Reading this month’s First Monday, I ran into a few of my least-favorite assumptions about publishing in general and e-publishing in particular. They are my least-favorite assumptions because people who buy into them design publications and publishing workflows that do not and cannot function well. They charge gaily into new projects that founder within months out of wild cluelessness about the work that the project would entail.
David J. Solomon’s article, “Talking Past Each Other,” contains the canard following:
Beyond that [the peer-review process], copyediting and formatting manuscripts is all that remains in preparing a manuscript for publication. Sophisticated word processors and typesetting applications, while not fully automating copyediting and formatting have greatly reduced the effort and skill required to produce a well-written and professionally formatted document.
It is marvelously ironic that this quote should appear in First Monday, which is abysmally copyedited, if indeed it is copyedited at all. Solomon’s own article contains the horrid typo “general pubic,” and a casual read through the rest of this issue turns up plenty more typos and missing words, as well as sentences in need of revision (note the missing comma in the passage I just quoted) and uncorrected character-set issues (the eth that turns up instead of an em dash in one article proves quite conclusively that the article came from a Mac-head).
The typographic and archival quality of First Monday is similarly low; nary a typographic quote (such as I employ in CavLec; I note with interest that several bloggers have recently learned how to do this also, possibly from me) to be seen. The HTML, while relatively clean, is uninspired, abusing the <blockquote> tag unmercifully. (Hint: Setting margin on body takes care of text crashing into the side of the window real nice. No need for tag abuse.) Metadata? Not that I see.
Anyway, moving on to a proper refutation. Word processors have made some publishing jobs easier and others harder. The editors and proofers I know will tell you that one key “advantage” of word processors is their ability to allow authors to get in the way of the publishing process. Authors do horrible things with word processors. They turn Greek letters into tiny images instead of inserting a symbol or using a Greek font. They use symbols from fonts nobody else in the world has ever heard of. They futz with formatting such that no two paragraphs look alike. And it’s publishers who have to clean up these messes, as their eyes roll over ignorance like Dr. Solomon’s.
As for typesetting, sure, Quark is easier than, say, Penta. A stupid Quarkster, however, will give you just as crappy a final document as a stupid author with a word processor does a manuscript. You want professional-level typesetting, you better darn well find a professional typesetter.
Electronic publication has also thrown a new monkey wrench into the works: conversion to multiple output formats. Dr. Solomon barely mentions this, and when he does, he implies that it is necessitated only by changes in technology. Horse-hooey. It’s inextricably part of publishing processes today. You want PDF and HTML out of the same process, you got work to do.
At least Dr. Solomon has the grace to admit he doesn’t know much about indexing. I can tell him that the software-writing world has done a marvelous job ignoring the needs of indexers. Not that it’s done a great deal better with anyone else in the process, but indexers have really gotten the short end of an already-short stick.
We text artisans, we don’t ask much. We really don’t. We do ask that those of you who don’t know how to do what we do admit as much. We ask that you come to us and find out what we do and how we do it before pontificating about how easy it is. We ask that you not mislead others into believing that what we do can be learned in an afternoon or programmed into idiot-level software.
Because, I tell you, we get real tired of cleaning up after the “it’s cheap, it’s easy, it’s fun!” meme of which Dr. Solomon is only the latest propagator. (Andrew Odlyzko, another First Mondayite, is also guilty.) If you want electronic publications that are as attractive and as durable as print publications, you will have to pay for the work of skilled text artisans, just as you must for print.
Edit: I hope this grumble doesn’t establish me as against online dissemination of scholarship, especially when that dissemination is free for the perusal. I cannot imagine a more odious result. All I ask is that quality, and the work necessary to achieve it, be respected.
