Response

SYLLECTA CLASSICA 16 (2005): 263–268 RESPONSE DAVID WHITEHEAD Technological revolutions are hard to live through (or they wouldn’t deserve their name). Grasping the totality of change they bring—the balance of pain and gain—is difficult as well, except in long retrospect. An historian of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries might look back and grasp, in our case (and with apologies for the anachronism), “Mechanical Publishing and the Classics Profession.” But Electronic Publishing, as one component of the overall computer revolution, has come in the adult lifetime of most people here, and its import is still emerging. Should we invoke Cornford’s principle of Unripe Time and declare the topic premature, for 2005? When issues are complex, temporizing looks attractive. Particularly so when inertia (whether of individuals or institutions) is reinforced by vested interests, unwilling to concede the need for change and its disturbing corollaries. Once open discussion begins, vested interests—conventional academic publishers and the rest—will perhaps have their say. And if so, good: we do want to know how imaginatively they are facing the changing environment they share with us. Still, I must give my own response. I am (in your terms) a Full Professor , of thirteen years standing. I use computer hardware and software with scant understanding of how, below screen level, they work. I find them, even so, an almost unqualified boon, both on my own desk-top and more widely—and whichever mode (Transmit or Receive) I am in. I therefore strive to enlarge my awareness of what is going on in the electronic media, and my “comfort zone” in using it. With that much autobiography as preface (or disclaimer), the context of these papers, and my own reflections on this issue prompt me to the following (inevitably summary) observations. There are eight of them in all: 264 SYLLECTA CLASSICA 16 (2005) 1) Though we as Classicists are who we are, I cannot see any signi ficant facet of this issue which is genuinely peculiar to ourselves. A decade or so ago it might have been different, when (e.g.) the gremlins in Greek fonts and other non-standard characters were more troublesome. But nowadays misgivings about electronic publication on that sort of score have surely lost their force. Instead, in the distinction that Peter Suber used, Classics is simply one SSH field amongst many—albeit one which, as he notes, rates low in “public demand.” 2) Another way in which the Classics profession is no different from many others—including others outside academic life—is that it is a gerontocracy. That is troubling, because where the present crisis bites most sharply is in the middle and lower reaches of the profession, the HTP (Hiring, Tenure, and Promotion) zones. We, the gerontocrats, simply must ensure that Jeff Rydberg-Cox and others like him do not suffer, in their professional environment, in ways that we ourselves never had to. 3) How we do this obviously entails support for (and involvement in) collective enterprises and reforms, of the kinds our speakers have described; but as context for it all there is our own personal mind-set. People like me have enjoyed the pleasure of holding actual books, expensively produced in Princeton or Oxford or wherever, which bear our names. If that is a vanishing luxury, we must not loftily declare that nothing else will do. Rather, we must learn to relish web-based monographs (or other projects) no less. Or there is the ongoing, reciprocal exchange that we have all taken for granted: sending friends and colleagues offprints of one’s latest article. I recently “published” a piece in an on-line journal (Electronic Antiquity), and it seemed wrong to be unable to do this. Inviting people, instead, to consult a website sounded mean-spirited (and presumptuous). Nevertheless, if one can set aside such sentimental—and ultimately trivial—attachments to the past (or the status quo), who can rationally disparage a properly-refereed piece in an electronic medium? 4) Just as the old should be alive to the plight of the young (see item 2 above), so other inequalities of distribution deserve recognition. Those able to stroll into the Widener or...