Is Limn obsolete? Or is it a replacement for something that is—or should become—obsolete? With the launch of this issue and the transition to a new set of voices and ideas, the former is clearly not the case. Limn is set to be more vibrant than ever, the editors firmly committed to the innovative, the untried, but also the careful, the reparative aspects of maintaining something. If the latter, though, what might Limn displace, repair, or supersede?

When Limn started in 2010, it emerged out of two puzzles of obsolescence. On the one hand, it was a puzzle why existing modes of research and writing in the interpretive social sciences remained committed to models and methods that seemed mismatched with contemporary problems. On the other hand, it responded to an obsolete publishing model by means of the technical and practical possibilities then emerging.

In addressing the first puzzle, Limn was created as a vehicle for new forms of concept work and collaboration. As founding editors, we came from disciplines, particularly anthropology, that valorized individualized research and virtuosic interpretation, with long time horizons for research and publication. By the early 2000s, this practice seemed increasingly insufficient for engaging with emergent phenomena in domains like science, technology, global health, governance, and planning. Limn was an experiment in a different model of writing and publication. It responded to rapidly unfolding situations such as pandemic outbreaks, industrial accidents, and cybersecurity breaches by framing them genealogically and placing them in the context of other events that raised similar problems. It asked contributors to quickly generate reflections on such events that would be accessible to a wide range of readers. The magazine’s title refers to illuminating the space around an event or problem in order to make it intelligible, rather than simply reporting on or critiquing it.

While Limn aimed to experiment, it also sought to conserve and reinvent certain practices that were, at the time, seen as obsolescent by many of our colleagues. It ran against the grain of siloed research practices, and against a methodological orientation to particularization and difference. It insisted on the importance of identifying shared problems, conducting inquiry into common or overlapping empirical objects, and creating venues for shared collaborative work. We were inspired by the notion of curation: the conceptually motivated juxtaposition of specific sites and topics to bring them into a conversation with one another, in the hope of generating surprise for readers, contributors, and ourselves.

At times, this meant crafting and testing concepts against different cases and ongoing research—clouds and crowds (Issue 2), public infrastructures and infrastructural publics (Issue 7)—that could make new sense of salient contemporary problems. In other cases, it involved identifying concepts that experts, policymakers, and advocates were defining and contesting, such as systemic risk (Issue 1) and disease ecologies (Issue 5). Limn extended such concepts beyond their expert usage to bring contemporary problems to light and to clarify their stakes. It was thus both a reaction to the fading utility of predominant models of knowledge production, and an effort to recapture and reinvent obsolescent forms. The proof of such a proposal is in the first ten issues of Limn—issues that captured this collaborative inquiry process in a series of snapshots distinct from the established model it responded to.

The second puzzle that Limn addressed was the state of scholarly publishing. For decades now, an enthusiasm for the digital has rendered old modes obsolete, often for no particularly good reason. By 2010, the digitization of the publishing industry had been underway for a long time. Still, it was at this moment that a range of new technologies suddenly made publishing much more accessible and immediate. Not only had it become possible to easily and quickly publish on the web, but it had also become much cheaper and easier to print and distribute physical books and magazines as a generation of start-ups experimented with “disrupting” publication.

Part of the puzzle of this moment was that the intense fever for digitizing everything actually opened up new ways of relating to the printed volume. Early discussions around Limn assumed it would be an online, blog-like publication—this was essential to its identity as timely, in contrast to traditionally slow scholarship in printed books and journals. But the apparent rapid obsolescence of printed books and journals instead created a renewed desire for them, and a new appreciation for the role of design and the care involved in crafting such things.

The decision to go with a printed volume was given momentum by a chance meeting with Martin Høyem. Høyem had been publishing an online magazine called American Ethnography, but he is also an artist producing various material objects, mail art, and woodcuts. His own engagement with the magazine as a form was instrumental to the shape that Limn eventually took, which was unlike most print versions of existing scholarly journals. With Martin’s help we enjoyed (and sometimes were exasperated by) the atavisms that the form could throw our way.

In 2010, open access to scholarly publications was still an untested and poorly understood idea. One of us had been experimenting with such forms for several years as part of research on open-source software and its derivatives, but also in one of the first scholarly blogs of the era, Savage Minds. Still, it was far from clear how to make it work for Limn. Many changes were on the horizon: social media, the proliferation of smartphones and tablets, and the first stirrings of a backlash in Edward Snowden’s revelations. One digital era seemed to be going obsolete even as another one emerged.

The commitment to open access was from the beginning, however, a question of money. Or to be more precise, the lack of it. Well before debates about open access spread widely into academia, it was clear that there was no viable financial model for an open-access scholarly magazine. Crowdfunding and novel subscription models for digital content (e.g., “pay what you want”) were in their infancy and, at the time, it was hard for anyone to imagine why they would pay for something they could freely access online. Thus, a print version seemed to hold out the possibility of a revenue stream—Limn was “free, but also for sale.” More importantly, it gave Limn a sense of permanence, an ironic bid at mediating between the timeliness of getting things published and into debate quickly, and the anxiety about having them obsolesce too quickly.

While the print version sold a reasonable number of copies, it was never quite enough to cover the significant design and labor costs associated with the magazine. Over the years, we negotiated with university presses, journal publishers, foundations, and our own universities. None were interested in funding a bespoke, expensive-to-produce scholarly magazine. But this, too, started to reveal an obsolete practice that we were embracing: the careful and passionate crafting of work in a small community of like-minded people, a labor of love. This small-scale form of care for the medium resonated and still resonates with many people.

Did we solve either puzzle? Maybe a bit? We are grateful for the attention, community, and support the project has received, and it is with honest enthusiasm that we hand it off to others who want to do more. Will the new incarnation of Limn address the same puzzles of obsolescence, or are the problems we face today in need of a different approach? Who knows? Limn is obsolete; long live Limn. ■