{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.023577652485904665, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0020502306509482316, 'mean_word_length': 5.506666666666667, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Reviving the Undead Book

Planned Obsolescence is foremost a work of advocacy. Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Director of Scholarly Communication at the Modern Language Association and Professor of English at New York University (NYU), is on a mission: to save scholarly (book) publishing; to alter the processes of knowledge production; and to direct academia as a whole towards a digital future. Planned Obsolescence is not just a print-on-paper argument, though; it is an extended digital project and scholarly network. It began with Fitzpatrick’s blog by the same name, finding its extension in MediaCommons, a scholarly publishing community that Fitzpatrick co-established to enable the building of networks and collaborations among media scholars. She used MediaCommons Press, a digital text platform and publishing experiment from MediaCommons, to openly review the manuscript of Planned Obsolescence. Adopting CommentPress software a WordPress plugin that allows comments to be made next to specific paragraphs of text the draft was made available online in 2009 to potential reviewers and commentators (alongside a traditional peer review process by NYU Press). With this experiment in ‘peer-to-peer reviewing’, Fitzpatrick not only wanted to critique existing forms of peer review and examine alternative ones, but she also wanted to experiment with creating an online community, promoting the values of collaboration and interactivity that form the basis of the argument of her book. Planned Obsolescence explores what the possibilities of digital tools, technologies and practices are to enhance and promote conversations around (long-form) texts. It also examines in what way these digital affordances are, perhaps, able to alleviate the crisis in academic publishing, and to save the scholarly monograph from what Fitzpatrick calls its zombie status: threatened with obsolescence, no longer viable or sustainable, though still required for tenure