Recently the A&E channel's Biography program produced a list of the 100 most influential people of the millennium. I was interested in seeing who the top ten were, and I wasn't surprised by most of the choices: an explorer, an author, a political theorist, a reformer, and several scientists. The person their panel of experts picked as the most influential, however, surprised me at first, but after I thought about it some, I had to agree with their selection. Their pick for most influential individual of the millennium was the inventor of the printing press, Johann Gutenberg.
Language, writing, and printing have been among the most important human inventions because they share one common attribute: they allow the knowledge gained by one generation to be passed on to the next. Language allowed information to be passed on orally to the immediately following generation; writing made it possible to preserve information for several generations. Printing improved upon writing by producing many copies of a work simultaneously, enabling both the wider dissemination of the information and increasing the probability that the knowledge would be preserved.
I think Biography's top 100 list should have included one more inventor, one whose work will ultimately prove to be just as important as Gutenberg's. I'm talking about Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web. I believe that the Web will expand the possibilities of printing similar to the way in which printing expanded the possibilities of writing. With the Web, not only can information be disseminated more widely than in print, it can be duplicated exactly almost instantaneously, a single copy can be viewed simultaneously by innumerable people, and it can be archived indefinitely in a variety of formats.
I would like to talk briefly about the promises and possibilities of electronic publication for the advancement of scholarship, focusing primarily on electronic journals and the subject of religion.
The first scholarly e-journal on the Web that dealt with religion was the Journal of Buddhist Ethics, established in 1994. Two biblical studies journals, TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism and the Journal of Hebrew Scriptures, were started in 1996, making a total of three e-journals that dealt with religion. Many academics in the early days of e-journals scoffed at these new publications, and few took their articles as serious scholarship. I remember approaching a leading textual critic to solicit an article for my journal, and he smiled rather condescendingly at me and declined. Others promised to submit an article to my journal if they couldn't get it published elsewhere. Although some scholars thought little of the early electronic journals, others embraced the new medium of publication and supported the new journals by submitting articles and by serving on their editorial boards. From three e-journals dealing with religion in 1996, the number has grown to more than fifty at the end of 1999.
The advantages of electronic publications are numerous, including the following:
The proliferation of e-journals raises some problems for the scholar. As with other types of Web sites, the material found in online journals cannot be taken as scholarly without some system of academic evaluation. Several editors of electronic journals realized this problem and began discussing it in early 1998. The result of these discussions was the creation of an accrediting body of sorts, the Association of Peer-Reviewed Electronic Journals in Religion, established in late 1998 with six charter members, including the Journal of Southern Religion (one other journal has been added since then, and others are currently being considered). Our goal in creating this consortium of e-journals was to set standards that member journals would be required to meet, so that scholars at large would have some assurance that the articles published in our journals met or exceeded the quality found in leading print journals. For journals to join the APEJR, they must have been publishing for at least one year, they must register for an ISSN number, and they must practice blind peer review of their articles. Prospective journals are reviewed by current APEJR members and by outside experts in the field covered by the journal. Finally, new journals must be approved by two-thirds of the current members in order to be accepted for membership.
An accreditation process similar to that adopted by the APEJR will undoubtedly become necessary for other electronic publications, including monographs, digital projects, and other Web sites. In the print world, the publisher a book has is often an indication of its scholarly quality. Book reviews by leading scholars also help to identify those books which should be taken seriously. The choices made by librarians whether or not to purchase a new monograph are also indicators of a book's likely usefulness. All of these methods of "accreditation," and perhaps others, will soon be applied to other electronic publications. Many scholars are already aware of Web sites that contain valuable information and others that are worthless (unfortunately, their students do not always know the difference), and the people who produce these sites are the equivalent of publishers in the print world. Reviews of Web sites of various sorts, including traditional print forms presented in electronic garb, are beginning to appear in various print and online publications, and the number will increase. Finally, scholars who put together supersites containing links to other Web sites are serving as gateways to scholarly material in much the same way that library catalogs do now. It should be added that scholars who produce such sites would do well to consult professional librarians when constructing their sites, since librarians specialize in the preservation and cataloging of information.
In addition to the problem of accreditation of information on the Web, other current limitations include organization of information (standards for cataloging electronic data), reliable methods of finding pertinent information (metadata, search techniques, supersites), impermanent Web site identifiers (URLs vs. URNs and PURLs), incompatible operating systems, use of proprietary software, delayed implementation of Unicode in preference to the ASCII encoding scheme, vaporware products for implementing proposed and existing standards, limited OCR software, limited bandwidth, limited distribution of the Web in economically depressed areas of the world.
The promises and possibilities of electronic publication are numerous, and many current limitations can be overcome with concerted effort, but scholars should also beware of limitations of technology in general and the Web in particular. I will discuss briefly three of these limitations.
First, many people hold the erroneous notion that technology can replace human invention in the creation, organization, archiving, and retrieval of information. Anyone who has performed a search on any of the major search engines, however, knows that, as valuable as those tools are, they often return extraneous information and fail to return information that is relevant. Those search engines that perform better generally make use of metadata embedded in Web documents, metadata that was put there by human intervention.
Second, scholars look forward to the adoption and implementation of standards by the technology community, and so they should. However, though standards make the interchange of information in electronic form easier, they do not solve all of the problems inherent in communication among scholars. To take Unicode, a 16-bit encoding scheme slated to replace the 8-bit ASCII scheme in the fairly near future, as an example, adoption of Unicode, though much to be desired because it enables true multilingual documents, will leave many encoding problems unaddressed. For example, because Unicode is designed primarily for use with modern languages, many ancient languages are either insufficiently represented or are entirely missing. Furthermore, scholars working with original materials will find that Unicode will not help them represent the numerous non-alphabetical markings characteristic of manuscripts, nor does it make any allowance for variant forms of the same character.
Third, scholars should always remember that the development of technology is much more likely to be spurred on by business rather than the needs and desires of scholarship. SGML, a text-encoding scheme both powerful and diverse, was used by scholars for many years as a method of encoding their texts, but few affordable implementations of it were available, and many of the most interesting features of SGML were never fully implemented in the software. By contrast, XML, an offshoot of SGML, is fairly new, yet many leading companies have promised to support it, and much software is already available for scholars to use. The difference between SGML and XML is that the business community which ignored SGML has embraced XML, and the developers of technology have listened.
Electronic publication of information, particularly on the World Wide Web, offers many advantages, and scholars would do well to take advantage of the power, economy, and democratization of scholarship that it offers. At the same time, they need to be aware of both current and long-term limitations of the technology.