About a year and a half ago (April 04), Ed White started a thread on WPA-L, about the question (and the difficulty) of "keeping up" with all that's published in the discipline. My contribution to the thread was to suggest that any answer to the dispersal of the field was going to need to be equally dispersed, some way to loosely join the small pieces, to paraphrase David Weinberger, that would be sustainable. And I offered a modest proposal in that regard.
Last fall, I decided to put my money where my mouth was, and to apply for the position of CCC Online Editor vacated by Todd Taylor, and the good folk at CCC and NCTE took me up on my offer. The result, as I've talked about a little bit here over the past month, may not compare in scope with a site like arXiv.org, but it's pretty (dare I say?) revolutionary for my field, which has been pretty slow to develop sustainable tools for managing all of the scholarship that we generate.
CCC Online is a small step in that direction, but I think (and hope) that years from now, it will have been an important one. The site uses Movable Type to archive the metadata from every essay published in CCC--we're currently four years deep into the archives, and hope to make steady, "backwards" progress over the course of the next year. Among other things, the site will:
- make the content of CCC accessible through search engines
- make the content of CCC available to bookmarking services like del.icio.us, CiteULike, etc.
- make the works cited of the CCC archives searchable (how many articles have cited X, e.g.)
- provide easy access to insular citations (the abstracts of CCC articles in the bibliographies will be a link away)
- allow similarly easy access to what we're calling "works citing"--links to CCC articles that have cited the article in question
- create annotated table of contents pages for each issue of the journal (using the monthly archive feature on MT, and retroactively timestamping the entries)
- classify articles according to their various and respective CCCC "area clusters" (each of which will eventually be available as an RSS feed)
- provide permalinks to the NCTE pages where the pdf's of the articles reside (sorry, subscribers only), tying that portion of the site to a much more focused search engine
- supply both author-generated and automatically generated keywords for the articles, offering a rough snapshot of each essay
- link to a del.icio.us account devoted exclusively to building a bottom-up, folksonomic network for describing the journal's content
- enable different kinds of synoptic, disciplinary research: trends in particular terminologies, vocabularies, and topics, e.g.
Not a bad list of features to start with, if I do say so. I should also add that the space on the front page currently occupied by the "Welcome" message will eventually turn into a rotating "feature" space, providing links to electronic content, relevant discussions in the blogosphere, resources, etc., pretty much whatever we can think of. Also, although it's not yet in place, we'll be housing the electronic content that's already been published in CCC, as well as providing room for such content in the future. My plan, in locating the site externally (from both NCTE and SU), was that, rather than changing the URL for all this stuff every few years, I could simply pass the account on to the next editor, leaving all of the URLs semi-permanent.
I don't have a lot more to add at this point. This has been an exciting project both to envision and to work on, and I think that it'll represent a real contribution to my field, one that carves out a different kind of space from the resources currently available. And given all the work that I've been doing with blogs, networks, social software, KM, etc., it's functioned for me as a concrete application for the more abstract ideas that I tend to focus my attention upon.
I'll be linking to this announcement and putting the word out over listservs in the next few days, but anyone reading this should feel free to beat me to it, or give us a shout out on your blog. And in the meantime, give the site a visit, take a look around, offer us feedback, pass the URL around, etc.
Update: Beth's comment reminds me that, as I should have made clear from the get-go, I wasn't the only person working on this. The team included me, Derek, and Madeline, and we've received timely advice and feedback from several people whom I'll be adding to the "Team" page on the site shortly...
Nice job. Nice site. Great feature list. Looks to me that you have the makings of a good Corporate Project Manager, but I'd talk you out of it in a hurry.
I'm following along.
I just took a quick spin through the site and del.icio.us links, and am absolutely amazed and impressed. Wonderful work.
Collin, this is so awesome . . . really, hats off to you and everyone who worked with you on this project.
So much work and thought went into this, and it is just wonderful. I can't wait until I'm awake enough to really try it out tomorrow.
Excellent site! I'm very impressed. This will be a very useful tool. The thought process behind this site and its organization is amazing. Thanks for your hard work.
Offering my accolades as well. Hopefully this will help a lot of people in our field understand networked rhetorics, semantic web, etc.
Here I'm inclined to say something with the word "forward" in it, but "The Great Leap Forward" and "fashion forward" don't seem to cut it...
Great work on the site, Collin and co. Very smooth experience. I checked it out, moved around, clicked on an article I was interested in, was prompted for my password and was reading the essay within seconds.
Marvelous. Beyond marvelous. Now, let me get back to the site! Congratulations to Madeline, Derek and you.
First off, kudos to all the folks who have put this together. I remember the thread on wpa-l that Collin is talking about-- I think I might have even emailed Collin and said something like "ya know, someone really ought to do what you're talking about"-- and here we are. I'm looking forward to exploring the site and this might finally motivate me to figure out the delicious links thing.
But I do have a question/critique/concern/comment: why is this site at http://inventio.us/ ? Why isn't this at NCTE? Collin, perhaps I am assuming incorrectly that you own this domain, as opposed to NCTE. Assuming this is Collin's domain: doesn't this potentially represent a problem if you step down from this position (which, presumably, you will do some day?)
This really isn't a question/critique/concern/comment for you per se, Collin. My guess is that you did what needed to be done to make this happen. Really, my beef/gripe is with the leaders at NCTE who seem to me to be kind of unprepared/dense about server stuff. Why wasn't the previous version of the CCC online available on an NCTE server? Why have the chairs of the CCCCs kept a blogspot blogger (instead of it being on an NCTE site)?
I might be way off base here, but my sense is that the powers that be at NCTE were either unable or unwilling to do this themselves. And I think that's kinda lame.
Collin says, "My plan, in locating the site externally (from both NCTE and SU), was that, rather than changing the URL for all this stuff every few years, I could simply pass the account on to the next editor, leaving all of the URLs semi-permanent." That's doable and makes sense to me. I'm not altogether clear who's paying for the domain, though (I'm with you, Steve, in thinking NCTE ought to do that).
I also agree with you, Steve, that NCTE should pay to host it as well, which is, duh, the major expense of having a site. I think I pay like eight bucks a year for my domain name, but $200/year for hosting.
NCTE doesn't support the site financially, it's true, but before I accepted the position, I talked with my chair about what I'd need in terms of resources to be able to accept it. The specific terms are probably not the kind of information I should make public, I suppose, but I'm happy to chat about them privately.
And so the immediate answer is that I'm not personally paying for the hosting costs, licenses for the software we use, or various other miscellaneous expenses. All expenses come out of a budget provided by SU.
The broader question is sort of an ongoing one, though--I wonder if it's not something that 7Cs should ultimately take up. There's definitely room for better communication in the org as a whole, and a sense that we don't use our collective expertise to its best advantage...
cgb