Grand Text Auto, a group blog about computer narrative, games, poetry and art, has recently launched an interesting blogging experiment that may take blogging and publishing to the next level. Noah Wardrip-Fruin is putting the manuscript of his upcoming book Expressive Processing, about digital fictions and computer games, online so that the Grand Text Auto community may participate in an open, blog-based peer review. The community is invited to give feedback on the work in the form of comments and/or trackbacks which in its turn may be picked up by the author.
It is the beginning of a more social and networked book.
Author Wardrip-Fruin enjoys the format of blogs as they can create communities and allow for interaction. While working on his manuscript he often turned to blogs and often cited blog posts. Blogs have changed how Wardrip-Fruin works as both a scholar and a creator of digital media thus creating a blog-based peer review seems like the logical next step. The project has been established in cooperation with Institute for the Future of the Book which developed the CommentPress theme:
CommentPress is an open source theme for the WordPress blogging engine that allows readers to comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text. Annotate, gloss, workshop, debate: with CommentPress you can do all of these things on a finer-grained level, turning a document into a conversation. It can be applied to a fixed document (paper/essay/book etc.) or to a running blog.
It aims to bring the characteristic features of the blog, such as comments, trackbacks and site feeds to the otherwise ‘fixed’ book. The Institute for the Future of the Book has developed the theme to enable the book to become a part of the network, the blogosphere. While this obviously does not work for every type of publication it will be interesting to see if this initiative will be followed in the (academic) blogosphere. CommentPress is a new type of structured blogging which is especially suitable for books, journal publications, papers and theses.
Edublogs, the free blog hosting service for students and educators, also offers the CommentPress theme to its users. It will be interesting to see how this initiative may change the future of publishing and what the impact will be on (academic and educational) blogging.
