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Stock, Flow, Field, Stream

April 3, 2013 in academia, blog, DH, pedagogy, social media with 8 Comments

Every once in a while, everything just seems to flow into one large conversation full of resonances, connections, and it’s like striking a tuning fork. This is a post about the challenges of graduate education, and perhaps, by extension, academic work for those of us who identify with the digital humanities. Let me see if I can gather the threads together.

There’s a little history. Jokingly, I tell people that one of my biggest academic regrets is a paper I delivered at CCCC a few years back (2010). Our session took place in a huge ballroom (the size of our audience did not do it justice), and rather than a projector and portable screen, we had like a 30-foot monitor. It was colossal, and one of the things I regret is that, not knowing about it ahead of time, I didn’t prepare a full slide deck. Instead, I gave the only talk I’ve ever given that had just one, solitary slide. Don’t get me wrong, I was proud of that slide, and I wish that I hadn’t lost it in the Great Laptop Crash of 2011. It was a screen capture of a cover of an old issue of Field & Stream magazine, lovingly Photoshopped to reflect the topics in my talk, which was called “Writing Retooled: Loop, Channel, Layer, Stream.” Keep in mind that this was 3 years ago, when Twitter was still relatively exotic for academics, but what I was arguing was that

For those of us who engage with the field through social media, though, that engagement may seem more shallow in the short term, but it is constant and ongoing. We are setting foot in the river every day, rather than waiting for the occasional, official “event” to do so.
Think of it this way: who is more likely to shape the field? The person who sits in the audience for a presentation or reads a journal article that’s already been written, or the one who participates in weblog or Twitter conversations about that writing as it is being done? And yet, if you asked 100 people at this conference whether they’d rather publish an essay in CCC or have a couple of hundred followers on Twitter, I’m pretty sure most people would choose the first option.

A couple of hundred. Heh. Anyways, I suggested that, rather than focusing exclusively on the “field” of writing studies, we needed to be building the tools and habits necessary for dealing with the “stream.” I was arguing and, not or, but my talk was certainly weighted towards the stream, given where the field was (is?) at the time.

Anyhow, someone reminded me of that talk this year at CCCC, my first trip back since I gave it, so I’ve had cause in the past month or so to remember it fondly. Over the past couple of days, it’s connected for me with a few different links. First, there’s Anil Dash’s talk yesterday at the Berkman Center on “The Web We Lost.” There are a number of things in there worth thinking about, but Doug Hesse pointed out in my FB comments something that I’m not sure we’ve all really processed:

We built the Web for pages, but increasingly we’re moving from pages to streams (most recently-updated on top, generally), on our phones but also on bigger screens. Sites that were pages have become streams. E.g., YouTube and Yahoo. These streams feel like apps, not pages. Our arrogance keeps us thinking that the Web is still about pages. Nope. The percentage of time we spend online looking at streams is rapidly increasing. It is already dominant.

In Writing Studies, I think that we still think of ourselves as being in the business of writing pages. Think about all of the infrastructure we have, from page counts to citation formats, that make this simple assumption about the “object” of our practices. Or about how vital .PDF has been in finally getting people to accept that scholarship isn’t necessarily inferior because it’s online. (None of these are particularly thrilling examples to me.)

As part of my own stream, I just came across a tweet from Jay Rosen that provides some nice overlap as well:

Screen Shot 2013-04-03 at 5.48.41 PM

Yes, that’s the same Robin Sloan who wrote Fish and Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore, which I happen to be reading at the moment. :) Sloan writes about stock and flow:

But I actually think stock and flow is the master metaphor for media today. Here’s what I mean:

  • Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people that you exist.
  • Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.

I feel like flow is ascendant these days, for obvious reasons—but we neglect stock at our own peril. I mean that both in terms of the health of an audience and, like, the health of a soul. Flow is a treadmill, and you can’t spend all of your time running on the treadmill. Well, you can. But then one day you’ll get off and look around and go: Oh man. I’ve got nothing here.

If you push on, as I did, and read the Rushkoff interview, then you’ll see Sloan’s treadmill metaphor writ large, and translated into “present shock.” This is a line from the book that the interviewer quotes:

When we attempt to pack the requirements of storage into media or flow, or to reap the benefits of flow from media that locks things into storage, we end up in present shock.

I realize here that I’m making my own talk appear far more prescient (and perhaps more sophisticated) than it actually was. I was in good shape just identifying the difference between what I was calling field and stream, I suspect.

Another thing that I talked about with several people at this year’s CCCC was how I was sometimes struggling with the presentism of social media. It’s particularly acute for me as I dip into conversations around the digital humanities, as so much of that discussion seems to happen on Twitter. You could argue variously that this is a symptom of its relative novelty but also of its dynamic energy, and even perhaps a combination of the two. Talk to me in five years, I suppose. It’s sometimes become difficult for me, though, to step back from social media and to focus instead on the page-oriented commitments that I have. The virtue of being in my position is that, if I want, I can just tone down the commitments and focus instead on more short-form work of the sort that social media energizes and provokes from me. I’m conscious that not everyone has that luxury, though.

This is not a post where I want to scold anyone. Rushkoff has a particular position that he’s promoting, to be sure, and there are hints of it in Dash and Sloan, I suppose, but my own interest is in thinking about how the balance that I was arguing for back in 2010 has so radically shifted in the other direction. But only in certain places. I’m slated to teach our Rhetoric, Composition, and Digital Humanities graduate course next spring, and already I’m thinking about how I can hack the curricular and conceptual space of my classroom to allow for a more dynamic and distributed course experience. But now I find myself in the odd position of thinking about whether that kind of course will provide enough field, enough stock, for students who (as I was arguing three years ago)

are more likely to rely on bookmarking than bookshelving. They are more likely to read an article that has well‐developed keywords than one with page numbers. And they are more likely to follow citation trails than to sit still and read a paper journal cover‐to‐cover. They are more accustomed to managing the flows of information, sorting them, and assembling them for their own uses. In short, they are much more likely today to be what  Thomas  Rickert  and  I  have  described  as  practitioners  of  ambient  research.

I’ve been deeply committed to making over my pedagogy in ways that help students work with flow, but as a colleague and I were talking about today, those students still have to go through a comprehensive exam process and to write a dissertation. Believe me when I say that I know all the arguments for reshaping those requirements, and that I agree with them. But I have to reconcile them with my own ethical beliefs about graduate education and whether it prepares students adequately for what follows. I’m not so full of myself as to think that a single graduate course with me will make the difference in a student’s ability to finish or not; however, years spent as a graduate director have made me keenly aware that every course is itself a blend of stock and flow, with obligations both to itself and to the ongoing curriculum that it is a part of.

So while the blogger in me celebrates the short-form and the streams, the academic in me starts to wonder if the shift away from more traditional academic practices doesn’t ultimately do my students a disservice–I think about whether or not I’m responsibly modeling the kind of balance they’re going to need in their own careers. I say that fully aware that it sounds like the first step on the road to rationalization, but it’s not. Really. I think that it means that I’ll think more carefully about how I hack my course next spring, not whether or not I’ll do so. It’s an issue that I’ll likely grapple with for some time, and this is really just the beginning of that process for me. That’s all.

(ps. If you’ve read the above and thought, “why isn’t he doing something about this in his research?” or some variation on the hack/yack question, then you’ve happened upon one of the driving forces behind my next major project. About which, more soon. :) )

 

Networked Humanities @ UKentucky (#nhuk), Spring 2013

February 25, 2013 in conferential, DH, if i were in charge with 6 Comments

What follows is a fairly rough approximation of the talk that I gave at the UK Networked Humanities Conference (#nhuk) in February, 2013. I don’t usually script out my talks in quite the level of detail that I have below, but this time out, I struggled to get my thoughts together, and scripting seemed to help. As usually happens with me, though, I went off-script early and often.

Also, I use a lot of slide builds to help pace myself, so I’m not providing a full slide deck here. Instead, I’m inserting slides where they feel necessary, and removing my deck cues from the script itself. I’m also interspersing some comments, based on the performance itself.

I’ll start with the panel proposal that Casey Boyle (@caseyboyle), Brian McNely (@bmcnely) and I put together:

Title: Networks as Infrastructure: Attunement, Altmetrics, Ambience

Panel Abstract:  In his early 2012 discussion of the digital humanities, Stanley Fish examines a number of recent publications in the field, and arrives at the conclusion that DH is not only political but “theological:”

The vision is theological because it promises to liberate us from the confines of the linear, temporal medium in the context of which knowledge is discrete, partial and situated — knowledge at this time and this place experienced by this limited being — and deliver us into a spatial universe where knowledge is everywhere available in a full and immediate presence to which everyone has access as a node or relay in the meaning-producing system.

Fish connects this diagnosis of DH with Robert Coover’s 20-year-old call for the “End of Books,” itself once a clarion call to practitioners and theorists of hypertext. While there is perhaps an implicit promise in some digital humanities work that we will be able to move beyond and/or better our current circumstances, we would argue that Fish’s dismissal of that work is misguided at best. The digital humanities broadly, and this panel more specifically, offers a careful revaluation of our current practices, treating the social, material, and intellectual infrastructures of the academy as objects of inquiry and transformation. Rather than seeing these long-invisible networks as given or as something to be “ended” and transcended, we follow Cathy Davidson’s call to engage with them critically, “to reconsider the most cherished assumptions and structures of [our] discipline[s].”

And here’s my contribution to this panel, titled “The N-Visible College: Trading in our Citations for RTs”

I want to start today by referencing two essays that I published last year. The first is an essay called “Discipline and Publish: Reading and Writing the Scholarly Network.” It appears in a collection edited by Sidney Dobrin called Ecology, Writing Theory and New Media, published by Routledge.

The second essay is a bit shorter, and appeared on my blog in July of last year. “Cs Just Not That Into You” was a response to the acceptance notifications from 4Cs, the annual conference in rhetoric and composition. In the space of roughly 24 hours, this essay received over 500 views, 100 comments on Facebook and my blog, and at least 20 retweets and shares.

Both essays grew out of my interest in the intellectual and organizational infrastructures of disciplines, and what network studies can tell us about those structures, but when it comes to my department and my discipline, only one of these essays really counts. I don’t think I’m revealing any great secrets when I say that only one of them appeared in my annual review form this year.

As folks who were there can attest, I actually scrapped this intro on the fly, since Byron Hawk’s presentation actually referenced “Discipline and Publish.” So instead I went meta, talking about how I was going to open the talk, right up until the point that Byron ruined it for me by citing the very essay I was going to claim would never be cited.

I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I find disappointing the fact that more people read and engaged with that blog post than will likely ever read “Discipline and Publish.” Routledge has library-priced the collection at a cool $130, meaning that it won’t be taught in courses, at least not legally. As much as I like the collection, I can hardly recommend it to friends and colleagues at that price. From the perspective of my institution, “Discipline and Publish” was probably my best piece of scholarship last year, but it’s also the one with the least value to me personally and professionally.

This question of relative value is one that has frustrated those of us who work closely in and with new media for years. There has been some progress in the form of organizational statements about the value of technology work, and some of us have pushed at the boundaries of our individual tenure and promotion requirements. But that progress has been slow, not the least reason for which is the patterned isolation that separates our disciplines, our institutions, and our departments. But I’ll get to that in a couple of minutes.

First, I want to offer one more example that raises this question of value. When Derek Mueller (@derekmueller) and I worked on the online archive for College Composition and Communication, one of the things we did was to track the internal citations of that journal. That is, whenever one essay from the journal cited another, we linked them together. So this list represents the 11 most frequently cited essays from CCC spanning roughly a 20-year period, ranked by the number of citations.

Compare that to the list of Braddock Award winners from the same time period. The Braddock Award is the prize for the best essay published in CCC in a given year. As you can see, there is some overlap between the lists, but there are substantial differences as well.

 

Lists of Internal Cites vs Braddock Awards

[beyond my scope today, but it’s interesting to think about how and why an essay might show up on one list and not the other, or on both lists]

For my purposes today, one of the most important differences between these lists is that our institutions are far more likely to recognize the Braddock Award as a sign of value than a handful of citations.

All of this is not to say that one of these lists is better than the other, but rather that we have different measures for value. If we think about this in terms of culture industries, this idea makes complete sense. There’s a substantial difference between the books that win literary prizes and those that top the New York Times bestseller lists. The top grossing movies for a given year don’t usually receive Academy Award nominations. We’re both comfortable and conversant with the different definitions of value that these lists and awards represent.

I had several slides here to slow myself down, with book covers and movie posters to help the contrast below between Best and Most. Copyright violations, every last one of them. So use your imagination. :)

This is horribly overreductive, I know, but I’ve been thinking about these two models of value as Best and Most. And much of our intellectual infrastructure in the humanities is targeted towards the idea of Best:

It operates on the principles of scarcity and selectivity, with the goal of establishing a stable, centralized core of recognizable activity. This model is a particularly strong one for fields in the early stages of disciplinarity–it creates shared values and history, as well as an institutional memory. On top of that, it’s a pretty easy model to implement.

But this model has some weaknesses as well. The larger a field becomes, the harder this model is to maintain. The center becomes conservative, slow to recognize or respond to change, and less and less representative of the majority of its members.

In some ways, what I’m calling Most runs counter to these principles. This model of value is collective rather than selective, focusing on the aggregation of abundance instead of scarcity. This model scales well with the size of a discipline–the more people and texts there, the better the information becomes.

If there’s a weakness to this model, it’s that it requires a lot more infrastructure and information to be productive. And it’s something of a chicken/egg problem: it’s hard to demonstrate the value of this model and to advocate for it without the model already in place.

Over the past couple of years though, we’ve seen a push towards something called altmetrics. Spearheaded by scholars in library and information studies, altmetrics is a term with several different layers. On the one hand, it refers to opening up traditional measures of value for alternative research products, like datasets, visualizations, and the like. On the other, altmetric advocates have also been pushing for measures other than the traditional (and flawed) idea of journal impact factor.

But there’s another layer to this term at well, one that gets at the questions of approved genres and recognizable metrics from a more ecological perspective. That is, altmetrics is only partly about reforming our current system; it’s also encouraging us to rethink the system itself. One of the leading voices in altmetrics, Jason Priem (@jasonpriem), gave a talk at Purdue last year where he talked about something called the Decoupled Journal.

I’m embarrassed to admit that, running out of time, I swiped three of the diagrams from Jason Priem’s slideshow. I’m hoping that the links here serve as sufficient apology. I’d hoped to adapt them to my own purposes and disciplinary circumstances, but I was putting the final movement together on the road, and took the shortcut. I also quoted (and attributed) the line that we’re currently working with the best possible system of scholarly communication given 17th century technology, which got both a chuckle from the room and a fair share of retweets.

Traditional journal system, where each journal is responsible for each stage of the publication process.

This traditional process is a masterpiece of patterned isolation — very little interaction from journal to journal — except when journals are owned by the same corporation. There’s tremendous duplication of effort, and that effort is stretched over a long period of time in the case of most traditional journals.

Thanks to blind peer review, most reviewers are isolated from each other as well, as are the contributors. It isn’t until you reach the top of the pyramid, with the journal editor, that there’s any kind of conversation or cross-pollenation of ideas and research. It’s a top-down model of scholarly communication.

I’m pretty sure I was completely off-script through here. I did remember to emphasize the idea that our current model is a “masterpiece of patterned isolation,” but I’m pretty sure that I forgot to mention at any point that PI is a phrase I’ve pulled from Gerald Graff, who borrows it from Laurence Veysey. Pretty sure I never defined it, either.

What Priem suggests is that we think about the various layers and practices independently of how they’ve traditionally been distributed. Social media in particular have opened up a number of possibilities for engaging with and assessing scholarship; rather than waiting for our journals to adopt these practices, altmetricians would have us begin exploring and applying them ourselves.

Considering that many journals treat promotion and search as somehow accomplished by their subscriber list and a conference booth or two, there’s a great deal of room for innovation. Priem describes this decoupled model as publishing a la carte. He offers an example of a writer who might place an essay in a journal, but choose a number of alternative methods for promoting it, making it findable, having it reviewed, etc.

Cheryl Ball (@s2ceball) called me out in Q&A for being too cavalier about the shift in my talk from the “Decoupled Journal” to DH Now, and she was absolutely right. What I was trying to get at here was the way that DHNow starts from a different set of questions, and thus “couples” the process in a way that accomplishes both “Most” and “Best” without buying in to the traditional model of what a journal should look like. This is also where my script simply turns into talking points.

DH Now

  • Aggregation of tweets, calls for papers, job announcements, and resources
  • Monitor the network for spikes in activity
  • Cross-post and RT the things that folks are paying attention to
  • Added layer of publication: Editors’ Choice
  • EC texts are solicited for the quarterly Journal of Digital Humanities
  • Publication is the final step of a fairly simple, but widely distributed process

Why it’s useful as a model

  • Process produces much closer relationship between the map and the territory – DH Now vs DH 2 years ago
  • Driven by engagement and usefulness to the community rather than obscure standards administered anonymously
  • That engagement occurs much more quickly, and at all stages of the process — publication becomes evidence of engagement rather than a precondition for it

Conclusion

 

Deleted Scenes

You might notice that there’s no reference at all here to my original title. As I was planning the talk, I’d intended to frame it with a three-part movement from invisible college to discipline to what I was calling the “n-visible college” (network-visible), a model of scholarly communication that preserved disciplinary memory but not at the cost of innovation and circulation. My CCCC talk from several years ago (this link is to QT movie of the talk) gestures towards that model, but to my mind Priem’s work in particular gets at it much more concretely.

Also, I didn’t emphasize enough the degree to which our traditional model has as a default the silos or smokestacks that separate us all (journals, disciplines, individuals) from each other. This may be part of my underemphasis on patterned isolation. Our current model keeps us silo’ed by default–to my mind, open access isn’t just a matter of taking down those walls, but in reimagining the system that defaults to silo in the first place. Nate Kreuter (@lawnsports) talked a little bit about this the following day in terms of considering both material and cognitive accessibility. We can make our work open materially, but without an infrastructure that makes it accessible cognitively, we’re not doing as much as we should be.

I spent way too much of my inventional time trying to figure out how to incorporate an essay from Noah Wardrip-Fruin on interface effects. It fit with what I wanted to say, which is that the “interface” of the Braddock essays fails us in that it gives very little sense of the complexity of the field that it represents. Love this line from NWF: “Just as play will unmask a simple process with more complex pretensions, so play with a fascinating system will lack all fascination if the system’s operations are too well hidden from the audience.” My point is that, at a certain disciplinary scale, holding to notions of the “Best” ends up occluding more of our scholarly activity than it reveals. It’s a point I like, but I just couldn’t get there from here. And it may be too intricate for the kind of talk that I give.

Finally, Nathaniel Rivers (@sophist_monster)asked a good question in Q&A that went something like “what happens if you succeed?” In other words, have we really thought through what it would mean if Facebook likes or retweets acquired currency. My answer was that it was less about replacing our current system with a better one than it was about opening the system up to the competing models of value that are currently neglected.

And that’s really all that I can remember. Like I said, this is a fair approximation, although not likely a perfect one. If you’ve read this far, thanks! And thanks to all those who chatted with me before, during, and after.

 

“No DH, No Interview” revisited

July 23, 2012 in academia, DH with Comments Off

William Pannapacker published a followup to his tweet from DHSI that I responded to a while ago. I spent a few minutes weighing in on the comment thread, and thought I’d go ahead and post it here.

I think what I’m responding to here is a general sense that the digital humanities is just another “area” to be “covered.” I don’t think anyone out and says so, but the vibe I’m getting is that notion that in a generation or so, people will all use these tools, and it’ll just be part of how the humanities operates from that point forward. Maybe so, but…

I take their project to be a little more far reaching than that. Could be partly because I’ve just been reading Hacking the Academy, but I think part of the DH agenda is to move the whole academic apparatus forward. That means making room for experiments with the review process, accepting forms of scholarship that aren’t always or only words in a row, and taking on an evaluation system that currently doesn’t accommodate the kind of “making” that DH advocates. Did I convey this successfully?

“such a person never needed a distinct, interdisciplinary field called DH to do that”

Well, yes and no. It’s certainly true that such a person could succeed without DH, by publishing articles and books, incorporating those passions into his or her teaching, etc. But one of the things that DH folks are advocating for, as I understand it, is that such work doesn’t necessarily (or even optimally) take the form of print, and that is a fight that’s still ongoing. I’ve been around long enough to hear the horror stories of colleagues’ digital work being misunderstood or misrepresented in tenure reviews, for example. I know places where they still hold to some fundamental distinction between print and online publication, even in cases where the peer review process is identical (to say nothing of more experimental moves towards open review). For many departments in the humanities, if those questions are settled, it’s because they haven’t been raised in the first place.

If our geographical Wordsworthian wanted to spend a couple of years developing the tools to be able to do that work, there are a lot of departments where that would not be considered valuable academically. And that’s a place where the fallback reliance on peer review doesn’t help. Traditionally published, innovative scholarship is going to be judged by the reviewers for journals and presses, but the humanities have not traditionally held themselves accountable for the kinds of “making” that Ramsay argues are central to DH.

I don’t think that most DH folk would suggest that other kinds of work in the humanities are less valuable, but I think it’s important for everyone to understand the ways that DH work differs from that work, and may need to be evaluated differently. My first foray into the job market was when “Computers and Writing” was trending in my field, and I had a number of friends who struggled, not because they couldn’t do “traditional” work, but because they were loaded up with responsibilities that ultimately counted for little later on.

All that said, I’m pretty ambivalent about the idea of “no DH, no interview” for a lot of the reasons explained above. I also believe, though, that part of the reason for the DH zeal (some of which I share) is that it takes a lot of pushing to shift some of the mindsets that I’m talking about here. For me, it’s more of a both/and than an either/or, though.

Academic Horoscopia

July 12, 2012 in academia, DH, pedagogy, writing with 1 Comment

Gah. I’m taking a break from putting the (semi) final touches on my contribution to the updated edition of A Guide to Composition Pedagogies. My chapter is about “New Media Pedagogy,” and it’s one of the most difficult things I’ve had to write in recent memory. I’m really hoping that it doesn’t turn out to be one of the worst things I’ve had to write in recent memory. So, fingers crossed.

One of the things that they don’t tell you as a graduate student is that there’s a special genre of writing that you get to do later on where failure is all but guaranteed. You get a little taste of it during the job search, I think, but because you’re competing against other candidates who are all faced with the same impossible task, there’s something mildly comforting about that. The best example of this is probably the teaching philosophy statement (the acronym for which should sound familiar). That statement needs to be general enough to fit into a couple of pages, and yet, the values/perspectives that operate at that level of generality are largely shared in a given community. If you asked most people in a given discipline to list 5 terms/phrases characteristic of their approach to teaching, my guess is that the overlap would run in the neighborhood of about 95%, and much of the underlap would have to do with only a few factors (early v late tech adoption, e.g.). There are strategies that we can use (examples, stories, assignments) to make ourselves somewhat distinctive, but honestly, even those are pretty generic. We are forced in the context of the old TPS Report to try and locate some middle ground between the universal, disciplinary values and the particularities of our classrooms (which often depend on factors beyond our control anyway: location, student population, time of day, curricular guidelines).

I can think of no better analogy for this sort of writing than the horoscope, and I think sometimes about what it would mean to have to actually write them for a living. You’re not allowed to be stupidly obvious (“You will wake up today.”), nor meaningfully specific (“That cutie on the elevator today will make eye contact and smile at you!”), so instead you’re stuck with this awkward language that implies specificity (“Today is an opportune time for changes and new things as long as you choose things that continue to pique your long-term interests.”) while still being vague enough to apply to roughly 1/12 of the population. So the horoscope has to try and capture both the macroscope (you’re a Pisces!) and the microscope (you’re a snowflake!), and ends up doing neither particularly well (“You might look around your house and think of some new and exciting ways to spruce it up a little, Gemini,” unless you don’t live in a house, work more than one job, need to spend that money on food and shelter, and/or are turned off by anyone using the word “spruce” as a verb.).

Back to my problem. One of the things that’s really valuable about books like GCP is its ability to distill a lot of expertise and sourcework into a small space. This is incredibly useful for folks who are new to the field. And yet, the process by which that work is published and made available is the same process that results in our specialist work. And so yes, it’s inevitable that this chapter I’m writing will be read alongside much better, more focused scholarship, and it will look like a poorly dressed bumpkin next to that work. I’m in the position of having to cover a lot of ground in a distressingly small space–pan out too wide and I’m obvious, zoom in too close and I’m pointless. If I try to be timeless, I can only speak in the broadest and most meaningless generalities; if I go timely, then I’m guaranteeing myself a six month shelf life. I remember sitting around as a graduate student, ripping apart others’ horoscope essays, taking them to task for all of the weaknesses that are built into the genre itself, not realizing until years later that maybe they weren’t such dullards after all. It’s not easy to write looking forward to that kind of reception.

It is both the best and the worst thing that horoscope essays are often read by more people than the combined scholarly audience for everything else an author has written. And yet, it’s also an honor to be asked to write them, despite the frustrating built-in failures of the genre. Gah.

For what it’s worth, I have to admit that I momentarily flirted with the idea of writing: “Today is an opportune time for changes and new media as long as you choose assignments that support your long-term pedagogical philosophy. You might look online and think of some new and exciting ways to spruce it up a little. Now, here’s a 25-page bibliography to get you started.”

Gah.

(ps. If ever there were a genre that would lend itself to crowdsourcing and curation, it is this one. Don’t think for a minute that I didn’t think about that as well.)

Open Peer Review and Generative Attention

June 21, 2012 in academia, curation, DH, social media, writing with Comments Off

I’ll begin by thanking Kathleen, Avi, and the rest of the Mellonaires for posting Open Review, and providing a nice hub for this conversation. Honestly, I have other things I should be doing, but upon reading Alex’s thoughts on the matter, and waiting for the aftermath of today’s root canal to come and go, I hunkered down and did a little reading. Now that I have enough focus to write, my thought is that if I don’t post something now about it, I probably won’t ever. So…open peer review.

I’m not opposed to it in any way, so like Alex, I may not quite be the audience for the piece. That being said, my own rhetorical disconnect differs a bit from his. Alex asks, “What is the problem with existing scholarly review procedures that the open review process seeks to solve?” and his answer is that “The humanities publish work of little interest.” There’s a lot more to his comments, so they’re worth reading in their entirety, but I want to pull out one thread and take it in a different direction. Among other things he notes:

For most humanities scholars (and when I say most, I mean 99%+), review feedback is the most substantive (and often only) conversation they encounter regarding their work. We know something like 95% of humanities articles go uncited. Even when an article is cited, there’s no assurance that the citation represents a substantive engagement with one’s text. So there is rarely much intertextual conversation that would be akin to editorial feedback. Be honest: have you ever published an article that received the degree of attention I’ve given this white paper here?

This was a little jarring to me, because honestly, my answer is yes. In fact, I’d say that just about every article I’ve published has received that degree of attention. I’ve gotten plenty of substantive conversation, engagement, and even some intertextual conversation. However, I’ve gotten that attention before publication, not after it. And although I do my share of reviewing for journals and tenure cases, most of my “generative attention,” if I may turn a phrase, is shared with those friends and colleagues who seek my feedback.

For example, the piece that I published in JAC on posthuman rhetorics way back when (PDF) actually began as a review essay of Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman, drifted towards Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, and I can still remember sitting with my writing group at ODU, talking about it, and feeling the click as we all realized that it was actually something else entirely. I remember that click better than I remember the essay itself, honestly. And just about every memory that I have of having received generative attention is similar–I remember the attention and engagement more than I do the final product. Insofar as open peer review might provide that, sign me up.

But I guess it feels like it’s almost a little backwards to me. My first reaction upon reading

They impact publishing, of course, but also the ways scholarly work is assessed beyond the moment of publication, from hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions to funding applications, and the development of a scholarly reputation.

was to mad-lib it, and to ask what about “the ways scholarly work is [encouraged] [before] the moment of publication…”? It seems to me that we do a better job of providing generative attention at conferences, research network fora, workshops, and the like. So, OPR feels a bit like we’re asking about how we can get X (peer review, publication) to be more like Y (conferences, writing groups), when it might be just as fruitful to ask how we can build upon Y to the point of making X less of a chokepoint.

It’s entirely possible that I’m inventing a difference where none exists. None need exist, certainly–the obvious answer to this concern is that there’s nothing to stop both kinds of projects from happening. And I buy that to a degree. But when I read through some of those recommendations, I felt exhausted by them. One obvious problem of starting from X is that you have to deal with all of the accumulated and varied baggage that the traditional peer review system brings. And honestly, I wonder a little about how these publication-style experiments would scale up if a significant portion of any community (much less lots of them) tried to implement them. I’m sympathetic to turning over a rock or two, but I can also imagine a world where every single site comes with its own set of rocks that have to be lifted over and over and over. I pity the first people who have to prepare their tenure committees by explaining each of the peer review schemes behind their various publications. :)

Maybe it’s just a push-pull thing for me. A site like Digital Humanities Now feels like a much more intuitive way to build upon the kinds of attention that we want than trying to chisel away at the gigantic ice block of publication. The more I say about this, the more I realize that this is more of a prepositional difference than a propositional one, so maybe I should stop writing at this point. Heh. If nothing else, I like the idea of generative attention, and I certainly agree with the goals behind the idea of OPR, enough so that I’m planning on experimenting with it for my second “book” project. More on that story as it develops. Now? Now I have deadlines to dispatch.

 

 

 

Plus ça change…

June 5, 2012 in academia, DH with Comments Off

There’s been some buzz on Twitter today, coming out of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI), about the increasing centrality of the digital humanities. William Pannapacker, who blogs for the Chronicle, notes:

This is a development guaranteed to scare the bejeezus out of any number of job applicants, I would suspect, not just those who self-identify with English. Like a lot of technology-oriented discussions, though, what will undoubtedly happen is that differences among fields will be elided, panic will ensue, and the fear generated will far outweigh any sort of perspective. A few thoughts:

I honestly believe that changing your department through the hiring process is a horrible strategy, with two exceptions. I have been in a department where there were a huge number of hires over the course of about 2 years, because of an early retirement outlay on the part of the school. Faced with turning over a significant portion of the department, departmental hiring priorities could actually be a good strategy. The only other exception I can imagine is if you’re looking to change what the department will look like 10 or 15 years down the road. But expecting a new hire to perform like a magic wand–ding! our department is now digital!–is a little insane.

A “no DH, no interview” kind of strategy places the burden for departmental change on those people least able to negotiate (much less question or resist) it, the as-of-yet-unhired colleagues. I don’t doubt that there are folks out there who would welcome that challenge and succeed at it, but engage in this little thought-experiment: imagine a fully-DH-ified department. Now measure the distance between your department and that one, honestly adding up all of the equipment, maintenance, and faculty, staff, and student training costs. Don’t forget to kick in the 2-3 years it will take to get all of the curricular changes approved. Oh, and the dedicated IT staff that you’ll have to draw upon. Add all that stuff up and then ask yourself: are you going to give all that time and all those resources to the person(s) you hire?

This is not to suggest that it’s not a good idea for departments to begin that process, because I think that it is. I don’t think of technology as an “area” to be “covered” with a single faculty member, though, nor do I believe that candidates can afford to be willfully ignorant of the various developments that are gathered under the DH umbrella. (In fact, I wrote about this, once upon a time.) But I do think that asking one’s applicants to commit to DH, to the point that it becomes a deciding factor, is problematic, unless the department has already thought through its own commitment and acted upon it in significant ways. Frankly, if a department can’t be bothered, then what business do they have requiring it of job candidates?

I can imagine DH expectations playing out in several different ways:

The buzz: Because it’s sexy for the time being, I suspect that DH will become another in a long list of buzzworthy ideas that some candidates will be able to exploit, armed with little more than a glossary of terms. Some candidates will be able to talk the talk, and even impress committees who are looking for DH without knowing exactly what it looks like.

The DH chapter: It wouldn’t shock me to find that some programs will start expecting their doctoral students to have a “DH chapter” in the dissertation, in the same way that our field has the “pedagogy chapter.” Insofar as this encourages them to consider carefully their project’s (digital or pedagogical) implications, this isn’t a horrible thing. Insofar as it will feel like a vestigial tail, pinned to the dissertation without much thought about how it actually might affect the rest of the project, this is a horrible thing. It will improve some projects and derail others.

The techie: I suspect that a number of departments will fold DH into their departments as though it is simply another speciality to be covered. I’d like to believe that, in 10+ years, we’ve gotten away from the “you know about computers; could you come see what’s wrong with my printer, young colleague whose tenure committee I’ll be on soon?” The academy often moves more slowly than I’d like to think it does, though.

I do hold out some optimism that there will be departments that get it right, that are able to rethink how they do things. Those departments would be flexible enough to account for the different kinds of work that a DH scholar/teacher might engage in, and foresighted enough to provide that person with the support that s/he needs to do those things. They would see their hire as part of a long-term, infrastructural plan to re-envision their department (and perhaps their college). And they would see it as something that is a part of their own expectations as well, not simply another job requirement to pile upon the newbie.

It would be unfair not to mention that I do believe that, in a lot of cases, rhetoric and composition has gotten it right with respect to computers and writing, our particular brand of DH. I think that there are a lot of programs out there that do a good job of preparing their students when it comes to technology, regardless of whether or not it’s their research interest.  And it’s here that the parallel with pedagogy strikes me as pertinent: you don’t have to count pedagogy among your primary research interests to care about teaching and to do well at it; increasingly, I think technology is functioning the same way, and that’s a good thing.