Reviewing a Series

I found Galey and Ruecker's observation that prototypes often come in a series (p. 414) to be an interesting point, because it reveals a key difference between texts and objects – that while both go through processes of editing, an object is much more likely to become a distinctly new concept in the process. Or rather, this may happen in texts as well, but the publishing process for academic work is such that the sense of a series is more obscured. Authors often refer in articles to related prior research they've done, but publishing two articles minimizes the connections between them. In the potential review system for prototypes that this article discusses, there is much more freedom to show gradual and incremental changes in prototypes, and in general to show how objects build on each other.

This potential approach to reviewing prototypes is a good jumping-off point for considering how the review process for texts imposes certain limits, like that against an article growing and changing over time. What would it look like for articles to have a space in between edits and entirely new pieces? I think it might be an exciting and fruitful possibility, although a difficult one to implement.