Watch Joseph Carroll discuss the journal he coedits (with Alice Andrews), The Evolutionary Review. Joe explains the journal's aim and style as well as the state of the two-cultures synthesis as it exists within the humanities and social sciences today. Enjoy!
Showing posts with label journals. Show all posts
Showing posts with label journals. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
The Digital Revolution
Today we'd like to share a message from our Executive Director, Gary H. Dunham.
________________________________________________________
Greetings,
It’s high time to speak again about the digital revolution. Dizzying advances in digital communication technologies make it an extraordinarily promising time to be a publisher. At the start of the second decade of the twenty-first century, our authors are sharing their creativity and scholarly research with readers through a wide array of means and media, only one of which is the printed book. As I have often said, those publishers who cling only to the printed book often are not standing in the same room where authors and readers are holding conversations. It’s time to move to where the information flow is taking place.
Don’t get me wrong. I absolutely adore an elegantly designed, printed book—a real, bound narrative that’s portable, acquires a wonderfully vintage smell over time, carries the marks and moments of its owner, and looks so right on a shelf. Printed books will not and should not go away, but they are part of a richer, more dynamic world of information sharing nowadays. It is our responsibility as a publisher to track closely and understand the evolving, myriad ways that authors and readers connect, and to offer a range of choices to both facilitate that communication and enhance the worldwide visibility and accessibility of SUNY Press publications. You deserve that attention and vision from a university press, and so do the lives, peoples, topics, issues, and histories that we share through publications.
Embracing the latest in digital communication technologies is thus a key cornerstone of SUNY Press’s long-term strategic plan. Many of the strategic initiatives and partnerships necessary to carry out this transformation are in full swing, and let me mention some of them here. Our seasonal catalog is now primarily issued as an online, interactive edition. All new titles and a growing number of our backlist are offered in XML, the most versatile and powerful digital platform available. We’re making huge strides towards realizing our dream of a largely virtual warehouse. Each new scholarly monograph published by SUNY Press is available simultaneously in an eco-friendly and affordable DirectText electronic edition. The press’s new journals and conference proceedings dissemination programs are also digitally based, allowing purchasers the freedom and flexibility to buy a digital or print-to-order copy of the whole volume, an individual chapter, or bundles of chapters. We have also aggressively pursued partnerships with a host of online partners in order to maximize the presence of our publications on the Web: NetLibrary and ebrary offer thousands of SUNY Press titles to libraries; Amazon's Kindle now features SUNY Press best sellers, with thousands more soon to be available; Barnes & Noble currently offers over 1,000 SUNY Press e-books, with thousands more on the way. And Google currently makes available thousands of SUNY Press books on Book Search, all of which will soon be sold also through the revolutionary Google Editions program. Wherever you look for a book on the Web, nowadays you are very likely to run into a SUNY Press publication.
Whew! There’s much going on here, digital-wise, and so much more in the works. Stay tuned!
Until next time,
Gary H. Dunham
Executive Director
________________________________________________________
Greetings,
It’s high time to speak again about the digital revolution. Dizzying advances in digital communication technologies make it an extraordinarily promising time to be a publisher. At the start of the second decade of the twenty-first century, our authors are sharing their creativity and scholarly research with readers through a wide array of means and media, only one of which is the printed book. As I have often said, those publishers who cling only to the printed book often are not standing in the same room where authors and readers are holding conversations. It’s time to move to where the information flow is taking place.
Don’t get me wrong. I absolutely adore an elegantly designed, printed book—a real, bound narrative that’s portable, acquires a wonderfully vintage smell over time, carries the marks and moments of its owner, and looks so right on a shelf. Printed books will not and should not go away, but they are part of a richer, more dynamic world of information sharing nowadays. It is our responsibility as a publisher to track closely and understand the evolving, myriad ways that authors and readers connect, and to offer a range of choices to both facilitate that communication and enhance the worldwide visibility and accessibility of SUNY Press publications. You deserve that attention and vision from a university press, and so do the lives, peoples, topics, issues, and histories that we share through publications.
Embracing the latest in digital communication technologies is thus a key cornerstone of SUNY Press’s long-term strategic plan. Many of the strategic initiatives and partnerships necessary to carry out this transformation are in full swing, and let me mention some of them here. Our seasonal catalog is now primarily issued as an online, interactive edition. All new titles and a growing number of our backlist are offered in XML, the most versatile and powerful digital platform available. We’re making huge strides towards realizing our dream of a largely virtual warehouse. Each new scholarly monograph published by SUNY Press is available simultaneously in an eco-friendly and affordable DirectText electronic edition. The press’s new journals and conference proceedings dissemination programs are also digitally based, allowing purchasers the freedom and flexibility to buy a digital or print-to-order copy of the whole volume, an individual chapter, or bundles of chapters. We have also aggressively pursued partnerships with a host of online partners in order to maximize the presence of our publications on the Web: NetLibrary and ebrary offer thousands of SUNY Press titles to libraries; Amazon's Kindle now features SUNY Press best sellers, with thousands more soon to be available; Barnes & Noble currently offers over 1,000 SUNY Press e-books, with thousands more on the way. And Google currently makes available thousands of SUNY Press books on Book Search, all of which will soon be sold also through the revolutionary Google Editions program. Wherever you look for a book on the Web, nowadays you are very likely to run into a SUNY Press publication.
Whew! There’s much going on here, digital-wise, and so much more in the works. Stay tuned!
Until next time,
Gary H. Dunham
Executive Director
Monday, March 29, 2010
Integral Theory
We're happy to announce that orders are now being taken online for the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice (JITP), "the official outlet for material related to Integral Theory and its application." This quarterly, peer-reviewed journal provides research on humanity’s most pressing problems. JITP articles are written by experts from several disciplines, including ecology, religion, sustainability, leadership, psychology, psychiatry, coaching, business, politics, and education.
Subscribe today, and browse back issues as well.
Be on the lookout in the coming months for new books in our companion series on Integral Theory. The first book in this new series, A Guide to Integral Psychotherapy, is available in April.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
On the Origins of Comics
Brian Boyd's fascinating essay in the inaugural issue of The Evolutionary Review is now available online for you to read—for free! Here's the opening two paragraphs, to set the scene a bit:
Comics can have almost no mass and yet be the most mass of mass arts: Garfield has had up to 263 million readers a day. Comics constitute a new art, just over a century old, and usually an unusually accessible one. So what can evolution add to our understanding of comics?Read the article and then subscribe to The Evolutionary Review (download the entire issue, order a hard copy, or order individual articles).
Evolution lets us see comics, like almost anything human or even alive, in a panoramic context but also in extreme close-up, as close as a comics artist trying to grab readers’ attention in this frame or with that angle. And it can zoom smoothly between these two poles. Evolution offers a unified and naturalistic causal system from the general to the very particular. Far from reducing all to biology and then to chemistry and physics, it easily and eagerly plugs in more local factors—in a case like comics, historical, technological, social, artistic and individual factors, for instance—the closer we get to particulars. Evolution accepts multilevel explanations, from cells to societies, and allows full room for nature and culture, society and individuals.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Launching the Journals Program: The Evolutionary Review
We are excited to begin a new Journals Program here at the Press, starting with the inaugural issue of The Evolutionary Review: Art, Science, Culture.
Over the past several years, “literary Darwinism,” evolutionary aesthetics, and evolutionary cultural theory have expanded and flourished, displaying their vitality in numerous articles and books, and gaining ever-increasing visibility not just in academic journals but in newspapers and magazines aimed at educated general readers. The Evolutionary Review (TER) now offers a forum for the whole scope of evolutionary thinking in every field of human interest.
The editors knew many evolutionists with lively, cultivated minds. They saw that many humanists have acquired a sophisticated understanding of human evolutionary biology and that many evolutionary scientists have become increasingly alert to the peculiarly “human” character of “human nature”—recognizing that culture has a truly exceptional importance for this one species. The time, then, seemed right. Even five years ago, such a journal might not have been possible. The first volume of TER splendidly demonstrates that evolutionary cultural critique can be wide-ranging, powerful, and subtle. The editors and contributors are confident that a vast territory lies open here for exploration. The pool of potential explorers has no visible limits. Come join us!
Most of the writers contributing to TER are academics, but the editors didn’t want this to be an “academic” publication. Even in its more respectful connotations, the word “academic” suggests writing oriented to specialized professional audiences highly tolerant of routine recitations, dry facts, neutral or conventional authorial personas, an impersonal manner, and prose that is merely efficient—not aesthetically pleasing, not expressive or evocative, not, in itself, enjoyable to read. Why should serious writing be dull? The editors (Alice Andrews and Joe Carroll) decided that they would make pleasure for readers one of the chief criteria for selecting contributions to TER. They aimed at eliciting critical reflections that would charm the imagination with wit, humor, and invention. They wanted prose that would please the tongue and tickle the ear, satisfying a lust for language that is sinuous, vivid, sharp, and clear.
The editors knew many evolutionists with lively, cultivated minds. They saw that many humanists have acquired a sophisticated understanding of human evolutionary biology and that many evolutionary scientists have become increasingly alert to the peculiarly “human” character of “human nature”—recognizing that culture has a truly exceptional importance for this one species. The time, then, seemed right. Even five years ago, such a journal might not have been possible. The first volume of TER splendidly demonstrates that evolutionary cultural critique can be wide-ranging, powerful, and subtle. The editors and contributors are confident that a vast territory lies open here for exploration. The pool of potential explorers has no visible limits. Come join us!
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