A couple of weeks ago, Todd Meyers, Emily Yates-Doerr and I spoke with Monique Dufour of New Books in Medicine about the origins of Somatosphere, our thoughts on its place in the ecology of academic communication, and our hopes for its future as a site for experimentation and collaboration. Personally, I can’t stand recordings of myself, so I’ll be staying away, but if you’d like, you can listen in here.  I also want to remind readers/listeners that Somatosphere is a deeply collaborative endeavor which would not exist without the hard work of the entire editorial team and our many contributors, and would all be beside the point without you: our readers.

Here is Monique’s kind introduction to the podcast:

“Founded in July 2008, Somatosphere has evolved into an innovative platform for collaborative experiments, interdisciplinary exchange, and intellectual community. As such, it reveals how websites–and the communities of discourse that create and read them–have become important sites of intellectual production, authorship, and exchange. In editorial departments such as ‘In the Journals’ and ‘Web Roundup,’ authors distill recent scholarly contributions across disciplines and spaces. More recently, the editors have incubated creative digital endeavors such as Commonplaces, a ‘collaborative cabinet’ that itemizes the technological present, with entries devoted to topics such as the petri dish, the brain, and the waiting room. Book Forum invites commentary from a range of authors, representing not only different scholarly disciplines but offering intriguing, timely, and often original angles on recent important texts. Thanks to its editorial vision and the palpable energy of its contributors, Somatosphere has become informative, creative, and essential reading.”

Interview with Somatosphere editors on New Books in Medicine