Art history straddles the digital divide. Its pedagogical practices have been transformed by digital technology, but its scholarship remains wedded to the printed page. Important investments in digital image libraries, multimedia laboratories and electronic classrooms have created a new infrastructure and allowed art historians to convert from slides to scans, but the forces that have transformed the classroom, library and scholar's desk have yet to enhance publishing options. The field's born-digital, peer-reviewed journals are limited to 19th-Century Art Worldwide and caa.reviews, which, as their names imply, are limited in scope. The journals of record are not published digitally, although back issues are available online through JSTOR.
The absence of electronic publishing outlets tailored to art history has several explanations, some legal, some technical, some based on scholarly traditions. Copyright owners have curtailed access to digital materials, and entry barriers on university sites deter electronic publication. The delivery, display, and manipulation of high-quality digital images as well as the preservation of digital materials present technical challenges. The problems of copyright, image quality, and stability of the digital file tend to reinforce some resistance to electronic forms of scholarly publication. Art history is invested in the monographic book as the prime vehicle for transmission of knowledge and academic advancement, and this bias is reinforced by tenure and promotion standards that privilege books over other types of publication.
The spread of electronic publishing with print-on-demand options may appear as an inevitable development, but it is not obvious what immediate next steps will facilitate a productive transition. One factor to take into account is that technologically driven solutions are in advance of the slower pace of institutional and professional change. Many art historians operate within universities that set conservative credentialing standards. The challenge is to find a pathway that accommodates institutional realities but invites innovation and opens new territory. An electronic publishing initiative must meet three basic conditions: art history's rigorous and distinctive requirements relating to images; the discipline's historiographical tradition of individual scholarship; and university standards of tenure and promotion, which value peer-reviewed publications.
This part of the report identifies two areas where electronic publishing initiatives would offer art history important benefits and respond to limitations of print publications: scholarly journals and collaborative, large-scale projects such as collection catalogues and catalogues raisonnés.
Art history is not only ripe for electronic publication but can push the enterprise in new directions with benefits for a wide variety of illustrated works. First, the discipline has developed digital competency due to profound changes in the classroom, where digital images are well on their way to supplanting 35mm slides. The electronic classroom has cultivated a relatively high degree of digital literacy among art historians of all generations who have learned the mechanics of digital teaching. Such a scholar can download images from the web, resize them, enlarge details, adjust the color and import the images into slide lectures. She scans, knows about pixels, tiffs and jpegs, uses PhotoShop, PowerPoint, Luna Insight, and ARTstor as well as its offline viewer, takes digital pictures and archives them in multiple formats suitable for the web, classroom projection, and publication.
Digital teaching has not only created digital competence; it has stimulated the development and application of tools to simulate and enhance the experience of viewing art and architecture in ways impossible to achieve with slides. These tools make it possible to unfurl scrolls, move through buildings, zoom in on details, overlay different states of an etching, track the build-up of a painting, animate structural forces, navigate 3-D reconstructions of ruins, model an unbuilt design, and map archaeological sites. These examples do not represent exotic, high-end technical toys. They are increasingly commonplace features of digital teaching, museum presentation, and tools of research and analysis, but cannot be well accommodated on the static printed page. Their spreading application is creating a demand for electronic publishing outlets.
Art history is characterized by a computer-literate professoriate, an established commitment to digital presentation, and an appreciation of the analytic potential of electronic tools. These tools are yielding new perspectives on the objects of study, but now the only place they can be deployed, and their evidence shared fully, is in the classroom. Incubated in digital laboratories, electronically enhanced research is secured by university passwords that make it inaccessible to outsiders. Publishable work needs to be lifted from university silos and made accessible to the scholarly community with a stake in its content.
Scholars repeatedly raise several basic concerns about electronic publication that must be addressed before the discipline can move forward. Art historians will not—and need not—surrender the pleasure of slowly reading a beautifully illustrated book, a pleasure not likely to be replicated in the electronic realm. Some worry that the electronic medium imposes, as it were, a cognitive style that favors scanning over close reading and modular information over holistic argument, but the growing range of electronic materials will gradually refute this technologically determinist position. Scholars in this study were prepared to believe that distinctive benefits will emerge from electronic publication, but flagged practical, professional, and disciplinary concerns summarized below. Their concerns may be understood as problems of transition in developing a new framework of scholarly communication.
Image quality is a decisive consideration in art history publishing. While image quality will require constant vigilance, continuing technological improvements highlight the advantages of digital illustrations over their print analogs in terms of color, interactivity, and quantity. Color is a rare luxury in scholarly print publications (exhibition catalogues are the exception), but color in online publications adds no extra cost. Zooming and panning tools make it possible to illustrate an argument with a thoroughness rarely achieved in print and fulfill the art historian’s singular desire to enlarge details and move through buildings. Of course there are costs, still unquantified, of online illustration programs, but costs are not based on the use of color, resolution, or digital enhancements such as magnification. As a result, electronic publications promise sumptuous, richly detailed, and interactive color illustration programs unparalleled in print form.
As set forth in Part II of this report, the regime of copyright restrictions has limited access to digital images and thwarted the potential to reach an expanding audience on the World Wide Web. Electronic publication requires still more than access to images. For the truly dynamic way we propose to use images, licenses must grant liberal terms of use.
Owners of works of art and images of them have a strong attachment to the integrity of the works, and copyright licenses habitually insist that images may not be cropped, rotated, animated, or manipulated in publication. When the heuristic value of interactive images to the works of art can be shown consistently, this objection can be expected to fall away.
Because born-digital publications of monographic scope do not now exist in the field, it is not clear if they would be accorded the same weight in tenure review as a printed book. Nevertheless, the perception that digital publications will be considered lesser contributions threatens to create a self-reinforcing resistance to such initiatives. This situation is likely to be changed by two dynamics. First, the increasing capacity of digital print-on-demand may succeed in erasing our awareness of a manuscript’s electronic origins. E-books will cease to seem a breed apart and join a continuum of books with varying production values. A 2006 University of California study envisioned this outcome: "because print on demand technology makes it possible cost effectively to produce high-quality print versions of rigorous reviewed digital-first or digital-only publications, print publication is no longer a meaningful surrogate for peer review and quality of imprint."[62] Second, the desire to publish will cause scholars to readjust their expectations in response to market forces: shrinking opportunities to publish traditional print monographs will send authors to other publishing outlets. If the discipline creates properly vetted and enhanced electronic alternatives, they will attract top manuscripts and the publications will have credibility with tenure committees.[63] Our proposal to use the journals as a portal seeks to mitigate professional concerns.
There are warnings that digital monographs are not cheaper to produce than books. Clifford Lynch points out electronic monographs displace costs from the publishers to the scholar and site manager: "the economic dilemma of the monograph has not been solved, but only rearranged."[64] The maturing of technology and software, the refinement of authoring tools and image viewers, and the development of other scalable models promise to reduce costs. Art history stands to benefit from the trailblazing organizations that found a sustainable e-publishing model by using a subscription-based distribution system and aggregating related material.
The permanent preservation and access to digital materials is a major concern of scholars who regularly experience the complications of upgrading software and migrating data to new formats. The launch of Portico, an electronic archiving service supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Itkaka, the Library of Congress and JSTOR, in 2005 offers a large-scale solution to this structural problem. As news of Portico’s work permeates the scholarly community, the question of preservation and permanent access will retreat, and migrating data will become a standard operation of cyberinfrastructure.[65]
Wikipedia’s model of collective authorship combined with the ease of revising digital files gives rise to a fear that the updating of content, or versioning, will blur the historiographic record and obscure the stance of a scholar at a given moment in time. Claims that electronic publication will nullify the concept of the author and integrity of the text, in an extreme variant of intertextuality, have a futuristic quality and suppose that technology determines outcomes. It is the case that scholars can determine applications of the medium that best serve their goals if they take charge of such efforts. Hypertext, as an example, is well suited to capture historiographical shifts and register disputes over dates, attributions, and interpretations.[66]
It is instructive to recall the contested authority of printed books in early modern Europe. As Adrian Johns elaborates in his study of seventeenth-century England, books originally had weak claims on truth in part because of the multi-step publishing process, which subjected the author’s manuscript to manipulation by type setters, printers, binders and other players.[67] A print culture was formed that regulated a potentially permissive process and established the authority of the text and credibility of the author—a project so effective that teachers must now teach students to question the truth of the printed word. The early modern history of print culture underscores the power of social structures to shape new forms of communication and suggests that scholars have an important role to play in the still formative phase of electronic publication.
The field of art and architectural history has two journals of record: the Art Bulletin and the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (JSAH). They are underused resources. Although modestly funded, the journals represent significant investments in scholarly capital and have the potential to play a larger role in the dissemination of knowledge through electronic extensions. The word extension is used advisedly to underscore the preservation of the print journal and provision of supplementary material online. A disclosure is warranted here. The authors of this report are closely associated with the journals: Mariët Westermann just completed a four-year term as Reviews Editor of the Art Bulletin, and Hilary Ballon recently began a three-year term as Editor of JSAH.
First, meet the protagonists. Art Bulletin and JSAH are peer-reviewed quarterlies published by scholarly societies, the College Art Association and the Society of Architectural Historians, respectively. Art Bulletin was founded in 1913, JSAH in 1947. At present back issues are available through JSTOR, but the current issues are not published digitally. The editors and book review editors are scholars in the discipline; their editorial appointments are a service to the profession and carry no compensation. The peer reviewers and authors are also unpaid. Thus the content of the journal is evaluated, selected, and developmentally edited with volunteer labor.
Both journals encompass the full scope of the discipline. They set no geographic, chronological, or methodological limits. Art Bulletin publishes articles in all spheres of art history with occasional articles on architectural history. JSAH addresses the built environment broadly defined, including landscape, urbanism and planning as well as architecture and theory. They publish medium-length articles and reviews. Art Bulletin publishes on average 7 articles per issue, or 28 articles per year; the articles average 10-12,000 words, with a maximum of 20,000 words on occasion. The review section is limited to books and has a highly selective approach; each issue has 6-8 reviews, some covering two or more books. (A companion online publication, caa.reviews, is more comprehensive.) JSAH publishes fewer articles, 4 per issue, for 16 per year, each also 10-12,000 words on average. It has a more extensive review section that covers multimedia, books, and exhibitions; websites have just been added. Both journals occasionally include special sections or "interventions." Recent features have examined the state of Renaissance art history, debated the interpretation of a single painting, and considered the linkages between architectural history and other fields. Both journals are extensively illustrated in black and white, with some color in Art Bulletin. A typical issue, March 2006 for example, has 146 illustrations of which 7 are in color. JSAH will have its first four-color illustrations in the December 2006 issue.
The argument to expand the scope of the journals with electronic extensions addresses peer-reviewed credentialing, access, and cost. This section expands on the following points.
The journals are edited by scholars and have effective and respected systems of peer review that guarantee high standards of scholarship. Their imprimatur therefore confers prestige and has value in tenure and promotion decisions.
The journals are a shared resource of the discipline, international in scope, and can provide better access to electronically generated work now contained in university silos.
The journals offer a cost-effective method of scholarly publication by reducing layout and design costs, by imposing a standardized design template, and by offering a circulation that exceeds the average print run of books in the field.
This recommendation is in part a tactical response to the realities of university promotion and tenure. Books are required for tenure in art history; depending on the institution, one or two books are expected. But the university imperative to publish books is at odds with the dynamics of publishing. The problem is not that publishers are abandoning art history, but their search for larger, cross-over audiences has disadvantaged monographs that primarily address a subfield and favored wider-ranging books typically by seasoned scholars. The widespread perception by art historians of a publishing "crisis" is connected specifically to the declining interest of publishers in scholarly monographs, which is the pertinent, tenure-making genre.
The current situation satisfies none of the stakeholders. Junior scholars experience a disconnect between the types of scholarly monographs required to demonstrate their expertise and considered appropriate for tenure, and the types of books editors are looking to publish. Publishers insist on the distinction between editorial decisions and judgments of academic quality, which is what tenure is about. They say it is wrong to use publishing choices as a surrogate for tenure review. The university press, in other words, should not be the tenure gatekeeper. Senior scholars are caught in the middle. Eager to support junior colleagues and former students, they may push for premature publication of manuscripts. Even so, they lament the rush to publish work before it has fully matured, expecting books to meet a high standard of intellectual argument and depth of research.[68]
Despite different perspectives and an unwavering devotion to books, scholars and publishers agree on several basic points: not all scholarship is suitable for publication as a book; credentialing considerations are unnecessarily fixated on the format of the book; an expanded range of publications, including long articles, would enrich the discipline and benefit scholars; and electronic publications, if properly vetted and produced well, ought to be recognized by tenure committees as well as authors as outlets for serious scholarship. These considerations point to the journals of record as viable portals of electronic publication with an expanded range of types of publication.
The journals rely on a proven, well-respected peer review system that upholds rigorous standards of scholarship. The system involves a large network of scholars that distributes the burden of reviewing and responsibility of enforcing professional and scholarly standards across the field.[69] Our research found a high degree of confidence in the double-blind peer review system of the journals, indeed, a higher degree of confidence than in the review system of the university presses. This confidence relates in part to the thoroughness of peer review of articles. As one scholar put it, there is greater density and stringency in peer review of article manuscripts than of book manuscripts. Another factor is the different way peer review operates in journal and book publishing. Most journal submissions undergo peer review; most submitted book manuscripts do not. Book editors work in a curatorial mode, shaping a line to realize an editorial vision. Their major decision point comes before peer review, which tends to serve a validating role. As one editor put it, "If I send a book manuscript out for review, I like it. I want a peer review to tell me how to make it better." Peer review for a journal is more influential in determining whether a submission is published. Moreover, the journal editor is often deeply involved in developmental editing to implement the recommended revisions whereas book editors and editorial boards place greater weight on the author's initiative in responding to the peer report. These procedural differences in the use of peer review flow from different missions. The journals serve the field as a whole and are meant to represent its eclectic range; the job of book editors is to create a well-defined list, develop a brand identity, and make a strong contribution to a particular niche.
Scholars often seek to publish in Art Bulletin and JSAH because their scholarly leadership, editorial guidance and effective peer-review system offer credentialing benefits and prestige. The credentialing benefits are constrained since journal articles are generally not sufficient for tenure in research universities; nevertheless, the imprimatur of these journals is valued. Does it follow that the book-length publication must appear in the shape of a traditional book? Our research showed that scholars would welcome alternative presentations of book-length arguments, that is properly vetted electronic editions with the option to print the text on demand, as long as the material could be afforded the same preservation and permanent access that books now enjoy.
Our argument thus proceeds from the premises that a book-length publication need not be a book, and that it is possible to combine the merits of journal peer review with the requirements of book-length argumentation in an electronic extension of the journal. The core requirements are that the electronic extension maintain the journal's high standards of peer review and access is permanent. Under these circumstances, it is reasonable to suppose that the reputational value of the journals will carry over from the print format to its electronic extension.
A second asset of the journals of record is their discipline-wide reach, which stems from their role as a shared resource, bridging departments, universities, and countries. While their contents are published in English, the contributors and subscribers are international. As a result, journals can overcome the limitations built into the first phase of digital experimentation conducted in university media labs. These labs have hatched dozens of fascinating projects related to art and architectural history. Some of this work is geared for teaching, but other projects are research oriented, should be disseminated, and are coming up against the limits of print publication which cannot accommodate certain digital proofs, such as 3-D models, QuickTime videos and other animation sequences. This work is sequestered in gate-restricted sites, but even if all access barriers were removed and one could freely enter the websites of university labs, it would still be desirable to publish the work. Publication involves a vetting and editorial process that benefits the work, and publication positions it in a prominent disciplinary context. Both the technology and the digital competence of art historians have reached a level permitting digital work to move from the domain of technical experts into that of art history, where the technology itself becomes transparent and the focus is on the scholarly content. Thanks to remarkable advances in a short period, we are poised to introduce digital research into scholar-driven vehicles where subject experts can access and evaluate the work.
Cost is a third factor that makes journal publication attractive. The journals famously have a lean cost structure; indeed it is the envy of book publishers, which have much higher fixed costs. Lynne Withey, Director of the University of California Press, has pointed to journals as a low-cost model of publication and has recommended the adoption of the journal model as a cost-lowering strategy for some university press lines, with the editorial process transferred from professional editors to faculty. While Withey's proposal may strike scholars as a way to extract more unpaid labor from the professoriate, we can recognize the economies and other benefits afforded in particular by the design and distribution system of journals, as well as the benefits to the field of scholar-driven editorial policies.[70]
Design expenditures are necessary in any illustrated publication, whether the format be book, journal or online. Books, however, are especially expensive in part because each one gets a customized design whereas journals lower design costs by imposing a design template to which all articles conform. The streamlined, formulaic approach of the journal is transferable to the electronic domain, and the development of so-called authoring tools, such as those devised by Gutenberg-e and the History E-Book Project, might capture further economies.[71]
Another cost factor relates to distribution, print run, and audience. Our survey of art history editors revealed that the average print run for a scholarly art history book in 2005 was 1,200 copies, down 33 percent from 1995 when the average print run was 1,781. As indicated in Part II on the Image Economy, art history books are not yet able to capture the cost efficiencies afforded by digital, print-on-demand publication nor can they tap the benefits of expanding access to readers and prolonging the sales life of a book that publishers and authors in other fields are beginning to derive from the internet. The costly dynamic driven by offset printing and inventory costs may be altered as print-on–demand becomes a viable alternative. In the current environment, however, economic factors mean that book publishing does not serve all types of scholarship, some of which by definition and in fulfillment of its purpose targets a limited audience of experts.
A virtue of journal publishing and its subscription system is that it distributes the cost of scholarly publication across an entire field and does not penalize subfields with small audiences. When you subscribe to Art Bulletin, you support endangered and emerging fields with limited audiences as well as large fields with popular appeal. One scholar reported that book editors were wary of titles in African art because of the limited audience for this subject. This may be a rational criterion in the book business, but it is irrational in terms of scholarship, which should push into new areas where audiences have not yet form