Week 11

Dr. Wible's comment on my Week 9 blog entry contained a link, so I felt I needed to check it out. It linked to an article on the future of academic journals and scholarly research generally. From where I currently sit, this was a very interesting article. It talked of the evolution (or devolution) of this field because of the recent trend toward (towards is the more generally British version of the word, just so you know--I didn't until recently) internet based information. I am in a unique position in this debate because, not only can I see it from both sides, I am living both sides. As a student writing papers, the internet based journals, JSTORs, and google.scholars have been fantastic. Without them, a forty works cited paper becomes a four or five month process. But as an intern for a publishing company, I hear the debate from their perspective. Their are definitely opponents to this trend because of the likelihood of it completely replacing the existing system. This system not only generates money, unlike blogging and the like, but provides an order and a context for the information provided in the articles. The grouping of articles around themes, for instance, is one of the main goals of academic journals, but with the advent and takeoff of internet based resources (including blogs), these articles are more and more likely to be seen as an individual piece without allowing a reader to see the same topic in a different light or otherwise being presented an argument from a context different than that provided by just one piece. The end of the article had a quote from one of the editors of Victorian Literature which summed up the state of print journals nicely: "You could think of our kind of scholarship," he said, "as something like 'slow food' in a fast-food culture." Very true.

And from what I've heard and what I'm seeing done at FIT, it seems like adaptation will be the necessary route for these articles, to some extent at least. For example, right now I'm designing a blog for one of the journals FIT produces, the International Journal of Sport Finance. This blog will have different contributors, the editors of the journal, and will be linked to FIT's Twitter page (yeah, that's right). This is an outfit that produces sport management/psychology textbooks and scholarly journals. The fact that they are creating blogs and tweeting should give a good sense of the direction these things are taking.