An Experiment in Blog-Based Peer Review

An exciting experiment was launched today.  As Jeff Young reports in The Chronicle of Higher Education today, we've decided to do something a little different with a book, Expressive Processing, that Noah Wardrip-Fruin is publishing next year.  Working with the Institute for the Future of the Book and asking the Grand Text Auto community to participate in an open, blog-based peer review. Why?  Well, in Noah's own words:

Blogging has already changed how I work as a scholar and creator of digital media. Reading blogs started out as a way to keep up with the field between conferences -- and I soon realized that blogs also contain raw research, early results, and other useful information that never gets presented at conferences. But, of course, that's just the beginning. We founded Grand Text Auto, in 2003, for an even more important reason: blogs can create community. And the communities around blogs can be much more open and welcoming than those at conferences and festivals, drawing in people from industry, universities, the arts, and the general public. Interdisciplinary conversations happen on blogs that are more diverse and sustained than any I've seen in person.

Given that ours is a field in which major expertise is located outside the academy (like many other fields, from 1950s cinema to Civil War history) the Grand Text Auto community has been invaluable for my work. In fact, while writing the manuscript for Expressive Processing I found myself regularly citing blog posts and comments, both from Grand Text Auto and elsewhere. . . . I immediately realized that the peer review I most wanted was from the community around Grand Text Auto

The Expressive Processing peer review experiment begins today (the first actual manuscript section is here and more information on how it will work is here) and will run for approximately ten weeks and 100 thousand words on Grand Text Auto, with a new post every weekday during that period. At the end, comments will be sorted, selected and incorporated and the whole thing bundled together--we're still figuring out how that part will work, but we'll let you know. Please go over and take a look and if a thought is provoked, join the discussion.