"The Politics of an Academic Discussion Group"

Hardy M. Cook
Bowie State University
Bowie, Maryland 20714

It seems appropriate to begin an essay about SHAKSPER, an academic
discussion group, with a digest from that conference:

-------------------------------------------------------------
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, SHK 8.0001.  Thursday, 2 January
1997.

From:           Hardy M. Cook 
Date:           Thursday, January 2, 1996
Subject:        New Year's Greetings and More

Dear SHAKSPEReans,

I would like to offer my best wishes to all of you for a healthy and
prosperous New Year and ask for your indulgence in a very long posting
of my own.

SHAKSPER was founded on July 16, 1990, by Ken Steele and a group of
thirteen or so interested Shakespeareans (including myself), many of
whom had met at the 1990 Annual Meeting of the Shakespeare Association
of America in Philadelphia. I became SHAKSPER's co-editor in February
1992 and editor in June of 1992. Despite the July founding date, our
digest numbers follow the calendar year, so we are now entering our
eighth year with approximately 1,250 members from thirty-one countries.

If you will allow me a few moments, I would like to describe my work in
bringing SHAKSPER to you and then to ask for your assistance on my
upcoming Shakespeare Association of America seminar paper.

I am currently a Professor of English and Interim Chair of the
Department of English and Modern Languages at Bowie State University.
Founded in 1865, Bowie State, an historically black institution, is a
member of the University of Maryland System.  It is a regional
comprehensive university of more than 5,000 students, offering 20
undergraduate majors and 13 graduate programs with a graduate program in
English that is under girded by Humanities Computing in its
final stages of approval.  Faculty at UMS regional comprehensives have a
four course per semester teaching load; chairs have a fifty percent
reduction.  So I currently teach two courses per semester, chair the
largest department in the School of Arts and Sciences, continue to
prepare my edition of Shakespeare's *Poems* for the Internet Shakespeare
Editions, produce four Table of Contents columns and the Summer
Festivals List for *The Shakespeare Newsletter*, serve on a number of
boards, and spend approximately one hour a day working on SHAKSPER.  I
also DO have a family, which includes my wife and teenage and
three-year-old daughters.

Most of my work for SHAKSPER involves preparing the digests, into which
I group related messages.  Each digest has a header and a table of
contents.  The table of contents includes the name and e-mail address of
the person making the submission, the date of the submission, and the
subject of the submission.  I also lightly edit the submissions
principally to keep a consistent look and feel.  This light editing
includes occasionally correcting typos, deleting emoticons and
Internet-speak abbreviations, reducing signatures to the barest
essentials, and so on.

Many SHAKSPER files require regular updating: some daily, some weekly,
some monthly, and other when needed.  This updating of files is just one
of the tasks of maintaining the SHAKSPER file server.

SHAKSPER is not open to automatic subscription and prospective members
are requested to supply brief autobiographies of themselves. Thus,
another part of my work for SHAKSPER includes adding and deleting
members and maintaining the biography and membership files.  I also
respond to personal inquires and attend to technical problems associated
with running a listserv.

One might reasonable ask why I spend so much time on these tasks.  The
easy answer is that I normally enjoy what I do; however, there is also
the issue that the work is important to me because I have such low
tolerance for un-moderated discussion groups and I am concerned with the
product itself.

My moderation brings to the membership organized digests with a
consistent format, yet approximately once a year someone complains of
the quality of some of the submissions. One such complaint arrived a few
weeks ago and I will post it as the next digest of this year, but I want
to add that naive questions from non-academics have provoked some of our
most memorable threads.  This meta-issue about the nature of the
Conference poses a dilemma for me - the works of Shakespeare are
appealing in ways that perhaps no other body of literature is. Thus, as
much as I want SHAKSPER to be an exclusively academic list, many
non-academics compose its membership. One way that I responded to my
dilemma was to announce on Friday, April 26, 1996, my intention of
forming a SHAKSPER Advisory Board (SHK 7.0320).  At that time, I wrote
the following:

I have been slow in making any changes in the manner in which SHAKSPER
operates, but circumstances are such that I now feel a change is in
order.

I have encouraged diversity and inclusiveness; nevertheless, SHAKSPER
was founded as an "academic" conference and I still view it as such. Our
current membership of 1250 includes many Shakespearean textual scholars
and bibliographers, editors and critics, but it also includes professors
and high school teachers, undergraduate and graduate students, actors,
poets, playwrights, theatre professionals, librarians, computer
scientists, and interested bystanders. The variety of SHAKSPEReans has
led to wide-ranging discussion, but many have lamented the recent
infrequency of the engaging scholarly exchange that SHAKSPER was
intended to cultivate.

I want SHAKSPER principally to be a forum for serious academic
discussion (especially since electronic alternatives exist) and to that
end I intend to establish a SHAKSPER Advisory Board.  This board will be
composed of from four to six Shakespearean scholars from within its
membership.

The purpose of the SHAKSPER Advisory Board will be to advise the editor

       1)  On matters of policy affecting the entire conference,
       2)  On resolving complaints, and
       3)  On determining the appropriateness of certain posting.

A LISTSERV discussion group of its nature is different from a journal
(electronic or traditional) and peer-reviewed posting is not possible or
desirable; however, I do need advice from peers regarding issues that
affect the conference and particular posting that are questionable.

On Tuesday, May 14, 1996, I announced the membership of the Board:
Michael Best, Thomas Bishop, Edna Boris, Ralph Alan Cohen, Kurt Daw, Roy
Flannagan, Phyllis Gorfain, Terence Hawkes, Dale Lyles, Cary Mazer,
Michael Mullin, David Schalkwyk, and Raymond G. Siemens (SHK 7.0370). I
have consulted with the Board on a number of occasions and have found
the advice of the members extremely useful.

What I would like to do now is to use the meta-issue - what is SHAKSPER
for? - as an opportunity to gather information for my upcoming SAA
seminar paper.  I will be a participant this year in the "Politics of
Electronic Texts" seminar. My abstract for my intended paper follows:

"The Politics of an Academic Discussion Group"

As the owner/editor/moderator of SHAKSPER: The Global Electronic
Shakespeare Conference, I am interesting in exploring some issues I have
faced in the past few years in my labors with SHAKSPER and their larger
implications. SHAKSPER is not open to automatic subscription, but I
generally do not turn requests for membership down.  SHAKSPER is
moderated, but there are only a few topics that I have ruled off limits.
SHAKSPER digests are formatted and lightly edited, but I often wonder if
there are limits I should put on myself - in other words, is any editing
an intrusion on the medium itself.  These and other issues are all
related to the larger issue I wish to explore: what academic currency
does a listserv such as SHAKSPER have - what place do the conversations
in an informal medium like a listserv have in the greater academic
world?

In terms of "academic currency," I know that many have used SHAKSPER
discussions in teaching, in planning performances, and in scholarly
papers.  At last year's World Congress, the session on Characters was in
some part inspired by SHAKSPER discussions and our discussions have also
led many of us to recognize our critical diversity, especially our
differing cross-Atlantic orientations.  However, I would like to learn
more by posing four questions and encouraging members to respond either
through the list or personally to me (if you wish your response to be
personal, please indicate so).

    What part if any has SHAKSPER had in any of your scholarly
publications?
    What part if any has SHAKSPER had in your teaching?
    What part if any has SHAKSPER had in other areas of your
professional life?
    What other parts has SHAKSPER played?

I am genuinely not interested in "fan" mail, but I would like to hear
from members and use those responses in preparing my paper for the SAA.

Thanks so much for putting up with such a long post, and once again
Happy New Year.

Hardy
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This digest (SHK 8.0001) was the first that I mailed to members of
SHAKSPER - The Global Shakespeare Electronic Conference - in its eighth
year of operation.  In it, I provide a brief history of the conference,
a summary of the work that I undertake as Editor/Moderator, a statement
of my desire that SHAKSPER be "a forum for serious academic discussion,"
an expression of my wish to explore the "academic currency" of such an
electronic forum in the greater academic world, and a plea to the
members to respond to a series of questions regarding the roles SHAKSPER
plays in their lives.

SHAKSPER is a listserv, a mail distribution list.  It is moderated,
which means that as editor only I can send messages to the membership,
and it is lightly edited, which means that as editor I strive to provide
a consistent look-and-feel to the digests that I organize generally by
subject.  Yet even this simple description of "what SHAKSPER is" is
fraught with inherent contradictions.

Many believe that the Internet, over which SHAKSPER's digests are
distributed, is the last frontier for democracy and free speech, but
SHAKSPER is moderated and edited.  I do not send out every post that is
submitted to me.  Some time ago, for example, I decided that I would no
longer distribute postings dealing with the so-called "authorship"
question.  I tried to be as patient as I could with the primarily
Oxfordians, who were generally non-academics and who had begun to flood
the list with posting.   However, after a while, I deemed as a
responsible Shakespearean firmly ensconced in academia that I could no
longer tolerate the misleading, conspiracy-laden ramblings and banned
further discussion on the topic.  For this decision, I was roasted in
private messages from Oxfordian who accused me of many things, the most
polite being of stifling "free speech."  There were some resignations,
and the Oxfordians went on to establish the news group
humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare, on which a significant number of
articles related to authorship regularly appear.

As moderator of SHAKSPER, I also do not post requests for "help with my
research paper," spams, messages directed to individuals and not of
interest to the conference as a whole, and similar requests such as for
someone's e-mail address.  Furthermore, I can intervene when an
inadvertently mistaken forward or response comes to the list rather than
to the person to whom it was intended, avoiding both the mistake and the
apology for it.  Finally, because I mail digests only once a day, I can
kill messages that a member may write and afterwards have second
thoughts about posting to the membership.  In fact, as a rule, it would
appear that moderated lists such as SHAKSPER seem to have less of a
problem with "flaming" than un-moderated lists, where all posts are
distributed to the members as soon as they are received by listserv.
However, before I leave this topic, I would like to make another
observation.  I am told by friends that on moderated scientific
listservs editors routinely do not post messages they determine
inappropriate.  So why the big fuss when I banned "authorship"
discussions?  I believe the answer lies in the appeal that Shakespeare's
works have to the culture as a whole.  The everybody's-an-expert
syndrome is far more prevalent in discussions about Shakespeare than it
is in say ones about particle physics.

In my posting above, I asked for members' responses to four questions.
I received 47 responses from members: 32 from the USA, 6 from Canada, 3
from the UK, and 1 each from Australia, Germany, Italy, Japan, the
Netherlands, and Taiwan.  Most of the respondents were academics from
English and Theatre departments (teachers and critics, a textual scholar
and a bibliographer, directors, and theatre historians).  Others who
responded were deans and other academic support personnel, high school
teachers, graduate and undergraduate students, and several
non-academics, including a theatre critic.  The responses I received
were varied and instructive, ranging from general observations to
detailed answers to my four questions.

Of the general observations, I enjoyed Steve Urkowitz's comparison of
SHAKSPER to "a fascinating playground.  Lots of different games happen.
Great surprises.  Painful predictabilities.  Like real playgrounds. I
love the openness of the gates.  And I greatly appreciate the choice
that some games are just not to be played in this particular park."  Two
persons who identified themselves as non-academics offer interesting
commentary on the level of discourse.  Michael J. Ryan, a Canadian
undergraduate, commenting on the continuing debate on politics, writes,
"I also appreciate the absolute contrariness of certain viewpoints,
strongly and convincingly presented."  On the other hand, Mike Field,
whose works at a university but regards himself neither an academic nor
a theater professional, remarks, "I find that while the academicians on
the list almost always have a fuller and more complete knowledge of the
texts, they are often rather too ready to fall into threads of
discussion that are obscure, overly theoretical and often dogmatic."  A
community college teacher, Tom Hodges, on the other hand, considers
SHAKSPER "the most helpful, stimulating, entertaining, and challenging
experience since my grad school days in the '60's."  From the academic
prospective, long-time SHAKSPERean, David Richman observes, "I find the
continuing conversation by turns engrossing, stimulating, revelatory,
distressing, heart sickening, annoying, enraging, boring.  My reaction
to *Shakespeare Quarterly* and other professional tracts is much the
same, but with a higher proportion of annoyance and boredom."  In
addition, SHAKSPER provides David Richman, who a blind, further
benefits: "The conversation gives me immediate access to information
that others, but not I, might get from a steady perusal of magazines and
newspapers.  I am always grateful and always make use of the notes and
descriptions of books, articles, and especially productions and films."

Many respondents expressed a sense of being connected to a virtual,
world-wide community.  In addition to the conversation, they find
SHAKSPER a source of general information, bibliographic citations,
references, publications, conferences announcements, and calls for
papers.  Lois Feuer, who teaches at a "smallish Cal State University,"
comments, "I have gone from being a rather isolated faculty member whose
workload was too great to allow me to read and write as much as I would
have liked, to becoming a member of a community of Shakespeareans.  The
difference in my outlook -- and indeed my output -- is considerable."
James Helfers, who describes himself as "a generalist who enjoys
Shakespeare," is thankful that "As a member of a small department at a
teaching university, I would never have the time to interact with
critics of such stature [Terence Hawkes, et al.] outside of the list."
Michael Cain, an administrator at the Japan campus of a community
college in Washington State, has yet another perspective: "I am in my
20th year of living and working outside of the US and maintaining my
participation in US academic culture is very difficult.  SHAKSPER  is
part of my maintaining my membership."  I found the most moving account
of SHAKSPER's providing community expressed by an Italian graduate
student and aspiring Shakespearean who wishes to remain anonymous.
After providing background in to the nature of Italian graduate
education, this student concludes, "SHAKSPER gives me what Italian
academy cannot or doesn't want to give me. A forum for discussion, a
place where I can pose questions and receive answers, a giant seminar
where I can sit and follow interesting debates, a virtual classroom
where the connection between literature and politics is at least taken
for granted (whereas in Italy after the hyperpoliticization of the
sixties and seventies people are sick and tired of Gramsci and Marx)."

Several additionally commented that in response to postings they had
corresponded with other members off-line. Nina Rulon-Miller shares this
anecdote: "My best experience on SHAKSPER was when I responded privately
to a teacher (high school, I think) asking about Shakespeare for
children. I told him about my third-grade class's study and performance
of _The Tempest_. He was so appreciative and sent me such a nice note
that it made my day."

Concerning my questions, the greatest number of respondents (more than
twenty) mentioned that they regularly use information gleaned from
SHAKSPER in their classes.  Pertinent discussions are printed and
distributed; cited in class; used to stimulate discussion and debate;
forwarded through the class listserv; and cut, pasted, and e-mailed to
students.  Fran Zauhar goes into detail on how she uses SHAKSPER
discussions in class: "the list has helped me see pairings/groupings of
the plays, verified my own instincts about topics for discussion,
pointed me in the direction of useful resource material, given me ideas
for topics and projects for student work."  Many professors in English
departments mentioned that they were particularly fond of reading
submissions from theatre professionals: A.E.B. Coldiron, for example,
writes, "I am always surprised by discussion from actors, directors--it
helps keep me grounded--I do teach "performed" Shakespeare, not purely
textual or literary Shakespeare (though we do plenty of that), and these
discussions remind me of the Players' view."  Although no actors and few
directors responded to my questions, SHAKSPER postings frequently
explore practical theatrical matters - discussions of past and possible
production approaches to conception, staging, and the like.

I was delighted that there were more than ten mentions of the part
SHAKSPER has played in scholarly publications.  Here are some of the
specific responses:

1) Bill Godshalk published, one of his first submissions to SHAKSPER, a
note in on Bottom's "cutting bowstrings" in *Notes and Queries*.
2) Gabriel Egan first heard about Michael Saenger's *Notes and Queries*
note on Ariel's costume on SHAKSPER, read the note, and produced a
related article that will be appearing in *Theatre Notebook*.
3) Ed Pechter made extensive mention of SHAKSPER in "Othello, SHAKSPER &
the Infamous Ripley," an essay he contributed to a festschrift for Ernst
Honigmann.
4) SHAKSPER played a major role in an essay Michael Friedman recently
published on the final scene of *Two Gentlemen of Verona,* "`To be slow
in words is a woman's only virtue': Silence and Satire in *The Two
Gentlemen of Verona*. While writing the piece, Michael sent a query to
SHAKSPER regarding Silvia's silence.  Neil Novelli replied to him
privately and provided useful reviews of productions Michael had not
seen. From Novelli, Michael also learned of a conference paper Dolores
Ringer had written about an all-female production she had directed.
Michael wrote to her, read the paper, and used it extensively in his own
piece.
5) Dave Evett explains how he uses his longer posting to SHAKSPER as a
kind of publication: "SHAKSPER has repeatedly been useful to me in
bringing to my attention texts, ideas, definitions, sources of
information, that have had or will have had a place in my scholarly
work.  I think especially of information about electronic information
sources--other discussion groups, electronic text depositories, etc.  At
the production end, I have several times used longish postings, written
off-line with some care, as occasions for drafting arguments that
eventually got incorporated in work to be submitted for publication. For
what it's worth (probably not much as yet), I have saved these, printed
them out, and submitted them along with offprints with the annual
activity reports we turn in to chair and dean each year--last year, my
chair commented on this body of work in his report to the dean."
6) From a SHAKSPER query, Laurie Osborne located a new series of
animated Shakespeare tales.  She wrote an essay around them, a sequel to
another essay she had written on the first series, and submitted this
new essay to the special issue of *PostScript on Shakespeare: The
Movie*, which she heard about from a Call for Papers posted on SHAKSPER.
7) Ken Rothwell wrote that he has found "the list extremely valuable in
my development of a *Short History of Shakespeare on Screen*. The
comments about Shakespeare films from a variety of readers with a
variety of perspectives have allowed me to keep my hand on the public
pulse, so to speak. I can't think of any other way before electronic
mail that I could've so quickly discovered what so many people were
thinking about in my special line of research.
8) Jim Harner uses SHAKSPER in his job as editor of *The Shakespeare
World Bibliography*: "there is rarely a day that goes by but that I find
an important lead for a production or publication that should go into
the _World Shakespeare Bibliography_. Frequently, I would not have know
about a production had someone not mentioned it on SHAKSPER. I
constantly use the list of subscribers to contact people to request
offprints (or information about an obscure publication that I can't
otherwise identify or track down). And, I've had decent--but not
overwhelming--response to my occasional postings that ask subscribers to
send along offprints.  Thus, I consider SHAKSPER one of the important
and essential research tools that any competent Shakespearean has to
monitor."

When I wrote the abstract for this paper I wonder aloud about the place
of moderation and editing in the informal medium of an Internet
listserv.  Consistently, however, my moderation and editing were cited
as the strengths of the conference - no one complained-and I have thus
decided that moderation and editing are not issues at all.

My greater concern in my abstract was with SHAKSPER's "academic
currency."  The responses I received would appear to support the
contention that an academic listserv such as SHAKSPER does have academic
value.  It provides a sense of a virtual, world-wide community.  It is a
forum for a wide variety of discussions that range from the trivial to
the profound.  It is a place that theatre professionals can explore
production possibilities and teachers can obtain ideas for the
classroom, and it has clearly played a role in many members'
scholarship.  All this notwithstanding, what I consider the most
interesting response to my queries reveals another aspect to SHAKSPER I
had not fully considered - SHAKSPER as a cite of cultural contestation.

In her SAA "President's Letter: 1993-94," Phyllis Rackin mentioned the
heated discussion that followed the announcement that Sam Wanamaker had
been awarded a CBE for his work on the Bankside Globe: "Outraged
responses form the UK provoked a series of exchanges that exposed
profound differences between the political and cultural locations
occupied by 'Shakespeare' on the two sides of the Atlantic." This
exchange lead Phyllis Rackin to reflect on the North American "cultural
location" of the SAA and to invite members to send thoughts about "the
new directions the organization should take and /or features you think
it most important to preserve."  This exchange was also particularly
enlightening to me - I learned a great deal about North American and
European cultural differences in a direct, immediate way.

For months now, there are been on SHAKSPER on-going debate about
"ideology" - a debate that has appeared again and again over the years.
One of the frequent contributors to the debate, Bill Godshalk, remarks,
"SHAKSPER certainly allows me to see where I stand in the current
debates, and who I tend to stand with."  Yet it was the comments of a
contributor who stands in opposition to Bill Godshalk, Terry Hawkes,
that opened my eyes to academic currency that SHAKSPER has as a cite of
cultural contestation: "[SHAKSPER] helps to sharpen my perception of
what scholars in the USA and elsewhere think and believe - not just
about Shakespeare, often about politics, economics, philosophy etc. -
and this is frequently and interestingly at odds with the 'official'
view you get from reading the journals. An unguarded blurt can be very
revelatory - particularly to someone who's interested in how Shakespeare
is used/processed by societies."  Terry Hawkes identifies a academic
role an electronic conference such as SHAKSPER plays as a result of its
being a less formal medium than a print journal.  SHAKSPER because of
its diversity and its relative informality may, in fact, represent more
accurately than *Shakespeare Quarterly*, than *Shakespeare Survey*, than
*Shakespeare Studies*, than *PMLA*, or than *The Shakespeare Newsletter*
what members of the Shakespeare industry and interested bystanders are
actually thinking and what Shakespeare teachers are actually teaching.
This is a possibility I had not contemplated before I began this paper.