This webtext explores how the World Wide Web is changing the ways that authors, publishers, vendors and archivists view the production, distribution, and management of new academic knowledge. Using Foucault's metaphor of heterotopic spaces ("living spaces" as opposed to utopian spaces), we theorize heterotopic spaces online. We examine five current models of archiving disciplinary knowledge and then suggest four concurrent transition models for print and academic institutions going online.  Drawing from these models, we conclude by exploring how the community of Computers and Writing might follow the lead of physics and related fields toward a fully automated, self-publishing, raw archive model of storing all new knowledge in our field. As Thomas Kuhn suggests, paradigm shifts do not occur with discoveries of new phenomena, but with new ways of seeing and talking about phenomena (in our case, archiving), which become normal ways of seeing and talking. We seek to accelerate the conversation on digital storage of new knowledge by offering a new vision of academic publishing.

"Heterotopic Spaces Online" was originally written for Dene Grigar and John Barber's New Worlds, New Words, which will be published by MIT Press in the fall of 1998. This webbed version is slightly revised and reorganized.

Respond to this hypertext on the Kairos CoverWeb Interactive Forum