SECTION 2: Digital Resources in Performance Studies 2.4: Scholarly Skywriting: Sound Journal and other projects
Alan Beck My title is borrowed from Steve Harnad (Harnad 1999), with thanks. He championed those peer-reviewed Internet journals which are free-to-view and independent of commercial publishers. And he argued that scholarly articles made available on the web are 'like a piece of skywriting, visible to one and all, today and forever more'. The ability to self-publish, as a group of peer-reviewing scholars, is with us now. Copyright remains with the authors, and all in all, this is a revolution for research. I describe below how I set up Sound Journal along with a couple of other projects and, hopefully, I encourage others to go and do likewise. First, I deal with the nuts and bolts of design and then I consider three interleaved issues - copyright, promoting the journal and opposition to electronic publishing. I also question why so many e-journals look formal and 'printy', mimicking the paper-based model when all e-journals can enjoy the value-added features of the Net: faster publication, multi-media, decreased costs, archiving, more collaborative work, data sharing and energising the key tasks of publishing research - quality control, dissemination, peer dialogue. 1. Setting up Sound Journal Assisted by a peer-review panel, I set up Sound Journal in 1998, along with co-editor Dave Reason, Senior Lecturer in Image Studies. We are skywriters, building what we hope is a journal of high-quality scholarship. Our mission in going online is to be innovative, to gain global accessibility and internationalism in research along with rapid updating and interaction with readers. Not being burdened with subscriptions or shipping the group's focus, along with that of our audience and potential contributors, is the value of scholarship in itself, its reliability, new-style electronic layout and consistency into the future. Sound Journal also led me to undertake other web projects and they too will be briefly mentioned below: an e-supplement to Studies in Theatre Production [STP] and a Radio Theory Site. Such developments augment my university courses which are 'paperless': the departmental Intranet supplying a range of materials and all the organisation along with links to the Web enlivened with images, sound files, varying designs, little self-tests and speedy navigation aids. The Sound Journal is available at http://www.ukc.ac.uk/sdfva/sound-journal/ An alternative in print was not financially feasible. We would be an 'independent' (no-cost, non-trade, and what is termed 'esoteric', that is, for a specialist audience). Immediately I encountered opinions against e-publishing and a reactionary disdain for the Web. Opposing voices said things like: 'I would never publish on the Web' or 'I'll be plagiarised' or 'A virtual journal is too virtual for me' or 'The Internet is full of here-today-and-gone-tomorrow'. Such anti-web sentiments have been interestingly surveyed, at least among German scholars in Canada, by Warkentin (1997) and he found that 42% in this very traditional area refused to publish digitally. Even today I meet the rare academic at theatre gatherings of UK drama departments who says 'My college hasn't supplied me with a desktop computer'. We need more research on this and recommendations by professional associations on the minimum electronic support a department should give a teacher. I suggest they should be read alongside Mark Batty's essential Very Basic Introduction to IT. It is a different matter if a scholar says to me - and one or two have - 'I will not publish in your journal' - if at issue is the quality of Sound Journal in itself. Sound Journal is now finding its place in the academic community but the road so far has been challenging and, I will confess, a couple of mistakes have been made. The founding concept had a single focus - sound - but 'sound' across disciplines, from drama, film and radio to music, anthropology and psychoanalysis. Part of the struggle is that it is tied to emerging research areas - radio studies, the film sound track and the aesthetics of sound in performance. It also attempts to straddle current research boundaries and to bring together a number of what are called 'invisible colleges'. We started in an initial burst of techno-optimism. Dave and I intended to ask the panel, contributors and readers to 'think electronic' rather than 'think print'. Like most good ideas this was easy to understand and tough to realise. Explorers on a new scholarly frontier in 1996-7, we surfed for other e-journals and quickly discovered the hits and pits in terms of design. Some offered a studied 'grunge' look, perhaps as a guarantee of their respectability. Others were out-and-out 'printy', mimicking the appearance and feel of paper-based journals (see Smith 1999a). A rare few seductively played with postmodernist style, typically in cinematics or gender. Then there was another puzzle: in what format should we publish? Was it to be HTML or PDF or SGML? PDF was rejected as being too uncomfortably 'printy' and too restrictive for our multi-media future. We also wanted a fully paperless publishing cycle from writing to end-use. My only regret is that we did not have the confidence to jump in sooner. That is the first advice I would offer. Start with a small, achievable project and go to a dummy mock-up as soon as possible. Ruthlessly copy others' design ideas and discover your own mix-and-match. Crucially we had gathered enough of a review panel and three start-up articles for submission which would show our range. We tried out colours - pleasant beige-yellow in a scrumpled background, and green bars - again getting away from the 'printy' look but also allowing maximum clarity. Dave (exercising his expertise as Disability Officer for the University) was concerned that pages should be clear and readable. So we established some key founding technical and design principles: 1) the site architecture and how it structures its units or pages, 2) navigation, 3) colour, backgrounds and instant recognisability for this journal, 4) font and images, and 5) avoiding the 'printy' and so rethinking the logic of the 'page', banning 'volumes' or 'issues'. There had to be an attractive overall design and easily navigable architecture. You could journey back-and-forth from each page via a clickable menu at the bottom so there were no 'orphan' pages. Backgrounds had to be pleasant - we avoided black-on-white - but allow maximum readability. Each of the articles has a different background and some small variation in design. All files had to be simply named and in a one-word-plus-number combination (for example, 'garner991'). Remember that short compact file names help non-Mac users and those on pre-Windows PCs: the latter have difficulty with file names which are over-long or in which there are blank spaces between words. We had to be aware of those using older browsers and what would be their default presentation. It also helped that we could consult Jakob Nielsen's 'useit.com' website at http://www.useit.com (Nielsen 1995-2000). There he dispenses swift and opinionated design wisdom to all, especially business users of the Net. He has regular 'Alertbox' columns and updates his 'Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design'. Another early question was which software to use for site construction and maintenance. We tried out Front Page but, although I am no computer novice, I found my apprenticeship on it too difficult. It does offer an attractive 'map' of links and site components but I decided I had to go for fast results. Since I do most of the designing and all of the data-input I settled for Adobe Page Mill and HTML. Sometimes I use the (lazy?) start-up in Microsoft Word, then save it into HTML. Glitches and fine-tuning are sorted out in Notepad. This is the speediest method that we discovered and fits in with our need for a streamlined production schedule. Then we had the debate: frames or not? This decision was key to our planning of the whole navigation system. We decided against using frames, partly on Nielsen's principle of 'Frames: Just Say No'! Our site uses relatively simple architecture at present. Clicking from the main index page, users are offered: ARTICLES (Articles sub-home page leading to the sub-site of separate articles) + SUBMISSIONS + REVIEW PANEL + SDFVA HOME (hosting department) + UKC HOME (hosting university) + RADIO THEORY SITE + WFAE SITE (World Forum for Acoustic Ecology) + LINKS (radio, film, etc.) The main home page however, for obvious marketing reasons, offers direct access to: SUBMISSIONS + REVIEW PANEL + ARTICLES These pages would later grow into sub-sites of reviews and creative sound works. Users move through the cascading pages not via frames but by single navigation actions and there are up to nine clickable options that are easily made available on every page (usually spread across the bottom, occasionally the top). Page 1 of 3 Top of Page
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