Nailchipper

CommentPress has been getting really nice attention: Kathleen Fitzpatrick recently published “CommentPress: New (Social) Structures for New (Networked) Texts” with the Journal of Electronic Publishing at University of Michigan this fall.

This connection, in CommentPress, of an experiment into the organization of digital text with a desire to promote social interaction within and around it offers us the opportunity to resituate the problem of electronic publishing in a potentially productive way, and in so doing compels a new perspective on certain aspects of the historical development of publishing. This paper will take that look backward as a means of considering the significance of a project like CommentPress — which should be understood not as the apotheosis of electronic publishing, but rather as one example of a fruitful avenue of development — for the future of textuality online.