TEXT Volume 22 No 2 October 2018
Editorial
How useful is TEXT?
It is always interesting to look at the cPanel stats provided by our excellent webhost, Netregistry. They show, for example, that ten years ago, in October 2008, TEXT had 2397 unique visitors who accessed on average 3.2 pages (i.e. 3 articles) in the month.
Ten years later, in October 2018 (which still has five days to run as I download these figures), TEXT had 6946 unique visitors who accessed on average 3.5 articles this month – and that’s before the new issue has been announced.
In 2008 we thought TEXT was doing well and highly valued in its international community. In the last decade its usefulness has increased threefold.
The statistics for 2018 so far are shown in this graph:
These stats indicate, unsurprisingly, that we do more research during the New Year break, before teaching takes over for the academic year. Around May there is a spike equivalent to our New Year involvement due to interest in the new issue at the end of April.
So, who are these ‘unique visitors’? Where do they come from?
The graph for this month (up to 26 October 2018) shows that Australians are the biggest users of TEXT, with the US, UK, Germany, New Zealand, China and South Korea also keen visitors. Many aspects of the following stats are notable. For example, the US is a greater contributor to TEXT traffic than the UK and New Zealand combined, using TEXT one-half to one-third as much as Australians, but clearly population difference has an effect. The number of Chinese and South Korean visits, however, is not so readily explained.
The webhost also tracks the download of pdf articles from the TEXT site, thus recording a significant aspect of usage of the Special Issues series. So far this month, the following have been well utilized.
Of interest here is the fact that Special Issues from six years ago, and older, continue to be accessed at a high rate. The TEXT Special Issues archive is an ongoing resource for scholars.
Copy and paste of regular articles cannot be traced as can pdf downloads, but the following graph shows the most visited pages in TEXT this month. Again, articles from a long while back (up to 20 years old) are still in significant currency:
What do these stats tell us? They indicate that TEXT continues to be a major player in the publishing of international creative writing research, and a major contributor to the ongoing development of the Creative Writing discipline.
—Nigel Krauth
Scholarly contributions to the general edition of TEXT Vol 22, No 2 include the second part of a ground-breaking article by Paul Collis and Jen Crawford on approaches to indigenous storytelling in the Creative Writing teaching and learning space. ‘Six groundings for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander story in the Creative Writing classroom: Part 2’ furthers the authors’ case for the acknowledgement and presence of Australian indigenous storytelling in the Creative Writing discipline using an inclusive approach pioneered at the University of Canberra. Together with Part 1, this work provides Creative Writing teachers and academics across Australia with a method and a framework for inviting Australian indigenous story into the discussion and into the collective creative writing studio or workshop. Part 1 of Collis and Crawford’s article was published in TEXT Vol 21, No 2 (October 2017).
Michael Cawood Green’s ‘Reflection and reflexivity: The archive and the creative process’ makes a convincing case for meta-fictional devices as a legitimate form of practice research methodology, particularly in the context of the research structures and processes required of the higher education sector in the UK. Green’s article is a sophisticated argument that artfully incorporates excerpts from his own work-in-progress. Maya Rasker’s ‘A writer’s oscillations: The beginning as mediating space between origin and destination’ also incorporates excerpts from the author’s fiction, in this case to problematise the notion of the beginning, drawing on Derrida, Barthes and Foucault. This is an article both poetically discursive and deeply scholarly: a rare achievement and a rewarding read.
Elsewhere in this edition, Ronnie Scott and Elizabeth McFarlane contribute to the scholarship of literary adaptation studies, and to comics studies, with reference to the remarkable Australian graphic novel, The Long Weekend in Alice Spring. Alayna Cole sheds light on the queering of fairy tale studies, particularly in relation to recent young-adult fiction, and Jessica Seymour offers useful insights into the podcast/audio format or medium, also a relatively new field of research. Rachel Hennessey addresses the vexed question of appropriation while also asking how emergent writers might ‘find their own voice.’ Her call for the emergent writer ‘to get beyond the voices of doubt, to give themselves permission to write the rubbishy first draft, to stop comparing themselves to the “greats” of literature and value their own production’ will strike a chord with many.
We hope TEXT readers enjoy the wide-ranging nature of the contributions to this edition.
—Julienne van Loon and Ross Watkins
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TEXT
Vol 22 No 2 October 2018
http://www.textjournal.com.au
General Editor: Nigel Krauth. Editors: Julienne van Loon & Ross Watkins
Special Issues Editor: Dallas John Baker
text@textjournal.com.au