There has been no shortage of innovation in web-based publishing in the last five years, and this certainly includes web-based S/scholarship that is difficult to count on a CV. That the innovations persist is certainly not surprising. In 2002, many people had not yet heard of blogs or wikis: how time flies.
Briefly, let me mention four new examples of web-only publications that might raise questions about S/scholarship as I discussed it in the original article:
Static web sites similar to what I originally discussed. An excellent example of this is Honeycutt's latest project, a hypertextualized version of Quintilian's Institutes of Oratory. This impressive project appears to have constituted an even bigger undertaking than Honeycutt's work on Aristotle, and it seems destined to me to become as useful a site-- certainly among scholars of rhetoric.
Content Management Sites. I mean content management
sites in two senses here: they are sites powered by a content
management system (Drupal and Plone in these examples), and they
are sites that are about managing a variety of different types of
academic
content. I mentioned one example in my discussion about
"Four (Old)
Examples": http://siteslab.org/,
which replaced Daniel Anderson's SITES homepage. There are many other
examples worth noting. For example, there's the
web site for Writing In Digital Environments (WIDE), a research
center at Michigan State University. Among other things, the WIDE
site includes a blog-like interface, references to publications
and presentations by WIDE participants, and WIDE papers, which the
site describes as "a
short paper series of time-sensitive issues related to topics such
as digital rhetoric, intellectual property and professional and
technical communication" (WIDE, 2006). There's also the web
site for the
Council of
Writing Program Administrators.
Like the other two sites, this CMS-powered page includes a blog-like
interface, position statements from the organization, employment resources,
information on the WPA Network for Media Action, and so forth.
The content and use of these pages continue to problematize the question
of how to count this work on a CV, especially since much
of it walks a fine line between scholarship and service. On the one hand,
I think that these projects are closer to the traditional category
of service than the Anderson and Honeycutt projects I originally discussed
in Version 1.0, work that both Anderson and Honeycutt were encouraged
to call service at the time. On the other hand, WPA scholarly work
has often been problematized by its service-like function. Further
complicating matters is the frequently collaborative nature of these
sorts of projects: for example, it's difficult to articulate who is
the author of the Council
of Writing Program Administrators web site, which complicates
the notions of individual and even joint work traditionally associated
with tenure and promotion processes.
Wikis. By and large, wikis in composition and rhetoric at this point seem to be largely a teaching tool. However, there are some interesting projects that probably could or should count as scholarship. For example, there is Rhetoric and Composition, a wiki-based textbook spearheaded by Matthew Barton. In email correspondence, Barton told me that St. Cloud State University's tenure and promotion system is tied to a union structure that has allowed him to fit this wiki project into both teaching and scholarship: "since I use it in my classes, present on it at conferences, and write about it in book chapters and journal articles when I get the chance." Nonetheless, he did express some reservations about how this project counts as small-s scholarship: "[M]y wiki work hasn't attracted nearly the attention that say, a scholarly monograph, or PMLA or CCC Article would have won. It's more along the lines of, 'That's kinda neat what you're doing with wikis'" (electronic mail communication, July 18, 2007). Outside of but related to computers and writing, Yochai Benkler published a wiki associated with his book The Wealth of Social Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, a space where readers could read summaries of the book, download a PDF version of the entire text, and participate in discussions.
Blogs. Of course, there are blogs, which I believe are the most significant writing and self-publishing phenomenon to come about since the World Wide Web began. I discuss that more in the section "And What About Blogs, Anyway?"
I think it's also worth noting two other trends in academic publishing since this article was originally published.
First, there have been a number of writers in both the academic and the trade book market who have simultaneously published their work in traditional print and electronically. I have already mentioned Benkler's wiki. John Logie's Peers, Pirates, and Persuasion: Rhetoric in the Peer-to-Peer Debates is available via Parlor Press as a traditional print book, an eBook, and as a free PDF, though this does not appear to be the general practice at Parlor Press. My assumption is that given the topic of Logie's book, both the author and publisher agreed that it made sense to offer it for free. Prolific blogger, science fiction writer, and internet activist Cory Doctorow has also made all of his books available via his web site. Again, given Doctorow's work advocating open source publishing and internet file sharing, this is perhaps not surprising.
Second, there has been at least some signs that academic publishers are interested in changing their standard practices for conducting business. The most visible example of this to date is Connexions, a relaunched version of the formerly dormant Rice University Press. Connexions presents itself as a fairly traditional content management system: with a few simple steps, anyone who creates an account can publish their work and have that worked distributed from the web site. However, writers who want to have their work reviewed and then available for on-demand printing have follow the guidelines outlined on the Rice University Press web site. Currently, the press is focusing on books on the topic of art history, and it lists two 2006 releases on its publications page.
What's interesting about these developments is that they seem to be methodologies for more or less solving the problem of making web sites count as the work we do to get tenure and promotion, while simultaneously allowing writers to release their Scholarship (the practice of engaging in work that furthers knowledge in our fields) in electronic form to a wider audience. Obviously, neither Logie's nor Doctorow's work are the same as self-published web sites since it is possible to obtain and read the very traditionally printed books from these authors; books that the publishers agreed to print after a traditional negotiation and editorial process. On the other hand, I think the logic of simultaneous traditional and electronic publishing builds upon the logic of self-published scholarly web sites and has great potential in academic publishing, where the books tend to be expensive and difficult to find. Further, the Rice University Press Connexions project makes it clear that it is possible for academic publishers to support both vetted and self-published S/scholarship.