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December, 1994 _EJournal_ Volume 4 Number 4 ISSN 1054-1055
An Electronic Journal concerned with the
implications of electronic networks and texts.
2873 Subscribers in 37 Countries
There are 708 lines in this issue.
University at Albany, State University of New York
EJOURNAL@ALBANY.edu
CONTENTS:
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND THE BREAKDOWN
OF "PLACES" OF KNOWLEDGE [ Begins at line 58 ]
by Doug Brent
University of Calgary
dabrent@acs.ucalgary.ca
EDITORIAL COMMENT [ Begins at line 521]
Archiving Electronic Journals:
Permanence, Integrity, Linking, Citation, Copyright
Information about _EJournal_ - [ Begins at line 619 ]
About Subscriptions and Back Issues
About Supplements to Previous Texts
About _EJournal_
People [ Begins at line 673 ]
Board of Advisors
Consulting Editors
==========================================================================
*****************************************************************
* This electronic publication and its contents are (c) copyright *
* 1994 by _EJournal_. Permission is hereby granted to give away *
* the journal and its contents, but no one may "own" it. Any and *
* all financial interest is hereby assigned to the acknowledged *
* authors of individual texts. This notification must accompany *
* all distribution of _EJournal_. *
*****************************************************************
==========================================================================
Information Technology and the
Breakdown of "Places" of Knowledge [l. 58]
Douglas A. Brent
In this essay I wish to argue that information technology --
electronic mail, electronic conferencing, digitized interactive
video, and the other gifts of the "information highway" -- will not
only interconnect people but will speed the dissolution of barriers
between disciplines.
Stated baldly in this way, this is a totally unremarkable argument.
Since electronic communication arose in the mid-Nineteenth Century,
people have been grandly claiming that it will usher in a new era of
harmony and connectedness (see Marvin 1988 for a fascinating
compendium of "electrical revolution" narratives). It takes only a
brief look at the history of technological revolutions to make one
suspicious of such claims. Consider the following effusion:
How potent a power is [communication technology] destined to
become in the civilization of the world! This binds together
by a vital cord all the nations of the earth. It is
impossible that old prejudices and hostilities should longer
exist, while such an instrument has been created for an
exchange of thought between all nations of the earth.
This claim was made in 1858 by Briggs and Maverick regarding the
telegraph (Carey 1989). Such examples of "the rhetoric of the
technological sublime" (to use a phrase that Carey borrows from Leo
Marx) should help us resist the temptation to assume that walls
between people will automatically fall to any technological ram's
horn that comes along.
[l. 89]
On the other hand, there is no doubt that communication and
information technology has made astounding changes in social
organization and in the status of knowledge. Carey himself has
shown how the telegraph effected profound changes in "popular ideas"
of time and space, economic and social conditions, and philosophical
notions of the relationship between transportation and
communication. His point is simply that the results of a
technological revolution are frequently more subtle than are
supposed by proponents of the technological sublime, and frequently
more far-reaching. If we proceed with caution, then, we can use
some of the changes that have already happened as indicators of
larger patterns, in turn enabling us to predict, or at least guess
more accurately, what new technologies can bring.
The particular pattern I am interested in here is the breakdown of
specialized realms of knowledge in the age of electronic
communication. The rise of specialized knowledge out of the warm,
intimate "noetic world" of primary orality has been exhaustively
discussed by Havelock (1963), Ong (1982), Logan (1986) and others.
I won't rehearse their arguments here except to say that these
authors attribute most of the characteristics of the modern "western
mind," including the specialization of knowledge, to the ability to
record thought in abstract, categorizable units that are distanced
from the authors. Though some authors challenge the extreme version
of what has been called the "cognitive great divide" theory (Bizell,
1988), its basic premise -- that the modern world could not have
come about without the distancing, specializing power of printed
text -- has in the main held firm. [l. 117]
The second part of this theory, argued most forcibly by Marshall
McLuhan, is that electronic communication is reversing this trend.
McLuhan's famous phrase "the global village" is frequently taken to
mean simply that people can connect easily to others anywhere in the
world. McLuhan, however, uses the phrase to point to a much deeper
change in social organization and individual psychology. In
_Understanding Media_, he argues that the electric media speak the
language of narrative and myth rather than abstracted intellectual
thought. Under their influence, the children of the television age
are growing up with an outlook marked by "wholeness, unity and
depth." However, he also calls attention to a profound
discontinuity between the retribalized social sphere and the still
fragmented academic world. At school, the child "encounters a world
organized by means of classified information. The subjects are
unrelated. They are visually conceived in terms of a blueprint"
(McLuhan 1964:ix). For the academic world is still organized
according to the abstract, linear, classificatory world of print.
"We actually live mythically and integrally, as it were, but we
continue to think in the old, fragmented space and time patterns of
the pre-electric age (McLuhan 1964:20).
McLuhan is always better at proposing ideas in general terms than at
working out their detailed implications. In this essay I would like
to examine this discontinuity more closely, using Joshua Meyrowitz's
theories of media to provide a conceptual framework in which to
explore the question of why the academic world has continued to be
dominated by these "old, fragmented space and time patterns." I
will also turn to recent explorations of the rhetoric of
disciplinarity to characterize this fragmentation more exactly and
to provide a basis for speculating on how information technology may
extend the "retribalization" of popular culture into the
intellectual world. [l. 150]
In _No Sense of Place_ (1985), Meyrowitz offers a detailed analysis
of the falling-together of cultural divisions in the television age.
He does so by using Goffman's social theories to extend McLuhan's
basic analysis of electric media. Goffman (1974) argues that human
interactions are governed by social roles, roles which shift
according to social situation. For instance, when a doctor is "on
stage," performing in her expert role as a professional examining a
patient, she plays out a specific set of interactions that emphasise
professionalism, objectivity, expertise, and distance. When "back
stage," such as at lunch with her colleagues, she may display much
more informal behaviours, including both doubts and glib remarks
that she would never display in front of a patient. The same
applies to waiters while they are serving as opposed to while they
are chatting in the kitchen.
Meyrowitz applies this dramaturgical model to media. Goffman
relates social situation to physical setting, but for Meyrowitz, it
is not so much the literal geography of a social setting -- the
eating area as opposed to the kitchen -- that matters, but the
pattern of information flow, which is only incidentally related to
physical location. A "given pattern of access to social
information, a given pattern of access to the behaviour of other
people" (37) controls the elements of the social drama. Note, for
instance, how we can enter a totally different social information
system, with attendant changes in behaviour, just by placing a hand
over a telephone receiver and making an unprofessional aside to a
spouse or co-worker. We leave the social space of our telephone
conversation with, say, a client, and enter another, less formal
social space simply by entering another realm of communication.
Meyrowitz goes on to argue that in the past many social distinctions
have been maintained because information flow could be controlled.
Leaving aside electric media, information flow normally takes place
either through face-to-face interactions or through print.
Face-to-face interactions are controlled by space: just as waiters
can talk about different things in the kitchen than they do in the
restaurant, parents can talk about different things in their
bedrooms than they do at the dinner table, and men can talk
differently with other men on an all-male fishing trip from the way
they can at a mixed-gender party. The world of print, on the other
hand, is controlled by access to the code. Children are completely
excluded from the print world until school age; other social and
professional spheres are separated by layers of specialization in
the print code, layers that naturally develop. Without special
training, the key texts of one discipline are simply unreadable by
members of another discipline.
[l. 198]
Television changes much of this by making social information
available everywhere to anyone who can press a channel changer.
Children and adults, men and women, experts and novices, public and
private figures, all have access to more or less the same
information system. Back stage and front stage have given way to
the universally accessible "middle stage" virtual space of
television. As a result, argues Myrowitz, the generation of the
sixties, the first generation to have grown up with television, saw
the breaking-down of barriers between the sexes, between children
and adults, between expert and novice, between authority figures and
the general public. For better or for worse, society has become
vastly more homogeneous.
This breakdown of distinctions between realms of information has
not, however, been translated very effectively into the academic
world. Despite recent trends to valorize "interdisciplinarity,"
academic knowledge is still deeply divided by discipline. This
division is not simply a matter of differences in terminology,
stocks of factual knowledge, or objects of analysis. As Kuhn has
argued, it is a matter of differences in shared premises or
"paradigms."
What Herbert Simons (1990) has called "the rhetorical turn" in the
study of disciplinary knowledge put these differences into a
rhetorical perspective by applying the rhetorical concept of
"commonplaces." In Aristotle's rhetorical scheme, speakers could
reference two different types of inventional resources. The first,
the "special topics," referred to the specialized knowledge that
characterizes a particular discipline. A political argument, for
instance, would be based on special knowledge of subjects such as
war and peace, national defense, imports and exports, etc. For
Aristotle, however, these realms of specialized knowledge were far
less interesting than the more philosophical "general" or
"universal" topics such as magnitude, degree, and time. These
topics are the foundation of basic logical principles that any
trained speaker can use to mold the minutiae of the special topics
and the individual facts of the case into a well-formed deductive
argument.
[l. 237]
The Roman name for these topoi, the _loci communes_ or
"commonplaces," captures the sense in which rhetoricians thought of
them as metaphorical locations in which ideas were stored and to
which a speaker could go for the materials of argument. Rhetorical
analysis of modern academic texts suggests that modern disciplines
are not just divided by different stocks of knowledge of "special
topics." Rather, they are divided by different kinds of arguments
which are unique the discourse of each discipline. McCloskey
(1993), for instance, documents ways in which writing in the field
of economics is not just "about" markets; it is dominated by a way
of thinking that uses the idea of "market" as a kind of universal
metaphor upon which all manner of arguments are based. It is a
metaphor that anyone could use, but for those within the discourse
community of economics, it takes on complex and deep significance.
It becomes not just another metaphor, but a fundamental
building-block of argument.
Similarly, Simons (1990), Bazerman (1988) and others have argued
that the structure of a scientific report is not just a matter of
superficial style, but rather a complex stock of argumentative moves
or commonplaces that serve to reinforce and reproduce a view of the
world that characterizes the discipline of science. In short, the
*common* topics have become, in their way, as specialized as the
*special* topics.
The relative homogeneity of the ancient commonplaces can be seen as
a holdover from the old oral world, a world which, as Ong documents,
took many centuries to lose its grip on human consciousness. The
deeply divided commonplaces of modern disciplines arose as
face-to-face communication and print communication increasingly
diverged after the Renaissance. This divergence created disciplines
with different back stage and different front stage information
systems.
These staging areas are separated, following Meyrowitz' argument, by
physical space in the one case and typographic space in the other.
It is only partially a fanciful pun to equate this sense of "place"
as separate stocks of argumentative resources with the literal
"places" -- faculty coffee lounges, academic conferences,
specialized journals -- which allow discourses to proceed within
disciplines without significant interaction with other disciplines.
To return to my original question: why has this distinction
persisted in academic knowledge when electronic media have broken
down most social distinctions based on separate information systems?
Clearly, there is no "middle stage" area in the academic disciplines
that corresponds to television. Television, a dramatic medium
ideally suited both to entertainment and the maintenance of popular
culture through reproduction of mythic structures, is totally
unsuited to the complex arguments that typify academic knowledge.
Academic knowledge remains, not just print oriented, but dependent
on a complex interaction between face-to-face interaction and print.
[l. 291]
The academic conference is a case in point. Scholars go to great
lengths to meet face-to-face, despite the fact that the main "front
stage" activity of most conferences is the bizarre academic habit of
reading papers at one another. Why don't scholars fax their papers
to each other and save money and fossil fuels? They don't because
they also value the back stage personal conversations that flesh out
the front stage activity with meaningful social interchange. My
point is that both of these social settings are bounded information
systems distinguished by what journal one publishes in, what
department one works in, what hallways one frequents. Without a
"middle stage" area equivalent to television, the academy has
remained remarkably resistant to the relative homogeneity celebrated
(McLuhan) or lamented (Postman) in the everyday social world.
Information technology has the potential to bring about profound
changes in intellectual knowledge because it can provide this middle
stage area, an area in which the "specialized" commonplaces of
disciplinary discourse can no longer maintain their separateness.
It is obvious that most electronic interchanges of information are
relatively independent of physical geography. But it is not the
ease with which one can exchange e-mail with a colleague in Tokyo
that makes networked information interchange so different from
previous media. The difference hinges on the fact that, although
networked information interchange tends to be spontaneously
organized into quasi-social "networlds" in a variety of manners --
the people with whom one regularly corresponds, the listserves,
newsgroups and ejournals one subscribes to (see for instance Harasim
1993) -- these virtual worlds of electronic interchange are
notoriously leaky.
The reason is that the cross-disciplinary contacts that occur in
cyberspace do not happen in clearly demarcated front stage or back
stage regions. In one sense, e-mail and related modes of
communication are analogous to face-to-face (back stage)
conversation, while more formal refereed electronic publishing is
analogous to print (front stage) behaviour. Yet both of these forms
are essentially textual in nature. They use exactly the same tools
of both reading and writing, and frequently one only knows whether
one is reading a refereed journal or an unmoderated discussion list
by carefully inspecting the masthead (if it has not irretrievably
scrolled off the screen). Unlike traditional staging areas, they
are marked off only by the social interactions that people choose to
perform there, not by any systematic closure of an information
system marked by spatial or textual boundaries.
Shoshana Zuboff (1988) has documented the immediate and striking
effect that even a simple interoffice conference system has on an
organization. In a close ethnographic analysis of a company she
calls "DrugCorp," she shows how the installation of an electronic
conferencing system almost immediately gave employees a more
universal view of the company's operations. They felt integrated
into a larger whole, not just specialized parts of an industrial-
age machine. Most important, knowledge began to be organized by
relevance to the task at hand rather than by department. For
instance, when a researcher in the R & D division encountered a
problem, he did not go to other R & D people; rather, he entered a
message into a conference organized by general subject --
mathematics and statistics -- and received varying answers from
across the company. "With that," writes Zuboff, "he not only was
able to solve his problem but also felt that he had learned even
more about the software package from analysing the differences
between these answers" (367).
[l. 354]
Hypertext increases further the interconnectivity of network space.
As Bolter (1992) points out, print indexing techniques emphasise the
systematic retrieval of information within domains of knowledge.
They are inherently hierarchical, emphasising categories and
subcategories of knowledge. Network space can also be organized
hierarchically, but the more natural structure of hypertext is a
network rather than a tree structure. The World Wide Web elevates
hypertext to a global level, offering the possibility of freely
structured connections among documents whose geographical location
and whose disciplinary placement are more or less irrelevant.
Nothing in these communications structures necessarily compels
people to begin recognizing and using the commonplaces of other
discourse communities rather than developing highly specialized
lines of argument. Discourse communities have a tendency to be
self-perpetuating, as people generally feel more comfortable and at
home talking to their own kind and thus tend to reproduce genre
distinctions spontaneously. A glance at the groups that naturally
form at any large cocktail party will immediately confirm this.
Threats to established territorial boundaries can also manifest
themselves in reactionary decisions at the management and government
level. The interconnectedness that Zuboff noted in DrugCorp, for
instance, was rapidly destroyed by a management fearful of the new
order of uncontrolled information that it had unleashed.
[l. 379]
However, the power of the "bias of communication" (to use Innis's
term) lies not in what it compels so much as in what it makes easy.
Indexing, for instance was always possible in a manuscript society,
but the labour of producing systematic indexes for one-off
manuscripts whose pagination inevitably varied from that of other
copies was simply too great to make the concept viable. Once print
technology made this communications structure easy, it became a
standard feature of any academic work. Likewise, interdisciplinary
contact and the rise of more shared commonplaces is no less probable
because it is not compelled. By breaking down distinctions among
information systems, the middle stage space of information
technology makes the development of isolated stocks of commonplaces
so much more difficult, and interchange among these commonplaces so
much easier, that only the most powerfully organized
countermovements can even slow it down.
This is not to say that greater use of information technology will
necessarily result in the complete breakdown of disciplinary boxes.
Nor would it necessarily be good if it were to do so. Kuhn
characterises "pre- paradigmatic" knowledge as a chaos of competing
premises and non-cumulative tinkering; we have no idea what
"post-paradigmatic" knowledge might look like, for we have never had
truly non-disciplinary academic knowledge of a modern variety. It
is not entirely clear whether the complexity and depth of current
disciplinary thought could exist without those very Disciplines to
provide a matrix of development; certainly the idea of achieving a
unification of knowledge at the expense of taking on the bland
uniformity of television is not an appealing thought.
There is no need, however, to push the television analogy this far.
Information technology may be capable of dissolving some of the
acute differences between fields of study by breaking down the
geographic and textual barriers between them, without giving rise to
the warm grey soup of McLuhan's "mythic" wholeness and unity. This
would be interdisciplinarity in Good and Roberts' (1993) sense of a
meeting of expertise from various disciplines in order to solve
common problems, rather than a non- disciplinarity analogous to the
merging of everyday social spheres described by Meyrowitz. [l. 417]
The residually textual nature of information technology may be
sufficient to allow academic fields of knowledge to remake
themselves into more integrated spheres of knowledge rather than
melt down into total "mythic unity." As noted earlier, television
is a fundamentally dramatic and narrative medium unsuited for
abstract linear thought or high degrees of specialization.
Electronic information interchange, on the other hand, is
fundamentally symbolic, requiring if anything a greater rather than
lesser degree of ability to process abstractions than does print
(Zuboff 1988). This fundamentally abstract nature of the medium may
serve to preserve a degree of specialization and disciplinary
situatedness because it will maintain at least some of the
characteristics of print that have been credited with the creation
of the modern noetic world.
However, writing histories of the future is always a dangerous
business. Despite the current explosion of the "information highway"
version of the rhetoric of the technological sublime, information
technology is so new and still so marginal in terms of academic
publishing that only the very leading edges of its effects can be
glimpsed. Thorough rhetorical analysis of electronic texts as they
become more dominant may allow us to track shifts in the
disciplinary commonplaces that Simons, McCloskey and others have
shown us. But in the meantime, McLuhanesque pattern-watching may
give us at least some idea of what we might be looking for.
[l. 445]
References
Bazerman, C. (1988). Shaping written knowledge: The genre and
activity of the experimental article in science. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press.
Bizell, P. (1988). Arguing about literacy. College English
50:141-53.
Bolter, J. (1991). Writing space: The computer, the text, and the
history of writing. Fairlawn, N.J.: Erlbaum.
Carey, J. W. (1989). Communication as culture: Essays on media and
society. Boston: Unwin Hyman.
Goffman, E. (1974). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of
experience. New York: Harper and Row.
Good, J. M. M., and R. H. Roberts. (1993). Persuasive discourse in
and between disciplines in the human sciences. The recovery of
rhetoric: Persuasive discourse and disciplinarity in the human
sciences. Ed. R. H. Roberts and J. M. M. Good. London: Bristol.
1-21.
Harasim, L. (1993). Networlds: Networks as social space. Global
networks: Computers and internations communication. Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press.
Havelock, E. A. (1963). Preface to Plato. Harvard University
Press: Cambridge.
Logan, R. (1986). The alphabet effect: The impact of the phonetic
alphabet on the development of western civilization. New York:
Morrow.
Marvin, C. (1988). When old technologies were new. New York:
Oxford University Press.
McCloskey, D. N. (1993). The rhetoric of economic expertise. The
recovery of rhetoric: Persuasive discourse and disciplinarity in the
human sciences. Ed. R. H. Roberts and J. M. M. Good. London:
Bristol. 137-47.
McLuhan, Marshal (1964). Understanding media: The extensions of
man. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Meyrowitz, J. (1985). No sense of place: The impact of electronic
media on social behavior. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ong, W. (1982). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the
word. New York: Methuen.
Postman, N. (1985). Amusing ourselves to death: Public discourse in
the age of show business. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Simons, H. W. (1990). The rhetoric of inquiry as an intellectual
movement. The rhetorical turn: Invention and persuasion in the
conduct of inquiry. Ed. H. W. Simons. Chicago: Chicago University
Press.
Zuboff, S. (1988). In the age of the smart machine: The future of
work and power. New York: Basic.
------------ ---------------- ----------
Doug Brent
University of Calgary
dab@acs.ucalgary.ca
------------ ---------------- ----------
[ This essay in Volume 4, Number 4 of _EJournal_ (December
1994) is (c) copyright _EJournal_. Permission is hereby
granted to give it away. _EJournal_ hereby assigns any and
all finaincial interest to Doug Brent. This note must
accompany all copies of this text. ]
[l. 518]
=====================================================================
EDITORIAL COMMENT
Archiving electronic periodicals involves issues -- permanence,
integrity, linking, citation, even copyright -- that won't become
stale for a long time. _EJournal_'s stance in the meantime is as
follows:
Copyright - on the principle that many creators are more interested
in sharing and serving than in making money with their work (or in
turning that benefit of possession over to others), we insist that
no one may "own" _EJournal_. Wherever you find it, take and use it.
Citation - After some confusing experiments, we have settled on
consecutivity (issue numbers) within calendar years (volume
numbers). Although the month of mailing also appears near the top
of each issue, there may be more than one mailing in the same month,
so that's not a unique identifier. We provide where-to-find-it line
numbers near the beginning, and incidental line numbers every few
screens throughout so that accurate citation and recall of
references are not too difficult.
Linking - It could be argued that line numbers will be made
irrelevant by full-text searching and html links. One could
imagine, that is, linking reference notes directly to citations,
instead of just pointing to them. Perhaps we'll be able to find
what we're looking for by asking for string matches -- or color or
shape or waveform matches. But that's a distant ideal. Despite our
interest in testing the default boundaries imposed by paper-based
conventions, _EJournal_ will stick for now with the "page" or
"space" orientation of the codex technologies.
Integrity - If we are to be useful in the evolution of the network
culture (in what may prove to have been its "self-organization"),
_EJournal_ has to be "dependable" within the traditions of codex
reliability. Much as we may *discuss* the ephemerality and
transformability of pixel-based display, that is, we have to prevent
suspicion that the record might have been tampered with. Therefore
we have a Fileserv that contains read-only "originals" of each
issue. In case there are questions about later "copies," there will
be a place to find what every issue looked like on mailing day. We
do NOT make changes, even of outdated e-mail addresses.
Permanence - What good are policies about integrity if the whole
record disappears? Floppy disks and regular backup from a hard
drive are not enough to assure perpetuity. Maintenance has to be
institutionalized. In our case, _EJournal_'s Fileserv is backed by
the institutional momentum of the State University of New York.
There are procedures for backup and provisions for continuity that
should make _EJournal_ as "permanent" as anything on paper. To be
sure, our great grandparents assumed that paper was as "permanent"
as anyone would ever need, and latent acidity has shown once more
that widely held assumptions aren't always correct. Something could
go wrong with the procedures we assume will work. But we have taken
responsible, reasonable precautions to preserve _EJournal_.
These comments are triggered by developments in ways to find
_EJournal_. Hanover College, thanks to John Ahrens, has been
archiving us for some time. We haven't made a big thing of that
because the full text of every issue is distributed to everyone who
has expressed an interest, by subscribing, in what we do. Now,
however, as Jennifer Wyman prepares html markup for every issue, and
as Albany's Library begins to archive us, and as Peter He wonders
about inter-issue cross-referencing and indexing, we are thinking
more and more about our availablity to people who might be
interested in _EJournal_, or a particular issue, but are not
subscribers. The presence of different *electronic* versions in
different *electronic* places allows the suspicion that they are
different from the originals. So it is important to know that the
original issues, unmodified, will be always available in our Bitnet
Fileserv (or its instituional successor) by way of the Listserv
command (or its equivalent) GET EJRNL VxNx.
_EJournal_ is now available from two sources, at least, other than
the Bitnet Fileserv at Albany.
Our first gopher site was and is at Hanover College, thanks to John
Ahrens -
at Hanover - /public/ftp/pub/ejournal
We are also available from the University at Albany's Library gopher,
thanks to Peter He -
at Albany(SUNY) - /service.../...libraries/electronic/EJournal
Furthermore, Jennifer Wyman has marked up back issues in html. The
URL isn't quite set yet, but we're getting close.
We'd appreciate suggestions from readers about access to _EJournal_,
as well as reports about your successful (or frustrating) gophering.
Also, we had a question recently about indexing: Is _EJournal_
indexed anywhere in the reference literature? If you know that we
are, would you let us know where? Thanks.
Ted Jennings [l. 614]
======================================================================
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About _EJournal_:
_EJournal_ is an all-electronic, e-mail delivered, peer-reviewed,
academic periodical. We are particularly interested in theory and
practice surrounding the creation, transmission, storage,
interpretation, alteration and replication of electronic "text" -
broadly defined. We are also interested in the broader social,
psychological, literary, economic and pedagogical implications of
computer- mediated networks. The journal's essays are delivered
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copies; _EJournal_ will provide authenticated paper copy from our
read-only archive when it is needed.
Writers who think their texts might be appreciated by _EJournal_'s
audience are invited to forward files to EJOURNAL@ALBANY.edu . If
you are wondering about starting to write a piece for to us, feel
free to ask if it sounds appropriate. There are no "styling"
guidelines; we try to be a little more direct and lively than many
paper publications, and considerably less hasty and ephemeral than
most postings to unreviewed electronic spaces. Essays in the vicinity
of 5000 words fit our format well. We read ASCII; we look forward to
experimenting with other transmission and display formats and
protocols.
[l. 671]
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Board of Advisors:
Stevan Harnad University of Southampton
Dick Lanham University of California at L. A.
Ann Okerson Association of Research Libraries
Joe Raben City University of New York
Bob Scholes Brown University
Harry Whitaker University of Quebec at Montreal
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Consulting Editors - December, 1994
ahrens@alpha.hanover.edu John Ahrens Hanover
srlclark@liverpool.ac.uk Stephen Clark Liverpool
dabrent@acs.ucalgary.ca Doug Brent Calgary
djb85@albany Don Byrd Albany
donaldson@loyvax Randall Donaldson Loyola College
ds001451@ndsuvm1 Ray Wheeler North Dakota
erdtt@pucal Terry Erdt Purdue-Calumet
fac_askahn@vax1.acs.jmu.edu Arnie Kahn James Madison
folger@watson.ibm.com Davis Foulger IBM - Watson Center
gms@psuvm Gerry Santoro Penn State
nakaplan@ubmail.ubalt.edu Nancy Kaplan Baltimore
nrcgsh@ritvax Norm Coombs RIT
r0731@csuohio Nelson Pole Cleveland State
richardj@bond.edu.au Joanna Richardson Bond
ryle@urvax Martin Ryle Richmond
twbatson@gallua Trent Batson Gallaudet
userlcbk@umichum Bill Condon Michigan
wcooper@gpu.srv.ualberta.ca Wes Cooper Alberta
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Editor: Ted Jennings, English, University at Albany
Managing Editor: Chris Funkhouser, University at Albany
Technical Editor: Jennifer Wyman, University at Albany
Editorial Asssociate: Jerry Hanley, emeritus, University at Albany
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University at Albany, State University of New York, Albany, NY 12222 USA
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