+ Page 91 +

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Jennings, Edward M.  "EJournal: An Account of the First Two
Years."  The Public-Access Computer Systems Review 2, no. 1
(1991): 91-110.
-----------------------------------------------------------------


1.0  Introduction

As I write these first paragraphs of EJournal's autobiography, it
is the morning after the first issue hit the "newsstands."
Yesterday, I uploaded the mailing list to the list server from my
personal account on SUNY Albany's VAX.  Then I finished the
unexpected task of deleting 283 copies of the subscription
confirmation message that was sent to recipients.  Ready at last,
I e-mailed the fourth "final" version of the 421-line issue to
the list server for network distribution.  Then came the catch: I
was not privileged to send anything to the list from that
account.  So, it wasn't until I had gone through one more file
transfer and the deletion of a "wrong-address" header that
EJournal 1.1 went off into the "matrix."

Yesterday's episode is typical of the last two years: one
adjustment of expectations after another.  This essay will fill
in some of the twists and turns along EJournal's short journey.
It will be a kind of editorial autobiography, and I will finish
up with a rationalized interpretation of the response to the mid-
March 1991 mailing.

Near the top of EJournal's front page is the line: "An Electronic
Journal concerned with the implications of electronic networks
and texts."  My interest in paperless texts goes back to an
experimental course in 1985.  In it, we almost abandoned the
classroom in favor of writing to each other from terminals.  My
awareness of larger networks began when Frank Madden, of SUNY's
Westchester Community College, introduced me to an Exxon-
sponsored project out of New York Institute of Technology.
Michael Spitzer had convinced several people interested in using
computers to help students figure out how to write more
confidently.  In the spring of 1989, after Michael's funding had
dried up and Fred Kemp started MegaByte University (MBU) on
BITNET, several intriguing issues began to pop up with some
frequency.  Let's turn the clock back, then, to Spring 1989.

+ Page 92 +

2.0  Initial Issues

One set of issues had to do with the academic sociology of
networks, lists, and bulletin boards as a medium--the fascination
they held for some people, and the nagging we felt as we wasted
our time in extended and stimulating, but professionally
unproductive conversations.  Another set had to do with the
peculiarities of the discourse itself.  We all had some inkling,
I think, that writing is different when you have to scroll it
instead of flip codex pages.  It is more like talking when you
know the names of almost everyone who will read what you type,
but have never met most of the group.  I think it was Michael
Cohen who likened the environment to a large party where friends,
acquaintances, and strangers mingle, and where most of the
conversations are familiar enough to be easy to join, yet just
strange enough so you don't feel obliged to chime in.

One fine day, as narrators blithely say, I wondered if it would
make sense to try distributing some sort of "journal" over the
network.   MBU had tried putting some texts into its archives.
Most of them had been donated by their authors after
presentations at meetings.  When I downloaded and scanned them,
though, they felt longer than I wanted to read.  I wanted a place
where some of the intriguing ideas that streamed across my screen
every week could be packaged so they would be eligible for
publication credit within the accounting system of higher
education.  I wanted something less stodgy than the familiar
pseudo-permanence of paper journals, but less quick-triggered
than the bright snippets on MBU and less scattered than the
stream of observations on HUMANIST.  Joe Raben, one of the first
people to whom I mentioned the idea, thought it might work.  This
brings us to the fall of 1989.

+ Page 93 +

3.0  The First Steps

The ideas sketched above were about all we had in mind when we
sent a notice to five BITNET lists in the fall of 1989:

     Electronic texts in the humanities are not yet generally
     considered academic "publications."  They are not likely to
     be taken seriously in the course of deliberations about
     tenure and promotion.  This can be attributed, in part, to a
     latent, unchallenged premise--a default assumption--that
     ideas aren't quite real until they have been printed and
     bound and received in the mail.  Another factor may be
     computer networks' reputation for informality.  Perhaps most
     restraining, though, is awareness of how pushy it would be
     to put forward "ideas" whose merit remained unacknowledged
     by one's peers.

     But an edited and refereed "paperless" journal, one devoted
     to electronic texts and the implications of the medium,
     would stand a good chance of acquiring legitimacy even if
     (and perhaps because) it appeared principally on-line.
     What's more, network communications ought to permit speedy
     exchange of submitted texts; reading, critiquing, revising
     and distributing ought to happen faster than with paperbound
     media.  We are proposing such a project.


3.1  Assembling the Staff

Several happy accidents happened between the first dream and the
drafting of those paragraphs.  The proprietors of SUNY Albany's
Computing Services Center, who had helped me with my paperless
writing experiments over the years, asked good questions about
what such a journal might accomplish.  I asked Kelly Kreiger,
among others, about finding someone who might help me, probably
an undergraduate with an interest in both writing and computers,
and she put me in touch with Allison Goldberg, who, it turned
out, had written an Honors Seminar paper with me the spring
before about computers and privacy.  Allison thought the project
might be fun, and a few extra credits would help her finish her
degree program ahead of schedule.  I was delighted.  Dave
Redding, Director of Undergraduate Studies in English, was
willing to let her register for an independent study.

+ Page 94 +

Don Byrd and Steve North thought an all-electronic journal
sounded like a good idea.  Steve inquired whether I had asked the
Council of Editors of Learned Journals if they knew of anything
like what we were doing.  My question to Evelyn Hinz, then the
Council's President, was answered with an invitation to speak
informally at their December session in Washington at the Modern
Language Association meeting.  Nervously working on that talk and
on some parallel speculations for Alan Purves' Center for Writing
and Literacy at Albany, I began to wonder about broadening the
journal's purpose (this happened as we were drafting and
distributing the announcement quoted above).


3.2   The Journal's Focus

At first, the journal was supposed to address the ways that
computers affect writing.  The focus was to be on texts,
discourse, language and rhetoric, and the reciprocities of
creating and interpreting.  I even asked a few people what they
would think of the neologisms "Techst" or "Alternatext" as
possible titles for the journal.  But, the tentative procedures
already implied a somewhat broader range of interests.  "Our
principal subject is what happens when computer networks
supplement paper and sound as channels for distributing 'texts',"
we had said.

I had begun to wonder if electronic networks were going to have
the same effect on culture as writing and printing.  Keeping
records, creating long fictions, and going to libraries had
transformed "oral" cultures, or so it appeared.  Would the new
medium for capturing and spreading information prove comparable
in its effects on "literate" cultures?  Perhaps electronic
journals would be the appropriate places to analyze and exhort
the Third Wave in the way that printed journals served, and would
continue to serve, the Second Wave.

+ Page 95 +

3.3  The First Announcement

The first preliminary draft announcement called "Credo1.Net" went
to a half dozen people, whose BITNET addresses I had handy, on
September 20, 1989.  By early October, we had received enough
curious responses to keep us going.  I began drafting journal
procedures on the 12th.  Allison sent the two-screen announcement
to Fred Kemp's MBU, LITERARY, Willard McCarty's HUMANIST, Rob
Royar's On-Line Composition Digest, Malcolm Hayward's EDITOR
list, and probably to others via links and nodes unfathomable
even by network experts.  No mailing lists, no brochures, no
paper, no printer, and no directly measurable costs were
involved.  We had responses from 40 or 50 people, including two
outspoken skeptics.  Most said they'd like to learn more; a few
offered to help.  So, we sent out those preliminary ideas about
procedures.


3.4  Preliminary Journal Policies

Perhaps the most noteworthy procedure, besides our intent to
conduct business electronically and keep essays brief, was the
three-tier distribution sequence.  Abstracts were to go to
subscribers frequently, a table of contents of accumulated titles
would go to a wider list occasionally, and everyone would
download what they wanted from a file server whenever they wanted
to.  Although we now send the full text of each article to all
subscribers, we intend to carry out the plan of having several
"tiers" of announcement and access.

Two other paragraphs, about money and ownership, from those
proposed procedures deserve to be noted:

     We want to avoid charging for the sharing of what we think
     we have learned about matters we are all investigating.  We
     all support BITNET, and we'll all share the load of
     reviewing, and I will feel better about being an editor if
     everyone knows that we're bootstrapping together in a low-
     overhead operation.  It may be necessary to discuss fund
     raising at some moment in the future, but for now it's all
     free.

+ Page 96 +

     Ownership: we will do nothing about copyright, permissions,
     first-refusals, or other paraphernalia of intellectual
     possessiveness.  We're operating in the domain of search,
     not re-search.


3.5  The Review Process

The idea of sharing the load of reviewing was predicated on the
formation of a group that would carry out the anonymous review of
submissions.  Here's our invitation to become an editor, which
was the last part of the proposed procedures sent to the group
that responded to the preliminary announcement:

     We would like to develop a list of co-editors or an
     editorial board or an advisory board, or all of the above.
     If you have ideas about people who might be invited to be on
     that sort of list (yourselves included), please send names
     to us.  I don't know how we'll make up panels without
     insulting someone, sooner or later, but we'll try.

Several people replied that they'd be willing to review
submissions in their specialties--history, philosophy,
whatever--or even in computer and network topics.  We had heard
from one person in Finland, one in Italy, and two or three in
England.  There was some question about whether "promulgate"
should replace "publish" in our vocabulary, because publishing
was associated with printing, mailing, and handling.  Cooler
heads prevailed.

By the end of December, I was ready to add two footnotes to our
procedures: (1) we could not deal with niceties of typography and
format, even underlining, at least in the beginning; and (2)
contributors would control, and be responsible for, final copy.
I really hoped I could avoid proofreading.

+ Page 97 +

3.6  The Idea Takes Shape

As we began 1990, there were two ways to look at what had
happened so far.  The idea of an electronic journal had begun to
acquire support and even something of an international audience
in just a few months.  On the other hand, given the efficiencies
of the medium we were celebrating so noisily, it seemed to have
taken us a ridiculously long time just to find a few people
willing to listen seriously to our ideas.

[As I draft this, it is almost 48 hours since Issue 1.1 was sent
out.  I have not logged in to find out what happened.  I may well
have done so by the time I resume work on this text; I will try
to keep a straight face and not let knowledge of the reaction
affect the story of 1990, the intervening year that both flashed
by and dragged along in the meantime.]


4.0  Down To Business

The second semester of 1990-91 seems almost empty.  I spent a
long time writing up a justification for "support for a
periodical" from the university.  My answers to the university
form's set questions turned into essays because I had to explain,
in what seemed like a dozen different ways, why those questions
were not pertinent to an electronic publication.  I was seeking
assurance that the university would underwrite a part-time
position, probably for a graduate student who could step into
Allison's shoes.  So, when I learned that there wouldn't be any
real money for the project, even if the committee found us
deserving, I thanked Bill Dumbleton, English Department Chair,
and Dona Parker, Associate Dean, for the indirect support they
said they could help us with, and set that application aside.

We also started talking with Kelly Kreiger Hoffman about using
the list server for distributing and archiving the journal.  We
thrashed our way through some uncertainties about why we would be
unlike a printed journal, accumulated a group of consulting
editors, signed on several Advisory Board members, and reviewed
our first submission.  Maybe the semester wasn't as empty as it
seemed.

+ Page 98 +

Arranging the list was almost as foolish as it was forehanded.
We locked ourselves into the subtitle "An Electronic Journal for
Humanists" in one unexpected instant when a network expert, hands
poised over the keyboard, turned suddenly and asked: "Wha'd'ya
wanna call it?"  But we really thought we might have an issue to
distribute before too long, so we wanted to have the mechanisms
in place.  Then I forgot about the arrangements.

At the end of January I asked John Slatin at the University of
Texas, Austin and Stuart Moulthrop at Yale (since gone to UT
Austin) if they'd be interested in collaborating on a piece for
EJournal about hypertext.  I had something of a run-in on one
network list with a person who felt strongly that electronic
journals could not, would not, and, perhaps, should not work.
The major objection was that originality, copyright, and
ownership could not be controlled on the network, and that the
world would virtually come to an end if they were not controlled.

My sketchy notes show that Stevan Harnad (editor of Psycoloquy)
jumped in to defend electronic media, and that Harry Whitaker
told me, rather eloquently, to stand my ground.  I immediately
asked Harry to join the Board of Advisors.  He lived in the world
of cognitive science and, like Joe Raben, had edited "real"
scholarly journals (Brain and Cognition as well as Brain and
Language).  I hoped that his presence would symbolize our
interest in reaching outside the realm of literary theory and he
would help us learn to edit responsibly.


4.1  The Board of Advisors

I will outline the process of putting together our Board of
Advisors because it illustrates serendipity and one way that e-
mail has spoiled me.

+ Page 99 +

Joe Raben, founding editor of Computers and the Humanities, had
said he'd be willing to help out.  I wrote Arthur Danto in early
February; he had helped me with a project in the seventies, and
was probing the blinkspace between art and artifice, between
medium and backdrop.  In mid-month, I found courage and time to
ask Bob Scholes and Dick Lanham if they would lend us their
imaginations and reputations.  Dick's insistence that the nature
of "text" had been irreversibly changed when pixels met ASCII was
part of EJournal's heritage, as was Bob's experiment with
computers in a poetry course in the mid-seventies.

Dick sent e-mail back at once, agreeing to be on the Board.
Arthur scrawled a nice note saying that he felt unqualified
because he had never used and probably never would use the
technology.  Bob answered positively, some time later, by regular
mail.  I finally remembered, in March, to ask Joe Raben about
actually using his name on the masthead.  Sigh of relief; he said
we could.

I had started out in the fall of 1989 hoping simply to enlist
people who would be recognized by professors of English; people
whose established reputations would validate EJournal's claim to
be as good a place to be published as most other refereed
journals in the humanities.  By mid-winter, the journal was
already respectable, from that point of view, and thanks to Harry
Whitaker's willingness was on its way to bringing the networks
and electronic texts within their purported scope.  By this time,
I was also aware of how dependent I had become on electronic mail
for getting everything done.  Some tasks that should have been
done months ago still get postponed because they require paper,
envelopes, and postage.

An aside about the name "EJournal."  The closest thing to a
disagreement with a Board member was my not heeding Joe Raben's
advice to assign an academically resplendent title like "Studies
in the Relationship . . ." or some such deliberately heavy
phrasing.  I had wanted a title as far from print-associated
locutions as I could get, which meant avoiding "journal,"
"studies," and "review."  But, I realized eventually that journal
implied day-by-day-record, which seemed appropriate for
adventures in new fields.

+ Page 100 +

When "Techst" was greeted with the scorn it deserved, I slipped
into "e-journal," short for electronic journal, in notes and some
conversations.  Then, when Joe suggested a weightier name, I
realized that I had come to like the abbreviation, which seemed
to suit the directness and informality of the network.  I was
also fully aware that some literary periodicals are known better
by their initials than by their formal titles.


4.2  Editorial Procedures

Our actual editorial procedures had not been worked out when the
first essay arrived to be considered.  We were committed to
anonymity and to using e-mail, so I stripped names and
affiliations from the essay and sent it to a distribution list
made up of people who had answered the call for volunteers.  I
asked them to think about what they would like EJournal to
become.  I don't remember specifying any criteria.  Within a week
I had received plenty of responses.  The consensus seemed to be
that the essay was interesting and well constructed; however, the
subject might be too narrow for our presumed audience.  I broke
the news to the author.

This process seems to me one of the great strengths of the
electronic journal format.  Not only can we be fast, but we can
look at every submission as a committee of the whole, reading it
from the perspectives of different academic disciplines as well
as in terms of our own experience in the network labyrinth.  The
senior editor merely decides what to send out for review, sifts
the panel's responses, and communicates consensus to the authors.

This procedure is also something of a happy accident.  EJournal
has never held a meeting to discuss and decide editorial policy.
In retrospect, the idea of settling on a definitive editorial
policy looks almost silly, like an exercise in compromise that
may have been useful in times when recording was dominated by
paper.  It implies permanence, the kind of congealed consistency
characteristic of print-dominated culture.  However, in the
matrix, with its heritage of lists and bulletin boards, both the
integrity of the journal and its evolving relevance seem best
served by the delegation of editorial judgment to independent
readers.

+ Page 101 +

4.3  Highs and Lows

By the end of March 1990, Allison and Kelly had shepherded the
journal past several milestones.  We had a Board of Advisors, we
had a panel of Consulting Editors, we had been through our first
review, and we had stuck our toes into the lake of "list
servering."  I had asked people to write essays about hypertext
and about a "hyperversity," a prophesied environment for
education in the coming cyberspace era.  All of this was
encouraging.

Then, however, Kelly confirmed that she would be leaving the
university, and I worried about what would happen if I couldn't
find people to answer my questions and look after the actual e-
mail and network connections.  There had been some nasty noise on
the line between my 8088 machine at home and the VAX on campus,
and I had gotten into a flurry of activity with a campus
committee charged with discussing "Educational Technology."
Allison had real jobs lined up for the fall.  Even if the Vice
President's committee was to endorse the idea of the journal,
there would be no money available to support any kind of student
assistance.  There were some discouraging moments.  EJournal sat
there waiting for something to happen.

Kelly arranged for Bob Pfeiffer, her successor as electronic
Postmaster, to guide us into the maze of list servers and file
servers.  As she moved into the position of Head Consultant in
our computer center, Allison persuaded Ron Bangel to think about
following her as Managing Editor (Acting) of the journal.  He
agreed to consider enrolling for several credits of independent
study.  The idea of an electronic journal had taken on potential
form thanks to Allison and Kelly, and the momentum of their
efforts carried us into the fall semester.

+ Page 102 +

5.0  Year Two Begins

As the first year was Allison Goldberg's, the second year was Ron
Bangel's.  An English major, he had also run the university's
"Open Line" through the Caucus software on the VAX.  Besides
looking after much of the correspondence that was beginning to
trickle in, Ron prodded me into arranging a totally separate
account for the journal, one that he and I could share.  Once we
got there, he found out that I was still confusing two kinds of
indexing locators, the file name and the directory the file was
stored in.  Having been conditioned by DOS to keep the filenames
short, I had kept assigning almost indecipherably short names.

Ron designed nests of subdirectories and taught me to use long,
thorough, and systematic filenames.  He set up a directory-tree
display called "Swing" (a program from the files of the local ACM
chapter) so we could navigate our multiplying directories and
subdirectories pictorially.  And he started keeping a log of what
we were doing so that the technical details of our procedures
wouldn't be forgotten as they became semi-automatic.

Meanwhile, EJournal's mission was expanding.  I didn't realize it
while the change was taking place--indeed, new implications keep
popping up--but a call from Ann Okerson in late summer helped us
see that EJournal was one of a few electronic publications that
were trying to be "scholarly" or "academic" by virtue of an
editorial process more elaborate than the screening of postings
to a BITNET list.  Ann pointed out that librarians had long been
worried about the rising cost of serial publications, and they
were wondering if experiments like EJournal might become one
route toward holding down escalating costs.


5.1  The Questions Emerge

It had been easy for me to vow that EJournal would be free.
Early statements of BITNET policy had frowned on activity that
might involve filthy lucre, and I had smiled at the thought that
the Net might let us revive motives from seventeenth-century
England.  As I saw it, Bacon's Solomon's House and the fledgling
Royal Society had assumed that discoveries should be shared and
that those who found or made new knowledge were more or less
obliged to give it away.

+ Page 103 +

Even though electronic distribution does indeed involve real
costs, it is cheaper than using paper, printers, and postage.
More significant, perhaps, is the appearance of freedom in the
eyes of the academic practitioner.  I had not stopped to think,
though, that seventeenth-century scientists set about sharing
knowledge before copyright and patent laws controlled the
ownership of intellectual property.

In short, money raised its ugly head.  Who does own what we make
public?  Who can get possession of it, and how?  How will
discipline-sponsored electronic journals "compete" with the codex
journals in their fields?  In this context, I am just now
recognizing some of the ways that EJournal is slightly different
from most other electronic publications.  We have no tight
disciplinary or departmental or program allegiance.  We have gone
outside the literature-writing realm to scan and report and
speculate about a phenomenon that is hostage to no academic
specialty.

Ann Okerson's call, then, prompted another round of pondering our
still-inchoate purpose, and led to two specific developments:
(1) participation in an October 1990 meeting at North Carolina
State University of a group she dubbed the Association of
Electronic Scholarly Journals, and (2) her acceptance of an
invitation to be one of our Advisors.


5.2  Two Articles are Submitted

Back at the keyboard and screen, we accepted our first piece.  We
used the procedures from the spring before, and got a different
range of replies from the panelists.  Some said, as I recall,
"Sure, this is just what we want, even though it's less formal
[read 'pompous'?] than most 'scholarship'."  Some said "It seems
a little hasty-drafty."  And some thought it could be OK with the
addition of a couple of acknowledgments of precedents for parts
of some of the ideas.

+ Page 104 +

I tried to articulate for the author a summary of the positive
responses, and asked for swift revision so that we could get a
first issue out.  One of the reviewers was inspired to send in an
essay that took off from the original piece.  We were excited
because we had imagined trying to trigger miniature chain
reactions to our essays.  This type of interchange would be more
stimulating than stale "snail mail" controversies that arrive
quarterly.

Both essays are still sitting in their subdirectories.
Electronic networks move texts fast once they are ready, but they
can't speed the writing and revising process all by themselves.

Ron and I exchanged ideas for a masthead.  I needed something to
put on paper in order to apply to the Library of Congress for an
ISSN, and he made sure that it would meet the needs of screen-
scroll technology.  We didn't want to pollute the channels and
mailboxes with wasteful "black space," and we wanted to let
readers proceed through an issue without having to find their way
backwards to information that had slipped away.

We were ready to add another layer of consultation.  Having
checked our efforts at on-screen design with the advisors, then
with the panel of consulting editors, we were ready to send an
announcement to the list of interested "subscribers" who had
signed on since the preliminary mailing of a year before.  Our
first mass mailing, so to speak, went to that group, and also to
managers of several closed lists.  We sent it, in a shotgun
blast, straight to all members of some open lists as well.  The
several screens included the cover page, the staff, and the
latest version of our evolving statement of purpose.

The first response was a howl about our breach of propriety; we
had somehow threatened to clog the circuits of the matrix by
using such a long distribution list instead of a BITNET file
server.  And there was enough overlap among lists, we were
lectured, so that some people were getting more than one copy.
Our Computing Services Center Director, Ben Chi, told me not to
worry.  We might have touched the edge of naughty behavior, but
shouldn't feel ashamed.  He estimated that the announcement might
have gotten to some 7,000 mailboxes.

+ Page 105 +

At this point we felt committed.  There was (1) an "accepted"
essay awaiting revision, (2) a set of editorial procedures that
seemed to have worked, (3) commitments to work on two more essays
and a review, and (4) enough responses to the late-fall
announcement to build our pre-publication subscriber list all the
way to 300.  Besides, we had been assigned an ISSN (1054-1055)
because we had promised to begin publishing in January.

But plenty could go wrong.  I lost one contributor's address and
almost refused what became our first article.  In our eagerness
to be all-electronic, we fouled up our list server's mailing
list.  These last few anecdotes bring us up to the first issue.


6.0  The First Issue

By spring 1991, the widely broadcast announcement had brought
inquiries about proposed essays.  Several seemed feasible, some
seemed a bit celebratory rather than ruminative, and one struck
me as a possibility.  I set up a subdirectory for it, removed its
mail header, added a headnote for the panel of consulting
editors, and sent it off to the group.  The return messages were
not enthusiastic.  The piece seemed somewhat stale, and it
probably would be redundant for most of our readers.  I went back
to the subdirectory to recapture the author's address.  No name.
There was an address, but it was cryptic; I had expunged the name
more thoroughly than I should have in the course of making the
piece anonymous.

There were some anxious hours while I tracked through notes,
logs, and who-where techniques to make a match I could be
confident would not embarrass the journal.  I am determined,
after that episode, to be sloppy in the direction of redundant
records.  And I dread discovering the next inadvertent error.
Someone will be mystified, frustrated, or hurt (or all three),
and we might not even know that anything happened.  I am finding
electronic files harder to keep track of than even sloppy paper
folders.  I hold on to more pieces, it seems, but have more
trouble finding them, in spite of Ron's valiant struggle towards
orderliness.

+ Page 106 +

I have reason to remember one particularly crisp note which
arrived at the end of December.  It proposed yet another
electronic journal, this one for the purpose of getting into
print research ideas that had not been funded.  Or so it
appeared.  I dashed off a "thanks but no thanks note," explaining
that the proposed journal sounded almost like a repository for
rejects.

I'm happy to say that my insult was forgiven.  The author, Robert
Lindsay, took me to task for not reading carefully, but accepted
responsibility for having left some implications out of his brief
inquiry.  The proposal he submitted, when fleshed out and
contextualized, became the first issue of the journal.  It seemed
to strike the editors as the kind of piece we should be offering.
It was a sensible way to make use of the novel opportunities
opening up on the network.


6.1  Distribution Decisions

While the panelists were pondering the article about "Electronic
Journals of Proposed Research," Ron was preparing an efficient
mailing list.  We couldn't just e-mail to the 300 ID's with a
distribution list; that would threaten to clog the network even
more than our redundant announcement had done in November.  A
BITNET list server was the obvious answer [1].  We uncovered the
list server niche set up almost a year earlier; all we had to do
was learn how to use it.

I had already learned a few tricks from starting up a closed list
in the fall, so this venture looked easy.  I deciphered enough of
the Parisian handbook, with Bob Pfeiffer's help, to customize the
message that subscribers would receive.  We made my personal VAX
account the "owner," so that the EJOURNAL@ALBNYVMS editorial
account wouldn't trip over itself in communicating with
EJRNL@ALBNYVM1 (the list).  Bob told us to ship the mailing list
to him when we were ready, and he would install it himself.  We
sent it over.

+ Page 107 +

Meanwhile, approving notes were arriving from the editorial
panel.  We set to preparing the texts to accompany the journal's
departments: supplements, letters, and reviews.  The idea of
supplements has to do with recantations, objections,
endorsements, or whatever might deserve to be appended to an
essay or article already published in EJournal.  The supplement
seems like a reasonable compromise between the permanent, frozen
text of the printed medium, and the indeterminate, perpetually
adjusted "con-text of electronic polylog." (Thanks to MBU and, I
think, John Slatin, for that post-dialogic term.)  Whether
supplements will replace letters of indignation or approbation we
can't predict.  We imagine that a letters section will permit
debate while issues are still warm, but it may be that anything
slower than instant e-mail feedback will lag too long to suit the
network community.

Mindful of the mailbox-clog problem, we had decided to devote
each issue to one substantial essay.  Also aware of the
importance of easy citation, but fretful about clutter and
conscious of the ways that techniques for electronic text-
searching have been developing, we decided to announce only the
number of lines in each section of the issue.  Since an
electronic publication needn't wait for, or rush to meet, a
quarterly or monthly schedule, I decided to identify each issue
with a volume number, based on a calendar year, and an
accompanying (serial) issue number, along with the month and year
of actual publication.  The March 1991 "edition" is Volume 1,
Issue 1.


6.2  The First Issue is Published

After the issue layout was prepared, text was copy-edited and
checked by the author, subscription information was tested for
comprehensibility as well as accuracy, and a dummy issue was sent
back and forth to verify arrival appearance, we were ready.  It
was at this point we learned that we'd sent a bad mailing list to
be installed on the list server.

+ Page 108 +

In order to be all-electronic, we had put only the e-mail address
of the recent subscribers into our mailing list, not the users'
names.  Because the list server requires a "real" name as well,
Bob Pfeiffer sent them back to us after he had arduously checked
out the validity of every address on our list.  Ron made up some
"real names," I inserted some that I remembered.  I dropped by
Bob's office to say that we were ready to send out EJournal 1.1.
He said he was leaving for a month's vacation that afternoon.
Flustered, I shipped over the updated list.  He squeezed its
installation into his countdown schedule, and the first issue was
ready to go out that evening.

However, as I mentioned at the beginning, the ownership question
tripped me up; I couldn't broadcast to the list from the account
where the laid-out issue was sitting.  Once again, an assumption
about how easy it would be was optimistic.  Again, the fix turned
out to be easier than we deserved.


7.0  Conclusion

Released in April 1991, EJournal 1.1 seems to have been received
reasonably well.  We have a small e-mail folder of
congratulations.  No one has complained.  Many more people have
subscribed than have asked to be dropped from the list.  On the
other hand, we haven't been flooded with submissions or other
editorial correspondence.

At the beginning of this essay I promised "a rationalized
interpretation of the response" to the first issue.  There isn't
much to interpret, but several matters have come into focus.
Essentially, I am increasingly aware of EJournal's precarious
position.

First, we have broken from several paper-based conventions, which
leaves us without much in the way of a conventional constituency.
At the same time, we don't yet know if networkers generally, even
those whose home base is in the humanities or social sciences,
are interested in a conveyance that is even a tiny bit slower
than lists, newsletters, and personal e-mail.

+ Page 109 +

Second, we are not a version of an existing print-oriented
journal.  Nor do we represent a professional society or an
existing academic field.  The number of subscribers, approaching
350, suggests that we may have a constituency, but the paucity of
submissions may imply that there are more observers of the
journal than participants in its mission.  Or there may simply be
many more participants in network activities than there are
observers of its implications.

Third, there has been an inversion of difficulties.  For two
years, it looked as if getting started would be hard.  Thanks to
the support and sympathy of many wonderful people, though, that
has turned out to be relatively easy, although not speedy.  The
hard part is going to be bootstrapping the reciprocal needs of
those writers and readers for whom the network itself, the
cyberspace matrix, constitutes a "field" to be explored.


Notes

1.   To subscribe to EJournal, send the following message to
     LISTSERV@ALBNYVM1: SUB EJRNL Subscriber's Name.  Submissions
     and all editorial correspondence should be addressed to our
     "office": EJOURNAL@ALBNYVMS.

+ Page 110 +

About the Author

Edward M. Jennings
Department of English
State University of New York at Albany
Albany, NY 12222
EJOURNAL@ALBNYVMS

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