The Future of PLATFORM
As we celebrate the second anniversary of PLATFORM, which launched in June 2019 (and 184 articles ago), we offer some reflections on our accomplishments and experience, and thoughts on what we hope to do in the future. Our inspiration is a roundtable discussion that we hosted at the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) 2021 Virtual Conference, in May, in which we discussed our ideas and process, with contributors and potential contributors.
A few themes featured prominently in this conversation, including the challenges and opportunities of multimedia publishing, ongoing efforts to publish multilingual articles (twelve and counting) and to reach non-English speaking audiences (around 29 percent of our site’s visitors are in non-Anglophone countries), and, ultimately, all that makes PLATFORM a unique and necessary venue. One of the most important topics to arise was our editorial process and, in particular, whether it qualifies as peer-reviewed.
Evolving Editorial Process
From the start we have often been asked, is PLATFORM peer-reviewed? Two years ago, our answer was a firm “no.” PLATFORM essays, we imagined in our early conversations, would be a place for raw and unfiltered timely public humanities writing, lightly edited for clarity and then proofread, but not reviewed in any conventional way, certainly not in the double-blind way that scholarly articles are.
We quickly learned, however, that while some of our authors had experience blogging, writing in other public-humanities venues, or even as journalists, most needed guidance. And so we developed a protocol of developmental editing, with the aim of convincing our authors—the bulk of whom are scholars or scholars in training—to present their arguments, their research, and their ideas to a general audience, and to free their writing of jargon and other apparatus that are often used in scholarly books and journal articles, but can alienate general readers.
One of our founding principles, after all, was that architecture, landscape, the built environment, and planning questions—and critical discussion of them—are too important to be sequestered in specialized professional silos.
“At PLATFORM we have created an alternative model that suits the kind of writing we aim to publish…we operate on the premise of empathetic critical reading.”
As we settled into PLATFORM, helping our writers hone their messages, their arguments, their presentation of evidence, and their public-facing writing became a core part of our mission. Today, every PLATFORM essay undergoes a process of developmental editing with one of our editors or contributing editors, in some cases two—depending on the area of inquiry and our own expertise. And that’s before our production editor—a position the five primary editors share, on a rotating basis—proofreads.
Now, though, when our contributors, and potential contributors, ask if we are peer-reviewed we hesitate. To be sure, we still don’t do anything like conventional, double-blind reviews. We editors know who the authors are, and they us. Yet the experience we editors bring to our work—including as editors or review editors of leading journals in our fields, including the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians and Buildings & Landscapes—means that we are often doing the same work we would do were we anonymous and, we believe, just as well.
Photography by Xew, courtesy Flickr, under Creative Commons License.
Peer Review
This question—is what we do peer review?—requires us to probe the purposes of peer-review and to pose a related question: “What does peer review mean now, in 2021?”
Peer-review evolved to ensure standards of scholarly rigor. Blind peer-review is premised on the idea that this form of reading minimizes bias and that only when protected by the cloak of anonymity will reviewers provide an impartial opinion on the scholarly merits of the work: the paper’s evidence, the author’s awareness of the state of the field, and ability to make an original argument, among other matters. In the humanities, the blindness of peer-review is useful for maintaining scholarly standards that may include argumentation based on archival and field research or a deep sense of the discipline’s genealogy.
Yet this form of review isn’t always appropriate. Just as paradigmatic shifts in science—thinking out of the box—is made difficult by entrenched ways of disciplinary thinking embodied in double-blind peer review, in the humanities anonymous review can be less effective as a tool for expanding a field or promoting creative thinking. The latter would require encouraging the publication of works that may be controversial, taboo, or against the grain of the existing direction of scholarship in the field. Additionally, the review process and length of time needed to see an article or book from submission to publication (often two years) can be cumbersome. The necessary slowness of the process cannot be responsive to rapidly developing events, nor can it accommodate the need, particularly among junior scholars, to communicate ideas about research, teaching, reading, and practice in a timely manner.
A New Model
At PLATFORM we have created an alternative model that suits the kind of writing we aim to publish. Our articles still undergo review, but in a manner that is open and transparent. We operate on the premise of empathetic critical reading. And we believe that it is working: generating quality research and writing and winning readers.
We are not alone in rethinking the meaning and value of peer review. Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative, another innovative venue for writing on the built environment, has, for several years, employed a system of workshopping they call “transparent peer review.” Society and Space, one of the most respected publications in our field, now issues a Magazine that includes informed essays that are shorter than their journal articles. Many scholarly societies and university presses have launched blogs. Even in the hard sciences there is a new movement, at least in some instances, toward “open peer review,” in which reviewer reports are published alongside articles.
At PLATFORM, articles are vetted and scrutinized for originality and potential for impact. The five editors and three contributing editors read the work of a colleague with scholarly rigor, provide feedback, and help an author clarify an article’s scope and argument, and enhance its brevity and lucidity. PLATFORM articles thus have to pass the muster of peers. Such feedback seems to be particularly useful for authors when their ideas may not yet be fully formed or publishable in long form.
This system has allowed us to publish articles on topics that remain taboo or that other publications have refused, because these authors are questioning the very parameters of architectural and urban analysis. We have also published pieces that adopt a personal narrative style that does not conform to the norms of scholarly publishing. We encourage authors to experiment with new ways of writing about buildings, landscapes, and places.
And the value of our approach, whatever one may call it, has been proven time and again, at least anecdotally, when authors discover that their neighborhood barista or a parent from their child’s baseball team has read their work. It has also been proven within academia by the use of our articles in university classrooms. As a free digital forum, PLATFORM articles are equidistant to readers across the globe, that is, those who have internet connection. Hence our global readership, with visitors to our site hailing not just from beyond the Anglophone world, but from 111 countries.
The global reach of articles is intimately related to not just content but their modality. We have published articles that use multimedia in a way that opens up new approaches to thinking about and publishing research. In hoping to make PLATFORM’s articles accessible to a broad readership, we have adopted three practices: emphasis on jargon-free lucid writing, articles that are suitable for multimedia publication, and multilingual publishing.
We have also encountered significant challenges. In trying to format an article in Arabic, we discovered the in-built biases of our web host, Squarespace, which is not set up to allow the formatting of scripts that are written right to left, requiring us to develop cumbersome work-arounds. Nevertheless, the logins from places in the world where readers need access to articles in languages other than English show that this goal is worthwhile.
As we enter our third year, we are proud to announce yet more opportunities to develop quality writing: two new sections. Photoessays, which brings together the fifteen visual articles we have already published, will serve as a home for new ones going forward. Conversations will publish interviews and oral histories, and hear architects, historians, urbanists, activists, and others, in their own words. We hope you will enjoy these features—and contribute to them.
