Ancient History, Archaeology and Hypertext Publishing

Some background. This was going to be an editorial / article for TUP, so it will read a bit oddly. After four months I’d heard nothing from the editors who’d said they’d handle it, and it was getting a bit out of date. This is ironic as the reason for setting up the journal was so I could get papers out quickly, but there you go. So it was going to be shelved.

Then the PGs in Archaeology and Ancient History got an email from the Faculty of Arts at Leicester. They were sponsoring an AHRB English conference on scholarly publishing, but were looking for papers from other departments to make a contribution for reasons I don’t fully understand. I’ve submitted a proposal on the use of standards in electronic publishing and plan to co-author with Clare Kelly-Blazeby (without whom I would have killed the idea of a PG journal long ago) using the missing editorial as a seed.

Comments are welcome, including “Isn’t this a bit dull?”, because I certainly think it is. However, I think there is stuff which could be usefully built on, so feel free to mention what you’d like to see expanded upon too.

I mentioned I was working on launching an internet journal to a friend at a party. “Oh, like the one at Sheffield?” she asked. I replied that the journal I was working on was hoping to be slightly more internet based than that. The plan was to use internet technologies to add value to the papers. “No, Sheffield’s journal does that. It’s on the web. It has those link things.” It is now eight years since Sheffield’s ground-breaking postgraduate journal assemblage launched. The launch statement of the editor of Internet Archaeology argues that the internet presents an exciting opportunity for publishing. Since then further postgraduate journals have sprung up. Newcastle and Durham have their Postgraduate Forum, Nottingham and Birmingham have Digressus. The internet also allows me to read Eras from Monash University. Yet, much as I love these sites, I cannot help noticing that only Internet Archaeology would suffer if the sites were available in printed form. After eight years is an internet journal really just a print-it-yourself paper journal? The original plan was not to have an internet journal. In fact several postgraduate students at Leicester examined alternatives to see if it could possibly be avoided. Print on Demand technologies meant that a printed version, capable of being ordered via Amazon was a plausible solution. In the end argument polarised into two camps. The first felt that charging for the journal was wrong. As postgraduates we should be idealists and free from commercial restraint. We had a unique time in our lives to explore the boundaries of publishing that the internet offered. Finally we were reminded of our place in Western Europe. By making the journal freely accessible we could remove a barrier to readership in poorer countries such as the third world.

The second faction felt that the people of the third world had enough problems as it was without them being expected to wade through a postgraduate journal. They also felt at a time of cutbacks in library acquisitions in many universities a postgraduate journal of any cost would be ignored by other universities. The purpose of publishing is to be read. Leicester has tended to look outwards and so while the journal would serve our interests, it was also acknowledged that one of our interests was to talk to the outside world. The internet was chosen as the medium then through a choice of idealism and pragmatism.

This would appear to be the approach of other postgraduate journals. However opinion at Leicester was that internet journals lacked the prestige or glamour that a printed journal holds. Therefore a long period of analysis followed where the problems of internet publishing were considered.

The first problem is one which you may well have already overcome. Reading papers on the internet is a very bad idea, unless you actively seek out a migraines. A slightly more spurious argument against internet publishing is that you cannot read electronic papers in the bath. This is both wrong (if you own a PDA) and irrelevant. The cost of printed journals are astronomical. No-one in their right mind would read a journal in the bath anyway. You might read an offprint though, so the solution is not to provide a waterproof internet journal, but a method for reliably producing offprints for those who want them. This is achieved in this journal by selecting the option ‘File’ and then ‘Print’ on your web browser. If you haven’t tried this I suggest you do so now.

The cynic will point out that any web page can be printed. The best argument for not doing so from the browser is that it often looks awful. This is why Digressus is clever, as they provide their files in PDF format which is suitable for printing. Neilsen (2003), however, has examined the PDF format and declared it to be “Unfit for Human Consumption”. There are certainly usability issues which PDF raises. Fortunately the technology exists to print pages from the browser using Cascading Style Sheets.

This is because the browser has access to two style sheets. The first is for the screen. It applies the colour to the page. The second sheet is specified for the use of the printer. The content remains the same, only the style changes. The menu to the right disappears because in the printed version the links back to the homepage are of absolutely no use. Internet Archaeology may argue for the existence for papers solely as electronic entities, to the extent of rendering papers awkward needlessly awkward to print (see http://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue1/gillings/part12c.html#xtocid12426 for one such pointless page), but experience shows that even their papers are printed by the user. If an internet journal is going to be a desirable read then it must compromise to work with the reader. This does not mean producing a print file and storing it on the web, merely assisting where possible the printing of material for the use of the reader.

Another deliberate omission has been the use of ‘issues’ or ‘volumes’. What purposes do issues serve?

1. In print media issues and volumes are essential. It is simply not practical to send out papers as they become ready.

2. Further the binding process into a volume physically places papers and reviews in context with other similar materials.

3. Finally the volume provides a reference point when citing a paper or review contained within. For print the volume in not merely useful, it is fundamental to medium.

None of these reasons can be said to transfer to the internet.

David Clarke’s “Archaeology: the loss of innocence” will always be found in Antiquity 47. It does not necessarily follow that volume 47 will be anyway near volumes 46 or 48. Someone may have removed the journal from the shelf to read it or else stacked issues 48 and later on the shelves and placed the rest in the stack. This is a situation that simply does not apply to journals on the internet, as they do not exist as discrete physical objects. Graham Wheeler’s paper on “Battlefield Epiphanies in Ancient Greece” will always be found at http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/classics/digressus/articles/a010204.pdf whether someone is reading it or not. In addition, no-one is going to run off with the 2003 volume of Digressus and hide it in the middle of a number of issues of Salon. Electronic papers derive their reference point from their location in web space. With the address above it should always be possible to find Graham Wheeler’s paper.

In reality this might not be entirely true. Sites move and Digressus could move to its own dedicated server in the future in which case the link will be broken. This means that any useful reference should include the journal named, so that it can be tracked. However I strongly predict that should Digressus move, papers in Volume 2004 will still be found on the same server as papers in Volumes 2003 and 2002. This is because it is the web site, rather than the volume that gives an electronic paper its academic context.

The only remaining point, the first also falls. Unless you work specifically within an issue based structure, there is no reason why electronic papers should not be released as soon as they are ready. Indeed Internet Archaeology manages to have both issues and immediate publication. Papers are published in the latest issue, which is closed on a six-monthly basis and a new one opened. For some journals papers are left to stagnate whilst a critical mass of information is accumulated to make a new ‘issue’ possible. Hence while print requires the volume to enable publication, on the web the volume can be a disabling concept.

Another argument for the power of the internet is the use of hypermedia. With a click on a link like this one, you can reach beyond the current text and see the original cited text. This is a process known to the technorati as ‘hyperlinking’. Academics who find the typewriter dangerously modern are already familiar with the notion, though they call it ‘citation’. The hyperlink may seem novel to people who don’t cite earlier works, however hyperlinking is nothing more than citation. In fact it is probably worse. A good citation in a book will enable you to find the original source eventually. If the page you link to disappears then may never find the original text or worse still you may find unexpected text. The website http://www.stonehengemasterplan.org has thankfully disappeared. It used to carry information about the plans for the development of Stonehenge. The current site http://thestonehengeproject.org still refers to it occasionally. I say stonehengemasterplan used have the information to as someone didn’t renew the registration and the name was taken by a company which chose to show other information which it claimed ‘left nothing to the imagination’, though I’ll leave it to yours.

Thus it would appear that the internet journal is the poor cousin of the print journal, and if you approach the internet with a print attitude you shall be proved right. Yet this is not the end, if the internet is explored for what it can do, rather than what it can emulate, new opportunities do appear.

The first is that this site should be searchable. This is because it sits in a MySQL database rather than as a series of HTML pages. The database is designed purely for processing searches, so everything posted here is retrievable whether an editor remembers to index the site or not. Indexing in fact should be irrelevant. The database is in turn hooked into a piece of software WordPress. The advantage of this system is that all the chores, such as updating pages, maintaining internal links and creating indices it handled by the computer. Personally I hate tedious coding and see no reason why I should do it if there’s a computer available to do the hard work. Removing the responsibility for most of the coding means that in turn the editors are freed to edit rather than learn how to code in XHTML. The system is transparent to the reader, but immediately the system allows for great speed in publishing.

Indeed, speed of publishing should be the internet’s biggest advantage over paper publishing. Once an article is in the system it should be immediately available worldwide. Only Internet Archaeology appears to be capable of turning around articles on a rapid basis. The reasons are not all technological. Postgraduates have much more pressure than in the past to complete on schedule and other training demands to meet. Editing systems will fall apart, but using a computer system wisely can at least remove some of the barriers to publishing.

Another much touted advantage is ‘interactivity’. I struggle to recall any interactive journals, though there are many interactive weblogs (see our news page for links. Again the move from static pages gives us the possibility to debate over the web. Below is a comment form. If you think this is tosh and that no-one would want to comment on a paper then fill it out and tell me. If you know of a webpage that proves that dynamic pages cannot function in the academic environment then you can even reference it by including the link simply by including “title of web page” in the comment. I would argue that in this the creation of links can lead to a deeper reading for the text. Yes, it is still citation but the collaborative accumulation of references and comments on the master copy of a paper is something of a different scale to what can be seen in print. The annotations found in books within the university library rarely travel, no matter how insightful.

There is a major problem with this method which does limit the usefulness of the comment system. Anyone who does use the comment form will find out that in this case, instant publication does not occur. Instead it passes into a moderation queue where an editor will decide whether or not publish it. This is treacle oiling the machinery of progress, but essential. In the very first day of being set up this journal garnered twenty comments. For a comparison in four years the intriguing PhD thesis of Cornelius Holtorf got forty emails (Holtorf 2004). Clare’s review of the UK grad scheme was thoughtful, interesting and didn’t mention enough about Texas Hold ‘Em or Baccarat in the opinion of one visitor who sent a robot to post comments to this effect. Over and over. One solution was to have a graphic code by the comment box. A graphic would spell out a code which a robot could not read but a human could, and so automated junk could be discarded. It was decided not to do this because it would disable another useful feature.

Unless you regularly browse weblogs the trackback concept will have passed you by. Trackback is an effect which can happen when weblogs start interacting with each other. For instance Michael Shanks may feel that some of my comments are wrong. He could write his own article on the flow of information across journals and link back to this page. This is simple citation. However, because Michael Shanks also uses weblog software he can place a trackback. This would add a note to the bottom of this page linking to and highlighting his comments. This gives a longevity to texts. Should I write on archaeology and the web again in ten years time, I can trackback to this article to show how my thoughts have changed. Someone researching in fifteen years time could still read this paper and find the added trackback to more recent papers. Consider this applied to the conventional print media. If an old paper in a journal could be constantly updated to show who referenced it then links to corrected data could ensure that old papers could still be read and receive the credit they deserve. Trackbacks could also create ‘node’ papers which would make some papers comprehensive bibliographies of the subjects they discuss.

In this particular case trackbacks will be necessary. The assemblage model was of its time. It worked and the quality of the editing ensures that it remains a valuable site to visit. Similarly this model too is of its time. It will be outdated, I suspect in three to five years. This remains at the cutting edge of archaeological journals then something will have gone badly wrong. The most obvious problem I foresee is in the concept of peer-review.

Articles and Reviews are reviewed on this site. News, conference announcements, job listings and other ephemera go up as is. Peer-review was essential for the ease of mind for the department. The next step could well remove this. There remains the problem of quality control, but the act of reading can contribute to the review process. Given a totally free hand this site would emulate Slashdot.

Slashdot is a broadly technology based news site. It attracts a massive audience. A link from Slashdot can cause so much traffic that servers of small sites are overwhelmed and shut down. Consequently many people wish to get their story on the site, even if the story is “Have you sampled the delights of Slow Hand Poker?” The mass of material coming in makes moderation impossible, and so the site uses post-publication review. Some readers are given a finite number of karma points. Once these points are gone you revert to being an ordinary reader, so these points have scarcity value. The points are the reader’s to allocate to stories, which can have their own karma between –1 and +5. The system works not by excluding junk, but by filtering it. A reader may set a preference to only read stories with a +5 rating. They may only see a couple of items a day. A slightly less discerning reader may set their filter to +4 and see ten times as many stories.

The Slashdot user system maintains a jury of point-holders to ensure constant review of their output. The composition of the jury could make a paper in its own right, but the system appears to work. This is peer-review, but post-publishing peer-review. Slashdot harnesses the mutability of the internet to organise material in a more flexible manner. Rather than a black or white acceptance of material there are shades. However, the ease of publishing will ensure that few of the papers published by this method will match the rigour or readability of peer-reviewed papers.

This illustrates the challenge that newer internet journals will have to face. It would be rash to produce assemblage or Digressus mark two, and it would miss the point, these journals already do a good job already. A truly valuable contribution to academia will be a journal which can reject the traditions of paper, and embrace the possibilities of the new medium. To do this requires imagination, a willingness to experiment and a bedrock of support to build upon. Fortunately Leicester possesses all three attributes in abundance. If the journal is a failure then at least it will be an interesting failure.

Bibliography

Holtorf, C. 2004. ‘The future of electronic scholarship’ Internet Archaeology 15 Available online at: http://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue15/11/ch8.html

Neilsen, J. 2003. PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption. Alertbox July 14 2003 Available online at: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030714.html —–