Copyright (c) 1994 Jean-Claude Guedon, guedon@ere.umontreal.ca --------- This work may be downloaded, copied, and cited by any personal and educational purposes of indivduals and organizations in their work, provided that proper attribution and context are given. Any commercial reproduction (reprinting, resale) by permission of the author. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- note: This article originally appeared in the 4th Edition of the Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters and Academic Discussion Lists, published by the Association of Research Libraries in May 1994. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Why are Electronic Publications Difficult to Classify?: The Orthogonality of Print and Digital Media Jean-Claude Guedon Department of Comparative Literature University of Montreal Students of the elusive nature of electronic publishing advocate two opposing viewpoints. One is that electronic publishing is so radically different from print that any reference to print is bound to create difficulties rather than help in understanding the nature of the new electronic medium. The other is that electronic publishing is little other than print transferred to the electronic medium. Both viewpoints are right and wrong, and it will be the burden of this essay to see how a kind of Hegelian Aufhebung of the two stances can be constructed so we may begin to approach the phenomenon of electronic publishing adequately. To affirm that electronic publishing and print publishing are radically different is to say that the kind of communication permitted by one has nothing to do with the other. In a sense, this view is correct, provided we agree to indulge in a bit of science fiction and, looking far down the time line, we take as inevitable the vision in which electronic publishing unavoidably leads to a situation best described by the metaphor of the permanent seminar. Logically, that is the direction where electronic scholarly communications should be going, except that history shows that society does not always behave logically. Technological innovations, as historians and sociologists have shown, interact with complex social constructs and, as a result, the smallest eddy or draft, however minuscule, can deeply perturb the flow of history -- the phenomenon is called the butterfly effect in the fashionable circles of chaos theory. In any case, knowing what the ultimate, logical goal is rarely says much about the best path to reach it. It is difficult to argue in favor of the radical otherness of electronic publishing, given that it is evolving in multiple ways, all of which have to take into account existing social systems and social functions of communications. The weight of tradition also contributes to the need for a measure of continuity with the past. Publishers of a research journal, for example, cannot ignore the fact that the research community has some very definite expectations as to the way articles should be submitted, checked, copy-edited, produced and distributed. Legitimacy and authority are built in part on this. Conversely, characterizing electronic publishing as a linear extension of print also misses the point. Exactly as porting a novel to the film medium generates effects that go well beyond the simple translation of a text into images, so moving text from print to a digitized medium transforms its functionalities, the way we relate to it, and the way it is distributed and received. For example, a digitized document is immediately amenable to full- text searching -- a possibility print cannot offer and which no index, chapter heading, sub-sections or any other devices invented in the course of the last few centuries of print could ever hope to fulfill. Also, print offers only one way to present information. Whether the reader is browsing or studying deeply, printed texts remain wedded to paper. With digitized documents, the reader moves from browsing mode, often on the screen, to deep reading, often through a printout of the document. In other words, electronic publishing brings about a distinction between the access to information and the way readers relate to it. According to our needs, we materialize the electronic information differently and we search it or study it or recycle it in other documents differently. Electronic publishing both partakes of the past and heralds the future. But this is not the only difference between it and print. Other dimensions are important as well. For one thing, electronic publishing does not emerge on an informational tabula rasa, but, on the contrary, it enters a world overfilled with many powerful communication tools already fully deployed. One of the common misconceptions about electronic publishing is that it is antagonistic to print culture. Nothing could be further from the truth. On the contrary, electronic publishing offers the reader/consumer/student of information the possibility of making it appear exactly when and as she wants it. In other words, electronic publishing can be described as a proto- publishing form: "proto" in the sense that a document is accessed in a form that is potential until the person accessing it makes it "real" or material in a particular way, be it screen, paper or even sound. An interesting consequence ensues. That is, although electronic publishing differs markedly from print, their differences do not make them mutually exclusive. Indeed, the passage from potential to real in e-publishing includes the possibility of print among many other possibilities. In other words, electronic publishing relocates print. Until now, most relations to information were mediated via paper. Now, print is not the absolute negative of electronic but merely a subset of its possible modes of materialization. That view both clarifies and obscures matters. The clarification lies in describing electronic publishing as process of displacement rather than one of replacement. Yet print is firmly ensconced in the whole cultural setup which we call ours, so that it is frequently examined in terms of resistance to novelty in a most powerful form -- so powerful, in fact, that e-publication must find ways to establish beachheads which can be used to buttress its own progress. It must take on forms and adopt appearances that, in a real way, ease its penetration into a well- entrenched territory replete with a dense network of power relationships that have emerged as the result of decades or even centuries of protracted struggles and negotiations. Another, less militaristic, metaphor is that e-publishing must give rise to materialized forms susceptible to occupying original niches in the quasi-ecological system of print publications. In fact such a mixture of both innovation and adaptation is displayed by e- publishing as it gains acceptance in our own culture. My own characterization of the relationship is that e-publishing positions itself orthogonally to the existing print domain. For an earlier example of orthogonality in the development of a technology, the development of print itself is instructive. The gradual transition from manuscript to print culture in Europe brought about greater levels of literacy and growing numbers of men of letters. At the same time, it relegated hand-writing to more limited functions, particularly letter writing. In fact, the epistolary habit developed so strongly that it became the backbone of the "Republic of Letters."1 The success of a backbone generally leads to its overload. Handwriting is no exception and it was soon woefully inadequate to the task of keeping European men of letters abreast of the latest intellectual developments across the continent. Few had Father Mersenne's stamina and his uncanny ability of refueling debates under the pretense of transmitting mere information.2 Moreover, quite a few Mersennes would have been needed to provide the bandwidth needed to respond to the growing demand for a synthetic, up-to-date synthesis of the intellectual pursuits of Europe. It is at this social and cultural juncture that the serial appeared, first with the Journal des s followed in London by the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (both started in 1665). With the advent of the periodical, print brought about a momentous change in the function of writing itself. Designed initially as a prop for memory, writing evolved into a virtual discussion space. To be sure, print as applied to books contributed to solidifying the canon by multiplying the number of sites where it could materialize, but in parallel and applied to periodicals, it also contributed to undermine the same canon by materializing a process of debate. Consider the quandary of a librarian at the end of the seventeenth century. What could it mean carefully to store a book-like object that offered the appearance of permanence but only reflected the transient, conversation-like dialogue of a moment? Up to that point, storing a text in a library meant consecrating it as part of some canon, be it that of the Church or the law, for example. Until the appearance of the periodical, the library's main function had not been to build a memory of the process through which certain products became temporarily accepted, but rather a memory of accepted products. Until 1665, the library offered a collection like a finished palace without any trace of the scaffolding that had allowed building the palace in the first place. With the "invention" of periodicals, even though the act from the outset involved selection, exclusion and filtering of all the available information, parts of the scaffoldings were to remain visible. As a corollary of this innovation, a deep cognitive shift took place. The very process of filtering and selection exerted by printed periodicals was not ignored; rather, it was recast as a process of legitimation. Henceforth, what was printed in a periodical was only what was destined to be part of the legitimate record of human thought in its unending march toward truth. Traditionally, libraries were supposed to preserve the canon as a kind of monument. With printed periodicals, a new, different, role began to emerge -- namely storing a kind of intellectual jurisprudence. The shift to print had contributed to place the on-going, collective work of thinkers, soon to be assembled under the banner of progress, in opposition to the venerable and static monument of some institutional or ancient truth. It is probably not far from the truth to claim that the advent of the periodical both signaled and ensured the victory of the Moderns over the Ancients. By stressing the process of debate over canonization, print, through the emergence of the periodical, was developing modes of communication and of diffusion orthogonal to the practices of manuscript culture and its early extensions in print. This evolution is particularly interesting because it shows that print both extended and increased the ambit of tradition while opening entirely new possibilities that, in the end, affected the status of tradition itself. Orthogonality refers to these new possibilities, generally unpredictable until they start manifesting themselves, sometimes in baffling fashion. A similar type of development can be seen in the novel in print. Because it began as popular culture, the popular novel was able to explore new, uncharted territories of imagination and of fiction. It was a subversive development: until this point, writing had developed to maintain a tighter contact with reality across time and space. Suddenly writing served to create entirely imaginary realms. With the practice of silent reading that also developed with print, the first operational prototype of virtual reality energes. "Le bovarysme," the maligned practice allegedly affecting mainly young, impressionable women in the nineteenth century, is nothing more than the realization of the fact that reading novels may subvert reality, even in the name of realism.3 It must be resisted. That was a losing battle as too many interests, daily newspapers in particular, were finding the force- feeding of imagination to be a lucrative source of revenues. Hollywood is the direct heir of a development that has now reached well beyond print. Against that historical backdrop, we approach the present phenomenon of electronic publishing and learn that our tendency to feel puzzled and even annoyed by the elusive nature of electronic documents should be expected. Now we need to move beyond irritation or sense of loss and try to understand what is happening. If we keep in mind that electronic publishing is as orthogonal to print as print was with respect to manuscript, while remembering that elements of print can also enjoy a second electronic life, we probably have in hand the right conceptual tools to greater understanding. Paying attention to the notion of orthogonal positioning should help classify electronic publications while unveiling their intrinsic nature. Historians often approach their research area by raising two simple and simultaneous questions: continuity and change. We follow a similar strategy here by appealing simultaneously to continuity and orthogonality. The latter refers to change, forms of change that are specified in some manner. Now, it is useful to recall the functions of printed text. These functions may vary in relative importance from sector to sector, so that a tabloid's cocktail of functions will be quite different from a learned journal's. Yet, the same functions coexist in all of print and beyond it as well. The functions are: communication and diffusion, legitimation and authority, archiving and memory. Looking at these three pairs of functions closely should help us manage the labyrinth of electronic publications. That print should facilitate communications appears common- sensical until we examine learned journals closely. Publication delays in journals have become such that real communication takes place through other channels: preprints of all sorts, from letters to faxes, including photocopies. Printed learned journals play less and less of a communicational role these days and at best they diffuse research results at a slow pace so that journals serve an archival rather than a communicational function. In all cases, print serves diffusion rather than communication because it does not lend itself readily to two-way dialogs. Readers' feedback sometimes appears, but in the best of cases it remains a minor part of the printing enterprise. By contrast, electronic publishing, even when designed to look as much as possible like traditional print, lends itself naturally to dialogue and feedback. To be sure, diffusion is done effectively through electronic means, but communication is such an essential part of the medium that electronic publications are better characterized as tools of communication than tools of diffusion. This change in emphasis defines a first dimension of the orthogonal positioning of e-publications with regard to print. >From the very beginning, print was associated with authority and power. The cost of the machinery involved, the unusual combination of skills needed by printers who, in effect, had to know classical languages and metallurgy, the societal implications of the new technology, particularly in terms of political power, all converged to transform the act of printing into one of social consecration. From the very start to be printed was to be, and the present academic slogan "publish or perish" is but the echo of this state of affairs. Committing texts, documents or information to print was equivalent to endowing them with a formidable dose of societal influence. Conversely, relegating a text to manuscript form meant destroying most of its social effectiveness. (Meslier's testament in the eighteenth century to twentieth- century samizdats in Communist countries illustrate this point.4) Access to print has often been limited, considered a privilege and often strictly controlled. One of the side effects is that the authority inherent in the printing process lent legitimacy to all forms of print. If we say that all that is printed is not necessarily true, it is precisely to try and counteract the strong legitimizing effects of print. By contrast, electronic publishing has emerged as a direct extension of electronic means of communication. In effect, anyone able to use electronic mail can become an electronic publisher with the result that electronic publishing does not derive any authority from its technological base. Thus, its legitimacy must be constructed through purely social and institutional means. The electronic medium, in effect, can accommodate the most legitimate as well as the most questionable forms of communication with great ease. To be sure, with time, print technology has also evolved to the point that it carries many questionable forms of diffusion, but, once again, what we see here is a shift in emphasis: print ultimately learns to diffuse what the electronic medium starts with. The meandering path leading from the Gutenberg Bible to Fanny Hill in the print world stands in stark contrast to their quasi-simultaneous publications on the net. The fact that electronic publishing is essentially devoid of authority and has to struggle for legitimacy points to its essential vulnerability. Anyone involved in electronic publishing has to address the very important question of authority even before looking at the economic dimension of the enterprise. The place of authority underscores a second dimension of the orthogonal relationship between electronic publishing and print. The third significant aspect publishing for our current consideration is archival value. Print holds a powerful archiving position, as the material form of books and journals seems to testify to the durability of the information. Yet, behind the apparent solidity of paper fragility lurks, especially given the type of paper used in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its acidity is such that assured self-destruction takes place within a century. And beyond the paper problem stands another one: paper books are stored easily enough, but storing is not enough to ensure archiving value. Retrieval of the information is equally critical to the archival function, and there print appears very weak indeed. Despite tools developed in the last few centuries (e.g., tables of content, quotation protocols, indices and bibliographies) print tends to bury information as much as it archives it. By contrast, digitized documents lend themselves to retrieval tools as well as to various, simultaneous forms of storage (plain text, database form, hypertext, etc.) so that, curiously, the virtual nature of the electronic text potentially provides a much more efficient tool to archive knowledge than print with all of its apparent solidity. As in the previous two axes of analysis, it is not a question of either-or, but one of emphasis on this or that capability. Despite its inherent deficiencies, print has played an important archival role and digitized text is about to play that role even more efficiently. In fact, the efficiency of the digitized document is such that it does approach the ideal of a fully functional memory as against a mere archiving capability. In the shift from uneasy archiving to full memory lies the third dimension of orthogonality between print and electronic publishing. In summary, it can be seen that print emphasizes diffusion, authority and some archival functionality while the electronic medium emphasizes communication, including interactivity, memory. Currently, electronic publishing has to strive to establish legitimacy. Therein lies the nature of the orthogonal relationship between print and electronic publishing. At this juncture, we return to the problem announced in the title- -that of classifying electronic texts. No solution is offered here because much more thinking is required to solve so difficult a question. Moreover (and if I were writing an electronic letter, I would be tempted to place a smiley here) the solutions that could be advanced might not correspond to the choices made by the editors of the fourth edition of the Directory of Electronic Journals. That said, looking at the three major axes identified above could provide an overarching principle of classification that distinguishes the archived results of discussions on a listserv from a refereed electronic journal trying to fulfill all the roles of its printed counterpart (and more). Such a first order of classification should precede any attempt to create sub- categories, for example disciplinary ones, all the more so because electronic publishing seems also to favor interdisciplinary ventures over purely disciplinary ones. The strong interactive bias of the electronic medium also means that even the more "monumentalized" forms of publishing, e.g. learned journals, will tend to evolve into something that will ultimately resemble the present workings of an academic seminar more than the relatively hardened document of the printed journal. The "preprint continuum" identified by Stevan Harnad5 may well reach full deployment in this kind of context, reuniting into a single process research dialog with its diffusion. If so, the electronic medium will have to marry the research dialogue with the strong legitimacy of scientific publishing presently guaranteed by processes such as peer review. The strong ability of electronic publishing to fulfill memory functions that print can never hope to achieve offers another way to classify electronic publications. In some cases, deep memory may appear completely superfluous because of the transient or frivolous nature of a great deal of what is published, but in other cases memory capability is underutilized. In other words, the attempt to design a classification scheme may also help in the design of specific electronic publications. Finally, the legitimacy problems that adversely affect electronic publications can also assist in their classification by helping us focus on the particular elements that might bring some relief to inadequacies of the print medium. In particular, the visibility of electronic publications from the perspective of those who are not yet members of the electronic network is a key matter, and in this regard, indexing in the traditional bibliographic tools is crucial. Explicit and transparent reference to a peer review process wherever it applies (particularly in the case of learned electronic journals) is also very important. Visual appearance, whether on screen or on paper, is also a crucial crucial element because readers are used to the accumulated typographic and layout expertise of five centuries of print culture. How to reconcile all of these parameters and arrange them hierarchically is a task we will leave to others for the moment, but the final lesson is that electronic publishing will need a classification scheme that is specific to its own nature. However, as that nature is still partially in question, it is clear that the evolution of these classifications will closely follow our understanding of the full potential of this new medium. Consequently, it will be interesting to watch the evolution of these classificatory schemes to learn how much understanding we have of this new, complex and fascinating form of publishing. Jean-Claude Guedon Professeur titulaire, and Editor of the Electronic Journal Surfaces Departement de litterature comparee Universite de Montreal Montreal, Qc H3C 3J7 Canada Tel. 514-343-6208 Fax: 514-343-2211 guedon@ere.umontreal.ca 1 Pierre Bayle's 17th century series (almost a periodical) Nouvelles de la Republique des Lettres gave concrete expression to an image very similar in power to that of the "information superhighway" today, and it too was made possible by the technological advance of the development of ar eliable postal system across large parts of Europe. 2 Mersenne (1588-1648) was a contemporary and a friend of Descartes and of many other people. He studied with Descartes at La Fleche. Well versed in mathematics as well as other sciences and languages, he could follow the research of the time and raise valuable objections without discovering anything significant himself. He undertook a gigantic correspondence with literally dozens if not hundreds of people and so was effectively a "node" in the Republic of Letters. See Robert Lenoble, Mersenne et la naissance du mecanisme (Paris, Vrin, 1971, 2nd ed. The first edition dates from 1943.) 3 Le bovarysme (after Flaubert's novel) imputed to the novel the same insidious detachment of the reader from reality that we now impute to Nintendo and escapist video. Young, dreamy damsels were particularly affected. 4 J. Meslier (1678-1733), French clergyman upon whose death a testament in manuscript form was found in his home in which he declared that he had never believed in religion, etc. Voltaire edited it and published it in 1762 under the name of Testament de Jean Meslier. 5 Stevan Harnad, "Scholarly Skywriting and the Prepublication Continuum of Scientific Inquiry", Current Contents 45 (November 11, 1991), 9-13. It was reprinted in Psychological Science and is available online from Princeton University by anonymous FTP. .