Introduction
Facing the Future of Electronic Publishing

Enculturation, Vol. 4, No. 1, Spring 2002

Past, Present, Future

Electronic Publication has come a long way since 1996 (when we began work on Enculturation). RhetNet was the only e-journal with any status. Kairos had been established (also by graduate students), but had yet to attain its current standing. Today there are a number of electronic journals in the discipline, as the existence of this multi-journal issue attests, started by graduate students as well as established professors. Some print journals have added an e-journal or archive (CCC, JAC, CC), some print journals have become e-journals (The Writing Instructor), some e-journals have been able to go print (Readerly/Writerly Texts), and some new journals have been established from the beginning as purely electronic entities (Academic.Writing, Enculturation, Kairos). It seems clear that academic publishing is entering a transitional period between literacy and electracy, spurred on, in part, by the current economic situation.[1] As print becomes more costly, publishers are cutting back on the number of books and journals they agree to publish, and as state budgets are squeezed tighter and tighter, administrators are less willing to fund the production of print journals (in some cases even asking print journals to move onto the web). This situation runs concurrent with an ever-greater publish or perish model, as Universities vie for greater credibility and renown in the expansion and development of the new corporate university. Even though the ethos of electronic publication was in serious question early on (1995-96)—supposedly anyone could publish anything, so the entire web was held under suspicion—the new economic times, and the growing importance of the web in our culture, has prompted academia to develop more definitive protocols for electronic publishing. Many administrations and tenure review boards are recognizing that blind peer review of submissions is not restricted to print (Sweeney). Consequently, editors are moving forward into an electronic world, a move that is setting the stage for newer forms of textuality.

This particular multi-journal issue is one such experiment in form. I began this project as a special issue of Enculturation, but came to realize that such a topic lent it self to experimentation at the journal level, not just the article level (thanks in part to discussions with Doug Eyman of Kairos). Print technology does not lend itself to a journal issue that incorporates multiple journals. It is possible, but the articles would remain separated by space/time. The kind of space provided by the web makes a more integrated multi-journal issue possible. The editors have had to reinvent the wheel as we have moved through the process of putting this issue together, but we think the experiment is worthwhile. What good is a new space if the avenues for communication, collaboration, and community are not followed? As Susan Lang notes in her recent College English article on electronic dissertations, using the web as an avenue for the distribution of print-based forms is presently confronting us, but the avenue for experimentation with the forms of textuality is still but a side-street. As she notes, the promise of changes in textuality made by early predictors like Landow and Bolter "have not been fulfilled in large part; indeed, principles of print-based text construction have found their way into web design" (692). While you will certainly find such examples of remediation in this issue and in the structure of our collaboration, the space provided by the web and electronic journals means that experimentation will happen at the level of journal articles (if not the structure of journals themselves) well before it makes its way to dissertations. And this is the focus of Enculturation's contributions to the special issue.

— BH

Note

[1] As the recent letter sent out by MLA's president makes so starkly clear:
Greenblatt, Stephen. "Call for Action on Problems in Scholarly Book Publishing: Special Letter from the President." (back)

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