In one of the best articles I've read in a long time on the possibilities for new technologies to enhance and save scholarly publishing from its crisis, Robert C. Binkley, in the Yale Review, remembers all the elements that are essential if we really are going to make a difference in our Digital Futures. His piece remembers historical examples that did or did not prove revolutionary. Rather than techno-determinism, he understands technology as part of vast social changes and underscores the relationship between economics, opportunity, interest, possibility, and social dynamics. He remembers aesthetics, and the sheer beauty of an object and its reduction when mechanically reproduced or its potential for enhancement through new technologies. And he realizes that culture is continuous and global, not provincial: his examples range across 15th century Chinese Sung Era bookmaking that made Chinese classics as well as Christian and Greco-Roman works available to a wider audience than ever before. He also makes reference to American Indian language specialists and the use of images as well as text to convey information. And he never strays far from the actual details of the technology, what it costs relative to other consumer goods (for text is also that), and how issues of archiving and distribution, production and consumption, individuals and institutions (libraries and presses, writers and readers, universities and IT departments) are all interconnected in scholarly communication.

But what makes this article so brilliant is that, unlike so much blather on electronic publishing, this article talks about the good and importance of scholarship in the world, talks about scholars as if we were also (imagine that!) workers who produced something of value, and then considers the arrangements of professionalization, training, and credentialing that go into the professional scholar and argues that, in this confluence of social conditions and technologies, now is the right time for the rise of the "amateur scholar." "Open access" doesn't matter if there is no one who wants to "access" what is "open." In other words, our demand for information that is free has to be accompanied by a responsibility to teach/support/develop a readership vitally interested in that information. If learning and curiosity are impoverished, who cares if our archives are lock-box or open? Why poor millions and millions into digital projects if there is no public excited to take advantage of such archives? Technology and information cannot be divorced from learning and the imperative to teach far and wide, beyond a handful of specialized scholars. We need "Citizen Scholars." And we need "Citizen Educators" for the new information technologies or why bother?

You don't write to archive. You write to be read. That doesn't mean you always write for the same audience. The point is that with variable modes of accessing scholarship, you can address a widespread but still niche audience. But not if that audience doesn't exist, isn't supported by networks and communities. (That is part of the Creative Commons mantra: we need to place less emphasis on "content" and more on "community." ) Content does not exist in a vacuum any more than does technology. The production of knowledge and the production of readers is a continuous process with technological development; knowledge is not some fly preserved in amber, all of its features in tact and utterly untouchable.

Binkley calls for "local studies" and a kind of distributed model of teaching scholarship, what a scholar does, what a scholar's methods are, why serious study (no matter the object) counts as part of technology's designs for universality, a distribution of teaching that works informally, outside of any professionalized, specialized school or educational or professional school credentialing. A community of readers suitable to the new and revolutionary technologies of communication. He calls this a "pilot of democracy." Where "science and scholarship and the intellectual ideal are not a doctrinaire respect for a participant's interest" but a de-centralized and expansive collaborative model where every home is a "library," every dining room a school room, and every person a "man of letters." [sic]

As he concludes, "Towards this end technology offers new devices and points the way."

Oh, one catch: the new technologies he is talking about in his brave new world of scholarly publishing may not be available to all. His focus is "near print" and micro-photography and photo-off set, mimeography and hectographing. Binkley's article was published in 1935.

I learned about this essay this morning on Facebook from Rutgers University professor and scholar Meredith McGill. (She says she learned about it from Lisa Gitelman in their American Antiquarian Society Seminar and Lisa received it from Rick Prelinger. I don't know where he first learned of it.) And you can read the article here, because Binkley's works have been lovingly digitized by those who remember him and are available on line:

http://www.wallandbinkley.com/rcb/articles/newtools-output.html

Here's a favorite section: "These three processes, photo-offset, micro-copying, and near-print, each important when considered by itself, offer an imposing prospect when they are considered together. . . . The duty of making reading matter accessible to the scholar may be assumed increasingly by the micro-copying process, and near-print may become the normal channel by which the creative worker, whether in literature or in scholarship, can be guaranteed communication with a limited group that shares his interesets, leaving publication in printed forma s the channel of communication with a larger public."

And then this section, on the "amateur scholar": "The professional scholars cannot indefinitely continue indifference to the prospects of amateur scholarship, for they are facing a crisis themselves. The strain that is appearing in their system of recruiting and maintaining financially a professional personnel will force them to consider the redistribution of scholarly labor and the reorganization of scholarly communications."

Wikipedia, anyone?