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From: wleric@SHOWME.MISSOURI.EDU
Subject: Re: Does this count?
Date: Sat, 10 Jun 1995 17:05:54 -0500
At 11:05 PM 6/9/95, Marcy Bauman wrote:
> What constitutes "substantial effort in scholarly, professional, community and educational work"?Ah yes, that's the question. And the reason I think participants in this symposium might consider taking credit for their accomplishments here is because *we* have to (as you note later) "explain what's good about what we do" not just to ourselves (though that's important) but to the academy.
It happens that sometimes online work gets recognized as valuable by established scholars, but it isn't enough to wait for that to happen generally before asserting its importance. We cannot afford to wait obediently for the academy to accept and reward. We have to help things along.
>And it wasn't refereed in any sense.I'd agree with you here, Marcy, if you would be willing to amend your statement to something like, "It wasn't refereed in any *traditional* sense." I do think the symposium was refereed, just not in a form that resembles the kind of review we're used to, certainly not the kind that precedes print publication.
Trent Batson, after observing our conversation about editing earlier this year, came up with this term: *ex post facto editing.* Same modifier might apply to the refereeing function as it manifests itself in online publishing. The refereeing during the symposium was not exclusionary, not a matter of culling for purity; it was extensional, incremental, augmentative (I'm groping for the right word, but maybe you get what I'm after?).
As usual, we have to go back to first principles here. What is refereeing *for*? We may want to look past our commonly held assumptions about what it does and how it works and think about what underlies the practice. Is refereeing a system of culling out bad or inappropriate stuff? Or is it a process of negotiating ideas and discovering quality? If it's more the former, then the symposium (so far) has not been refereed. If it's the latter, then it was refereeing in new pajamas.
I bet most everybody on this list will (at first anyway) disagree with my assertion that the symposium was refereed. You could make a good case that--if *this* group is reluctant to accept that claim, print-established scholars on hiring and p/t committees will be quite incredulous. I wouldn't dispute that as an accurate description of where we *are* in terms of the politics of the intellectual landscape. The point I'd like to stress, though, is that to whatever extent we concede to the current reading of our work, we are complicit with that reading. Without being overly obnoxious about it, we really have to suggest new readings if we want anyone to learn the language of our work. Alien notions like "extensive ex post facto refereeing" will take a good bit of explaining, I expect.
--Eric Crump
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E-mail: seth@bradley.bradley.edu
Last revised February 3, 1997