Three Things on Publishing

This month I’ve been thinking a bit about editing and publishing. Partly because I’ve been working on a bunch of books that are trickling out from my nano-press, The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota, and partly because I’m contributing to a NEH funded seminar on Saturday about digital archaeological data and publishing. 

There has also been a good bit of publishing related news lately. Some of it is bad news, like the closing of Gettysburg Review, a little magazine published for three decades at Gettysburg College. Some of its is interesting: such as recent discussions and lawsuits associated with the use of texts to train natural language modeling software like ChatGPT. Some of it is business as usual: the purchase of Brill by De Gruyter which marks the merging of two of the larger for-profit academic publishers.

As a result, I thought it might be a useful moment to post on three things that have crossed my mind lately. None of these things are particularly related to one another, but it is Tuesday so a “Three Things Tuesday” seem sufficiently alliterative to stand in for a Three Things Thursday.

First, whenever I hear about the closing of a university literary magazine, my heart goes out to the staff who worked so hard to keep that magazine alive, relevant, and vibrant. The ephemerality of so many of these little journals makes them incredibly fragile things in the best of times, and while there’s beauty in their fragility, it does little to soften the pain, disappointment, and sense of displacement that their closure will inevitably produces. People are losing their jobs and the culture industry is remorseless in its lack of social or economic safety nets. So much of the work to keep little magazines going is done by precarious and contingent workers. 

The contingency of culture workers make little magazines convenient targets for administrators seeking to promote their commitment to austerity. More than that, a certain kind of administrator views literary magazines as non-essential, as luxuries, and as somehow separate from the broader mission of their institutions. This makes little magazines ideologically vulnerable as they are synonymous with a set of values that people with particular political investments see as frivolous. Efforts to promote these publications as the workforce training for editors and publishers invariably (and perhaps appropriately) falls on deaf ears.  

Invariably, when you read about one of these little magazines closing, you wonder about how these publications will be archived and disseminated after the magazines has closed. (And I realize that this might sound a bit crass when people are losing their jobs.) Writers who contribute to these magazines develop an investment, of sorts, in their continued relevance and even the availability of back issues. One wonders what the Gettysburg College community (or the community of authors, editors, and readers) will do to keep the Gettysburg Review relevant and influential. Will it have a second act as relevant archive for the turn of the century writing?

Second, I’ve been mulling over the changing relationship between authors, editors, and publishers. I’m a bit of a romantic when I imagine a time where a publisher (or an editor) developed personal relationships with authors and worked with them to produce the best versions of their works. I know, of course, that things were never that simple, but I wonder whether there remains room for the small publisher who works closely with an author (or an editor). 

I say this as someone who has encountered authors who appear to really enjoy working closely with me as a publisher and editor and as someone who has discovered that some authors find my familiar style and lack of professionalism problematic (and to be honest, offensive). To be clear, I find working with professional editors and publishers can be a joy, but I also realize that the structures that they impose on the publishing process invariably shape my work in ways commercial character of publish at the expense of, say, originality or individual creativity. As the publishing industry continues to go through paroxysms and consolidations, I often wonder whether commercial concerns will produce increasingly formulaic publications (susceptible both to streamlined workflows and non-human readers) academic publishing in the future will bifurcate between creative nano-presses that are ephemeral, occasional, and generally unprofitable, and massive mega-presses whose automated workflows churn out a growing quantity of cookie cutter works.

This is a long way to say that perhaps we should stop regarding professionalism as an unqualified good thing. Embrace amateurism. 

Finally, I’ve been thinking a bit how the growing swarm of non-human readers — whether ChatGPT or other forms of knowledge aggregators — will shape how we produce knowledge. As my students are increasingly drawn to natural language models to help them refine and sometimes improve their writing, I increasingly wonder how I should train my students (and myself) to write for a world mediated by bots.

This isn’t meant to suggest that we only write for bots (or that we only write for any one audience as a general rule), but to some extent academic writing is defined, in some ways, by accessibility and even discoverability. This is particularly true as we embrace our identities as “cyborgs” hybridized through technology. How do we introduce students to seeing these systems not as external crutches to our creative processes, but as integral to how we produce knowledge?