This morning we turned our working site design and logo over to the server development team. And tonight I read: “the visual design may be the first test of a site’s credibility. If it fails on this criterion, Web users are likely to abandon the site and seek other sources of information and services” (Fogg, Soohoo, and Danielson qtd in Warnick, Rhetoric Online 34).

Um, great! I guess this is not surprising, but it does add quite an element of pressure to what has already become one of our more challenging tasks. For most of us, the web page is a new genre whose conventions and strategies feel alternately intuitive and alien. Yet I think any one of us could easily speak or write a persuasive mission statement about the Harlot project… the trick will be in the translation. And clearly, the stakes of design are high.

Speaking of, a special shout-out to my good friend James for his brilliant (and patient) work on Harlot’s forthcoming logo…. coming soon to a blog space near you!

Hooray! Finally, after months of revising and agonizing, we’ve sent out the first wave of our call for submissions to the OSU community. It was suddenly scary as we began pressing “send”–exciting and a relief, but there was certainly a moment of “Wow — who do we think we are?” A bunch of grad students with a good idea and a catchy name… what right do we have to think that we can be publishers, let alone that undefinable “public intellectual”? I prefer to think of it in terms of responsibilities rather than rights (if only it didn’t sound so pretentious! but why should it?). And in a less altruistic vein, I think Harlot springs from a real need for some extracurricular application of our scholarly work.

As I said, though, the first wave only. We’ve given ourselves permission to keep our expectations and ambitions reasonable for the pilot issue this fall. But in order to get the sort of variety we want, we will have to reach much further afield — and, as the gracious genius Cheryl challenged us, to revise our notion of the very genre of the call in light of our goals of reaching “public” thinkers: why should it be print? where and how shoud it be distributed? We have dreams of video calls released to YouTube, notices in local community papers… Other ideas?

I’m inserting here some notes from our pre-blog days:

7/1/07
The web site design is in play and making progress, however haltingly. Getting a bunch of opinionated grad students to vocalize, let alone agree upon, color schemes, design motifs, and (the biggie right now) a logo is surprisingly more challenging than getting us all on the same page about our mission. It’s a heck of an interesting exercise in rhetoric.

7/5/07
A long editorial meeting—5 hours on the 4th of July—brought home the challenges of collaborative writing and group dynamics. Put 5 strong-willed and smart academics in a room and ask them to write a paragraph… would make for a fascinating case study, whether in composition or psychology!

Not to mention the tough theoretical and practical tasks we have set ourselves, plus our own high standards… Translating academicese, which we are all too fluent in, into real language for real people: now that’s a rhetorical challenge. And in all the fuss, I’m not sure the call has yet answered the question: why a journal about rhetoric for popular audiences? Somehow, though, we managed to keep pretty focused and worked through the biggest changes, I think.

A fun aside: Today we realized that, ironically, “Academicese” is pronounced almost identically to “Academic Ease.”
-Catie

7/6
A meeting with Jim and some space to breathe, and we rediscovered our sense of humor (sense of Harlot?), manifested in tag line suggestions ranging from “For what you can’t get at home” to “Open Minds, Open Legs.” (Okay, that last was mine, and not quite serious.) For some fun with brainstorming, check out the Whiteboard’s ongoing list…

7/7
Last night Catie and I, over cosmos, decide on our preferred subtitle: A Promiscuous Guide to Public Intercourse. Tim, over beer, agrees. But today, in the sunlight and back in the big group, we negotiate objections and suggestions and finally (tentatively?) decide on A Revealing Look at Public Discourse. The urgency over such details is caused by our (twice extended) deadline for sending out the pilot call for submissions. The main body seems ready; we’re soooooooo close.

And so, with the help of tech genius Jason and his delightfully appropriate domain name, we launch our blog.

Welcome to the Harlot blog, the playground of our new web publishing venture. To quote our most recent call for submissions, “Positioned at the intersection of cultural studies, new media, and the creative arts, Harlot is a digital magazine and web forum dedicated to investigations of persuasive communication in the public sphere.”

This story begins in media res, halfway through the “Summer of Harlot.” Marked by editorial compromise, heavy reading, technological creativity, and more than a bit of personal obsession, the summer has so far been an exhilarating experience in translating theory into practice. This space has been designed to track that progress, to explore those challenges, and to share our development process. Contributors include the editorial board, technology consultants, faculty advisors and friends of Harlot. In addition to the main narrative, the site includes pages for ongoing conversations about the title, technology, philosophy, and submission guidelines. Please join in!