Taking the Baton

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Editor’s Note TAKING THE BATON Technology and Culture turns thirty-seven today. For only the second time in those years the name of the editor changes, even as SHOT says its final goodbyes to the journal’s founder, Melvin Kranzberg, who died shortly before we went to press.1 It is an opportune moment to take stock. Bob Post has passed along more than a baton; he has left us ajournal that looks remarkably healthy on at least three differ­ ent counts. First, the relationship between the journal and its pub­ lisher, the University of Chicago Press, is in fine shape. We are fiscally sound and growing at a modest rate year by year. Our institutional subscriptions have held steady over years of library budget slashing, a sign of notable competitive vigor. Just as important, over the past ten years our individual membership has held steady for the United States (up 4 percent), while our European membership has grown over 65 percent during the same period, and U.S. graduate student memberships have more than doubled. As an intellectual community we grow younger and find our homes more commonly on both sides of the Atlantic. Second, the flow of new scholarship into our editorial office is im­ pressive in both scale and scope, describing a community of scholars that is expanding its geographical, topical, methodological, and chro­ nological range. Consider the articles in this issue, all inherited from Bob’s time. They treat geographically based technological interpreta­ tion (Carney), historiography (Gerovitch and Levin), a slow-burn rev­ olution in flour production (Tann and Jones), and the relationship between industry, science, and electrical engineering (Konig). With the exception of Carney’s foray from West Africa to the tidewater coast of South Carolina and Georgia, none of the articles discusses the United States, and to my knowledge Gerovitch is the first T&C author to take Russian history of technology seriously. This inmigration of scholars from neighboring fields—geographers, sociolo­ gists, anthropologists, a professor of management—is very good news. Just as important, many manuscripts come from advanced graduate students and recent postdocs from North American and European programs in the history of technology. All these contribuTechnology and Culture will publish a memorial to Mel in the July 1996 issue. 1 2 John M. Staudenmaier, S.J. tors combine to bring new voices and new methodological perspec­ tives to T&C’s universe of discourse. But nowhere is the health of this publishing venture more evident than in the quality of referee reports. Technology and Culture, like all academicjournals, depends on scholars willing to referee manuscripts and review publications for small reward and little recognition. With very few exceptions, T&fC’s readers are extraordinarily conscientious. They understand that our claim to publish original and substantive scholarship depends on their watchfulness about sources and inter­ pretative argument. I expected a high standard of performance on that count and have not been disappointed. More surprising are the many referees who go an extra mile or two to help the unnamed author. It frequently astonishes me that very busy women and men take the time to work the manuscript, suggesting new sources and correcting nuances for existing ones, offering help toward a more felicitous articulation of the author’s argument, even suggesting other venues when they recommend that T&C not publish the piece in hand. Double-blind refereeing has one limitation that can only be corrected anonymously. There is no way to publicly reward referees, a fact of scholarly life that makes the commitment all the more re­ markable. To all of you, I want to say at least a collective public thank you. Taken together, these three perspectives on TciC’s current healthy state remind us that the journal is much more than the pages that appear four times a year. Technology and Culture embodies a commu­ nity of scholars—authors and readers—collectively engaged in selfcritical rumination about the meaning of technological change. To say that T&C is “healthy” means that the participants in this collectiv­ ity stay fresh and inventive and that they sustain that care for fine­ grained detail absent which fresh imagination turns silly. I grow more proud to be identified with T&C with every manuscript and referee report...