplying access to
information and they should play a crucial role in constructing
the systems that supply that access. Otherwise the business
sector will dominate this enterprise.
The description I gave
above of how each writer or purveyor of one sort of information
or another can have their own Internet site on the world wide web
(or on some other information system) is exciting, but without
the sort of centrality offered by publishers, the seeker of
poetry (or whatever) is bound to find herself in the bewildering
position we currently are in when navigating the Internet trying
to find just about any information. Publishers will become the
sort of information brokers mentioned above. They will probably
still publish books, but they will also provide libraries with
the sort of indexes I mentioned. And, in turn, they will pay a
fee to umbrella organisations that will advertise the publisher's
wares to a larger audience.
The publishers will still publish books, but their business
will increasingly become oriented toward electronic texts (and
other forms of information). An author will choose a publisher
and either have that work available at the publisher's site or
have the web connection set up so that the fee the reader pays
for the book goes partly to the author and partly to the
publisher. There is no reason why the text cannot reside solely
on the author's web site, really. The interested reader connects
to the publisher's site, clicks on the author's book, and the
book is downloaded to the reader via the author's web site.
I see this presents a rather nasty solution for those who are
whining about copyright issues. What I've outlined provides for
publishers and authors receiving a fee more often than what
currently happens--insofar as the library does not hold a public
copy of the text but only provides access to copies for sale.
However, there will undoubtedly arise sufficiently many
pirate libraries (or pirate info dealers--whatever) that the
level of subterfuge and underhanded dealings will remain more or
less constant and congruent with our nature--resulting in the
same sort of game we currently play.
Footnotes
- Richard A. Lanham, The Electronic Word (Chicago
and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), p.
135. Return to essay.
- Here
is a link to the review by James O'Donnell. The
review appeared in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review--which
makes many articles available! Return to essay.
- "Whatever happens,
however we rearrange our marketplace of ideas--as sooner
or later we certainly shall--our sense of what
"publication" means is bound to change. We will
be able to make our commentary part of the text, and
weave an elaborate series of interlocked commentaries
together. We will, that is, be moving from a series of
orations to a continuing conversation and, as we have
always known, these two rhetorics differ
fundamentally." (Lanham, p. 22) Return to essay.
© Jim Andrews
Created: 7/28/96
Last Modified: May 2005
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