A University of California, San Diego communications professor is starting an unusual experiment today (Jan 22): He's testing whether a large online community of academic bloggers are better at peer review than a few hand-picked experts. To compare the two review methods, Noah Wardrip-Fruin is posting excerpts from his new book about video games onto the linkurl:blog;http://grandtextauto.org/ Grand Text Auto, run by himself and five colleagues. He linkurl:told;http://chronicle.com/free/2008/01/1322n.htm the Chronicle of Higher Education that the blog attracts academic scholars and video-game players, and receives up to 200,000 visitors per month. "This is the community whose response I want, not just the small circle of academics," he told the Chronicle. He is using a tool called CommentPress to allow bloggers to add notes to the excerpts. Wardrip-Fruin's editor at MIT Press is simultaneously running the book through traditional peer review, to enable the author to compare both evaluation methods. Can't...
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