How many times have you written something, published it, and then realized in retrospect that what you thought you said was not in fact what came through? (Even if you’ve never done this yourself, you’ve certainly witnessed it in others.) What if you could revise a work after publishing it, and release it again, making clear the relationship between the first version and the new one. What if you could publish iteratively, bit by bit, at each step gathering feedback from your readers and refining the text. Would our writing be better?
Iteration in public is a principle of nearly all good product design; you release a version, then see how people use it, then revise and release again. With tangible products (hardware, furniture, appliances, etc.), that release cycle is long, just as with books. But when the product is weightless, the time between one release and the next can be reduced from months or years to days or even hours. The faster the release cycle, the more opportunities for revision—and, often, the better the product itself.
Perhaps this is just a feature of being further along in one's academic career than I am, but I doubt the process is ever "write something, then publish it." It's "draft something, re-draft it, show it to one audience, revise, show it to another audience, revise, send to friends for their comments, revise to send to a journal, receive comments, revise for the same or another journal, repeat this process several more times, then maybe publish if you're persistent enough." In other words, every text already is iterative; these iterations form the basis of future scholarly work if the end product is significant enough, or the basis for travaux on which we can interpret legal documents. Nor does the fact that a book must be published in a discrete form change this: successful books can have editions in which the content changes (especially true for textbooks, one would think), and if one eventually thinks better of an argument one made, then there's always the option of writing something else to represent one's new view on that work (is this not the essence of Augustine's Retractions, or Auden's explanations for why he altered or omitted poetic work he no longer believed in?).
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