Journal Articles as Ephemeral Texts

Pence, Charles H. [UCL]

If there is any non-ephemeral cultural artifact, it should be the journal article. Now quickly registered into all-encompassing databases like Crossref or Web of Science, the “record” of journal articles is often taken by scholars doing digital-humanities or bibliometric work to be a paradigmatic example of temporal and cultural stability. Setting aside the fact that this is an evident fiction – as anyone who has ever attempted to download the “complete” catalog of even a relatively recent journal can tell you – I want to pursue the question of the “digital journal record” through a more theoretical lens in this talk. Humanistic analyses of “the literature” need to not only wrestle with the syntactic content, and with the difficulties of moving from syntax to semantics, but if such an analysis is to be in the slightest a historical endeavor, it needs also to deal with the epistemic, social, and cultural contexts of journal article production. What it means to publish a journal article in 2015 in Nature is, both unsurprisingly and importantly, words away from an article in the Journal des sçavans in 1685. While any such study will be necessarily partial, and I will likely pose more questions than I offer answers, I aim to come to grips with this ephemerality across complex axes of time and meaning.