• Digital Vampires, Zombie Books: Peer-to-Peer Review (an article in the online edition of Library Journal thinking through the argument of Planned Obsolescence in relation to Rupert Murdoch’s decision to pull his publications out of Google results)
• “Giving it away” a textbook argument (an article in Times Higher Education, the UK equivalent to the Chronicle of Higher Education, exploring the implications of the open-access movement in scholarly book publishing; my work comes in near the article’s end)
• Blogging MLA: Day Two (a report from the presidential address at the Council of Editors of Learned Journals meeting at the Modern Language Association conference, during which Bonnie Wheeler discussed Planned Obsolescence at some length)
• L’avenir du livre: l’édition sous la forme du flux (an article in the journal of a French literary foundation, focused on the future forms of the book, and using Planned Obsolescence as an example)
• On the shoulders of giants (a post exploring the publish-then-filter model of publication I advocate for in Planned Obsolescence)
• Innovations: Scholarly Writing at MediaCommons (a post exploring my work at MediaCommons, and in particular Planned Obsolescence; full disclosure: the author is my grad school roommate, whom I haven’t seen in about ten years)
• ACRLog: The Future of Peer Review? (a post about Planned Obsolescence‘s open peer review process, on the blog of the Association of College and Research Libraries)
• Scholarly Communication @ OHSU: Open Scholarship (a post about the project on a blog co-published by the Oregon Health & Science University’s Library and Research Office)
• ProfHacker: Writing in the Internet’s Margins (a post about the project on a blog focused on technology and productivity for higher education professionals)
• Digital & Scholarly: Monograph for Open Review (a post about the project on a blog published by the libraries of the University of Western Ontario)
• squidBits: Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Planned Obsolescence (a blog post about the project, the last line of which I’m particularly fond of!)
• Liberal Education Tomorrow: Scholarly Publication and Web 2.0 (a post about the project on one of the NITLE blogs)
• TechnoHistory: Planned Obsolescence Published in CommentPress (a mention of the project on the blog of Steve Anderson, assistant professor of interactive media at USC)
• The Medium Is the Message: Process of Tenure and Promotion a Monster That Eats Its Young? (discussion of the project on the blog of Eric Schnell, associate professor at the Ohio State University Libraries)
• TeleRead: Peer Review Going Digital (a post about Planned Obsolescence‘s open review process)
• Open Reflections: Publishing, Peer Review and Quality Certification in the Digital Age (an article about new digital modes of peer review that discusses my work near the end)
• Clionauta: La escritura académica digital (a post about the project on a Spanish historian’s blog)
• Online Humanities Scholarship: The Shape of Things to Come (a collection of resources for a March conference on the future of digital scholarship)
• I, Reader: From Reading to Writing to Publishing with Digital Media (a post in an ongoing project that mentions Planned Obsolescence in the context of new digital publishing technologies)

I will also note that Planned Obsolescence is being taught in at least four graduate classes during the Spring 2010 semester:

• English 354: Professional Publication in Theory and Practice (Illinois State University)
• History 377: History in the Digital Age (American University)
• History 650: History and the New Media (Indiana University)
• ITCP 70020: Interactive Technology and the University (CUNY Graduate Center)

It’s also being taught in several courses during the Fall 2010 semester:

• English 209: Literary Kinds: Thinking Through Genre, From Blogs to…? (Bryn Mawr College)
• DSMS 700. Seminar in Digital Scholarship and Media Studies (Emory University)

[updated 15 November 2010]

• Conversation with Kathleen Fitzpatrick, NITLE Summit Keynote Speaker (a quick back-and-forth with Nancy Millichap, NITLE’s Director of Program Development, published on one of the NITLE blogs)
• Impertinent Questions (an interview with me in the September 2009 Humanities magazine)
• Stephen Schenkenberg: The Next Generation of Scholarly Publishing (a post pointing to and quoting from the interview above)
• Black Marks on Wood Pulp: The not-so-imminent death of the novel (another post referring to the Humanities interview)
• “This Is Scholarship” (a video, published in Kairos, exploring the multimodal future of scholarship; my work is referenced just before the halfway point)
• Techno-Cultures (a post to a class blog broadly referencing my recent work)
• Queer Geek Theory, and Related Wanderings (a post focused on a talk I gave at USC in early 2009)
• info NeoGnostic: Scrolling the Scroll (a response to my CommentPress article)
• Lifelong Learning (a post responding to my MediaCommons article)
• if:book (a post on the Institute for the Future of the Book’s blog announcing the MediaCommons article)
• One-hundred-thirteenth Street (another post responding to the MediaCommons article)
• Scholarly Communication News @ BC (another post referring to the MediaCommons article)
• TheoLib: Libraries as publishers (a response to some of my earlier writing about digital scholarly publishing)
• Networked Public Culture: Networked Scholarship and the Social Life of Books (a post to a class blog at Loyola University Chicago responding to a cluster of articles on the future of the book, including a couple of articles of mine)
• MetaMedia: The Ethics of Class Blogging (a response to a blog post of mine thinking about ethical issues surrounding the use of blogs in undergraduate instruction)
• Infocult: Web 2.0 narrative (a report on a talk I gave at Reed College in 2006)
• Speedysnail: You Are Where? (a 2004 post by Rory Ewins, a scholar at the University of Edinburgh, which first made clear to me the potential reach that my blog could have, as compared with more traditional forms of scholarly publishing)

[updated 7 January 2010]

• Global Studies in Education Digest
• booktwo.org
• Kairosnews
• Pravda Kid
• Grand Text Auto
• Academic Commons
• Cliopatria (on the History News Network)
• Ars Technica
• ZDNet
• Inside Higher Ed
• The Chutry Experiment
• Generalia
• Scholarly Communication News @ BC
• academHacK

Other reviews have appeared in Modern Fiction Studies and electronic book review.

The Anxiety of Obsolescence has also been taught in a number of graduate courses (such as Complexity in Contemporary Narrative), resulting in a number of grad student class blog posts, including:

• Expertise Project: The Anxiety of Obsolescence
• Three Discourses on the Age of Television by Kathleen Fitzpatrick
• The Network in Black or White

A copy of the manuscript is also available in Word format, and my contract with NYU is likewise attached here.

That the article will be released six years after the experiments, and three and a half years after it was written, might serve as confirmation of one of the problems with traditional academic publishing structures, as I explore in Planned Obsolescence: appalling lag times. Many of the conclusions that this article reaches cannot help but feel dated now; what might have been possible if this volume had been published online?

I named the blog I then started Planned Obsolescence as a sort of joking acknowledgment of the form’s inherent ephemerality; the material I wrote about there was taken from the bits and pieces of my daily reading and engagement with the always-vanishing contemporary, and the posts I wrote scrolled, with time, down the front page and off into the archives. On the other hand, though, the blog has had an astonishing persistence: I’ve been at it for over seven years, writing over 1300 posts that have collectively received nearly 3000 comments, and all of that archival material remains accessible.

Not only that, but these blog posts were the first of my publications to be cited by other scholars, the first of my writing that obtained broader attention within the field. It was through connections established by the blog — connections to other scholars who blogged, and connections to the readers of my blog — that I was first extended invitations to give talks and to collaborate on new projects.

There’s been a debate for years now within the academy, a debate that began almost the moment scholars began blogging, about whether one’s blog should be included on one’s CV, whether it constitutes a publication or whether it should be listed as some kind of service, akin to serving on the editorial board of a journal. Fortunately for me, as a scholar of digital media studies, I have a “multimedia” category on my vita into which the blog fits nicely, but I feel strongly that scholars should include their blogs as scholarship, where those blogs are predominantly oriented toward a critical engagement with the same materials about which they write in more formal venues. I make this argument in no small part because of the urgency with which I believe we need to reconnect our critical work with the work of the public intellectual, making the kinds of analysis we do available to a broader community of readers. Such public work is necessary not only for academics to be able to communicate in an ongoing way with one another, but also for demonstrating the ongoing relevance of the academy and its values to an increasingly skeptical voting public.

I also include the blog in this dossier as scholarship because of the key role that it played in the development of my most recent book project, Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy. It was both the form of and the audience for the blog that enabled me to begin thinking through what the future of digital scholarship might look like.

And yes, I named the book after the blog, in large part as tribute to that new scholarly form, but also because I increasingly believe that the permanence we believe is represented by print-on-paper publishing is an illusion, and that unless we begin to understand its obsolescence, we run the risk of finding our traditional channels of scholarly communication choked off without our having adequate — or even more productive — replacements for them.

The development of MediaCommons has moved far more slowly than we’d like, given our complete lack of staff and budget, but we’ve produced one extremely successful ongoing feature, In Media Res, in which each weekday a scholar curates a media clip alongside some kind of commentary designed to foster discussion of media texts and forms that moves at a speed much closer to that of the media itself. We have also begun, via In Syndication, to aggregate the best media studies blogs from around the internet, hoping to develop MediaCommons into a portal through which members can access a wide range of scholarly writing in the field, in a wide range of registers.

This fall, we’ve launched a new major project, MediaCommons Press, through which we hope to begin publishing longer texts for open comment and review. In order to practice what I preach, both as director of MediaCommons Press and in Planned Obsolescence, I’ve used my own work as a sort of test bed for the project, but I’m in the process of developing a number of new projects that will be released in the coming months.

In the next few days, we should be releasing the new MediaCommons member profile system as well; I’ll update this post once it’s gone live. For the moment, however, one might imagine this system as a sort of Facebook for scholars, allowing the members of MediaCommons to connect and collaborate with one another. But the system also allows members to build extensive digital portfolios, gathering the work that they do within MediaCommons and across the internet into a coherent form that will allow other scholars to find and engage with that work.