Digital Knowledge Production
Posted in The Gnovis Blog
I thought I would open my year of blogging by pointing to a post that is getting a lot of attention at the Transformative Works and Cultures Symposium Blog called “Breaking The Primacy of Print” by Karen Hellekson, in which she discusses the decision made by the TWC founders not to produce a print issue.
I have a number of strong feelings in this regard, and am happy and proud to see that TWC has taken such strong stances that may trade some of their mainstream credit in order to better reflect the values of the community they’re based in and also to push the envelope of the future development of scholarship. It also pings my environmental sensitivities as all of us in academia have to come to terms with the amount of paper our industry uses and the number of trees that must equate to.
We here at gnovis also occupy a very specific space within the world of academia. Being a graduate student enterprise, there is more room for us to take risks than, say, junior faculty and I believe that we take full advantage of that. One much touted way that we capitalize on that is through our commitment to interdisciplinarity, but I think that our online format is similarly revolutionary for all the reasons Hellekson describes. And, like TWC, we also remain rigorous with our peer-review process.
Of course, for many of us who have grown up on the internet, the idea that what takes place there should be any less legitemate than anything else seems almost absurd. But hopefully, at least in this area, our future is digital.