Geoffrey Sauer

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Geoffrey Sauer
Geoffrey Sauer, presenting at an IEEE Conference
Born	(1968-10-10) October 10, 1968 (age 52) Bloomington, Indiana
Occupation	Professor, Iowa State University
Title	Director, EServer.org

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^{[citation needed]}, 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^{[citation needed]}, as well as an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Professional Communication in the Department of English at ISU.

Biography[]

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

Education[]

Sauer attended the University of Notre Dame's Honors Program^{[citation needed]}. 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.^{[citation needed]}

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^{[citation needed]}.

In 1998 he received a postdoctoral fellowship at CMU^{[citation needed]}. 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^{[citation needed]}.

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)^{[citation needed]}
• Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life (New York University Press, 1997)
• Online Communities: Commerce, Community Action, and the Virtual University. (Pearson Education, 2001)^{[citation needed]}

References[]

External links[]

• ISU English Department: Geoffrey Sauer