From the Editors:
Welcome to Broadly Textual Pub, the publication formerly known as Metathesis. From its origins in 2014, this online blog space has always been about sharing ideas with a broader audience. The blog began in a meeting of graduate students with a mission: to connect the public with ideas and conversation usually contained within the university campus. They wanted to fulfill this mission ethically, in a way that respected the needs and experiences of that audience, and that also respected the labor of the contributors. Over the past four years, those graduate students in the Department of English at Syracuse University have worked with Dr. Harvey Teres, in his role as Professor for the Public Humanities in English, to make this dream of collaboration a reality.
We at Broadly Textual have sought to create a virtual meeting ground where critical conversations occur beyond the seminar classroom or the academic textbook. In this space, thinkers from vastly different backgrounds and lifestyles come together and contribute by sharing their unique knowledge and life experiences, and challenging themselves and their readers to think critically and deeply about the complex world around us. Four years after our founding, we are still dedicated to this vibrant collaboration between the university and the public.
We’re proud of where we’ve been and of the space that’s been created, and we’re also dedicated to growing and changing in ways that help us to serve our original purpose in new ways. You may notice some changes hitting the blog as we keep moving forward in pursuit of this goal.
First, we’ve changed the name. In our attempt to better communicate what it is that we do here at the blog, we’ve put it in the name. We’re a pub, or publication, focused on the analysis and discussion of texts drawn from a broad range of sources, and examined with a variety of theoretical approaches. The word “text” itself is part of this mission, indicating not just printed books, but also films, video games, plays, comic books, poetry, news, advertisements, and so much more. Any object meant to communicate an idea can be read as a text. As you might have guessed from this breadth of objects ripe for analysis, no two contributing writers at our blog focus on the exact same subject. As such, each month, there’s a taste of something new on tap, with new texts and new theories joining the pub mix.
In addition to a more accessible name, we’re launching other initiatives this year to bring academic scholarship to a bigger public space. On the writing side of things, we’ll be making our posts more accessible than ever. Working with our editors, our contributors are moving away from field-of-study specific jargon and specialized language, and moving toward defining specific term use and providing references for further study. On our website, we are also adding image tagging for all image content moving forward, with descriptive captions for cover images and any graphics used within the bodies of the posts. We’ll also be continuing our efforts from last year to provide content warnings at the beginning of all posts that contain topics associated with traumatic experience.
As we enter our fifth year of publication, we look forward to how these exciting changes can open this space to an even larger audience, exchanging new ideas and generating intellectual growth for readers and writers.
Sincerely,
Rhyse Curtis, Editor-In-Chief,
Ashley O’Mara, Web Editor
