Paratext Why am I being this way? .

Q & A.

Answering the questions
of the curious and the critics (both inner and outer)

Q You do know you don’t have to publish on your own website to make your work available to the world, right? Open Access is a thing, now.

A

The open access (OA) movement is a great idea. The essence of the plan is to juggle the publishing structure so that articles and whole books can be made digitally accessible to researchers around the globe, free of charge. This means that even if a university can’t afford subscriptions to all the major and minor journals, its scholars can still read and participate in the wider conversation. The same is true for independent researchers without academic jobs — without open access, their work is limited to what is available at their public library, what they can afford to buy, and what’s free online. With open access, they can get the bleeding-edge information, much like their academic peers.

But the movement has been commandeered. Journal publishers, especially, have somehow managed to turn OA into an exclusionary, money-making machine. Now, rather than having to pay to read academic materials, scholars pay to publish their materials open access. Only the point-of-payment has changed. For folks employed by big universities, this may not be a huge issue; the university often pays the OA fee. But for the independent scholar and the academic at smaller, less advantaged institutions, if they can’t pay their own open access fees, their voices are just as obscured as they ever were. On the whole, OA is overcoming only some of inequities it is aimed at. To be clear, I’m not claiming this is the full picture in open access, or that people aren’t trying to fix the glitches in the system. Hooray for the folks who see the problems and are working to remedy them.

But in the meantime, I can make my work open access without waiting for the broader OA system to work out the bugs. My solo academic research is available on this site, free to read for anyone with internet access. (That said, my work is not free to steal. If you use my ideas, please cite me.)

And, by the way, for scholars who may not be able to afford web hosting to post their own research, there’s an open web host called Neocities, where you can post your work on a personal website designed by you, free of charge.^{footnote 1}

Q Is this real research? What are your qualifications?

A

I am a postgraduate researcher — a PhD candidate — at the University of Essex, a public research university in England, established by royal charter. I also received my MA (with distinction) at Essex. I have been taught by and have trained under some of the most gifted, qualified scholars in my field, including Dr Orsola Lukács, Dr Roderick Main, and Dr Mark Saban.

As part of the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, I specialize in the idea that each person is a community of parts — a concept which is the foundation for all the articles and papers you’ll find on this site. I am a qualified and careful researcher, and all of the work on this site is crafted with attention to academic rigor and ethics.

Q Is the material on this site peer reviewed?

A

I have published peer-reviewed articles, but most of the research on this website is not peer reviewed. But, then, I can’t really say that my traditionally published, peer-reviewed articles were actually peer-reviewed either. I got editorial comments, yes, but not a whiff of actual, substantive feedback.

While I don’t dismiss the value of peer review in theory, the peer-review system is a crumbling tower. There is no established standard for peer reviewers, and most reviewers will receive no formal competency training. Further, peer reviewers are unpaid, so it can be hard to find folks with rich knowledge in the applicable subject area. More, the reviewing process can be long and inefficient. The introduction of AI into the system has only lowered standards. (In one case, my ‘editor’ told me she let AI make ‘all the changes it wanted to’ to my article.) As I’m not a professor at a university, there is no particular requirement for me to participate in this system. For my solo work, I choose not to.

Q You could post all this stuff on Academia.edu for no cost. If you insist on giving your research away, why pay for hosting and domain name on top of it?

A

I have a no-frills phone, my husband and I share a car, and rather than paying for TV, we use library-streamed resources for education and entertainment. For us, that frees up the relatively small amount of money [$6 per month] needed to run a website.

Besides, do you know of any academics who are rolling in money? Journals don’t pay writers, and the likelihood of any book earning-out its advance (if the author even receives an advance) is small. Virtually everybody is already giving their research away. It’s just that some give it to journals and publishers, while I choose to make mine freely available on my website. And, yes, I could do something similar by way of Academia.edu, but Academia.edu has all the drawbacks of platforms, while my personal website gives me full authority over my ideas and how they are presented.

Q You’re putting so much work into these articles. Do know you could put them on Substack and make some money off them?

A

I am putting a lot of work into this website. Thanks for noticing. It’s definitely a labor of love, and of soul.

And I do know about Substack, Medium, Facebook, and all the rest. They’re all the rage. But these are platforms. Platforms go down. Businesses go out of business. If I entrust my material to a Medium or a MySpace, and they shut down, temporarily or permanently, my work winks out with them. Besides, none of these venture-capital backed businesses are bastions of ethical virtuosity. There is a price to pay for all these social media ‘opportunities,’ and the cost is carved directly from our our mental health and the integrity of our systems, political and otherwise.

On my own website, yeah, my server may blip occasionally, but otherwise, my work is my own, available online for readers twenty-four hours a day, no sign-up or scroll-dooming required.

Q You’re wasting your research. Suck it up, write a damned book proposal, and submit it. Or at least break it up into articles and send them to peer-reviewed journals. Stop being a slacker.

A

My, you are a charmer, aren’t you?

The fact is, I have already taken that ride. I’ve published traditionally — both books and journal articles. I’ve had a literary agent. I’ve been on a national book tour. And do you know what I found at the end of that rainbow? A professionally published, professionally edited work, a ration of creative wounds heal from, and the prospect of starting the whole {expletive} process all over again. Next cold-call submission. Next batch of wounds.

Publishing is a business, and writers are generally treated as cogs in a machine, not as artists and thinkers. Meanwhile, the value of giving one’s work to that machine is debatable. Perhaps this wasn’t so in the past, when editors at publishing houses were career shapers and allies to their authors. But after a decade of participating in that system, I’m over it. Admittedly, if I were employed by a university and hoping to earn tenure, my situation would be different. I might have to publish or perish. As it stands, I can choose to feed the beast or not. For my solo projects, artistic and academic, I choose not.

Q If you self-published a book, you’d at least have something to sell.

A

While my view on self-publishing has softened as traditional publishing abrogates its role of producing excellent work excellently, I still maintain that the self-publishing book trade, utterly without gatekeepers, is a flood of untrained writers, abysmal prose, and AI drek. Worse still, the market is now so deluged with books that even the most gifted authors — ones who actually pay their dues — can’t make a living at writing anymore. As some authors have said, there are simply too many people on the raft. The fact that many vanity presses operate predatorily makes matters even worse. So, yes, I could self-publish a book. But I won’t.

Q You’ll never be taken seriously as a professional.

A

I am a professional. I’m a professional writer and a scholar who will soon have a PhD. Being a professional shouldn’t require a quivering obedience to the old forms. If sharing my work online means that some people don’t take me seriously, I can be okay with that.

Q How will people know what to think about your work if there aren’t any ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’ buttons?

A

I confess, nobody actually asked me that. Just a bit of snark to liven things up.

Q Personal websites are so 1997. And, by the way, you do know that nobody hand-codes their own web content anymore, right? WordPress and Wix are quick and easy. And also, AI could do all this work for you.

A

You’re missing the beauty of the project, I think. Let me share some cool stuff about hand-coding.

First — and this is really important to me — there is the matter of accessibility. HTML has lots of tools to improve the web experience of visitors who use screen readers and other assistive technologies. Very cool.

Second, when I develop my own website independent of CMSs or other templates, the content and boundaries of my site are limited only by my creativity. The look and feel are up to me, and I can give lots of attention to user experience. For instance, unlike a blog, which is generally organized by dates and, maybe, by keywords, I can deliberately design my navigation for clarity and ease of use.^{footnote 2} This is especially important for busy researchers who come to my site looking for particular information.

Third, the 1997 web was, in many ways, a much nicer place than the internet we have today. On the contemporary, mainstream web, even the benign videos and articles I want to see are often framed with crass and creepy content. I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of surfing an internet that leaves me feeling vaguely unclean.

But (behold!) there is an alternative. My website is part of a growing community of personal sites called the open web, also called the indieweb. And, yes, more than a few of us make homage to the early internet — not out of a cloying nostalgia, but as part of a playful spirit that today’s web, for the most part, lacks. As part of that homage, I do make use of some (occasionally kitschy) Web 1.5 flourishes.

Q Still, AI can do that.

A

Are you sure you want to get me started? … Well, if you insist.

I am one of the thousands of hard-working writers whose art and whose voice was stolen in the Anthropic LLM debacle. And I’m here to tell you that the output of so-called generative AI is not free. It is derived from work stolen without consent, then chewed up and spit out for the greater glory of …what? If you figure that out, do let me know.

When we need art, we need to hire an artist. When we need something written, it’s time to pay a writer. Period.

Everything about this website, from its design to the articles and papers on it, is the creative work of the Harkey Family. The only generative AI in this house is Active Imagination. This is a matter of integrity, but there’s also a practical piece. If I had used AI to code my website and it broke (in one browser, in all browsers, whatever), I’d have to first, convince AI that the code really was broken, and second, rely on AI to fix it. As it stands, if my site has a problem, my husband and I puzzle it out, and fix it. There’s a certain peace in that.

Q Will you be posting your fiction on this site, too?

A

No. After the Anthropic debacle, I’ve decided that any dissemination of my solo fiction will be non-digital. But thanks for asking. Truly.

Q I can’t seem to find you on social media. How do I reach you?

A

Actually, I am on LinkedIn for professional purposes, so you can find me there.

Otherwise, feel free to contact me by way of my email at the University of Essex. I welcome invitations to write articles, chapters, and books. I teach, consult, and present occasionally (though I do like to be paid for that work). If you are part of a conference or organization that dovetails with my work, I’d be glad to hear about it.