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#30, December 28, 2003

Histrionyx – the Review

Since I will now be making Histrionyx: Rethinking Migration in American History available as an e-book, even before I have been given permission to use all the images (adding the images when permission is granted), I have decided that I should accompany its unveiling with the book’s first review. The comments in the review speak to the current dilemmas about academic publishing on the web, so I thought I would also provide a response to some of the questions it poses. Other readers have been positive also. When the book was presented at the University of Toronto to a workshop made up of scholars from Duke, University of Toronto, and an assortment of other places the responses were all favorable, one historian likening it to performance art.

Don’t know much about history, and even less about the ex-centric, campy, fearless kind you practice, but I do know that your e-book is impressive.... I can’t imagine the hundreds of hours it must have taken to put this multi-media extravaganza together. Visually, it's very appealing (the images are wonderful). I read the introduction and only quickly browsed through some of the essays, but the topics are ambitious and provocative. The categories taken from art history work nicely too.

And yet, this enterprise leaves me a little puzzled. Maybe it’s just that I can't shake my Luddite attachment to the printed page. Am I being a muckedy-muck (?) for fearing that your work will not be taken as seriously in this form or that it won't be widely read?

Not a muckedy-muck; I reserved this term for manuscript readers deployed by the discipline to police its boundaries. But it is a good question whether this will be taken seriously as an e-book. But how widely read would a book like this be anyway? And isn’t it better that it be put out by me, rather than sit unread by anyone, because it doesn’t easily fit the format of the printed page? Another way of looking at it is to say, since most people are doing their reading and research on the web isn’t it more likely to be used in the future if it is accessible by google, than if it remains on a dusty book shelf.

Will the very attractiveness and accessibility of the medium detract from the real message(s)?

Here I think it is interesting that we have come to instinctively feel that medium and message may be in conflict, especially if the former is attractive. I think there are fears among historians about how we undertake and assess our teaching if what our students produce resembles more my website than a chapter in a book.

How prevalent do you think these e-books will become in history or in other disciplines?

It seems to me that these e-books can only become more prevalent in the future. What I think we need to be thinking about is freeing ourselves of most of the ways we go about creating them; generally they look like books or journals on the web; they have the potential not only to look different, but also to facilitate efforts to cross disciplinary boundaries.

Who is going to read this (besides your devoted groupies) and how would you ever find out?

I have no groupies unfortunately, but I am in some ways more likely to hear back from readers when there is an email link attached to every article, than under present conditions. The problem is likely to be too much feedback rather than too little. Also, should the reader be reticent to communicate, then a counter might be added so that I can at least know how many hits my site is getting.

How will it be received by your colleagues at Stockton and elsewhere? Do you care?

My colleagues at are generally intrigued. What would concern them is the whole question about how this will affect people’s tenure and promotion decisions. Truth be told, if this were my first book as opposed to my third, I might be more worried about getting the backing of a publisher. I have the luxury not to worry about these issues too much, but if I can contribute to the process by which we begin to reconsider the iron cage of publication that we inhabit, so much the better. If someone comes up for tenure in the future at Stockton, they might have this as a precedent; they will be able to demand, with perhaps greater likelihood of being listened to, that the e-text that they have created should be considered on its own merits, rather than according to some tenure prescription that was established by our predecessors in a different academic world. In short, I do care about this, and I have the luxury to attempt to suggest something different.