ASA: American Studies at the Digital Crossroads
On Friday, October 17, 2008 (12:00 pm) Keywords editor Glenn Hendler and program coordinator Deborah Kimmey will participate in the “American Studies at the Digital Crossroads” panel at the 2008 ASA Annual Convention. They will join Randy Bass and Tim Powell of the ASA’s Crossroads website and Tara McPherson and Sharon Daniels from the online journal Vectors, along with American Quarterly editor Curtis Marez as commentator and Keywords editor Bruce Burgett as moderator. The panel will explore how digital forms of pedagogy and publication challenge existing hierarchies and forms of American Studies scholarship and engagement.
Preconference (and Postconference) Blog
This panel focuses on the implications of the emergence of digital forms of pedagogy, engagement, and publication for American Studies and related inter/disciplines. We are particularly interested in thinking about how digital technology challenges us to alter our assumptions about what counts as American Studies teaching and research, including the fundamental question of how those activities are assessed and rewarded. Specifically, we are concerned with the how digital forms of pedagogy and publication challenge existing hierarchies and forms of scholarship and engagement.
This blog is intended to open discussion about the possibilities of digital technologies, to raise questions concerning the sometimes overly celebratory marketing of those technologies, and to invite future collaboration in digital projects like (or better than) those showcased here. Please take a look at the three sites — Crossroads; Keywords for American Cultural Studies; and Vectors — and let us know what you think. We’re particularly interested in hearing responses to the question of how digital technologies can and should reshape knowledge production in the context of American Studies, including challenges to received and institutionalized notions of what counts as American Studies publication, pedagogy, and engagement.
We’ve begun the conversation below and will incorporate any further discussion into the panel at the ASA.
September 4th, 2008 at 11:03 pm
I’ve been thinking about what I might like to discuss at the ASDC panel in Albuquerque and thought I might bounce some ideas off everybody in the hope that we can feed off of one another without overlapping too much. Here are two ideas bouncing around my brain at the moment, either of which I would happy to dialogue about:
1) I’m currently writing an article for a new collection entitled: The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age, eds. Amy Earhart and Andrew Jewell (U Michigan P’s new digitalculturebooks imprint). The article addresses the question of whether digital scholarship/archives have fully engaged the question of cultural epistemology. More specifically, I’m developing a digital archive, “Digital Partnerships with Indian Communities,” that takes seriously the idea that the navigation system, the interface, the search engine, and the content should be deeply rooted in the culture it represents.
Because I am working with tribal historians, healers, elders, and storytellers from the Ojibwe Nation in northern Minnesota, I believe the content should be organized according to the Ojibwe cosmology, based on the seven sacred directions rather than on Library of Congress headings or even folksonomies generated by non-Native visitors. The ASA, of course, has fully engaged the significance of cultural epistemologies over the last two decades, but it seems to me that this discussion has not yet been turned full force on the web or digital scholarship. (An early prototype for the project can be seen at “A Drum Awakens “; click on cardinal points to see videos).
The fact that this article will be printed as part of a book and on-line seems like an important step forward, but I would argue that it also reflects a glaring problem in academic publishing. It is essential to my scholarship that Native people be allowed to speak for themselves (made possible by digital video presented on a website). And yet, the necessity of “writing” the essay in paper form imposes very problematic limitations and essentially means I’ll have to write two very different essays. My questions would be: Does digital scholarship that allows the viewer to see and hear an Ojibwe Sacred Pipe Carrier telling stories in English and Ojibwemowin constitute an important step forward? At what point in the 21st century are we going to be able to publish multimedia projects and why is there so much resistance to work that, at least in my mind, allows voices rarely heard in the academy to speak so eloquently?
2) I am on the Project Bamboo committee at Penn, which hopes to initiate a national discussion on the question: How can we advance arts and humanities research through the development of shared technology services?”
As Curtis and Randy know, I am the Head of the Crossroads Advisory Board and I wrote in my annual report about the need for ASA to help protect jr. faculty who want to do digital scholarship but find themselves in departments where only paper-based scholarship (e.g. book = tenure) “counts” for tenure and promotion. Curtis and I exchanged a brief series of emails about how AQ is attempting to address these questions, so this might lead to a collaborative discussion about how Crossroads, AQ, and the ASA are wrestling with this issue as the academy as a whole stumbles headlong into the digital age.
I think important questions also need to be asked about how we are training undergrads & grad students in the use of digital technology to enhance their scholarship. I cannot speak for more than the two universities where I’ve worked, but it seems to me that there are a lot of structural problems. For example, my generation was not trained in digital technology, so most of us are not “qualified” to teach the students these skills (although some of us are self-taught to the point where it is possible, but is this what we want to spend time on in class and would all students in a department receive adequate and equal training using this model?).
This problem is compounded by the fact that the English departments I’ve worked in made it quite clear that digital scholarship would not count towards tenure and promotion. So there’s implicitly a disincentive to hire jr. faculty who would be able to teach such courses. Thus, it seems to me, the students are not being trained adequately for the digital age and the faculty is not expanding to encompass this need for students of Anthropology / English / History to be taught specific software / hardware that would be valuable to them in their own particular field.
Any input about what sounds interesting and/or what others would like to discuss in this particular panel would be very helpful in terms of preparation. I’m really looking forward to meeting everyone and hearing your thoughts about this important topic. [Sorry for the long post.]
In solidarity,
Tim
September 4th, 2008 at 11:05 pm
Just wanted to say that I find Tim’s post quite on target on a number of key issues: the need for warranted publishing venues for rich media work, the imperative that we find better structural, methodological and institutional platforms for enabling students to work in digital modalities, and the possibility that these actions might lead to meaningful dialogue with communities outside of the academy. I’d also add (given the work that Vectors tries to do) that digital authoring further allows us to engage other expressive and aesthetic possibilities that target emotion and visuality differently. It’s crucial that we get humanities scholars working with database, design and algorithmic structures because these are the emerging lingua franca of our era. Who better to re-imagine the relationship of scholarly form to content than those who have devoted their careers to studying narrative structure, representation and meaning, or the aesthetics and ethics of visuality?
In the last year, I’ve been working on a Mellon project that will hopefully enter phase 2 soon in a partnership that will include presses and a push toward new platforms for publishing under their auspices. I’d love to have some of you involved with that as we move ahead. I’ve also seen more movement on the topics Tim outlined as of late, with a plenary panel devoted to them at the ACLS this year (although the reaction to us with decidedly mixed!) and more work by Mellon and their offshoot the Scholarly Communications Institute (which hosted humanities center directors this summer to discuss these things.) Cinema Journal is publishing a special “In Focus” section (in print of course) this winter looking at digital scholarship and pedagogy in that field. Vectors will host an NEH institute in advanced topics in the digital humanities on these issues this summer. But, as Tim notes, progress remains slow, especially when it comes to senior colleagues in home departments (less so at the dean or provost level, I think.) The problems parallel those facing scholars in the ‘public humanities,’ and I think ASA uniquely brings these fields together.
I’m also always dismayed by how easy it is, when speaking about digital technology/media and the humanities, to cordon off or lose sight of the key questions about race/power/ideology that motivate so much of the work in ASA. I’m actually convinced that the very (infra)structural and technological forms that have increasingly dominated/shaped culture since the 1960s actually underwrite this partitioning, from object-oriented programming languages to basic database structures (something that Tim gets at when he pushes us to think about cultural epistemologies below.)
So: clearly we have a lot to talk about!
Tara
P.S. Tim: have you met Kim Christen? She’s doing work closely related to what you describe below and trying to build culturally-specific database platforms: she’s great and was a Vectors’ fellow early on - http://www.kimberlychristen.com/ .
September 4th, 2008 at 11:05 pm
Hello all,
So far this is a great discussion; I look forward to participating in it and meeting you all.
Tara, I would be curious at some point to hear more about how digital authorship targets emotion and visuality differently, and would really be interested in the longer version of –“I’m actually convinced that the very (infra)structural and technological forms that have increasingly dominated/shaped culture since the 1960s actually underwrite this partitioning, from object-oriented programming languages to basic database structures.”
As for tenure and promotional questions related to digital publishing, my experience with AQ would seem to deconstruct them. Like other journals published by Johns Hopkins, AQ is available electronically for subscribers to Project Muse, and ASA members can chose to receive the journal only electronically (which they do in increasingly large numbers). More eyes scan the electronic version of the journal than the paper version. Hopkins treats the e-AQ as the version of record. There are all sorts of issues here, but one implication would be the undermining of the distinction between paper and digital scholarship, making it somewhat arbitrary or even mystical to hold out for paper publication as the gold standard for tenure and promotion.
The paper standard, as it were, seems to presuppose some notions of selection, discrimination, exclusivity—one version is peer review, another is privitization (you’ve got to subscribe to Project Muse). So one of the topics I’m also interested in is how digital publishing comes up against privitization, intellectual property, etc.
September 4th, 2008 at 11:06 pm
hi curtis:
i’m hoping the longer version of that cryptic sentence will some day be a tired, old-fashioned print book but perhaps an AQ article before then.
in short, i really do think that computer coding practices, database structures, etc., took the shape they did (ie, one available path of many open in the early days of networked computing) at least partially as a reaction formation to the social changes underway in the mid-20th century….
t
September 4th, 2008 at 11:07 pm
Thanks Tara for trying to figure out a way to beam me in. Having served on the board of Crossroads for many years, I know how difficult it is to arrange for the use of advanced technology in a panel, so please don’t spend too much time on it. Just being part of this conversation is very rewarding and perhaps panelists can incorporate some of my concerns into their presentation.
Regarding Tara and Curtis’s interesting intervention into the status quo of academic publishing, I have an interesting anecdote that perhaps captures where we are in this struggle. I just heard from U Michigan Press’s editor of the new series digitalculturebooks, which is publishing The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age to which I’m contributing an essay. They have made the “bold” decision to allow me to publish a diptych in which one part of the article will appear in print and the other will be entirely digital, to be published free on the Press’s website. It seems to me this is an important step in the right direction in the sense that they are supporting the publication of *digital* scholarship rather than just publishing the written document in digital form (the way that Project Muse does). I think there’s real hope that we’re reaching a tipping point.
I think Curtis is correct that the gold standard is currently paper and that this is creating all kinds of problems. As Tara points out, the default setting seems to be that journals and presses are interested in paper-based scholarship about digital scholarship, but that they are not really prepared to publish scholarship that exists only in digital form. Tara’s point that “It’s crucial that we get humanities scholars working with database, design and algorithmic structures because these are the emerging lingua franca of our era” is dead on.
I just met, here at Penn, with the Asso. Dean of Arts & Sciences, the Head of the Library, the Curator of the Schoenberg Center for Electronic Texts and Images (SCETI) and they basically agreed that Penn (and most other universities/colleges) are not yet structured to address the fact that Anthropology or English or History students (staff & faculty) need specialized training in digital technology related to their field. Because jr. faculty who have these skills are not being tenured and because each new entering class is more highly skilled in digital technology, most universities are actually impeding progress towards the kind of digital literacy Tara describes. The future of digital scholarship is inevitable. It is shocking that presses, departments, and universities are not moving more quickly to make structural changes. This is a serious problem that I hope might be discussed in the panel in such a way that we encourage more people to push for change.
Finally, I agree whole heartedly with Tara’s point about “how easy it is, when speaking about digital technology/media and the humanities, to cordon off or lose sight of the key questions about race/power/ideology that motivate so much of the work in ASA.” I work with Native American communities and it is incredibly exciting to see how their meaningful inclusion into digital projects creates wondrous new opportunities to rethink race/power/ideology. I am concerned, though, that a project like NINES, for which I serve on the Advisory Board, is doing very important work towards helping scholars get credit for their digital scholarship yet seems to be unwittingly recreating the old canon. Admittedly, the scholars involved are all very supportive of bringing more non-white cultural archives into the fold, but the limited number of such projects speaks to ways in which digital humanities seems to be unintentionally replicating problems that the ASA worked so hard to solve in the last two decades.
Sorry for the long email, this kind of thing get me all revved up,
Tim
September 5th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
Hi all —
I too, Tara and Tim, would love to hear more about the geneaology of the form of contemporary digital practices in relation to other forms of social organizing, activism, and mobilization, either here or in October.
On academic rewards systems, one thing I like about Vectors is that, as I understand it, the design/production process creates collaborations among those needing and those capable of specialized training in digital technology. I’m guessing that the actual work of collaboration is mixed across different projects, but it’s an interesting model, and one that points toward the possibilty/necessity of project teams in the cultural disciplines. It creates some lateral training in the context of academic disciplines (or interdisciplinaries) that tend to be so vertically integrated in terms of professional development and rewards — and that tend to think about (single-author) books and articles (and websites?) as the end products of research rather than starting points or mid-points for projects that are not exhausted by those products.
The other, related questions for me are how we think about what a digital (or print or multi-media) project should do, how we know if it has done that thing, and how we can create structured spaces that invite the unpredictable and generative when standard forms of assessment and evaluation are so oriented toward summaries of what just happened. (”I published X articles last year.” “My website got X hits last month.”)
In a way, this bounces back to Curtis’s comment about Project Muse. In one sense, that’s digital scholarship, but does the form of the research and presentation change or is it just a cheaper and more efficient mode of disseminating the same research products? It could be that this is the slow eroding of the resistance to changes in research design and dissemination, especially as folks learn to expect to be able to add links that will not work in print, but will work in digital databases. I’m now convincing myself that this may be what gets folks to think about the difference among different media and forms of presentation (not just to contrast the “new” and the “old”). But in my experience, the idea of changing the form of the presentation of the research is what makes folks stubbornly attached to guild-like structures of apprenticeship and professionalization nervous, not the idea that the old forms can be distributed more easily.
Graduate students are, of course, intensely aware of this, since they are caught in the middle.
-Bruce
September 5th, 2008 at 6:54 pm
Since a number of the comments so far have (very generously!) addressed graduate training, I thought I might add something to the conversation with both my professional background and my academic training – which, I think, are symptomatic of the gap that Tara and Tim articulate so well.
Prior to starting at UW, I was a consultant in Chicago. My job, essentially, was to translate business strategy into a marketable, user-friendly web presence. I worked on the nuts-and-bolts of content development and implementation; but my specialty was designing navigation, testing usability, and writing content. Daily, I used catch phrases that I quite frankly cringe at now: “increasing speed-to-market” and “valuing human capital.” It was a job. When I began working on my doctorate, I instinctively steered away from academic discussions about technology because they seemed tragically behind (and even mystified) the very technologies I worked in. It also became clear to me that my professional experience wouldn’t (necessarily) benefit me in my program or on the job market. [Here, I’d like to add to Tim’s comments about how graduate students aren’t being trained in digital technologies by saying that I could devote a whole sidebar to my frustrations with research databases, notably MLA. It’s sad that my best returns for research and course planning often come from restricting google searches to academic sites (“keyword” site:.edu).]
That said … last year and this year, I’ve been fortunate enough to have two appointments that have recuperated the skills I learned in the corporate world: my work with Bruce and Glenn through the Keywords website — and now my affiliation with the HASTAC scholars. At minimum, and rather crudely, these appointments create CV lines — but, more optimistically, they will hopefully generate new critical trajectories through technology-enabled forms of collaboration. Indeed, HASTAC is an amazing site for institutionally creating a sustainable and rewarding (in terms of professionally rewarding) online environment for grad students engaged in digital scholarship. Other discussions I’ve had here at UW have also helped me think strategically about digital scholarship — specifically about how to translate community-based and other non-traditional forms scholarship into what counts for professionalization: publication. For example, by publishing an article about using new media or Web 2.0 technologies in the classroom. (Here I could also plug Randy and Tim’s work on Crossroads, which does that and more… )
How you create that sort of “trickle down effect” (pardon the loaded language) with more than just pedagogy, and with critical research on race, power, and ideology is still unclear to me. I’m undecided about how this will contribute to my primary research (on race and sexuality) – which is why, Tara, your comment about the disconnect between new media technologies and Am Stud scholarship is really provocative. It calls to mind some work I’ve been reading lately about how business activism in the 60s and 70s reacted to large-scale cultural shifts generated by social movements (the civil rights moment, women’s lib, the gay rights movement, among others).
I suppose to wrap this up, one question I would benefit from hearing addressed at the panel would be how we work against this partitioning at the level of research in American Studies. What is required to bridge that gap in critical practice? And not just when “technology” is the keyword or object of study? — since I can’t wait for Tara’s book to come out on this one!
September 6th, 2008 at 10:22 am
This has been great; I’m already learning a lot from this discussion. I want to introduce another thread mentioned in our proposal for this panel: pedagogy. It’s been touched on in earlier comments and clearly relates to several of the issues already raised, but I think it deserves some focus of its own.
Though pedagogy is not the only purpose for the keywords site, I’ve used the wiki-based aspect of it—what we call the Collaboratories–as a teaching tool, and am doing so again this current semester. I’m still experimenting with different uses of it, but they tend to focus on using the wiki as a space for collaborative writing (specifically, producing essays on specific keywords—this semester I have an American Studies class collectively writing an essay on the keyword technology).
Deborah and I and a couple of other people who’d used the collaboratories recently had an online chat about the experience. (If you’re interested, the transcript is at http://keywords.nyupress.org/chat_pg1.html ). During that chat, Deborah brought up a question that I think is relevant to our conversation here: “How does the technological medium relate to the practices we’re asking students to engage in?” In the immediate context of that conversation, that meant something like: Is the wiki merely a medium that makes collaborative writing easier, as compared to making students sit in a room with rough drafts and debate wording together? Or is working collaboratively on a wiki a distinct formal practice, one that requires a different skill set (which I have to confess I’m not sure I yet know how to teach) and which can lead to different modes of thinking, different research practices and outcomes, and so on?
I think this question actually has some parallels with the one that Bruce raised in response to Curtis’s comment. Putting it in broader terms again, then, it appears as a very basic question: How can and should we distinguish between uses of new media and technologies that see them simply as more efficient ways of doing what we’ve done for a long time: publish scholarly articles; assign and grade student papers, and the like, and uses of such technologies that are significantly new, that allow for and even require different forms of thinking, research, and scholarly production?
I hasten to add that, despite my use of the word “simply” above, I am very happy about that first use of new technologies—I read articles online, too. I’m also confident that as it becomes more widely known that some online journals use precisely the same peer-review procedures as do paper journals, and that that distinction has become basically irrelevant, straightforward online publication will be widely accepted and the fetishization of paper in the job application and tenure dossier will fade away. But this work on the wiki has made me more interested in trying to create pedagogical experiences that—like the exciting work on Vectors, and that Tim has been involved in—explores the possibility of connecting new technological forms with new intellectual formations, if you see what I mean.
September 6th, 2008 at 1:08 pm
Speaking of pedagogy, I really should be preparing for class, but I can’t resist some quick comments. Glenn is right, e-journals can be peer reviewed and this should ultimately lead to a transformation of standards (though there is still a kind nostalgia for books, not to mention real use value in the form, its portability, etc., which in part explains why the promised boom in e-trade books hasn’t really materialized in a big way; and on Project Muse, we lose the art work on the back cover of AQ!). But the change would make an institutional difference. I’m partly thinking of the way in which musicians are bypassing record companies and distributing music themselves on the internet, and I wonder if there is an analogue in academic publishing. Simply put, subscriber services generate surpluses; other forms of online publishing, without a subscriber fee, generally do not. What are the pluses and minuses of the two systems? What’s the difference between being beholden to a University Press vs., say, the University that hosts your digital publishing project? In both cases are we talking about University institutions as platforms or are there other models?
Tara and Tim have mentioned the disconnect between discussions of the digital and race, and Deborah has referenced issues of race and sexuality. I agree and would suggest that we widen out the frame to think about the relations between the digital and forms of equality as such, or the unequal distribution of life chances. This would enable us to think also about nation, region, language, religion, class, etc.
The disconnect between discussions of the digital and a the world of material inequalities is of course familiar to most of us as a function of a kind of techno fetishism or techno progressivism in which it is believed that tech precisely transcends material realities. This is a criticism often made but then just as often forgotten or ignored. As a reconstructed Marxist, in the classroom, this means I turn such discourse on its head, as it were, and insist on a materialist framework for the digital. I like to teach, for example, Silicon Valley of Dreams, about environmental injustice and labor exploitation in the computer industry. I also teach a good deal of material from the social sciences that provide tools for combating techno fetishism. Now it may not be that the labor relations of microchip production are not up your intellectual alley, but I think it vital that we foreground the material in some way in our teaching about the
September 12th, 2008 at 12:19 pm
I have been resisting the temptation (but am now not resisting) to add to Curtis’s list of questions in the first paragraph something that sort of ties back to his earlier questions about privatization and intellectual property: What’s the difference between a technology in which scholarly and other work can be reproduced without permission using a photocopying machine, and one where it can be reproduced without permission by passing on a pdf, or a password to a site?
October 6th, 2008 at 5:35 am
I want to begin by saying how encouraging it is to see such important questions discussed by editors, scholars, and graduate students. I want to follow up on a number of points that have been made. I’m not sure I know the answers to these challenging questions, but I want to share what I’ve been thinking.
It’s very interesting to hear Deborah’s thoughts, from a graduate student’s perspective. I’m curious to know if graduate students are being trained in digital skills specifically tailored to their field of study. If you are a grad student in anthropology, for example, do you have access to training in GPS, videography, web design, and data systems management? I know there are a few places that have set up Centers capable of doing this kind of work, UVA and U Nebraska-Lincoln come to mind. It seems to me that this would be the most effective way to come at the problems, since the training would seem directly relevant to the student’s studies rather than just another requirement.
This also makes me think of Glenn and Curtis’s insightful points about pedagogy. We’re working hard on this problem at Penn. One of the questions that keeps coming up is whether departments should be encouraged to train their own students or wether the library can support the training of students from many different departments. It’s a centralization vs. decentralization question and I’d be curious to hear what other people think. What’s compelling to me about de-centralization is that it would encourage departments to hire jr. faculty with the training to teach the use of digital tools. Having said that, it is not the way we’re going at Penn. Just wondering what other campuses are up to on this front.
Finally, Curtis’s point about subscriber services really intrigues me and is a subject that Randy and I have been discussing in Crossroads meetings. The analogy to the music industry is frightening. Although rarely discussed, it seems that digitization has the peculiar power of being able to destabilize business models (I was shocked when my beloved local Tower Records shut down). I worry that university presses may be the next tower to topple and it’s troublesome to me that very few presses see this moment coming. This may be heresy to the open source apostles (whom I greatly respect), but I’ve actually floated the question of the ASA functioning like a university press in the sense that it would peer review and rigorously test digital projects that could then be bundled together and given the imprimatur of ASA in return for a subscription fee. It would generate revenue, help solve the credit for tenure problem, and provide the kind of credibility that Deborah is seeking by only searching sites that conclude with .edu
October 9th, 2008 at 7:17 am
I think some version of Tim’s plan makes sense. AQ has for some time been working on an online special issue which has unfortunately been momentarily stalled for reasons unrelated to its online form. At USC there is also the relatively new International Journal of Communication, which is online, peer reviewed, and free once you register with the cite (http://ijoc.org/ojs/index.php/ijoc), and of course Vectors. At the ASA there will be a launch party for a new peer-reviewed online journal, Transnational American Studies, sponsored by the Stanford American Studies Program and UCSB’s American Cultures and Global Contents.
So the models are out there, which makes me think it’s only a matter of time before the tide turns but questions remain. In either case, paper or online, you’re still dependent on some sort of institutional support—a university press or a university—so I would be curious to know more about the pros and cons of each.
It’s hard not to think about the current financial crises in these terms. No cyborg from the future is going to give the state of California a loan right now. What happens in tough times to subscription systems like Project Muse and JSTOR—at least with paper publication you will always have the thing itself but if your library cancels it’s e-subscriptions you don’t get to keep the catalogue of back issues. And can we be certain that universities will continue to archive online publications?
This is partly about larger questions of public and private, but even with their often deeper pockets private universities can be neoliberal actors, jumping on projects that seem to enhance their “brand” one moment but leaving them by the wayside when markets change.
October 10th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
A few summary thoughts as we move to the non-digital conversation next Friday. I’m hearing three main lines of inquiry that might organize our thinking, session, and any follow-up:
1) The question of digital scholarship — meaning research, teaching, and engagement — as one of the new forms of practice in research universities, and across their boundaries. The themes here focus on sub-questions of (disciplinary) peer review, of what publics and/or communities are being engaged, and of what form projects can and should take as they move across different disciplinary, intellectual, and social formations, both inside and outside of universities.
2) The question of professional and institutional development in and for a digital age. Avoiding either technofetishism or technoprogressivism (to use Curtis’s terms), we might want to think about what sort of digital literacy and design training graduate students (along with undergrads and faculty) are or should be mastering in the cultural disciplines. Also present here are concerns with how to institutionalize this type of training (and pedagogy), and how to make it sustainable.
3) The question of the (existing/emerging) gap between interest in race/power/ideology in American Studies (and other fields) and the focus on the digital. How does the history of technology figure into our more familiar and largely social movement-based understandings of American Studies field formation? A subquestion here concerns who owns the means and the products of digital scholarship.
Other suggestions?
October 12th, 2008 at 11:48 am
Hi, everyone —
Just so I’m not responding on the panel on behalf of grad students everywhere, I’ve put together this ten-question, single-page survey. Bruce, Glenn, Tim, Curtis, and Tara: Will you do me the favor of forwarding this along to grad students in your respective departments/institutions? They can complete the survey on our blog.
View Survey
You can also forward a direct link to your students:
http://www.polldaddy.com/s/90A6CFC5B5F21A44/
October 18th, 2008 at 7:59 am
Thanks to all for a wonderful panel on Friday, and for this conversation. While I find all the discussion here of the institutional issues (publishing, tenure, peer review, etc.) important, I actually think they will resolve themselves when, and if, works of digital scholarship proliferate. Thus I am more intrigued with how we might make such things than with how they will be evaluated or housed (maybe that’s the luxury of the tenured already).
Tara writes (and said at the panel) “It’s crucial that we get humanities scholars working with database, design and algorithmic structures because these are the emerging lingua franca of our era.” While this may be true, I’d never say it to any of my colleagues. First, because I have no idea what it means. And second, because it has an imperialist tone to it. That said, I AM intrigued to know what “working with database” would look like for the literature scholar. For most of us, about as close as we get to that are the search engines at EBSCO or JSTOR, which are just digital bibliographies. I assume Tara is rather referring to the kind of thing we see in Vectors, though I still have trouble imagining it. Are we talking about a process that first digitalizes the materials under study, marks them in certain ways, and then makes possible different analytic searches that produce ….. well, what? And since I quote high school math after Algebra, I wouldn’t know an algorithm if I saw one.
But I say all that knowing that the last scholarly project I started on my sabbatical got stuck not only for lack of time, but because it would really require a Vectors scholarship to initiate (and I don’t have the luxury right now of doing that). I can’t see how to do this project, in an interesting way, without building a multimedia work on a platform. Which raises the question of the “killer app.” Traditional academics made the switch to digital once the internet had a critical mass of valuable content and once the web browser became fast and user friendly. At this time I am not aware of a similar killer app for either multimedia authorship or multimedia pedagogy, though obviously y’all are making great headway.
Do this again next year….
August 6th, 2009 at 4:35 pm
cool read