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Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Books Seattle Literary Magazines as Facebook

Posted by Paul Constant on Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 4:24 PM

9ed9/1238528954-prettygraph.jpg Matt Briggs has published an article on Issuu that looks into how people published in Seattle's literary magazines interact with other publications.

There are several tables and pretty graphs like the one at left (with Wordle accompaniment!), but the story is, I think, most interesting in how the internet has affected literary magazine editors. Briggs quotes Dave Clapper, publisher of the Seattle-based SmokeLong Quarterly, as saying that they are decidedly not a Seattle publication. There's also evidence that the internet is not as grand a publishing platform as people may believe:

From 2003 to 2008, 454 individual authors published 552 articles, including poems and stories. From March to September 2008, there were only 31 posts on Web site and forums related to the four magazines [that Briggs studied in depth]

It's worth checking out, although Issuu is the clumsiest platform for web publishing I've ever tried to use.

Comments (5) RSS

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Obviously, blogs on Wordpress don't qualify as literary. Else his numbers powers of 10 too small...

Posted by Word Press on March 31, 2009 at 5:17 PM

Have you see this Paul? You might like it:
http://www.notcot.com/archives/2008/04/s…

Posted by Olytomato on March 31, 2009 at 7:12 PM

Thanks Paul for the link. I was not too surprised by the low number, but yeah, it was really, really low. But I should note, I was filtering by the names of the magazines -- i.e., The Raven Chronicles (and only references to the actual magazine, not just the string "The Raven Chronicles" (I had to hand sort references, which was made easier by the low numbers) and other mags. I was also looking at CGM specific sites available through BlogPulse (http://www.blogpulse.com) the source of my data -- and was at their mercy in terms of what they collect. Facebook for instance is not collected by these kinds of things, but MySpace/LiveJournal are. So I would take the literal numbers with a grain of salt. I was also limited to the last six months, since that is the retention period, I think, for BlogPulse. As a point of comparison, tho, even topics such as commercial brands of juice or salsa can see numbers comparable to these three lit mags, that is maybe two thousand posts over a six month period, and maybe only 10-15% brand-specific posts.

The gist was to try to get at some patterns. Pantoon is where it is at among local pubs both online and off in terms of connectivity. Most publications (about 84%) go to first time authors in "Seattle" lit mags. Ron Silliman's blog is the red hot center of the poetry/heavy-lit discussion online.

I also agree about Issuu's weirdness, but I like it better than a PDF, and it allows for zoom. But, the network graph for the online world still ended up being really, really blurry.

BTW (2) : the notcot.com link is amazing.

Posted by Matt Briggs on March 31, 2009 at 7:34 PM

Thanks for sharing that, truly some interesting data visualization (NOTCOT link is fantastic!).

Regarding Issuu, I don't know how you got that link you posted? It wasn't made to stand alone like that. Normally you'd just get the link from the browser, e.g. http://issuu.com/zingzang/docs/seattleli… - or you could click Embed to get a 'styled' link like this: http://tinyurl.com/dfp5jk - or get the embed code and post it directly on this blog (there's a WP plugin). Thanks, Martin

Posted by Martin Ferro-Thomsen on April 1, 2009 at 2:24 AM

h+ magazine tried the same publishing method with the 'digital edition' of their first issue
http://hplusmagazine.com/digitaledition/…
and yes, it's the clumsiest interface i've ever tried to use.

they've been smart enough to put it online in html since

Posted by tunanator on April 1, 2009 at 2:55 PM