D ocum E nt New Criteria for New Media Jon Ippolito, Joline Blais, Owen F. Smith, Steve Evans and Nathan Stormer Part 1: Introduction by Jon Ippolito print journals do have some ad- © Jon Ippolito vantages over virtual ink. For one In 1998, Benjamin Weil curated an exhibition for London’s thing, paper is much more back- Institute for Contemporary Art called Web Classics. The title ward compatible; it is easier to find a university library with a century- was both ironic—the Web had only been around for 5 years at abst R act the time—and prophetic. Weil, a co-founder of the influential old book than a working floppy site ada’web and later curator at the San Francisco Museum drive. But research universities are This paper argues for rede- of Modern Art, once opined that every calendar year corre- supposed to represent the future as fining evaluation criteria for sponded to three Web years. well as the past, and the future is faculty working in new media about connecting rather than stor- research and makes specific Weil was right that Internet art has grown up quickly, at least recommendations for promotion to judge from the frequency of e-mails popping into my inbox ing knowledge. and tenure committees in U.S. from masters’ and Ph.D. students researching ada’web and its Fortunately, new media of- universities. contemporaries. In recognition of the speedy maturation of fer plenty of ways for scholars to networked media, a new generation of fledgling new media connect. ThoughtMesh <http:// scholars—and an aging generation of digital trailblazers—will thoughtmesh.net> [1], a project soon establish a tenured foothold in academic departments Craig Dietrich and I have devel- worldwide. oped for the Still Water network Or will they? The university, an institution that dates back to for art and culture at the University of Maine and University the 5th century BC, operates by calendar years rather than Web of Southern California’s Vectors program, gives readers a years, and academic review committees still expect candidates tag-based navigation system that uses keywords to connect ex- for promotion and tenure to hand them stacks of books and cerpts of essays published on different web sites. For example, periodicals rather than a list of URLs. Nevertheless, I hope that the reader of an essay on modern art can pick a single term being a new media scholar means more than publishing books out of that essay’s tag cloud, such as “Nam June Paik” and with the word “digital” or “Internet” in the title. Marxism and view a list of all the sections from that essay that relate to Paik. feminism were also revolutionary discourses, but they failed to Or one can view a list of sections of other articles tagged with change the way history and other academic disciplines do busi- “Nam June Paik” and jump right to one of those sections. One ness. By that I mean that even in universities where Marxism can also combine tags to narrow the search: “Nam June Paik” or feminism influence scholarship, the broadcast paradigms + “Fluxus” + “1962.” are still in place: professors “instructing” students, scholars Related efforts include Still Water Research Fellow John competing for publication in prestigious journals, attention- Bell’s distributed publication system Re:Paik <http://repaik. constraining media such as print and PowerPoint enforcing org> [2], which allows scholars and critics to ferret out and the one-way flow of information. share contemporary signs of the legacy of this “grandfather New media hold out the promise of toppling these behav- of video art” in everything from museum exhibitions to pop ioral hierarchies, rather than merely changing the subjects music. Recognizing new-media researchers’ need to get infor- taught according to them. Whether this effort succeeds will mation into the collective ether as quickly as possible, Leo- depend on whether we, as a group of scholars and activists, can nardo has embarked on Leonardo Transactions (http://www. point out the hypocrisy of preaching decentralization from leonardotransactions.com/), a “fast track” section of its vener- PowerPoint slides or closed-access journals and investigate and able print journal, which subjects two-page papers to a faster contribute to networked modes of sharing knowledge. referee process than most peer-reviewed journals can muster. Consider scholarly publication, for example. Books and Of course, academics can also circulate ideas quickly and widely by blogging, contributing to Wikipedia, or at least pub- lishing in open access repositories. Jon Ippolito (artist, professor), 406 Chadbourne Hall, The University of Maine, Orono, ME 04469-5713, U.S.A. E-mail: <[email protected]>. Unfortunately, few new-media academics are going to bother with these innovations if their departments’ criteria Joline Blais (writer, educator), 400 Chadbourne Hall, University of Maine, Orono, ME 04469-5713, U.S.A. E-mail: <[email protected]>. for promotion and tenure recognize only dead-tree journals. That is why these criteria have to change. It will not be easy; the Owen F. Smith (educator, artist), 404 Chadbourne Hall, University of Maine, Orono, ME 04469, U.S.A. E-mail: <[email protected]>. most conservative constituents of university hierarchies often control these criteria. Times are changing, however: not only Steve Evans (educator, literary critic), National Poetry Foundation, 313 Neville Hall, Uni- versity of Maine, Orono, ME 04469, U.S.A. E-mail: <[email protected]>. is tenure irrelevant in many universities worldwide, but even in Nathan Stormer (educator), 430 Dunn Hall, University of Maine, Orono, ME 04469, U.S.A. countries such as the U.K. and the U.S. traditional criteria are E-mail: <[email protected]>. becoming overshadowed by “research assessment exercises” and other metrics. By publishing the following criteria de- ©2009 ISAST. Individual article sections copyright as indicated. Published under Creative Commons Attribution (CC-by) license. All rights not granted thereunder to the public are reserved to the publisher and may not be exercised without its express written permission. LEONARDO, Vol. 42, No. 1, pp. 71–75, 2009 71 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/leon.2009.42.1.71 by guest on 28 September 2021 veloped by Still Water, the research arm ten requires its practitioners to develop distributed publication are on the hori- of the University of Maine’s New Media a critical context for their own creative zon, at the time of this writing these sys- Department, we hope to influence these work. This is why the majority of first- tems are only in the planning stage [11]. fledgling developments—if only philo- generation new media critics are also art- Finally, as the MLA warns, participation sophically—and remind scholars of all ists [7]. It is also why new media research in electronic scholarship should not place generations that impact in our field can spans numerous genres, from critical es- extra demands on a researcher [12]; an and should be measured differently. says to political activism to community- accomplishment in new media research building to software design. New media should substitute for a print article or faculties may profit by examining and monograph, not merely supplement Part 2: New Criteria for borrowing criteria from practice-based them. New Media ( January 2008) departments such as journalism and ar- © Jon Ippolito et al. chitecture. Alternative Recognition Authors: Joline Blais, Jon Ippolito, and Measures Owen Smith in collaboration with Steve Limitations of Academic Given the accessibility and timeliness re- Evans and Nathan Stormer. Journals quired for new media research, the fol- These differences may require evaluators lowing measures of recognition should Introduction of new media artist-researchers to look be prioritized in the evaluation of new Recognition and achievement in the beyond the usual standards applicable media research candidates: field of new media must be measured by in other disciplines. As noted by a 2003 standards as high as but different from National Academies report: 1. Invited/Edited Publications those in established artistic or scien- Invitations to publish in edited electronic tific disciplines. As the reports from the Because the field of [Information Tech- journals or printed magazines and books nology and Creative Practices] is young American Council of Learned Societies and dynamic, ITCP production is hard to should be recognized as the kind of peer [3], the Modern Language Association evaluate. Traditional review panels . may influence that in other fields would be [4], and the University of Maine [5] rec- be hampered by their members’ ties signaled by acceptance in peer-reviewed ommend, promotion and tenure guide- to single disciplines and the absence journals. of a time-tested consensus about what lines must be revised to encourage the constitutes good work in ITCP and why creative and innovative use of technology [8]. 2. Live Conferences if universities are to remain relevant in The 2003 National Academies study the 21st century. Ironically, the National Academies concludes that conferences on new me- The following points summarize some study found that the highest benchmark dia, both face-to-face and virtual, offer of the key areas in which new media re- for success in traditional academic de- a more useful and in some cases more search departs from traditional academic partments, publication in peer-reviewed prestigious venue for exposition than scholarship, with the aim of providing a journals, is less relevant to success in new academic journals: rationale for specific criteria for universi- media—and empirically less an accurate ties with U.S.-style promotion and tenure measure of stature in the field—than [The sluggishness of journal publica- more supple or timely forms of intellec- tions] is offset somewhat by a flourishing policies.