Scholarly Journals in the Digital Age: Old versus New Forms of Inquiry

I am not a scholar of the history of academic journals. Academic journals are not, except very incidentally, a field of study for me but a field of my professional practice (or, as our employers like to call it, 'professional service,' which, as you know, means 'heavy labour that need not be recognized or remunerated'). So the observations that follow are mostly in the nature of anecdotes and outlooks from my personal experience as an editor. I have recently stepped down from a five-year stint as co-editor of Postmodern Culture (PMC), which is now back under the guiding hand of Eyal Amiran, one of its co-founders along with John Unsworth. My own connection with PMC – initially as a board member and review editor, before serving as co-editor – likewise dates back to its founding, in 1990, when Amiran and Unsworth established it as the first all-electronic peer-reviewed journal in the humanities: 'an experiment in electronic publishing,' to quote the promotional boilerplate.

It was quite an experiment fifteen years ago, before the implementation of hypertext and the World Wide Web, before the invention of Mosaic, before the first national Internet service provider – and before the 'breakthrough' of those $200 28KB modems. A lot has changed in that interval. These days, a peer-reviewed journal in the humanities can scarcely distinguish itself on the basis of being electronic. According to recent statistics, roughly half of all humanities journals are available in digital format. If accurate, this figure shows humanities journals gradually closing the gap with science titles, of which more than 80 per cent are available online.¹ Even 'all-electronic' – that is, paperless – seems a muted claim in these days of 'flip-pricing,' whereby the print version of a journal, if there is one, can be tossed into the subscription package for a nominal extra charge, like a once desirable little house on a suddenly far more desirable lot.²

If all this were not enough to render PMC's 'experiment in electronic publishing' a quaint relic, or at any rate a hopeless redundancy, the field of study that from the start formed a key focus of editorial energy and a main area of submissions for us – that of new media and new information technologies in their aesthetic, cultural, and political aspects – now has more than a dozen journals devoted to it, exclusively or in significant part. New Media, Digital Media, and Humanities Computing have, after all, become recognized sub-fields with a foothold in the discipline of English. I have advised three students in recent years who have taken tenure-track jobs in first-rank English departments on the basis of their abilities and credentials in digital technology. In fact, our students who have combined literary training with skill and creativity as programmers, and who can show publications on digital culture, have, I think, done better of late in the academic job market than students with literary training alone.

These changes in the technology of academic journal publishing and in the place of new technologies within the discipline of literary and cultural study have been profound, and they have presented a formidable challenge to PMC in its ongoing struggle to differentiate itself from an increasing number of other, increasingly similar journals. But the changes have not, I think, had a very significant impact on journal publications, in PMC or elsewhere, considered individually. However much the advent of electronic venues, searchable databases of academic work, broadband access, and so on have reshaped our scholarly practices as researchers, these developments have done little to transform our scholarly 'output' – the published article itself.

As Cheryl Ball, among others, has pointed out, new media scholarship has essentially consisted of conventional scholarship about new media rather than of scholarship within which new media have been taken up and deployed toward innovative ends – that is, toward a break with traditional print-bound models.³ The actual quantity of scholarship of this more innovative sort, as represented in academic journals, is infinitesimal, and it is mostly to be found in...