Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-45692830-20200610235524

So I've finally gotten TARDIS Eruditorum into a state that I'm satisfied with to begin this discussion. Technically the "needs cleaning" tag is still present, but I'd prefer if the person who put it there would take it down as I don't want to step on their toes by removing it myself and suggesting that there's consensus that the article is 100% kosher in its formatting. Given that, let's begin the discussion.

What is TARDIS Eruditorum?
TARDIS Eruditorum is a mixed media project consisting of a series of books as well as a series of "blogposts". I note here that this is not a technically correct usage of the term, as blogs are by definition inherently casual rather than formal, colloquially are in reversal chronological order (while these are in chronological order), and even historically even represent a diary, which these assuredly do not. However, as the author, Sandifer, herself uses the term, I too will use the term. Just be aware that these are formal essays at the very least approaching academic levels of rigor if not consistently at academic levels of rigor analyzing Doctor Who.

There is also an associated podcast, but I'm not taking that to be part of the main project for purposes of this discussion. It's important to note, for full transparency, that this podcast has had several figures involved in production of the DWU interviewed on said podcast, including Kate Orman and Peter Harness.

Okay, so What's the Problem?
Even discounting the obvious differences between the podcast and the other forms of the text, there are some massive issues that arise.

Speed in Publication
First and foremost, the website version of the text has far outpaced the book version of the text. Currently the page I've created covers both, as I consider them one project, and Talk:TARDIS Eruditorum seems to be in agreement on this. But this is the first instance of a publication like this to be addressed on this wiki, so a hard and fast policy going forward would be prudent in my eyes.

What the Books Have That the Website Does Not
Another issue that emerges is that the books will add in content after the fact in an attempt to get people who've read the online version to buy the book. One example is that Sandifer is currently writing the McCoy book and had for her kickstarter a stretch goal of an essay "Is Ace Queer?" Now, this might encourage someone to say, "well, alright then, that's easy, the books are the definitive edition of the project and online is secondary, a test run." But not so fast.

What the Website Has That the Books Do Not
Sandifer has experimented with the fact that she's originally writing for a digital medium and used that to great effect. She wrote a chapter in emoji. She wrote a chapter as a choose your own adventure novel, of which the definitive account is one that someone adapted online. Interference part II would be nasty to read in a book. The Family of Blood is a rewrite of the Human Nature post. Silence in the Library is itself a small book in its own right. All of these things can in principle be translated to a book. But they lose something when you do. They're designed first and foremost with the digital medium in mind. The fact that she doesn't have to be constrained by normal printing procedures is what allowed her to do these experiments.

Aside from this, some of the posts on her website end up "on the cutting room floor" as it were when the book is published, as mentioned here. And all of this ignores...

The Comments
Now here we have a real quandary. Are comments sections supposed to be "text" (part of the work) or "paratext" (other material that helps us interpret the work)? There's decent arguments in either direction. The author is actively engaging in the comment sections and elaborating on their work, as well as responding to criticisms. This is deeply important if it is indeed text. And, as this is already media criticism, it's not as if these actions are unrelated to what the text normally does. In addition, these comment sections are often frequented by prominent figures in the Doctor Who community. So losing this information when you go to the book is a very real blow.

With that said, there is one caveat, and that's that on the older comments a different threading system was used and Sandifer used a different name. So while the name was changed site-wide, people responding to the name in their comments never went back to discussions 7 years ago to edit their comments. So these old discussions would be hard to read. A footnote added to discuss this would be appropriate, if we do decide to incorporate the comments as part of the text.

Current Policy
Honestly? There's not much. I wasn't able to find anything in the forums, but someone who's been here longer than me might know of a post I overlooked, or on the old boards. T:UNOFF REF is going to be the relevant rule here, but the wording on this is pretty clear that it wasn't built to handle a case like this.

"A distinction should be made, however, between the above types of sites which are "forbidden" because of their fan involvement and lack of intellectual rigour, and, for lack of a better phrase, "unofficial reference sources".

Some fans have created sites that are more like interactive reference books, in that they present well-sourced analyses, in exactly the same manner as would any reputable reference writer. Prime amongst this type of allowed fan site is Shannon Sullivan's A Brief History of Time (Travel), which we feel is a genuine attempt at behind-the-scenes scholarship."

- T:UNOFF REF

But this just isn't what TARDIS Eruditorum is attempting to do at all. It's not merely attempting to document facts about production or continuity, it's attempting to look at Doctor Who's broader impact on culture, and culture's impact on Doctor Who. The one bit of this that is relevant is 'A distinction should be made, however, between the above types of sites which are "forbidden" because of their fan involvement and lack of intellectual rigour'.

I'll also note that the rule as written allows for unofficial reference websites and interviews, but not other works of analysis like Running Through Corridors, About Time, or even scholarly works like this one, even if analysis books are mentioned in Tardis:Resources. I'll note that Tardis:Resources also says "Only official sites should be cited on articles", a policy that I think this example shows is outdated.

Clearly TARDIS Eruditorum, while a fan project, is intellectually rigorous. So the spirit of the rule would seem to support the website version being included, even if the actual letter of the law does not suggest so. (Note here that there have been actual developments about the show only detailed heretofore on the website version of this project, such as the original scripts for The Pyramid at the End of the World (TV story).)

One could even argue that we should expand this to the entirety of Eruditorum Press, allowing things like Orman's comments about Looms in this post to be treated as text and part of an interview, but that is beyond the scope of my argument here.

Where Do We Go From Here?
I propose the following policy changes.


 * 1) When discussing an out of universe project spread out over multiple forms of media, if there is significant overlap between those forms of media, they are all contained on a single page. However, no one of them is to be taken as definitive, and instead content is solely additive.
 * 2) T:UNOFF REF be rewritten to include language allowing broader analyses of the form. My specific proposed wording would be "[...]which we feel is a genuine attempt at behind-the-scenes scholarship. In addition, analysis of Doctor Who using specialized knowledge or academic scholarship also serves as a reference point for this wiki." But I'm not wedded to this and it's something we can workshop.
 * 3) If we adopt language explicitly mentioning academic scholarship, I'd suggest making a page referencing all academic papers discussing Doctor Who (or at least one by field), rather than a page for each paper.
 * 4) The "Only official sites should be cited on articles" language in Tardis:Resources be reworked to also allow for the website version of a mixed media project to be cited. An example would be "Only official sites or digital publications of reference texts or academic sources should be cited on articles".
 * 5) For scholarly works of the type above detailed in the new T:UNOFF REF, if this work is online, we take comments sections to be treated as text rather than paratext. This does not mean that we must cover everything detailed in the comments sections. It just means that if, for instance, the author elaborates on a thought, we can cite that elaboration in an OOU section somewhere. If need-be, we can even require that it be tagged as "comments", to note that it's specifically on the online version of the text. But as this is freely available to users, and so more accessible than the book version, this seems to me to be only a positive. 