Harvard University Press Blog

Facebook Interruptus

In Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age, Bernard Harcourt assays the deeply troubling implications of pervasive surveillance in our age of lives lived online, and the degree to which we willingly trade our privacy for the fleeting rewards of digital affirmation. To Harcourt, a professor of law and political science at Columbia University and the author most recently of The Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went to War Against Its Own Citizens, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance before Congress last week was a pageant that will do nothing to address the perilous dynamic of our society of exposure. Meaningful reform will come only when we recognize the libidinal allure of today’s digital platforms, as Harcourt explains below.

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The Facebook hearings last week were quite the spectacle. Mark Zuckerberg deftly deflected his inquisitors and misled them, while share price rose 4.5% in a single day. Senators and representatives postured for their constituents and got free prime-time media exposure. Privacy experts crowed and gloated that they had always been right, but unfairly ignored. The media and the Internet harvested abundant costless content. And social media lit up, abuzz. Between the schadenfreude and the glee, and the plain-old gawking and goggling, everybody seemed to pleasure themselves. It was win-win—except, perhaps, for the ordinary digital subjects who were left high and dry: pleasantly entertained, but totally exposed.

In the end, the Facebook hearings were nothing more than another tantalizing but anxious digital distraction. The greatest paradox, perhaps, is how much personal data and digital exhaust we all emitted and how many digital traces we shed watching Zuckerberg and simultaneously fretting over our privacy.

If anything, the Facebook hearings confirm the dreadful bind in which we find ourselves: social media and the Internet companies have us all in the palms of their hands because the digital experience itself is so seductive, consuming, and self-gratifying. Their Faustian business model works because their platforms tap directly into our pleasure centers and trigger deep reward circuits. Seeing our selfies online, tracking our likes and shares, counting our followers and retweets—these stimuli are almost more reinforcing than food or sex. We find ourselves going from one digital platform or device to another, swiping and clicking, pressing the levers like a rat in Skinner’s box, desperately seeking more stimulus and gratification.

And unless and until we come to grips with the place of desire and of our libidinal and at times narcissistic urges in relation to these new digital technologies, we won’t make any progress, we won’t get anywhere. Yes, the #DropFacebook campaign just gained Susan Sarandon and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. But the vast majority of the users of Facebook—as well as Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, etc.—will stay put because these platforms satisfy their desires, provide the gratification, and remain the easiest way to enjoy social relations today, even when they do make us anxious about our privacy.

The fact is, power circulates differently in the digital age, and the social media powerhouses have tapped deep into our pleasure centers and egos. The dark analogies to George Orwell’s 1984 or to Foucault’s “panopticon” just do not capture the present moment, nor will they alone stop us from sharing and liking.   

Today, we are no longer being coerced to give up our privacy, as Winston and Julia were by Big Brother. We are no longer confined to a panoptic cell, naked before the all-seeing guard tower. There is no telescreen forcibly anchored into our apartment walls. Instead, today we share our personal information jubilantly, out of love and desire, and for self-affirmation. We post selfies on Instagram, status updates on Facebook, screeds on Twitter. We invite Echo into our homes. We build personal websites open to all. And it feels so good, it’s so pleasurable, that even when we are warned about how much of our private information the social media and Internet companies have, we cringe but go on.  

The Rule of Code vs. The Rule of Law

Many compare the emergence of the blockchain to the arrival of the internet, and anticipate a corresponding transformation in communications, business, and individual freedoms. In Blockchain and the Law, new this month, Primavera De Filippi and Aaron Wright examine both the profound opportunities the technology presents and the legal and even ethical challenges it poses. In the brief excerpt below, they consider possible paths away from our current crossroads between the rule of code and the rule of law.

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When Satoshi Nakamoto released Bitcoin to the world, he had a clear idea in mind, which was reflected in the message he included in Bitcoin’s genesis block:

The Times 03 / Jan / 2009
Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks

Nakamoto released the Bitcoin network in the middle of a financial crisis, as a reaction to an unstable international banking system. In doing so, he gave birth to a new currency—one controlled not by any government or central bank but only by cryptography and code.

As a global and decentralized payment system that operates without centralized control, Bitcoin held out the hope of newfound economic freedom for those dubious of governmental authority. Early Bitcoin adopters subscribed to the notion of vires in numeris (strength in numbers), a motto emphasizing the fact that, when it comes to money, only math can be trusted.

But Bitcoin was only the first step in a much grander vision. Shortly after Bitcoin’s release, technologists began to realize that the true potential of Bitcoin—the real innovation—was its underlying data structure: a blockchain. While Bitcoin offered the ability to replace the role of central banks and eliminate the need for financial institutions, blockchain technology could be applied more generally to reduce the need for middlemen in many sectors of the economy. Whenever a trusted authority is necessary to coordinate social or economic activity, blockchain technology could provide the necessary infrastructure to replace this activity. The roles of banks, financial institutions, stock exchanges, clearinghouses, content providers, online operators, and even governmental systems could all be modeled by a set of protocols and code-based rules deployed on top of a blockchain-based network.

Blockchain technology presents some risks, however. The technology supports technological systems and decentralized applications that operate independently of any centralized institution or trusted authority. They implement their own internal systems of rules, which often ignore or attempt to circumvent traditional systems of control. Unlike other technological constructs currently deployed on the Internet, these decentralized systems and applications can be governed almost exclusively by the rules of code.

The Internet had already raised a fundamental tension between the rule of law, based on geographical boundaries, and the rule of code, based on topological constructs. The regulation of “cyberspace” lies at the intersection between these two normative systems—which can either cooperate or compete with one another, depending on the circumstances at hand.

At the outset, legal scholars thought that the rule of code would ultimately prevail on the Internet. With code, people could implement their own systems of rules, enforced by a technological construct that operates outside of any legal jurisdiction. This is what inspired a number of technology activists to believe that cyberspace was an unregulatable space that governments did not have the right or ability to control—as opposed to the “meat space,” which is mostly governed by the rule of law.

Eager to bypass the politics of enclosure and control enacted by governments and corporations, these groups believed that the Internet would foster new normative systems, which would facilitate the free flow of information and promote political and cultural autonomy. The Internet marked the beginning of a new paradigm for regulation—one where regulation would be applied through the rule of code, with power dynamics that differed significantly from those of the physical world. Over time, however, governments recognized and embraced the potential for the rule of code to maintain the rule of law on the Internet. Governments have extended their control by requiring that intermediaries change their code to maintain and respect jurisdictional laws.

With the advent of Bitcoin and blockchain technology more generally, we are poised to witness a new wave of decentralization and new calls that the world will—once again—be governed by the rule of code. Echoes of the first Internet wave permeate the discourse around blockchains, with claims that blockchain technology will lead to greater individual freedom and emancipation, as these early technology advocates initially aspired to. Blockchain technology is viewed as a new opportunity by many cypherpunks and decentralization advocates, who see it as a new means for people to liberate themselves from the tyranny of governments and corporations—in ways that are quite reminiscent of the Internet’s early days.

Social Media and Scholarship (and Impeachment)

On November 10th 2016, it was reported that Google searches for “How to impeach a president” had increased by 4,850%. Fast forward a year, and impeachment is still frequently discussed—and still widely misunderstood. And so last week we published Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide, by Harvard’s Cass Sunstein. An urgent addition to our fall list, the book provides an essential guide to what every American should know, and answers important questions like “who impeaches the President?”, “does impeachment mean the president has to leave office?”, and “is impeachment a criminal proceeding?”

This University Press Week we’re joining our sister presses in considering how our publications can cut through the noise and provide the facts. And, just as discussion of impeachment has swirled on social media, social media can help spread word of an important work of scholarship intended to ensure that the swirl’s better informed. Below, alongside a video of Sunstein produced by the virally-minded Big Think, Sunstein’s editor Thomas LeBien writes of the necessity of publishing Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide.

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For the purposes of this post, you could translate the subtitle of Cass Sunstein’s latest book, Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide, as follows: Social Media Doesn’t Contribute to Anything—You Do. Probably there is no one better than a university press editor to remind everyone that, in sentences, subjects and objects matter. Just as it does for citizens in a republic, it matters a great deal if you imagine that social media acts on you and not the other way around. Put differently, I am less focused on whether social media has contributed to the success of a university press initiative than I am on whether thousands upon thousands of individuals have used social media to help spread word of important new scholarship. And that has very much been our hope in publishing Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide.

Here’s a useful irony. Sunstein has done more than his share of scholarly work to focus the world’s attention on nudges, choice architecture, and the dangers of Internet cyber cascades that encourage each of us to live in a news bubble of the like-minded. Here again, the subtitle to Sunstein’s current book is important. Impeachment isn’t a book aimed at just some citizens—for subsets of people who spend time on Twitter and Facebook loathing or lauding a president or political party. It hopes to inform citizens collectively. It was with this hope in mind that Sunstein wrote the book without so much as mentioning the current president. It was with this hope in mind that Sunstein did not write a book pitched at impeaching someone, but rather wrote a book pitched at guiding American citizens through the Constitutional impeachment mechanism and how it works.

This means, when it comes to social media, that this book should serve as a useful guide for anyone, on any point of the opinion spectrum, thinking about whether and how (and how not) to impeach a president. And therein lies the most vaunted hope. Commercial publishers have become ever more skilled at using social media to toss chum to the like-minded. University press publishers, guided by their non-profit mission, aim to allow readers to use social media for a different purpose. Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide came to be because there was a crying need for authoritative expertise on impeachment. If, as some of Sunstein’s prior scholarship suggests, social media is a vast echo chamber of divisive opinion, then it matters—especially for those of us working to disseminate scholarly insights—that some of those opinions are better informed.

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Head on over to the blogs of Johns Hopkins University Press, Athabasca University Press, and Beacon Press for a few more thoughts on social media and scholarship, or check out a list of everything offered up on the 2017 University Press Week Blog Tour.

A "Powerful Surveillance Program" Exposed

From Bernard Harcourt’s Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age:

In the wake of the two grand jury decisions to refuse to indict police officers in the homicides of Michael Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner in Staten Island, a protest was organized for Saturday, December 13, 2014, in New York City. The organizers of the Millions March set up a Facebook page, where, by the night before, more than 45,000 people had RSVPed. It was posted as a public event on Facebook, so everyone and anyone could see who had signed up to attend—providing everyone and anyone, including the social media unit of the New York City Police Department, a costless, pristine list of all the individuals who feel so strongly about the problem of police accountability that they are willing to identify themselves publicly.

It takes little imagination to think of the ways that such a list could be exploited: As a background check during a police-civilian encounter or stop-and-frisk. As a red flag for a customs search at the airport, or a secondary search at a random checkpoint. As part of a larger profile for constructing a no-fly list, or for attributing a lower priority to a 911 emergency call. For more aggressive misdemeanor arrests in neighborhoods that have higher concentrations of protesters. As part of a strategy to dampen voter turnout in certain precincts. For a cavity search in case of arrest. There are myriad creative ways to misuse the data; our imagination is the only limit. And with a single click, a prying eye can learn everything about each of the digital selves that signed up for the protest on Facebook; using a simple selector, an intelligence analyst could collect all of the digital information about any one of those signatories, read all their emails, attachments, wall posts, and comments, decipher their political opinions and engagements, scan their photos and texts, target their videochats, track them by cell phone location—in sum, follow their every movement and digital action throughout every moment of their day. Once we are identified, we can be relentlessly monitored across practically every dimension of our daily routine—by means of the GPS on our phones, our IP addresses and web surfing, our Gmail contacts, MetroCards, employee IDs, and social media posts.

From the Washington Post:

A powerful surveillance program that police used for tracking racially charged protests in Baltimore and Ferguson, Mo., relied on special feeds of user data provided by Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, according to an ACLU report Tuesday.

From the ACLU:

The ACLU of California has obtained records showing that Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram provided user data access to Geofeedia, a developer of a social media monitoring product that we have seen marketed to law enforcement as a tool to monitor activists and protesters.

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• Instagram had provided Geofeedia access to the Instagram API, a stream of public Instagram user posts. This data feed included any location data associated with the posts by users. Instagram terminated this access on September 19, 2016.
• Facebook had provided Geofeedia with access to a data feed called the Topic Feed API, which is supposed to be a tool for media companies and brand purposes, and which allowed Geofeedia to obtain a ranked feed of public posts from Facebook that mention a specific topic, including hashtags, events, or specific places. Facebook terminated this access on September 19, 2016.
• Twitter did not provide access to its “Firehose,” but has an agreement, via a subsidiary, to provide Geofeedia with searchable access to its database of public tweets. In February, Twitter added additional contract terms to try to further safeguard against surveillance. But our records show that as recently as July 11th, Geofeedia was still touting its product as a tool to monitor protests. After learning of this, Twitter sent Geofeedia a cease and desist letter.

Because Geofeedia obtained this access to Twitter, Facebook and Instagram as a developer, it could access a flow of data that would otherwise require an individual to “scrape” user data off of the services in an automated fashion that is prohibited by the terms of service (here and here). With this special access, Geofeedia could quickly access public user content and make it available to the 500 law enforcement and public safety clients claimed by the company.

Social media monitoring is spreading fast and is a powerful example of surveillance technology that can disproportionately impact communities of color. Using Geofeedia’s analytics and search capabilities and following the recommendations in their marketing materials, law enforcement in places like Oakland, Denver, and Seattle could easily target neighborhoods where people of color live, monitor hashtags used by activists and allies, or target activist groups as “overt threats.” We know for a fact that in Oakland and Baltimore, law enforcement has used Geofeedia to monitor protests.

Social media companies and their executives have expressed support for activists, movements, and free speech. Mark Zuckerberg endorsed Black Lives Matter and expressed sympathy after Philando Castile’s killing, which was broadcast on Facebook Live. Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey went to Ferguson. Above all, the companies articulate their role as a home for free speech about important social or political issues.

Yet there is a severe disconnect between these positions and the data access they have provided.

From Exposed:

We face today, in advanced capitalist liberal democracies, a radically new form of power in a completely altered landscape of political and social possibilities.

Creative Insurgency in the Arab World

In The Naked Blogger of Cairo, Marwan Kraidy builds on his decades of experience researching and writing about Arab media, culture, and politics to consider the ways in which people create rebellious art, attract public attention, and conjure new political imaginaries. At the heart of these processes Kraidy finds the human body, employed as tool, medium, symbol, and metaphor, tying the revolutionary activism we associate with the Arab uprisings of recent years to those of a longer past.

The book develops the notion of “creative insurgency” to explore the mixture of activism and artistry characteristic of revolutionary expression, turning to the work of dozens of sloganeers, graffiti artists, puppeteers, videographers, cartoonists, satirists, and bloggers to explore a series of cross-disciplinary questions about practices of rebellion:

How does creative insurgency emerge and thrive? What kinds of artistic practices does it spur? What debates does it foment? How has creative insurgency evolved in different periods and places? What do self-immolations in 1963 Saigon and 1969 Prague reveal about Bouazizi’s in 2010 Sidi Bouzid? How does Mubarak’s switching off the Internet in 2011 resonate with the British ban on theater in 1919 Cairo? What historical perspective can we gain by revisiting the French Revolution? Can the aesthetic sensibility of Delacroix’s La liberté guidant le peuple help us grasp the Naked Blogger of Cairo? What can we learn about political street art in 2010 Arab capitals from civil war–era stencil graffiti in 1970s Beirut? How do loaf-brandishing revolutionaries and the superhero Captain Khobza in 2010 Tunis echo past bread riots? How does Top Goon—Diaries of a Little Dictator recast ancient puppetry traditions for the digital era? Is revolutionary graffiti mere political messaging or is it art? How has creative insurgency evolved in different periods and places?

Kraidy gives a more complete sense of his project in the video below.

 

MOOCs Are the Thing with Feathers

If we could channel a time before “how to code” seemed deemed the only thing worth learning, an enhanced appreciation for poetry would probably feature highly on surveys of edificatory aspiration. Such a goal may also be among those most rarely pursued, though, given the barriers—real or imagined—that surround that most refined of literary forms.

Enter the MOOC. Maligned as they are, MOOCs can actually be just the thing for someone looking for a bit of guidance on a first foray into an area they may never have visited on their own. And so Harvard’s edX Poetry in America series has hopefully been received as a welcome entry point for the masses to whom it’s open.

The next four-week installment of the course, set to begin March 4th, explores the work of Emily Dickinson. The course description:

This course, the fourth installment of the multi-part Poetry in America series, explores the poetry of Emily Dickinson, one of America’s most distinctive and prolific poets. While Dickinson wrote nearly 2,000 poems during her lifetime, she chose never to publish, opting instead to revisit and revise her works throughout her lifetime. Keeping this dynamic of self-revision in mind, we will consider a number of Dickinson’s poems—many seemingly in tension with one another—concerned with Nature, Art, the Self, and Darkness. We will travel to the Dickinson Collection at Harvard's Houghton Library, and to Amherst, Massachusetts, paying a visit to the house in which the poet lived and wrote until her death in 1886. Distinguished guests for this module include NBA athlete Jason Collins, dancers Damian Woetzel and Charles “Lil Buck” Riley, and President and CEO of the New America Foundation Anne Marie Slaughter, among others.
 


Led by Harvard Professor Elisa New, Poetry in America surveys nearly 400 years of American poetry. Through video lectures, archival images and texts, expeditions to historic sites, interpretive seminars with large and small groups, interviews with poets and scholars, and conversations about poems with distinguished Americans, Poetry in America embarks on a journey through the literature of a nation. Distinguished guests, including President Bill Clinton, Elena Kagan, Henry Louis Gates, Eve Ensler, John McCain, Andrea Mitchell, Michael Pollan, Drew Faust, Tony Kushner, and Nas, among others, bring fresh perspectives to the study of American Poetry.

Previous units of the course took as their subjects the poetry of early New England, “Nature and Nation,” and Walt Whitman. With the launch in 2013 of the open access Emily Dickinson Archive, though, this new installment should prove itself an unusually fruitful bit of internet matchmaking. And, as Houghton Library curator and Emily Dickinson Archive General Editor Leslie Morris explains in the video below, that’s exactly what we all hoped for as the Archive took shape.

 

Every Loeb at a Single Site

We went live this week with the digital Loeb Classical Library, a platform representing only the most recent in a line of many technological upgrades survived by “the beauty and learning, the philosophy and wit of the great writers of ancient Greece and Rome.” Loeb Classical Library General Editor Jeffrey Henderson introduces the site in the exchange below. 

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Q: What inspired the creation of the digital Loeb Classical Library, and what needs does it seek to meet?

When he introduced the LCL in 1912 James Loeb wrote, “means must be found to place these treasures within the reach of all who care for the finer things of life,” and in the 21st century that means online as well as print. We wanted to assure that the LCL made that transition as soon as it was technologically feasible and in a form befitting the elegance of the iconic print volumes. The digital LCL meets needs thinkable only in this form: not merely another format for reading a given volume but for having the whole Library, a wallful of volumes, on any connected device anywhere, all the Latin, Greek, and English easily searchable, with a personal online workspace for storing, sharing, and teaching.

Q: How long has it taken to create the digital Loeb Classical Library? What have you and your colleagues learned along the way?

Five years. We’ve learned a lot: machines can reveal many things we take for granted after a couple of millennia using books with pages, for example we needed a new unicode font that would look good online and in print, and to determine what characters it should have—which ones are in the Library now and which are we likely to need in the future? how we would represent footnotes, marginal notes, textual variants; how we could navigate the works themselves, since each has its own internal reference system; and who knew that the LCL has over 300 different style sheets!

Policing Plagiarism vs Increasing Learning

Earlier this week NPR’s All Things Considered ran a story on Turnitin, which describes itself as “the most innovative and effective online technology for evaluating student learning.” Its main feature is an enormous database against which instructors can check their students’ writing for “originality.” As the NPR segment explains, students are directed to upload their work straight to Turnitin, which compares the text against over 45 billion web pages, more than 337 million student papers, and well over 100 million articles from academic books and publications. Turnitin determines how much of a submission matches content from the database, flagging potential plagiarism for instructors to evaluate.

Last fall we published James Lang’s Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty, a practical guide to creating learning environments with fewer opportunities and lesser incentives to cheat. Lang closes the book by considering Turnitin and its ilk:

The future of cheating also includes the future of technologies to prevent and reduce cheating, which are constantly evolving in response to new cheating techniques, pushing and pulling at one another uncertainly in an awkward waltz. Many institutions and faculty members now rely on plagiarism detection software, which itself of course constantly evolves in the wake of new technological developments. Smart theorists of these programs, like Sharon Flynn, the Assistant Director of the Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the National University of Ireland-Galway, will tell you that, contrary to popular belief, they do not catch plagiarists. As Flynn puts it in an excellent blog post introducing new users to the software program Turnitin.com, “Turnitin does not detect plagiarism, it highlights matching text. It is very good at what it does, but it cannot tell you that a student has plagiarised. You, as the teacher, are the one who decides if the matching text indicates a problem, or otherwise.” As she also point out, the program can only detect “matching text,” and will not help you with “plagiarism of ideas” or “ghost-written materials.” Faculty members cannot expect that running every student’s paper through Turnitin or any compatible program will solve their cheating problems for them—especially since Turnitin offers a comparable service for students that allows them to submit their papers to the same database used by faculty members in order to see what their reports will look like—and, presumably, modify plagiarized text just enough to avoid detection.

Instead, faculty members who choose to make use of Turnitin and its equivalents should think of it like they think of anything else they might make use of in their teaching: as a tool that can help or hinder student learning. For example, faculty members who want to help students understand more clearly how to incorporate the words of others into their research or scholarly writing can use Turnitin’s originality reports for that purpose. Projecting for students in class an originality report from an unpublished piece of academic writing—such as a forthcoming bit of your own work—will allow them to see the extent to which scholarship relies on direct quotations from the work of scholars in dialogue with the writer’s original interpretations; doing so with multiple pieces of writing, and discussing it with them, will allow them to gain a general sense of the amount of original writing typically required from an academic essay in your discipline. As long as you inform students in advance that you will be doing so, projecting in class selected originality reports from your students can help accomplish the same objective, especially if the students have already seen comparable reports from published work, and can begin to make those comparisons themselves.

Lang’s research found that students cheat for understandable reasons, and that tweaks to course design and classroom practice can both better motivate students to learn and give them better tools to do so. For Lang, simply improving technological tools with which to police academic dishonesty does nothing to actually improve student learning, which should always be the goal.

Association of American University Presses Supports Principles of Net Neutrality

In a statement issued today, the Association of American University Presses declared its support for net neutrality and the “Net Neutrality Principles” issued by 11 library, higher education, and scholarly organizations on July 10. The full AAUP statement follows.

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University Presses are famously committed to the dissemination of scholarship “far and wide,” in the words of Daniel Coit Gilman. Today, that mission often relies on the Internet and open, neutral public network access to the online content and services of libraries, institutions of higher learning, and publishers small and large. Proposals to allow ISPs to create paid “fast lanes” and other threats to open and equitable online access for all users, content, and services also threaten the underlying mission of the nonprofit members of the Association of American University Presses (AAUP). AAUP supports the “Net Neutrality Principles” issued by eleven library and higher education groups on July 10, 2014, in the interest of protecting the foundational freedoms of thought and expression on which our culture and society rests.

Read the full Net Neutrality Principles here:
http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/EPO1305_1.pdf

A statement from the eleven groups, including AAUP member the Modern Language Association, issuing the principles is here:
http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/EPO1305.pdf

The Association of American University Presses is an organization of more than 130 nonprofit scholarly publishers around the globe. AAUP advances the essential role of this global community of publishers whose mission is to ensure academic excellence and cultivate knowledge. Learn more about the Association and our members at http://www.aaupnet.org.

"No Book Is Ever Finished"

In a recent post at the Society for Scholarly Publishing’s “Scholarly Kitchen” blog, the always-astute Joseph Esposito considers the unwieldiness of “post-publication peer review” as both locution and concept. The term signals an inversion in the traditional model of scholarly publishing, which typically relies on the evaluation of materials prior to release as a critical node in the determination of a work’s suitability for publication. The post-publication peer review scheme, as Esposito explains, is developing as a means for gauging the value of a text after its publication because new models for the online publication of scholarly work may not necessarily involve rigorous pre-publication evaluation.

Esposito identifies a series of complications obscured by the notion that the peer review process can just be tacked on to new models and serve the same function. Like the term “horseless carriage” used to describe early automobiles, he writes, “ ‘post-publication peer review’ seems like an early and imprecise way of describing something that is just coming into existence.”

The shift to Open Access publishing, particularly for scholarly journals, has been a major stimulant for theorizing the restructuring of evaluation, for reasons partly to do with business models that we won’t get into here. For Esposito, the issue—which involves not just peer review but the very definition of “publication”—gives rise to the question of “whether publication in an OA journal represents the end of a process or the beginning of a different one.”

He continues:

Rather than talking about post-publication peer review, we really should be talking about an ongoing conversation that begins with colleagues and perhaps never really ends. This is going to be frustrating for those who yearn for the solidity of a fixed text, and these people have my sympathy. But the Web is developing its own kinds of systems, some of which may prove valuable, some of which are at best silly.

The implicit comparison here is to traditional scholarly publication, where peer reviewed works are published as “fixed text.” Though they hope to be discussed, their contribution to that discussion is essentially final on arrival. Bells rang, then, when historian Matthew Pratt Guterl wrote a week later of the collaborative process that has emerged since our recent publication of his Josephine Baker and the Rainbow Tribe.

Guterl’s post, “The Afterlife of Josephine,” is about “the way that work and text and image move and circulate.” His book tells of Baker’s quixotic project of building “the family of the future,” a multi-racial brood of adopted children whom she put on display in a veritable theme park as a demonstration of harmonious diversity. That Baker created her “Rainbow Tribe” decades before Benetton marketed such imagery, before Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch opened another star’s home life to the public, and before Angelina Jolie’s international adoptions became tabloid fodder meant that Guterl’s project necessarily considered the legacies of Baker’s.

And now his book, too, has its own afterlife:

Last spring, I published a “life” of Baker. And it—circulating well beyond my control—has started to return. An email here. And letter there. A comment made in conversation elsewhere. This entirely unsurprising return has reminded me, though, that writers and readers share a responsibility to curate objects publicly and collaboratively, and to encourage conversation across communities, long after the book is published or the exhibit is closed down. Attending to the life of Josephine requires that one also attend to the post-life of Josephine.

[…]

The larger takeaway is clear: no book is ever finished, really, because a book is a part of a conversation, not a declaration of permanent authority. A conversation, I might add, that includes a wider range of people—readers as well as writers and reviewers. This set of enduring afterlives—our obligations and responsibilities to the subject, to the public, to one’s self, long after the book appears as if by magic at a store—is, I think, why we imagine writing as a professional commitment, and not merely as a pleasurable hobby. It doesn’t stop with publication.

Not to make a straw man of Esposito, but Guterl’s “Afterlife of Josephine” is a nice reminder that even horse-drawn publication can represent a beginning.