11.0255 Why online? what's there this week.

Humanist Discussion Group (humanist@kcl.ac.uk)
Fri, 5 Sep 1997 19:23:19 +0100 (BST)

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 11, No. 255.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>

[1] From: "Judith A. Turner" <judith@turner.net> (81)
Subject: Come see the new Journal of Electronic Publishing

[2] From: Willard McCarty <Willard.McCarty@kcl.ac.uk> (45)
Subject: Online this week

--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 03 Sep 1997 13:43:04 +0100
From: "Judith A. Turner" <judith@turner.net>
Subject: Come see the new Journal of Electronic Publishing

Why Publish a Journal On Line?
THE JOURNAL OF ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING Tells Why

September 1, 1997 -- You can't read it on the train, or make notes in the
margin. You can't tear out an article to put in your files. You have to buy
an expensive machine, learn a confusing interface, and master a cranky
connection even to open it up.

So why does anyone publish a scholarly peer-reviewed journal electronically?

Editors of eight electronic-only peer-reviewed scholarly journals answer
that question in the latest edition of The Journal of Electronic
Publishing, available now at <http://www.press.umich.edu/jep>. JEP is
published by the University of Michigan Press.

JEP has a new design, a new format, and a host of new articles (including
reviews JEP itself, and brave commentary by a librarian who wants to invest
in article futures and by a university-press leader who prefers paper). The
JEP reincarnation has come with the editorship of Judith Axler Turner, who
sharpened her e-publishing teeth creating the online version of The
Chronicle of Higher Education.

The September issue of this sparkling online quarterly is entitled

ELECTRONIC JOURNALS: Why? -- A look at how eight e-journals
came about, and what they offer that you can't get in print

The invited feature articles are:

ACM's Journal of Experimental Algorithmics
"Bridging the Gap Between Theory and Practice"
by Bernard M. E. Moret
ACM

Earth Interactions
"Transcending the Limitations of the Printed Page"
by Judy C. Holoviak
American Geophysical Union
and Keith L. Seitter
American Meteorological Association

The Electronic Journal of Cognitive and Brain Science
"Democracy Replaces Peer Review in an All-Electronic Journal"
by Zoltan Nadasdy
Rutgers University

First Monday
"Waiting for Thomas Kuhn"
by Edward J. Valauskas
Internet Mechanics

Living Reviews in Relativity
"Making an Electronic Journal Live"
by Jennifer Wheary
and Bernard Schutz
Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics

Public-Access Computer Systems Review
"Testing the Promise"
by Pat Ensor
and Thomas C. Wilson
University of Houston Libraries

RSNA EJ
"Beyond Paper Images: Radiology on the Web"
by Laurens V. Ackerman
Rush Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center
and Alphonse Simonaitis
RSNA

TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism
"A Modern Experiment in Studying the Ancients"
by James R. Adair, Jr.
Scholars Press

In addition, the issue includes invited articles by Mike Cuenca, William
Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications, University of
Kansas; Paul M. Gherman, Vanderbilt University; Peter Grenquist, New York
University; and Thom Lieb, Towson University.

JEP is continuing its effort to find and reprint articles important to
electronic publishing that have appeared elsewhere. The September issue
includes an excerpt from conference proceedings in textual scholarship, an
article on the economics of online publishing, and an article on how
electronic publishing supports the Muslim diaspora community.

JEP welcomes submissions of original articles for peer review, and of
articles that have appeared elsewhere that are of interest to JEP's unique
audience, publishers, authors, and scholars interested in the
online-publishing environment.

Contact:
Colin Day
313-764-4388; colinday@umich.edu
Judith Axler Turner
202-986-3463; judith@turner.net

Judith Axler Turner
Editor
The Journal of Electronic Publishing
http://www.press.umich.edu/jep
(202) 986-3463

--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri, 05 Sep 1997 19:14:24 +0100
From: Willard McCarty <Willard.McCarty@kcl.ac.uk>

THIS is partly to reassure Humanists elsewhere that the U.K. does have news
apart from that concerning the late and much lamented Princess. But in case
more is required, see <http://www.royalnetwork.com/clubdi/> & others that
AltaVista surely would turn up. Otherwise, with a view to the rule about not
drinking until after sunset, see <http://www.blackwalk.com/suntimes.htm>
(which oddly specifies the range of time-zones in the world as "Automatic |
Eastern | Central | Mountain | Pacific | Zulu/GMT"). Personally I take great
satisfaction in keeping time with the Zulus -- or does British Summer
Time deprive me of this benefit?

Big in the Guardian Online this week is the complex relationship between
what we think or imagine and what happens in the outside world -- a dubious
distinction, I would think, a "cloven fiction". But putting our heads down
into the smell of wet wool, we read about: the changing scientific
perceptions of schizophrenia ("Odd ideas and beliefs are held unshakeably
against all evidence to the contrary"); the current form of the old
mind-body problem, i.e. mind-brain ("why do patients experience
self-generated activity as not under their control and, sometimes, coming
from the outside world?"); the impossibility of detecting lies reliably (or
"why you can fool all of the people all of the time"). It is useful, I'd
suppose, for us as computing humanists to think about where we sit, at the
intersection of readings and things read, or viewings and things observed.

On the growth of the Internet (more than 19.5 million users, expanding at
the rate of 52%/year), Jack Scofield directs us to the bi-annual survey by
Network Wizards, <http://www.nw.com>. One consequence of this growth Douglas
Rushkoff features in his regular column, namely spamming. After recounting
the troubles he has had from spammers, and their hiding behind layers of
intermediate servers, he suggests that as countermeasures you should (1)
remove your e-mail address from your Web page, replacing it with a version
that must be read and interpreted by a human being in order to be used, e.g.
rather than "sam.cooke@motown.detroit.org" write "sam.cooke at
motown.detroit.org"; (2) avoid browsing the Web from your normal account;
and (3) stay current with the action, by visiting
<http://www.spam.abuse.net>, <http://www.cauce.org> and the like. Is all
this really necessary??? It reminds me of my own reaction after being
burgled a few months ago; I woke up when the nice man from Bates Alarms
handed me an estimate of 2,000 pounds sterling for a high-tech,
computer-controlled, multi-beamed system that could tell the difference
between a cat and a human being.... For e-mail security all I do now is to
keep adding spammers' addresses to my Eudora filtering mechanism,
redirecting all unwanted mail to the trash folder. Is this not enough?

All in all not a very newsworthy week online.

WM
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Dr. Willard McCarty, Senior Lecturer, King's College London
voice: +44 (0)171 873 2784 fax: +44 (0)171 873 5801
e-mail: Willard.McCarty@kcl.ac.uk
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/wlm/>

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