MTO at the Leading Edge

[1] As I sit with my feet propped up on my desk, typing on a wireless keyboard on my lap, a laptop computer and 23-inch monitor ahead of me, an iPhone recharging to the left, an iPad synchronizing to the right, and music streaming from Pandora quietly playing on Bluetooth-connected speakers across the room, it's hard to picture how the technological landscape looked when the email announcing the first issue of MTO arrived twenty-one years ago. Many people didn't have home computers yet. Some didn't even have office computers. Windows 3.0, the first widely distributed version of that operating system, had been released less than three years earlier (May 1990). Email, stored on mainframe computers and accessed through terminal applications, was purely text-based-displayed in fixed-width fonts without modern adornments like italics. In contrast to today's "always on" networks, going online from home required use of a dialup modem that tied up the household landline (cell phones were quite rare). Hypertext was in its infancy. Among the myriad things that grew out of this primordial Internet soup was a little scholarly journal that was bold in its conception and that effectively navigated the rapid, almost continual, changes in its technological environment. The first issue of MTO predated the establishment of the WWW Consortium and the founding of Mosaic (whose Netscape Navigator became the first broadly distributed web browser) by a year, and the incorporation of Google by five years. Unlike Netscape, Alta Vista, MySpace, KaZaa, and countless other early entrants to the Web, it has weathered the changes in technology, adapted to the times, and grown in relevance to its constituency.[2] This article will survey MTO 's twenty-one-year technological history.(1) My primary focus will be on the technologies that have come and-in some cases-gone over these two decades. I will start, however, with a look at how the journal has grown in other ways.Figure 1. Number of articles published per year[3] At first, MTO's normal publication pattern was to publish an issue when an article was ready for publication, to which would be added whatever reviews and announcements had been received at that point. The number of issues per volume thus varied in the early years, from four to as many as seven. Beginning in volume 8 (2002), however, the number remained steady at four issues per year. (One exception is that volume 15 [2009] had five numbers; nos. 3 and 4 formed a double issue, however, so there were in fact four issues that year, as well.) Although the number of issues per year has been steady, the number articles published per year has been increasing over time (Figure 1).(2) In volumes 0 (1993) through 8 (2002), MTO averaged one to two articles per issue. From volumes 9 through 14 (2003-08) the average jumped to 3-4. Beginning with volume 15 (2009), the average has been closer to six articles per issue. The number of articles often jumps in years when an issue has a special collection of articles. For instance, volume 6 included two such issues, one (no. 1) included five articles taken from the 1999 SMT plenary session, while another (no. 3) featured six articles derived from the plenary session of the 2000 Meeting of the New England Conference of Music Theorists. Volume 15, nos. 3-4 contained 15 essays on disabilities.[4] What has not changed in a consistent way is the length of the articles published in MTO. During the first three years (volumes 0-1, 1993-95) the average article included about 22 paragraphs,(3) and in fact, if we exclude a 130-paragraph piece in volume 2, no. 6, the same is true of volume 2 (1996). After that, the articles in most volumes average 30-40 paragraphs, ranging from 26 in volume 6 (2000) to 47 in volume 8 (2002).Figure 2. Publication formats[5] Figure 2 shows the formats in which MTO articles have been published. Of course, in the first three years, MTO was distributed via an email listserv, though these early volumes were subsequently retrofitted to the web. …