Raising the Wind

A year ago, the James Joyce Quarterly proudly marked an extraordinary milestone by publishing its fiftieth anniversary issue. In collecting some twenty articles from our archives alongside essays and commentary from the journal’s three editors, we sought to give some sense of the ideas, energies, and arguments that helped solidify Joyce’s position at the pinnacle of modern world literature. With this installment of the journal, I now want to begin the process of looking forward—if not to our next fifty years then at least to the next ten. The scholarly world of 2015, after all, is far different than the one into which the JJQ was born in 1963. Indeed, it’s far different than the one that greeted my own arrival in 2001. These changes require a flexible, adaptive response that will allow the journal to navigate the unpredictable flux of technologies, audiences, and intellectual traditions through which it circulates. I’m thus briefly reviving my “Raising in the Wind” column in an effort to begin outlining some thoughts about the challenges as well as the opportunities ahead of us.

The journal is sustained by its three-pronged mission: to circulate high-quality, peer-reviewed critical and scholarly work; to provide a comprehensive review of books about Joyce and his works published throughout the world; and, in the words of Tom Staley’s opening editorial, “to draw Joyceans together” so that we might sustain a robust sense of intellectual community. For decades, these directives comfortably coexisted between the covers of a journal that operated in what we can now look back on as the slow time of print culture, when arguments could unfold across years and quarterly publications could bear news that seemed immediate and fresh. It was also a time when publishing resources themselves were scarce, and ideas had to be carefully vetted before they could be widely shared with a group of readers. New ideas, new publications, and even word about conferences, performances, or exhibitions found their way into the world with some difficulty, making them all the more valuable when they appeared in the JJQ’s pages.

The slow time of print, of course, now coexists alongside the fast time of globalized digital networks that have made the circulation of ideas and news alike all but frictionless. Whether this has plunged us into what Nicholas Carr calls the “shallows” or instead opened what Clay Shirky terms a “cognitive surplus” remains a matter of contentious debate. For academic publishers, however, the consequences are enormous. Governments, institutions, individual readers, and even authors often demand that information should be provided free of charge. At the same time, we see expansive new assessment regimes that seek to quantify impact based, in part, on the rigors of a journal’s editorial apparatus. These are largely incommensurable demands, of course, but both are pressed with equal urgency. The information contained within journals, furthermore, has become increasingly compartmentalized, severed not only into individual pieces that can be served through digital aggregators like MUSE, but into increasingly tiny strings of data that can be searched, extracted, and quoted. It’s fair to say, in fact, that machines “read” articles before we do, sorting them for new kinds of consumption that are often far removed from the slow time of print culture. The patient work of the bibliographer and editor now often gives way to nearly instantaneous Google searches and the “flattening” of information. This closes off some modes of access to the material in the JJQ even as it opens others. Amid the tumult of such change, how can the JJQ remain true to its mission even while adapting to new modes of circulation, discovery, and publication?

This question is complex since it involves the allocation of financial resources, the cultivation of expertise, and, indeed, the very nature of twenty-first-century humanities research. I certainly have my own ideas, and the JJQ has, in fact, initiated a number of changes that will be slowly taking hold over the course of the next year. We have begun, for example, a fundamental redesign of our website that will make it much easier to use...