Original birdlab about statement
For more than fourteen years, the staff of Blackbird has been working and learning about online publishing on the run, and in an era of constant change. As anyone working with a publication with limited resources knows, the challenge is finding the time to research for longer-term goals, fixes, and improvements when the deadline for the next issue looms; even as one number of the journal goes live, work is already underway on the next.
While senior editors make annual outings to talk about the journal’s literary and artistic content and to promote our efforts to writers, artists, and readers around the country, the production teams and online editors have been relatively unpublic by comparison.
This has been a good thing, all-in-all, in that our work should first facilitate silent delivery of content; if a reader becomes suddenly self-conscious about the build, it’s sometimes because something has glitched, or we have slipped in our build of the pages. If a reader or contributor doesn’t notice the structure, but can find her way readily to content, we’ve done our job.
But we’ve worked in relative isolation too long. We would like colleagues, contributors, former staff, potential students, readers, editors, and fellow publishers to have access to more of our behind-the-scenes problem-solving and deliberation. We’ve been talking about something like this for some time, but a recent lecture on Open Access (given at Emory by VCU MFA alum Cheryl Ball) spurred us action.
Blackbird itself is natively Open Access (free to read) but Ball’s enthusiastic push to make all aspects of professional work public led us to create the blog birdlab as an open process initiative.
birdlab, the blog, is one aspect of the initiative; another is the introduction of featured process-content in the pages of the issue itself. birdlab Features will focus on an aspect of process or production surrounding a specific piece of content and of interest, we hope, to readers at large. Our first forthcoming birdlab feature, discussing publication of a photo of Larry Levis, is entitled “Familiar Scars vs. Original Intent: A Photo Restoration Case.”
The birdlab blog will focus, more broadly, on larger behind-the-scenes discussions, many of them ongoing, and generally of a more specialized nature. The first blog post, for instance, is about Facebook meta-data and open graph code standards; the second is about unidirectional and directional quotation marks.
Blackbird‘s production practices have evolved from raw trial and error at our start to solid professional training. Going forward, we’ll be looking for instances of our influence on former staff (and others) that we can document in birdlab. If you are a former staff member whose Blackbird experience has benefited you in your personal, professional, or creative work, please get in touch to tell us your story.
In the meantime, we’ll do our best to document more of our process, to think out loud about questions and solutions and ongoing problems in front of an audience of readers, contributors, and peers. We’ll try to get as many of our local staff voices in play as possible. We also look forward to starting a professional conversation with those of you engaged in similar questions surrounding online literary and arts publishing.
M.A. Keller
Online Editor, Blackbird
Fall 2014