Daniel R. Driver

I have started reading a new book, online, that explores the future of academic publishing. I'm predisposed to like it because it has made a bold experiment in this direction, opening itself to public review. From the introduction:

One of the points that this text argues hardest about is the need to reform peer review for the digital age, insisting that peer review will be a more productive, more helpful, more transparent, and more effective process if conducted in the open. And so here’s the text, practicing what it preaches, available online for open review.

Take a look at Kathleen Fitzpatrick's Planned Obsolescence. For the right project, I'd like to try working like this myself. I wonder, though: Could someone do a PhD like this? Or is it better as a post-tenure project?

(Hat-tip: AJ.) 

Update on Sunday, 7 March 2010 at 4:05 PM by D. R. Driver

It turns out that Kathleen Fitzpatrick teaches at Pomona College, and was a colleague of the late David Foster Wallace. And she has taught a course on DFW, with a blog. There's also a very fine memorial, which rings the changes on some of my favorite essays. It has some splendid anecdotes, too, like this:

These students, from across his career, tell strikingly similar stories about the effects he had on them, both as writers and as people. Sometimes those effects were produced in surprising ways: a student from his days at Amherst noted, “I used to confuse further and farther, and, apparently, I did it quite often. In one of my stories, I’d confused them yet again, and in the margins, he’d written, simply, ‘I hate you.’ I’ve never confused them since.”

As a reader I still miss that guy.