Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Do I Really Care?

...that TriQuarterly is dead? People are falling all over themselves to decry the move to "open source." I don't think they even know what that means. Here's what it means: the admin. at Northwestern has regarded TriQ more or less as an organ of scholarship, a 'review' in the sense of peer review. Within the peer-review culture, the easier the pub is to acquire, the less stature it has. For example, I'll bet lots of money that TriQ wasn't free to students of Northwestern, even though their money funded it. Because if it had been free--even to students--it would have had less stature. It seems people are rushing to embrace the idea of stature itself. Something closed off. Distant and admirable. Fuck stature. I won't miss TriQ. I think there's a very good chance that, with the online ("open source") version of TriQ, the CW people at Northwestern will produce something a lot more compelling.

2 comments:

Jason Jordan said...

Yeah, I don't care either. I didn't read it, so I won't miss it.

Laura Ellen Scott said...

The TriQ news was fresh when Dave Housley brought it up at a panel at Mason, and the crowd expressed mixed feelings, which I take as a good sign.