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Comments on the Book
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3. The Born-Digital Monograph (10 comments)
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It seems to me, though, that the monograph is partly valued because it is assumed that the longer your argument, the stronger it must inevitably be. I think many humanities scholars struggle under the constraint of needing to sustain a concise but valuable argument, best expressed in a chapter, an essay, or even a paragraph, across 200+ pages. Many books are only consulted because many only contain a couple of strong paragraphs and a lot of filler. I am not trying to dismiss the monograph, but merely to suggest that a more flexible validation of scholarship is needed, not measured by word counts. Also, it seems to me that the short tenure window for publishing the print monograph is also part of the problem. Often scholarly books are uneven precisely because certain chapters needed more time to bake than their authors could afford to take given the lengthy review processes for print publishing.
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Absolutely! and not just as add-ons, but as integral ways for re-envisioning both the writing and the scholarly process. I am also intrigued with the opportunities for praxis that digital publishing provide.
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I value the scholarly monograph for similar reasons, Kathleen. Individual chapters may have appeared elsewhere, but the books that I find most valuable–and return to most often–are doing that kind of synthesis work in their introductions.
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Perhaps the value of the monograph, then, is in its idea (not necessarily its execution)? Would a digital monograph be any different?
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Yes – I see one of the great possibilities of digital publishing is to change the “interfaces” that we use to access knowledge. Books, even with good indexes, lack the ability to search and link in ways that the author did not anticipate. Digital publishing would allow the idea of “emergent indexes and interfaces,” developing from the ways people read & use texts, not the way publishers & authors design them.
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I think this point is an important one. Academic blogging offers an intriguing model for future directions in scholarship. I’m obviously heavily invested in academic blogging as a practice, but the connections and conversations you describe have been instrumental in allowing me to see myself as a part of an academic community rather than an isolated researcher.
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Somewhere Marx distinguishes between the mode of inquiry and the mode of presentation. I wonder to what extent that might be useful here. I think about how writing and working through chapters is a mode of inquiry, and only after all that is finished can one write an introduction. And I think this is what makes the introduction often the most useful part of may books, where the author has to sketch her overall argument arc, present a mode of presentation, whereas the chapters reflect more of a mode of inquiry. Both are useful and rely on each other for context and meaning. But I think this is changed in the digital, especially if one “published” during the mode of inquiry.
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I think it is useful to distinguish, as you hint at here, the difference between what is part of the manuscript culture, that is intrinsic to the form of the manuscript, and what is fetishized in the manuscript. Seems to me that a great deal of what is valued in codex books is not actually intrinsic to the book but based on a whole set of other support structures. Just as an example, we tend to think of the book as being self-contained, or a completed argument, which of course it is not.
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This also makes me think of the space and the time of the book. I sometimes argue, mostly for effect, that the time of the book has gone. If we think about how ideas are communicated now the space and time of those communications are increasingly short. I know many professors who will not teach novels longer than 300 pages because students loose interest, or they don’t want to take too much class time to cover one novel when they want to include a variety of viewpoints. Given the abundance of content, quick content becomes key. Long YouTube videos often don’t have an audience. I don’t just mean the end of the book, but rather the end of a librocentric way of thinking, of presenting and storing content.
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4. Trackback, Versioning, Comments (7 comments)
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This is all reliant on being able to effectively filter out spam, though, which in my experience can outweigh and reduce the value of legitimate trackbacks.
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You are NOT kidding. I’ve got super-secure randomized trackback URLs set up on my personal blog, which require a human being to ctrl-C and ctrl-V in order to ping my posts, and I still spent five minutes today deleting trackback spam. In fact, the most heartbreaking aspect of the bloggerly world for me right now is the degree to which developers seem to have given up on attempting to fix the technology. I wish I had the resources to hold a “save trackbacks!” contest.
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Might trackbacks be reimagined as tied to the user’s identity & “trusted” status in the community? Thus hypothetically as a registered non-anonymous user in MediaCommons, I could register a trackback, but a random spam blog could not. I don’t know enough about the technology to know why this wouldn’t work, but it seems that tying the trackback to the user makes intuitive sense…
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I’m also somewhat disappointed that trackbacks have been watered down by so much trackback spam. Maybe one of the MediaCommons “advocacy” efforts could be supporting attempts to revive trackbacks.
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The issue of identity is very sticky. As a technologist, I can say that I don’t know of any technological solution; it has to be combined with a social solution.
For example, suppose I tell you that I am actually Noam Chomsky writing under a pseudonym. Do you believe me? Probably not, but only because the claim is so outrageous. If I claimed to be someone less well known, how could you really tell I was lying?
I found myself reading the comments to this excellent article and wondering who “james” and “francois” are. They’re registered users, but who *are* they? Have they written elsewhere on this topic? Should I value their opinions or not? These are not easy questions to answer in the current framework.
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What you’re describing sounds very similar to a traditional discipline within library science called bibliometrics, which continues on but got somewhat ignored due to the efficiency and glamour of information retrieval activities. Highlighting it and refurbishing it in the online venues that you’re describing is interesting.
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Versioning is so important, but raises other issues when implemented in the scholarly communication flow, specifically the problem of citations. This is something that we are grappling with at the CDL–generating sufficiently granular digital citations that are persistent (UIDs are generated and maintained), meaningful enough to a human being (one citation can be easily and usefully distinguished from another), and flexible (identifiers used in citations are not ordered with each other).
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2. MLA Task Force Recommendations (5 comments)
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Taking only this brief, simple step would go such a long way toward rewarding work appropriately. Also, what about annual progress toward tenure letters? We get these at East Carolina University; do they do this at other places too? We were in the top six universities for tenure clarity (subscribers only), so I don’t want to assume that they do PTT letters everywhere.
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Interesting – we do not get PTT letters, and I don’t know anybody else at an institution who does. The one danger with such a system is that the definition of “progress” gets so routinized and quantified that it can’t address the broad array of work that people do, especially alternative & long-term research projects. I know of instances where this boils down to annual “page counts” for publications, which is certainly not the answer…
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The University of Alabama does not offer memorandums of understanding (What a terrific phrase! I only wish these were available in all areas of one’s life!), but tenure-track individuals are reviewed annually and officially advised as to their progress toward tenure.
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Much of what is talked about throughout this paper is “software” focused, but this paragraph makes me think of “hardware” issues as well. That is some of the resistance to the digital I see, particularly in the humanities comes from a lack of ability to use the tools, or a lack of familiarity with the tools. This goes back to some of the divide that you were speaking of earlier with regards to the sciences and humanities. There is a basic hardware literacy that probably would need to supplement a digitization of scholarship. As a rather rudimentary example I think of the number of times I have meet professors who have no idea how to use tabbed browsing–a basic skill I think for navigating web based information, for example the trackback that you mention later. As content moves digital, printing out the journal article will no longer suffice, not only for the volume of printing that would have to be done, but also because printing a work which is native to the digital environment will fundamentally change it.
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This is an extremely interesting point, Dave; I’ve written about this kind of technical illiteracy elsewhere as being akin to the days when profs all either had secretaries or had their wives type their manuscripts for them (or both). Some of that technical illiteracy was then, and is now, a matter of social privilege — those of us who get to do the “higher” thinking are forgiven our inability to operate the machinery. But I suspect there’s a day coming, and soon, when asking someone to do your digital production for you will be looked at much like asking someone to type up your documents would be today…
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5. Peer Review (5 comments)
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In fact, I would contend that in the humanities, where “quality research” is arguably more subjective than in the sciences, the blind peer review process can directly undermine new research. When a project challenges established orthodoxy (which good research should regularly do, right?), anonymous reviewers can defend their turf without engaging in conversation or publicly representing themselves as unwilling to reconsider their positions. I’ve had anonymous reviewers reject my work in ways that are merely dismissive, not thinking about how they might develop a project or better respond to counter-arguments – while I’m sure such reviewers would be willing to publicly critique my work, the veil of anonymity allows them to be non-constructive. If such reviews were tied to a reviewer’s reputation, they would have to argue their position proactively, not just issue defensive dismissals. The result is that work that replicates & applies existing ideas uncontroversially can pass review, while original arguments can be rejected under the cloak of darkness.
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Just a comment on the relationship between the sciences and the humanities — projects like arXiv and ETAI’s two-stage review process certainly illustrate that some academic publishing in the sciences can teach the humanities how to reform its academic publishing. However, I think it’s also important to underscore that the most exciting innovations in reading/writing & digital media often happen at the intersections of the humanities and the sciences (MediaCommons is an example); I’m thinking of XEROX PARC’s XFR: Experiments in the Future of Reading (http://www.onomy.com/redweb/index.html), for instance, and projects at MIT Multimedia Lab — where cultural theorists, linguists, and literary critics (among others) shape the technology and its use just as much as the programmers. MediaCommons seems singularly poised to promote these kinds of cross-disciplinary revisions, collaborations, and critiques.
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This question of using email addresses (for example) as identifiers of academic affiliation may be a little complicated for young academics who change positions several times. I’ve had three positions in three years, making my personal email address far more permanent, which is why I use it. I agree with the implication that these models depend on scholars being willing to write under their own names, but I wonder if there are other, more effective ways of communicating academic affiliation.
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To take the more radical position, why should academic affiliation even matter? If what is being trafficed in here is ideas as a member of a community why should that be limited to affiliation with a .edu address? And in some cases I can imagine this authority as running contrary to the needs of the institution, as the comment above points out–you can leave but you can’t take your email with you, or any of the ideas attached to it.
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At SSP, Christopher Surridge from the Public Library of Science made a convincing argument that since peer review serves multiple purposes, those purposes should be broken apart and focused on by discrete groups of people with the right skills for addressing that particular task. For instance, one group of people may be able to select among submitted articles to find the exciting and important research that should be published regardless of venue. Another set of people (and skills) would then be required for reviewing such a vetted set of articles for various publications. The ETAI hybrid approach seems like an effort in that direction, but the reviewing process is still tied to a specific journal. Decoupling that first group of people from a given journal or publishing site seems compelling but difficult to accomplish.
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7. MediaCommons (5 comments)
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The tenure process may be partially to blame here as well. Only certain kinds of writing “count,” so writing for a wider audience can actually, or so I’ve heard, be seen as evidence of lack of seriousness. We young academics sometimes hear the message, often implicit, that we should focus on particular kinds of work to the exclusion of participating in a broader intellectual discussion.
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One potential red flag here – media scholars are often regarded skeptically within their institutions (”you study what?”), and thus might feel the need to follow well-established publishing routes to ensure legitimacy of form, if not content. As I’ve said in other contexts, though, those of us who can publish our scholarly output in both traditional and non-traditional venues should advocate for the equal legitimacy & varying possibilities of all these avenues of dissemination.
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I wonder about the argument that lag times will lessen — i.e. how that argument will be received. Wouldn’t the intensity of interaction required to sustain the social capital that is vital for fostering networks of supportive relationships require more time investments? In a sense the deployment of information and communication technologies is pressuring administrators (deans et al.) to construct significant release time for academics to participate in peer-to-peer interaction and public engagement? Revised models of publication and circulation may depend upon recalibrating teaching loads and less upon the particular configuration of enabling technologies. And so the door opens to a possible convergence… the classroom in a networked environment is not only in the library but also in the publisher’s house. Commentators are in a sense modelling behaviours for students as much as they are supporting dialogue with their peers.
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This seems to me an important step for creating a “commons” and also another way to think of trackbacks, as you could look at the author of a comment and see how her comments range and perhaps connect over a variety of discussions. But it also seems that this is a place where individual authorship and authority are going to be valued and re-inscribed even as the sense of commons moves away from this. That is here is “my profile” with everything I have done.
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I am wondering about the analogy between science publishing and humanities publishing. Is it useful to hold out the sciences as some sort of evolutionary model to which the humanities need aspire? Scientists long ago stopped writing books in favor of articles (and textbooks for students), but that has not happened in the humanities. Should we forego books, too, because the sciences have? There are real differences between the sciences and humanities, and I worry that something fundamental about the sort of knowledge produced by the human sciences is lost when we assume that it must “catch up” to the sciences.
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1. The Beginning (4 comments)
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I wouldn’t call it “preaching to the choir,” as much as preaching to soloists in a choir that they don’t quite fit into. Most of us are anomolies in our institutions and thus need to regularly “preach” and harmonize with people who read the same music
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I agree with your assessment that there are problems with the traditional print publishing route (and I realize that you are being intentionally provocative and polemical here), but I am increasingly leaning toward seeing a born digital press as a queering of the academic publishing process rather than an attempt to fix it. Economics will eventually push print publishing into the digital era, but the underlying assumptions of how a press should operate and how scholarly discourse should circulate are what need to be destabilized as well, and this is what I see as MediaCommons’ greatest potential — it’s rendering strange what has long been taken for granted about what constitutes scholarship, review, expertise, and engagement.
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Absolutely…so we’re not talking about academic publishing as the brew to which we just add technology and stir, but that the engagement of the technology offers the means to transform the brew. At the risk of stretching this analogy, we’re also talking about looking at the cauldron itself…messing with questions “about what constitutes scholarship, review, expertise, and engagement” necessarily leads to questions about how institutions work, produce work, evaluate it, and pay for it.
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I’d also add that the humanities seem fairly far behind the sciences in terms of the way collaboration is encouraged and valued. Obviously, collaboration is key to the formation of any kind of network, and I’d imagine it will be especially so for MediaCommons because of folks’ interest in diverse projects/discourses.
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6. Peer-to-Peer Review (4 comments)
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Digg and systems like it seem to reply on a large amount of low quality feedback. They also seem subject to manipulation. It seems to me that scholarly peer review or discussion, in any form, needs to reply on a relatively small amount of high quality feedback. As scholars, most of us do work that is of direct interest to a relatively small number of people. Reputation systems like Slashdot or Digg are designed to deal with fairly large communities. They also seem to seek to eliminate the role of dedicated editors, something that I’m not sure scholarly publishing should emulate.
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Agreed as an “either/or” model, but already scholarship gets evaluated through a model of reputation system through citations. The technology of the web would allow this to become more transparent & accessible, supplementing available “high-quality feedback” with some indication of how useful the work is to its readers.
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There’s already a certain level of dishonesty in the single-author humanities article. In the sciences, research assistants, etc. receive some author credit for their contributions. In the humanities, the best we can hope for is an acknowledgment or citation.
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Yes, I think this is probably another place where we find the humanities particularly conservative. There is a sense that our work should be individually authored a work of “genius” rather than collaborative, which is of course a sort of historical fiction to say the least. Why is it that co-authored pieces are less prestigious?
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Comments on the Blog
I see the tendency to consult rather than read scholarly books as partly the result of pressures on scholars to carve out specialized niches that will distinguish them on the job market. There is a tendency to read for how something contributes to one’s own particular argument rather than for the sake of understanding/appreciating someone else’s. One of the possibilities of a digital press might be its potential to allow for targeted conversations to extend out of larger monographs while simultaneously putting these consultants in conversation with one another. Rather than lament the “decline” in literacy, we ought to re-imagine how reading communities might function to build aggregate knowledge. I think you are probably getting to this in the next section…