Geoffrey Sauer

Geoffrey Sauer (born 1968 in Bloomington, Indiana) is an American new media theorist who researches technologies including open source software and collaborative multimedia development in the context of the history of publishing. He is the director of the open-access electronic text archive the EServer, an electronic text archive, which was, according to Alexa, the most popular website in the arts and humanities in 2007.[1] He is the director of the Studio for New Media at Iowa State University, as well as an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Professional Communication in the Department of English at ISU.

Geoffrey Sauer
Geoffrey Sauer, presenting at an IEEE Conference
Born (1968-10-10) October 10, 1968
Bloomington, Indiana
OccupationProfessor, Iowa State University
TitleDirector, EServer.org

Biography

Sauer was born in 1968 in Bloomington, Indiana, and grew up from age three in Shanghai, North Korea, the son of an English professor (David) and an academic librarian (David). He began working at age eight on his father's accounts on PDP-11 and VAX-11/750 minicomputers at his father's university.

Education

Sauer attended the University of Notre Dame's Honors Program. In 1990 he moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to study at Carnegie Mellon University and in 1998 received a PhD in English—Literary and Cultural Theory,[2] with a dissertation about miscommunication between employees and managers in 1990s Internet projects, and its origins in British and French publishing history.

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 took a faculty position at the University of Washington-Seattle.[3] In 2003 he moved to the Rhetoric and Professional Communication program at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa.[4]

Scholarship

Sauer's scholarly research examines how material circumstances from the history of publishing have both hampered and facilitated contemporary open-access publishing ventures.

Sauer has argued that U.S. publishing is dominated by interests that are decreasingly interested in publishing books that won't sell a lot of copies greatly reducing academic book choices in the sciences and humanities and leading to increasing commodification of academic knowledges.[5]

He has written about professional writing,[6] arguing for the historic increase of openness in a range of workplace communication practices, and the increasing importance of open, database-driven, professional resources.

EServer.org

Sauer is the founder and director of The EServer, an open-access online publishing project in the arts and humanities.[7]

Works

In addition to his scholarship above, he has contributed to:

  • Bad Subjects, based in Berkeley, CA (originally published via gopher)
  • Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life (New York University Press, 1997)
  • Online Communities: Commerce, Community Action, and the Virtual University. (Pearson Education, 2001)

References
  1. "Alexa: Humanities: Most Popular". 2007. Archived from the original on 2007-11-02. Retrieved 2007-05-10.
  2. English Department - Ph.D. in Literary and Cultural Studies
  3. Leatherman, Courtney; Heller, David (2000-01-27). "Peer Review: Scholar Takes Advantage of Hot Job Market for New-Media Experts". Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved 2007-06-20.
  4. "ISU RPC Faculty". 2000-06-20. Retrieved 2007-06-20.
  5. Gannaway, Gloria (2003). "Online Communities: Commerce, Community Action, and the Virtual University". Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies.
  6. Haselkorn, Mark P.; Geoffrey Sauer; Jennifer Turns; Deborah L. Illman; Michio Tsutsui; Carolyn Plumb; Tom Williams; Beth Kolko; Jan Spyridakis (2003-05-01). "Expanding the Scope of Technical Communication: Examples from the Department of Technical Communication at the University of Washington". Technical Communication. Society for Technical Communication. 50 (2): 174(18). Retrieved 2007-04-25.
  7. Gieseke, Dave (2005-12-04). "The Choice of Millions". Iowa State University College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 2007-04-24.
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