Certain recent posts here at IMproPRieTies might seem rather random. What could Everything is Miscellaneous, JSTOR, the White House Press Corps and the Extraordinary and Plenipotent Roland E. Arnall possibly have in common? I’m not sure. All I know is, after reading David Weinberger’s book, and writing a bit about it, a certain stimulus deriving from that reading seemed to propel me to “voice” certain, uh, reservations I’ve had about, among other things, the JSTOR Fortress of Knowledge.
– Tom Matrullo
I have hope that one day soon the data in the pay-per-view vaults of the academic e-journals will be released for free and open access. Tom Matrullo deserves credit for this. His recent work has brought a wider range of awareness of the matter than all the comments and complaints I’ve raised here over the last year.
Tom’s technique deserves a closer look.
First, he roared and howled, he pounded the logo and the JSTOR name into the search engines with a series of almost surreal posts… he linked to JSTOR’s mission and goals from a post titled “Obscenity on the web.” The post juxtaposes a picture of a prison with significant text pointing to the JSTOR lockdown of information. The permalink carries the droll identifier “improprieties-least-favorite-place.html” and is presented with keyword labels including academic epidemic, black hole, dark knowledge, fortress of fecklessness, Obscenity, panoptic optokinetic jerk nystagmus, [and] roosters of cognitive oblivion.
His next post asked: who the fuck are these niggaz? and helpfully included a link to a complete list of members of the JSTOR Board of Trustees. Keyword labels (tags) included on this post included groves of academe my ass, ivory cerebellum, [and] jstor. In rapid succession Tom laid out three more posts saturated with irony and sarcasm, juxtaposing Bill O’Reilly with JSTOR, tying Young-Hae Chang’s flash presentation on North Korean men’s cunnilingustic prowess to the JSTOR terms and conditions, and
I could stop my lecture here, and say with my hair standing straight up on my head like a singer in the Punk style: no future! After that we would all drink the alcohol of nihilism.
finally in that series a thought provoking assemblage of images and links, the eternal night of alain badiou, high brow thoughts and kinks featuring a photo of Alain Badiou and a woman seated at a table near the front of a stage with Badiou wailing into the mic and the lady all earnest in her moderne specs, loose white linen jacket, black slacks, sheer white ankle sox, and pointy toed shoes. Tom labels this post badiou, creation, intellectual property, jstor, philosophy, repetition, [and] worst stage set. You have to follow his links to decide what he intends with this lacanian calling card.
Tom took some time out to report on Ameriquest and our unindicted Ambassador to the Netherlands before continuing direct reflections on JSTOR. (This post did have crossover connections since it included the label scum of the earth, a label Tom used on the previous post linking JSTOR and Bill O’Reilly).
Then it was down to business. Tom pulled the Board of Trustees list forward to a direct posting, contrasted those stuffy old fat cats with a picture of Paris Hilton on the beach, and linked to the Mellon Foundation’s tax returns. Within a few hours, Bruce Heterick contacted him through his comments and a conversation began that resulted in what AKMA today called “a lovely investigation of JSTOR.”
There are perhaps three posts that if lumped together out of the context I’ve recapped above actually do turn this emotion charged struggle into a “lovely investigation.” AKMA references the antepenultimate post, in which Tom observes that “Google is less than Google when it returns unavailable data.” The penultimate post, the report on his conversation with Bruce Heterick almost stands alone and is indeed lovely. It makes a fine starting point for a common understanding of the challenges we face opening up access to information on the web.
Finally, posting today, Tom ties his thoughts on JSTOR to David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous and says:
We are still subject to the constraints of paper insofar as the business model of JSTOR has a ways to evolve before it can revolutionize its gatekeeping function to allow open access.
It seems that between the prisonhouse of paper and the unfettered bliss of what “we” can do with universal miscellaneity lie some bumps in the road: the event of Google, and the encrustations of first and second order economies, at the very least.
Why should we think that they, the JSTOR management, will be interested in tearing down the ivy covered walls when their stakeholders are the ones most interested in creating a distinction between “University” and non-academic culture? It remains for us, the interested parties, to find a way through the maze and a way to straighten out these crooked paths.
[tags]JSTOR, monopolistic practices, academic insularity, class struggle, Mellon Foundation[/tags]
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