Eyal Amiran and John Unsworth

"Postmodern Culture: Publishing

in the Electronic Medium."

The Public-Access Computer Systems

Review 2, no. 1 (1991): 67-76.

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1.0 Introduction

Postmodern Culture was founded in 1990 by Eyal Amiran, Greg

Dawes, Elaine Orr, and John Unsworth at North Carolina State

University (professors Dawes and Orr have subsequently stepped

down as editors in order to pursue their research projects,

though both remain on the editorial board).

Postmodern Culture is a peer-reviewed electronic journal which

provides an international, interdisciplinary forum for

discussions of contemporary literature, theory, and culture. It

accepts for consideration both finished essays and working

papers, and carries in each issue fiction and/or poetry, book

reviews, a popular culture column, and announcements. The

journal does not consider essays dealing exclusively with

computer hardware or software, unless those essays raise

significant aesthetic or theoretical issues.

PMC comes out three times a year (September, January, and May)

and is free to the public and to libraries via electronic mail.

Each issue of Postmodern Culture carries a volume and number

designation. The journal is also available on computer diskette

and microfiche; it is distributed in a variety of diskette

formats (Macintosh 3.5", IBM 5.25", or IBM 3.5"), but no issue

will exceed 720 KB of data, the equivalent of one 3.5" or two

5.25" low-density diskettes. The subscription rate for diskette

or microfiche is $15/year for individuals, $30/year for

institutions (in Canada add $3; elsewhere outside the U.S. add

$7). At the present time PMC has about 1,200 subscribers in 17

countries. The journal's ISSN number is 1053-1920.

The editorial board for Postmodern Culture includes researchers

and writers in African American studies, cultural studies, film,

Latin American studies, literature and literary theory,

philosophy, sociology, and religion.

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The board members' primary responsibilities include reading

essays for the journal (approximately four essays a year),

inviting submissions, and helping to publicize the existence of

the journal. Some have also contributed essays. Members were

chosen because of their own performance in their field (or the

promise of it--we chose some younger scholars who were highly

recommended by their colleagues) and because they offer special

knowledge of diverse disciplines, genres, and cultures.

The first volume (numbers 1-3) of the journal included essays on

Latin American politics, eating disorders and spiritual

transcendence, the theory of writing in the hypertext

environment, William Gaddis's novel JR, the implications of the

postmodern critique of identity for the Afro-American community,

the rhetoric of the Persian Gulf War as presented in the New York

Times, the politics of Sartre, AIDS and cyborgs, Ishmael Reed's

The Terrible Two's, and representations of mass culture,

postmodern ethnography, and other subjects.

The journal has also published popular culture columns on the

televising of the Tour de France, Satanism and the mass media,

and female body building, plus fiction by Kathy Acker, a hybrid

theoretical-interpretive-poetic work by Susan Howe, a video

script by Laura Kipnis, and a number of poems and book reviews.

2.0 Distribution

When an issue is published, its table of contents is distributed

(using the Revised LISTSERV program) to all of the journal's

subscribers. This file contains the journal's masthead,

information about subscription and submission, the names of

authors published in that issue, and titles, filenames, and

abstracts for each item in the issue.

Subscribers can then choose to retrieve one essay, several

essays, or the whole issue as a package, using a few simple

LISTSERV commands (it is not necessary for individual subscribers

to have a copy of the LISTSERV program running at their site in

order to issue these commands). Essays can be retrieved as files

or as mail, and all essays are stored in a file list maintained

on the NCSU mainframe, so readers can get copies of material

published in back issues at any time.

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We have found the LISTSERV program to be an extremely flexible

and effective way to publish in this medium. It is widely used,

and it is generally familiar to those who already participate in

network discussion groups. It is also well-documented, and

support for list owners is available both locally (from the

postmaster and support staff at one's site) and through an

electronic discussion group moderated by Eric Thomas, who wrote

the program.

LISTSERV lists can be set up in different ways. For instance,

one can set up a list so that all mail posted to it is

automatically distributed to all subscribers, or so that all mail

posted to the list is sent to the list editor for screening

and/or compilation. Subscription to the list can be open or

restricted, as can access to the names of other subscribers and

to any files stored in association with the list. Furthermore,

the ability to edit files on the file list can be limited to the

editors, permitted to a designated group of readers, or permitted

to all readers. List maintenance and list editing can be

performed by different people (or by a number of people) at the

same site or at different sites, and one can automate certain

functions, such as the distribution of a designated set of files

for new subscribers.

Postmodern Culture is open to public subscription, and its

archived files are available for retrieval. Mail cannot be sent

directly for distribution to the list. Only the editors post and

edit items and maintain the list.

3.0 History

Some of our earliest discussion focused on the format in which we

might distribute the journal. We considered various analogues

and models for what we wanted to do, including interactive

software such as electronic bulletin boards (for example, the

Electronic College of Theory), hardware- or software-specific

journals such as TidBITS (a HyperCard, Macintosh-based journal),

and network discussion groups (such as HUMANIST).

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We decided that restricting ourselves to the lowest common

denominator would increase our accessibility and make us

available to a wider pool of subscribers. For these reasons, we

settled on ASCII text transmitted by electronic mail as our

format. ASCII text can be imported into almost any word

processing program, and electronic mail can be delivered free of

charge through Internet and BITNET, networks which connect

thousands of sites around the world.

Our next logistical decision was to set up PMC-Talk, a discussion

group which supplements the journal with an open channel for

critique, informational exchanges, and the publication of

non-juried submissions.

Finally, we elected to make the journal available on disk and

microfiche, so that libraries which could not devote the hardware

to making the journal available in its electronic mail form could

still subscribe, and so that individual users who had no access

to electronic mail could still have access to us.

During the Spring of 1990, we mailed several hundred letters to

artists, scholars, and critics in a wide variety of fields.

These letters met with a remarkably positive reception, and

enabled us to assemble a first-rate editorial board and a very

interesting first issue within a period of months. The response

to our mailings is a strong indication that many humanists are

prepared for the advent of electronic publication, and are eager

to learn more about the possibilities of the medium.

The response we met with at our own institution has been equally

encouraging. We have received financial and technical support

from several parts of North Carolina State University (NCSU): the

Computing Center, the Humanities Computing Lab, the Social

Sciences Computing Lab, the Department of English (which has

agreed, for instance, to give course reductions to the editors),

the Department of Foreign Languages, the College of Humanities

and Social Sciences, and the NCSU Libraries.

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4.0 Standards and the Medium

One of the questions we have considered in the course of putting

together the first three issues is whether the medium in which we

publish is particularly appropriate to a certain kind of essay.

Is the "finished" work more appropriate in the print medium,

while works in progress, collaborative essays, and interviews are

more appropriate for an electronic journal? Or, is there room

for both in this medium? Might the common sense of what it is

that constitutes a finished work itself be transformed when the

journal invites and publishes responses to the essay, and these

appear only days after the essay had been published?

Postmodern Culture can serve to encourage more experimental

scholarly writing. For example, we publish works-in-progress,

such as Bell Hooks's investigation of the interrelations and

contradictions of African American culture and postmodern theory,

which invite discussion and allow scholars to open their work to

criticism as they write, so that texts may in fact evolve as

collaborative ventures between readers and writers. We have also

published works which fall between or outside traditional generic

categories, like a video script by Laura Kipnis, which

literalizes the metaphor of the body politic, mixing a

biographical account of Marx's health problems during the writing

of Das Kapital with a discussion of contemporary anorexia and

bulimia.

We've also had to grapple with some more mundane questions which

are nonetheless still quite important, since there is very little

in the way of history or tradition to draw on. For example, how

should we format the essays published in the journal so that they

can be easily imported into whatever word processing software the

reader might have? Margins, spacing, the designation of units of

text, typographical conventions for underlining, boldfacing,

italics, superscript, and subscript (these are not possible with

ASCII text), must all be developed and tested with different

users before we will know what works, what is clearly readable

and understandable, and what users prefer.

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There are several other technical questions as well. For

example, every issue of the journal will have to navigate the

sometimes obscure connections between different

networks--particularly between the non-commercial academic

networks and the more widely available commercial carriers of

electronic mail, such as MCI, AT&T, Sprint, and CompuServe.

CompuServe, for example, limits the size of electronic mail

transmissions which can be received into individual accounts, and

that limit is well below what would be necessary to receive the

journal.

We are concerned that the journal should be available to

non-academic subscribers, so we will be working to make existing

connections work and to open new ones. We will also be exploring

possibilities for using visual materials, which include faxing

graphics to subscribers on request or transmitting through the

networks compressed graphics files in commonly used formats.

As the networks update their own hardware (especially with

the introduction of fiber-optic cables for data transmission),

new possibilities in the use of interactive software will also

become available. All of this makes it likely that the format

and the nature of Postmodern Culture will continue to evolve,

even in the immediate future. We have learned from print

publication to work around problems and limitations in production

and dissemination, but these problems do not pose as serious a

threat to electronic publishing. Electronic technology is

evolving so quickly--compare current desktop technology with that

available ten years ago--that today's problems (e.g.,

distributing graphics over the nets) will in all likelihood be

solved soon. We do not need to develop standards and techniques

that accept today's limitations, but to build into our medium a

flexibility that will anticipate and accommodate upcoming change.

5.0 The Future of Electronic Serials

In order for a publication in electronic media to succeed in

serving even the most traditional purposes, such publication

obviously needs to be available to the public--to students, to

researchers, and to interested readers.

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An electronic publication can keep its back issues on a file list

(an electronic log of reserved files) where network users may

retrieve them, but not everyone has access to the networks, and

there is no guarantee that a file list maintained by a given

electronic mail account-holder will always be there. If a

journal moves to another institution or ceases publication, how

will researchers have access to essays published by the journal?

In the same way they do for print journals, libraries should

provide that access. Many libraries have local area networks and

can make electronic publications available to patrons on those

networks; many more libraries have online card catalogs, and

might use some of those terminals to provide access to electronic

texts. It makes sense for libraries to use computer resources to

deliver publications which originate as electronic text, since

computerized access brings with it powerful capabilities for

searching, indexing, and analyzing texts even from remote sites.

However, until most libraries have the facilities to present full

text online and most readers have the skills to use such

services, we feel that it is important for electronic

publications to be available in several formats.

Electronic publications are likely to proliferate sooner than

most now expect. Although electronic text may never replace

print, it is likely to dominate where information storage,

retrieval, and manipulation are more important than the aesthetic

qualities of a printed text. Economic reasons alone will force

letters out of their time-honored sanctuary in wood-products and

into the electronic ether. It will soon seem as illogical to

print archives, data banks, government and business documents,

and much scholarly material as it already is to catalog the

holdings of large libraries on three-by-five cards.

Today, we still produce limited numbers of books whose physical

well-being must be guarded at regulated institutions around the

world. We must have these objects shipped to us or travel to

centers where they are collected. Compare this to a situation

where a library would not house a given number of volumes, but

would provide access to all books in an international network of

libraries. In this scenario, all books would be available to

anyone with a library card. Even the aesthetic appeal of

electronic text is bound to improve as computer equipment becomes

more portable, more sophisticated, and simpler to use.

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Such revolutionary flexibility holds dangers too--technological

freedom and the control of information may be flip and flop of

the same switch. For example, if commercial organizations step

into academic electronic publishing, then they may come to limit

redistribution of such publication or insist on copyright

restrictions that may serve their financial interests but not the

interests of the research community. In effect, this is the case

with print publication: much of it is determined by the financial

interests and possibilities of commercial presses--a condition

which seems so inevitable that it is virtually transparent.

Highly developed technological flexibility may depend on

private-sector support in the long run. The government now

subsidizes the networks, but threatens to cut its support by the

end of the decade. It is hard to say if and how the financial

support and interests of commercial enterprises will affect the

contents and availability of electronic serials. The nets now

offer an ideal international venue for small-budget,

limited-interest discussion groups and serials that may not have

had a chance for wide distribution in print, but all this may

change if the nets go private.

6.0 Conclusion

Electronic publishing needs the encouragement and participation

of the profession so that it leads where we want to go.

Libraries should take an active role in making electronic

publications--journals now, books in all likelihood

later--available to their users; universities should recognize

scholarly activity in the electronic field and see their support

of such developments as wise investments; and the profession

should recognize the legitimacy of electronic publications where

issues of tenure and promotion are involved.

For their part, the publishers of refereed electronic

journals--and of other electronic work in the future--should both

work to maintain professional credibility and take into account

the needs of an audience that is likely to be diverse and large.

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Selected Bibliography

Bailey, Charles W., Jr. "Intellectual Property Issues."

Electronic mail message to the Association of Electronic

Scholarly Journals list, 1 January 1991. BITNET, AESJ-

L@ALBNYVM1, GET AESJ-L LOG9101 to LISTSERV@ALBNYVM1.

Engst, Adam C. "TidBITS#30/Xanadu_text." Electronic mail message

to the Machine-Readable Texts list, November 1990. BITNET,

GUTENBERG@UIUCVMD, GET GUTNBERG LOG9011 to LISTSERV@UIUCVMD.

Herwijnen, Eric van. Practical SGML. Geneva, Switzerland:

Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990.

Jennings, Ted. "Electronic publishing." Electronic mail message

to the Association of Electronic Scholarly Journals list, 30

December 1990. BITNET, AESJ-L@ALBNYVM1, GET AESJ-L LOG9012 TO

LISTSERV@ALBNYVM1.

Kulikowski, S. "Network Reference and Publication." Electronic

mail message to Educational Technology list, October 1990.

BITNET, EDTECH@OHSTVMA, GET EDTECH LOG9010 to LISTSERV@OHSTVMA.

Lambert, Jill. Scientific and Technical Journals. London: Clive

Bingley, 1985.

Ulmer, Gregory. "Grammatology Hypertext." Postmodern Culture

1, No. 2 (January 1991). BITNET, GET ULMER 191 PMC-LIST to

LISTSERV@NCSUVM.

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About the Authors

Eyal Amiran and John Unsworth

Postmodern Culture

Box 8105

North Carolina State University

Raleigh, NC 27695

PMC@NCSUVM

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Last Modified: 4 / 11 / 2008

[Comedy of Knowledge] [Orchestrating Reception] [Postmodern Culture: Publishing in the Electronic Medium] [Practicing Postmodernism] [Networked Academic Publishing and the Rhetorics of Its Reception] [Documenting the Reinvention of Text: The Importance of Failure] [What is Humanities Computing and what is not?] [The Next Wave: Liberation Technology]

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