This chapter focuses on a basic model of professional communication and two basic goals of journal article publication. It has five major sections, Intuitive Thoughts, Frank and Neil, Professional Communication, Scientific Research, and Practical Suggestions. It starts with a discussion of intuitive thoughts of graduate students and then a discussion of two real-life cases (Frank and Nell) so that we can see how new authors think and act related to the central question of the chapter. After that, two core concepts, professional communication and scientific research, are discussed in detail, followed by several practical suggestions. In brief, there are two major reasons why we publish journal articles, that is, to develop skills of professional communication and ultimately to advance scientific knowledge and to improve human life.

Building on earlier accounts of print culture that consider its cultural work in puritan America, this essay considers where, how, and for whom print culture does and does not work. Informed by the “bummer theory” of print culture developed by Trish Loughran, Lara Cohen, and Jordan Stein, this account attempts to read slippages and silences alongside the familiar print performances of the era. Puritan print culture is inherently transatlantic, and understanding the affordances and obstacles presented by having this big, wet, and cold barrier between authors, presses, and audiences is crucial to understanding the vagaries of print for writers and readers in this era. Beyond physical barriers, there are also considerable social and cultural barriers, barriers that serve as a filter which produces the overwhelmingly orthodox, male, and white corpus of print that constitutes a major portion of the archive of puritan settlement. Finally, this essay considers the affordances and obstacles in place today that shape which puritan texts are available where and to whom.

Chapter 2 is a meditation on the general conditions of our intercourse with the past, especially as engaged by its material forms, whether in buildings, artworks, literary works or musical works. Distinctions between the forms are of course necessary but, it is argued, continuities remain: the mute testimony of the material object concerning the agents of its creation; the role of the viewer or reader in realising the work; the hand of the editor-conservator; and the role of time in its successive forms of existence.

Lydia Goehr’s history of the work-concept in music is pushed further and the dilemma of conservation, witnessed by the restored Teatro La Fenice (Phoenix Theatre) in Venice, is explored. The work-concept emerges as a regulative idea rather than a transcendent ideal form.

From the 1980s a pincer movement on editorial prerogatives came into play. The post-structuralist movement gradually undermined the assumption that works required a single reading text based on final authorial intention. Texts were also revealed to have a social dimension, as the meanings of their versional, redesigned and reprinted forms are ‘realised’ by successive readerships. The inherited but rarely inspected work-concept was thrown into doubt.

Conscientious editors who nevertheless felt the need to intervene on behalf of a new readership seemed to be left with no ground to stand on.

This chapter argues that a failure to theorise the work-concept is at the root of the problem. It shows that we need a broader concept of textual agency and an emphasis on the role of the reader in the functioning of what may now be cast as the embodied or living work. The role of the reader applies also for the scholarly edition, which emerges as a form of argument, aimed at the reader, about the archival materials it deploys.

Other possible work-models are considered, especially those implied in the writings of Franco Moretti and Rita Felski, based on the actor-network theory of Bruno Latour.