Geoffrey Sauer
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Geoffrey Sauer (born 1968, Bloomington, Indiana) is an American new media theorist who studies contemporary media technologies including open source software and collaborative multimedia development in the context of the history of publishing. He is the director of the EServer (Who's Who 2003), which is according to Alexa the most popular website in the arts and humanities.[1] He is also the director of the Studio for New Media at Iowa State University,[2] as well as an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Professional Communication in the ISU English Department.[3]
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[edit] Biography
Sauer was born in 1968, and grew up in Mobile, Alabama, the son of an English professor (David) and an academic librarian (Janice) (Who's Who 2003). He began working at age eight on his father's accounts on PDP-11 and VAX-11 750 minicomputers at his father's university, and read history and literature from the large collection of books owned by his family.
He graduated from Murphy High School and in 1986 moved to South Bend, Indiana, where he attended the University of Notre Dame's Honors Program and was influenced by the work of scholars such as Antonio Gramsci, Jacques Derrida and Louis Althusser. In 1990 he moved to Pittsburgh, Pennslvania to pursue graduate study at Carnegie Mellon University and in 1998 received a PhD in Literary and Cultural Theory,[4] with a dissertation about miscommunications between employees and managers in 1990s Internet projects, and its origins in British and French publishing history. (Who's Who 2003)
While he was at Carnegie Mellon, he was a founding member (and later, director) of the English Server (later the EServer), which he led to publish writings in arts and humanities free of charge online.
In 1998 he received a postdoctoral fellowship at CMU. In 2000 he accepted an Assistant Professor position at the University of Washington-Seattle (Who's Who 2003). In 2003 he was recruited to join the Rhetoric and Professional Communication program at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa.[5]
[edit] EServer.org
The EServer is an online publishing cooperative created in 1990 by a team of graduate students led by Sauer at Carnegie Mellon University in 1990.[6] The site, originally called the English Server, was dedicated to publishing works in the arts and humanities free of charge to Internet readers. It was developed to assist leisure reading in particular, following a 1991 study by Sauer into the rapid and significant increase of books in the United States post-1979 and a consequent decrease in leisure readings among young Americans. By 1992 it was an extremely popular Gopher and FTP site, and by 1993 had a significant World Wide Web presence.
Some of the notable scholarly journals hosted by the EServer have included Bad Subjects, Ctheory, Cultronix, Cultural Logic, Early Modern Culture, The David Mamet Review, The Orange Journal, and Reconstruction.
Other significant resources organized by areas of interest include: The Antislavery Literature Project, The Drama Collection, The Electronic Labyrinth, Feminism and Women's Studies, Fiction, Poetry, Rhetoric and Composition, The Technical Communication Library, and The Thoreau Reader.
The EServer today hosts just over two million visitors per month.[7] Sauer today directs the site's 227 volunteer editors.
[edit] Works
In addition to his online work, some of his writings in print include:
- Bad Subjects, touted as the first leftist publication on the Internet (originally published via gopher)
- The Bad Subjects Anthology (New York University Press, 1998)
- Online Communities: Commerce, Community Action, and the Virtual University. (Pearson Education, 2001)
- 'コミュニティ、コースウェア、' In オンライン・コミュニティ: ｅコマース、教育オンライン、非営利オンライン 活動の最先端レポート (Online Communities: A Cutting-Edge Report on E-Commerce, Education Online, and Non-Profit Online Activities). Chris Werry and Miranda Mowbray, eds. Ken'ich Ikeda, Ed. Supervisor. Midori Shimoda, Kiichi Obata, Ko Ito and Yumiko Koiwa, translators. (Tokyo: Pearson Education Japan, 2003)
