Thank you all for joining us this afternoon. My name is Wayne Chapman. I'm a professor of English and editor of The South Carolina Review. I also direct the Center for Electronic and Digital Publishing (or CEDP), which hosts today's program in this wonderful new facility, for which I thank Tom Kuehn, Chair of the History Department, for instruction on the use of these facilities, which have been in use as a classroom since January although the formal Hardin Hall ribbon-cutting ceremony only recently took place, last Saturday. I think it is a striking sign of the future, for which we might indeed be optimistic in spite of the generally dismal state of the last two fiscal years and the one ahead, that this new, technologically cutting-edge auditorium is housed in the oldest building on campus, save for the nearby home of John C. Calhoun and Thomas Green Clemson, which was also recently renovated. "Renewal" and "building for the future" might serve us today as the broad context suggested in the theme of our meeting for the next couple of hours-and perhaps another hour for those faculty who wish to remain to discuss Digital Publishing and Media as a niche within the Information Technology and Communication Studies focus area of the university's new academic plan.

I hope you'll help yourselves to those snacks and refreshments the caterers have put out near the entrance, near the SUMMIT of this facility (from my perspective below almost all of you). My thanks to my distinguished colleague, Professor Art Young and to the staff of the Pearce Center for making this epicurean comfort possible. We will not be taking breaks other than to change speakers, so please help yourselves now if you have not already done so and buss the area where you are sitting when you leave. There'll be a class in here at 3:30, so let's keep it tidy. Moreover, when you move about, please do this QUIETLY.

This Year's Tech Colloquium, on The Media of Publishing: Reading, Writing, and Editing, is the end of a trilogy that began in 2001, with New Technology and the Future of Publishing, followed in 2002 by The Future of New Technology in the Arts and Humanities. The Media of Publishing also marks the beginning of an alliance between the CEDP's literary journal, The South Carolina Review, and the English Department's poetry and fiction reading series, including the Richard J. Calhoun Distinguished Lecturer, supported annually by SCR's Editor Emeritus and co-founder, Professor Emeritus Richard J. Calhoun. The alliance between CEDP and English has been there since the first colloquium, with help from the South Carolina Humanities Council. However, re-focusing the alliance began in October 2002 with SCR's first-ever sponsorship of award-winning poet Vivian Shipley, Editor of The Connecticut Review, as you will find confirmed on our new "Writers' Nook" page, accessed on the South Carolina Review On-Line Library (or SCROLL) website (at www.clemson.edu/caah/cedp/SCROLLhome.htm).

Yesterday evening and this morning, Clyde Edgerton read and conducted a workshop as our Richard J. Calhoun speaker. A North Carolina author of seven novels--including Where Trouble Sleeps and Walking Across Egypt (which was released as a movie three years ago)-Edgerton is more senior to today's featured speaker, Melvin Sterne, who is, I think it is fair to say, one of our discoveries at The South Carolina Review though he has already made a name for himself as an editor and publisher of literature on the internet. A version of the paper he is presenting today I originally received as a submission for The South Carolina Review after an engaging telephone conversation. When I read it, I knew I wanted to publish it but thought I had the perfect venue for it in a book, in company with several papers from last years' colloquium. And so they were joined in Literature and Digital Technologies: W. B. Yeats, Virginia Woolf, Mary Shelley, and William Gass, edited by my colleague Karen Schiff. I call your attention to a cover proof on the exhibit table at the back of the auditorium. I have a proof copy of the whole book with me if anyone would like to see it. William Gass is Mr. Sterne's contribution to it. So it is fitting that he should be invited to deliver the keynote address of this assembly. And so he will shortly.
If there is time after our several featured presentations, I might demonstrate more examples of our capacity as an academic publishing house than I have time for now. But let me speak now of our proudest creation, Clemson University Digital Press itself. As you see, it may be accessed from the university home page and part of the CEDP website. [From CEDP home page, click CUDP button.] Our first Electronic and Digital Publishing Annual Fellow, Manika Gandhi, will show you around the "house," so to speak, on the screen, as I continue to speak to you from the pit.
When I began to consider showing you about the proverbial "house that Jack [or CEDP] built" in the last three years, I concluded that I couldn't show you the whole house-not because rooms and furnishings of the house are under construction (which is ever true)-but because the house is already too large to tour in the time at hand. So we'll start with the Home Page and take you down a few corridors and leave it to you to visit us again on your own time. You'll find a menu at the top and links at the bottom. At General Information (at the top), you'll find context and definition as it emerged from the founding process in the year before the Center and the press emerged under then-Dean, now President Jim Barker. If you click on Student Journals, you will be able to dock with one and eventually with two orbiting satellites: Synergy and E-Agora, about which you will learn more in the next hour. For the moment, we'll skip the important Clemson University Digital Press button to observe, by analogy to the student journals, that CEDP has a formerly-printed but discontinued newsletter, Mirare, orbiting about it as an archive. The AAH College has a new online newsletter, Voices, which is not yet linked to the site although it will be in time since the members of the CEDP Advisory Board serve the editor, Sean Williams, as its editorial advisors. Unlike the journals The South Carolina Review and The Upstart Crow, Mirare had no subscriptions and became history with the first round of mid-year budget cuts a couple of years ago. And a rich history it is, too, as it chronicles the first six years of the only college of its kind in the universe.
Also on the second row of the top menu, you'll find links to announcements and archives for the Presidential Colloquium and the Colloquium on New Technology. To demonstrate, let's go to the second [CLICK Colloquium on New Technology]. Perhaps you've already been there for information about this meeting. On the left side of the screen, there is a link to the Colloquium archive. To take us back to the Center's and the digital press's banner-hoisting of just two Aprils past, click there. Then, choose the Online Proceedings and open President Barker's Welcoming remarks (a transcription to which we'll soon add the audio and visual elements from videotape). I took encouragement from his observations then and, reconciling vision and reality, still think we are wise to remain small, nimble, and solvent-a "smart mouse," as I've been saying, to survive the extinction of dinosaurs.
To go now to the Clemson University Digital Press (CUDP) site is to show you the trademark of our publishing house, if CEDP is the administrative unit of our program. You will see that we openly display the charter (or constitution) of the digital press if you follow links to the full text of its Preamble, Mission Statement, Guiding Principles, Imprint (or interests), Editorial and Publication Policy, and Administration. With the university's several cycles of reaccreditation self-evaluation, this constitution has become more overtly joined with the university's strategic plan. Various areas of concentation, so far as the use of our trademark is concerned, might originate with disciplines in the College of Architecture, Arts, and Humanies--particularly the School of Humanities-but a "platform for collaboration" for the university we certainly are. Moreover, as such, we have kept our eyes and limited resources focused on CEDP's own strategic objective of achieving Affiliate Member status for Clemson in the prestigious American Association of University Presses, whose procedures we invoke in our Editorial and Publication Policy, drawn up at the request of the provost and approved by Clemson's Board of Trustees. So, while chasing both public and private sources of funding, I and my collaborating editors have concentrated our collective energy on reading, writing, and editing for the digital press. In fact, you could say we have been writing and editing for readers in and of different media. CUDP's room in our house is consequently furnished by some work, or states of work in different media, that you may not see on a computer screen. We do, after all, print a substantial amount of literary and scholarly work each year, by camera-ready and print-on-demand processes, both with private vendors and Clemson University Printing Services.
Here I call your attention to the exhibits on the table in the back of the auditorium (my right) and refer to a leaflet called "New and Forthcoming Works by Clemson's Digital Press." There are 14 titles, most published, some in progress or in press. But as printed monographs, as a rule, are also issued online by CUDP, Manika will continue your visual tour to the Publications section of our website as I make a few observations about printed works available. So listen to me but watch the screen, too, as we will not always be on the same page, figuratively or literally. There are stories behind each one of these, but just let me read the names and titles . . . .
[EXTEMPORANEOUS REMARKS FROM LIST LINKED TO THIS ESSAY AT THE END.]
Finally, I should say a word about our journals, and, for sake of priority and time, I will restrict myself to The South Carolina Review and the features of SCROLL, the web-based library into which we are beginning to restore the inventory of literature that, progressively, has been going out of print over a period of almost four decades. I'd like you to see how we are beginning to do this. [Go to SCR page.] If you click on the image [CLICK], you find yourself facing a number of choices beyond the options of reading Contents lists and a cumulative Index of titles for more than 70 issues. You may access the essays of two recent theme-based issues. You may access facsimiles of the first two volumes. And you may read up on the creative writers who have been visiting Clemson and participating in public readings and writing workshops with students. As I said at the outset of this talk by invoking the name of The South Carolina Review and referring to the announcement of this program attached to Writers' Nook [CLICK ON Writers' Nook and go through Shipley & Clarke pages], the making and experiencing of contemporary letters by acts of reading, writing, and editing in various media is exactly what this colloquium is about. So I conclude by asking you to lend your ears and (possibly) your eyes to Melvin Sterne, a comparatively new American writer who has thought hard about the impact of new techology on the future of the book. He is an editor whose experience with this technology seems in sympathy with our own enterprise. As the best defense is supposed to be a good offense, he calls his talk, simply, "On Offense for the Book."
Sterne graduated Magna Cum Laude from the University of Washington and is completing his studies in creative writing at the University of California, Davis. He has published works of fiction and poetry in various journals and will have a long short story in The South Carolina Review about this time next year. His story "Bread" won the 2001 Frank O'Connor Short Story Award; he has also received several other awards. Melvin Sterne is the founder of the Mild Horse Press and, perhaps more notably, Carve Magazine, which is an exclusively electronic publication with a readership of over 5000 per month. His presentation speaks to issues raised by novelist William Gass on new technology and the future of the book. He will also illustrate some of the features of his journal and press. To come full circle, I'll say it again: his talk will be published in Literature and Digital Technologies: W. B. Yeats, Virginia Woolf, Mary Shelley, and William Gass, soon to be printed and displayed at summer conferences. Thus, with pleasure, I give you Melvin Sterne.

Please send comments to the Web Curator: Dr. Sean Williams
Design: Kaushal Seshadri, Heather Cox, and Manika Gandhi
Last revision: 11 March 2003