The Modal Mode of Thinking about Scholarly Publishing

The essay argues that the study of scholarly communication would benefit from attending to a “modal” sensibility—that is, a self-conscious sensitivity to the differences that different mediums make in understanding published works of scholarship. The essay critiques the unreflective textualism that dominates the conversation on publishing. The claim is that the primacy of text, as the sovereign medium of academic communication, is a largely invisible parochialism. The essay points to examples and traditions of multi-modal publishing as an entry point to taking the medium-specificity of publishing formats as an object of analysis. Such experimentation has followed, sometimes closely, the emergence of new mediums of storage and transmission within the societies that scholars work. The mid-twentieth century birth of the modern medium concept made multi-modality a conceivable, self-conscious project. Even so, the discourse on academic publishing has rarely registered the implications, including for inherited text-based formats. The essay concludes with a call for media scholars, curiously underrepresented in the discourse, to take up this task, with reference to pioneering works in the field.