RodeWorks

On the Grand Text Auto blog, author Noah Wardrip-Fruin is publishing sections of his upcoming book, and inviting review comments.  This doesn’t quite replace the traditional academic book peer review process — MIT Press is still insisting on that step.  But it is an interesting extension of that idea.  In looking over the posts and comments so far, it looks like he’s getting substantial input with the comments he does get.  Although the process of reading, analyzing, and then crafting a comment is pretty time consuming — not that I feel qualified in any way to offer Professor Wardrip-Fruin a comment myself.  But for a blog that, as per the article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed (2/1/2008), gets up to 200,000 visitors per month, there are not an overwhelming number of comments — this time commitment issue may be a factor.  Also in traditional academic circles you don’t get any credit for an anonymous blog post — in contrast to participation in a peer review panel.  But its a terrific experiment, and I’m sure will yield a fresh perspective that will add significantly to the peer review results.

Also of note is he’s using CommentPress.  The integration is very nicely done, with only individual posts utilizing the CommentPress Theme. The only issue I came across is with some of the longer comments — they degraded into a series of colored bars that obliterated the actual comment.  It might be some CSS quirk related to use of a Firefox browser?  Anyhow for me it rendered part of the comments unreadable. But it is a terrific example of CommentPress in action.  Our own CommentPress project is coming along nicely — we launch it to the class this Thursday!

Grand Text Auto » EP Meta: Chapter One

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