Passing the Baton

A historian maps a research site, explores and seeks evidence, creates a thesis—laboring to interpret some patch of the human condition. An author historian emerges from the research to tell some audience what s/he has found. In that second moment of articulation, the author's task is to intimately imagine readers, calling forth awareness of the kinship that connects writer and reader. At Technology and Culture, imagining the reader can be tricky because our readers come from so many different specific interests—medieval European sewage management, nano-scale probe microscopes, kitchen stoves, nonpoint source pollution, a nearly endless list. The scope of T&C's readership calls for a second round of editing, after the referees have signed off on the originality, credibility, and substance of the core thesis. In the second round we ask authors to stretch their imaginations so that they can write both within and beyond the circle of their fellow specialists.

Writing "Passing the Baton" brings to mind years of conversations with authors as we have negotiated the relationship between serious research and good writing. Sometimes imagining the readers draws out a fresh articulation, something that transcends the first achievement of a strong thesis. When that happens T&C's core mission comes to life as a forum wherein scholars from many perspectives educate one another and one another's core readers about questions of compelling interest. This same kind of conversation happens in T&C's essays and reviews. When thoughtful people stretch to imagine the wide world of T&C's readership, sometimes magical things happen.

The intersection between research and writing in a scholar's work got me thinking of how the same tension works for an editor. The editor is ultimately responsible for all the work that ensures quality on every page. But if editorial quality control parallels the scholar's responsibility to get the research right, how does the scholar's act of imagining the readers work for an editor? "Passing the Baton" gives me an opportunity to consider the challenges of editing as a way to celebrate the work that Suzanne Moon and her team have already begun at the University of Oklahoma and the half-century tradition of editing as it has emerged over T&C's lifetime. First, then, something about the editorial team and quality control, then some thoughts about how editors imagine the constituencies on which T&C depends for its existence. Let's call these two aspects of the editor's responsibility precision management and the ancient art and labors of hospitality.

Precision Management

The author whose research creates the work shares responsibility with the editorial team for the quality of the finished piece. Taken together, however, they are only the most visible members in a network of what is necessarily a larger community of intellectual practice. From the perspective of T&C/SHOT's long-term health it may be the least visible people in the journal's communality who are most important, the referees who work anonymously and without measurable rewards. T&C looks for four referees but does not always find that many. At a minimum a manuscript requires one or several readers with expertise about the author's major topics and at least one who is familiar with T&C's intellectual and rhetorical standards. Our database includes, as of this writing, 4,896 entries of whom about 3,000 are active, go-to resources for manuscript refereeing and book reviewing. One could argue that the editor's most important responsibility lies in choosing referees—and, mutatis mutandis, book reviewers—who will read a manuscript intelligently and fairly. Their reports, therefore, directly address the editor, who depends on their judgment to ensure that T&C gets the finished work right. Editor and referees form the heart of the journal's responsibility for quality control. However, as I discovered early in my stint as editor, many T&C referees address their reports to the author as well. If there is a more edifying dimension to academic scholarship than the painstaking care with which referees encourage and criticize authors...