DH without the DH

Today I did not tag any content with metadata.  Today I did not write any code. Today I did not work on my Scalar project. Today the plugins for Neatline did not get installed.

Today was the Day of DH, except it seems that I didn't do anything recognizably associated with digital humanities work, even though the entire day -- like almost every day -- was devoted to the digital humanities.

Which is to say that a lot of DH isn't coding or hacking or tagging or building.  A lot of DH is just about regular typing.  A lot of DH is writing e-mail, instructions, reports, and even text messages. It's about filling out Doodle polls, filling in spreadsheets, and filling in names in Google hangouts.

Some of the day was defined by the Academic Scholarly Print Industrial Complex (otherwise known as ASPIC).  I am working on finishing an article for an open-access online journal, which I promised to the wonderful Annette Vee, but the whole process of working with a stack of library books is basically the same as the one I follow for a print publication.

Of course, a lot of the day was doing digital humanities work that one can't write about on a blog.  It's about serving on committees that handle the business of people getting hired or people getting reviewed.  It's about the strange set of knowledge domains that prove to be useful to the institution that are gained from being part of the DH community for over a decade: digital archives, open access publishing, information literacy, multimodal scholarship, rich media production, and hands-on experiential learning.  It's about the need for campuses to have people to assess if they have the right people and enough people too.  It's about the Weberian bureaucracy of files, files, and more files, which are conveniently accessible online but differ little from their paper counterparts.

Yet, like most days at UC San Diego's Sixth College, it was an interesting day.  As soon as I came into the office, I sat down to do a Skype interview with Pia Mancini of the Net Party in Argentina for DML Central.  Purists would say that her work with Democracy OS isn't really a DH project.  After all the NEH Office of Digital Humanities prohibits work with a political agenda.  But I tend to argue that the continuum between politics and culture includes blended areas, and hacktivism and the humanities are not so separate.

Then there was the teaching I did today.  In an upcoming volume edited by David Theo Goldberg and Patrik Svensson, I argue that teaching is often a marginalized activity in the digital humanities.  Right now I am teaching an exciting FemTechNet course with the amazing Lisa Cartwright, in collaboration with many people who have built scholarly databases and digital collections.  It was true that much of the day's communication with students entailed educating them about their Blogger IDs and Twitter hashtags for the course.  But the bulk of our dedicated face-to-face class time involved chalkboards, raised hands, and a presentation by a performance artist.

Future projects mostly require coordinating with other people.  It turns out that the most important tool for executing our Innovative Learning Technology Initiative Grant will probably be the humble calendar.

Jacque Wernimont and I are also planning to teach a Digital Humanities Summer Institute course together, but we weren't debugging code in Processing or tinkering with our Arduinos, which are the activities slated for June.  Today we were handling more mundane tasks, such as slimming down the size of our course-pack PDF.

As usual, not every effort to coordinate was successful.  Today Jessica Pressman and I had to cancel a planning meeting.  We have an upcoming DHSoCal event slated for April 18th to prepare for, but she had an ASPIC obligation too.

On Twitter, Ian Bogost quipped that "Digital Humanities is the process of creating infrastructure in which to discuss the concept of 'digital humanities."'  Given the nature of DH work, that might be a fair assessment.  If only there were time for conceptual speculation and discussion in my typical day.  If we do it, we have to spend twice as much time scheduling it first.

The MLA and Continuing and Distance Education

This year I was honored to be nominated as a special-interest delegate for the MLA in "continuing and distance education." Now I am officially on the 2013 Modern Language Association Ballot that goes out to thousands of instructors in literature and language departments across the country to support the governance of the major scholarly association for the discipline in which I was trained.  The MLA handles influential publications, conferences, job resources, and policy statements and advocates for the role of the humanities in public life.

Adeline Koh has also been nominated, and knowing her work I have to say that she is a great candidate too.

No matter which nominee you choose this year, I would urge MLA members to do some research about the issues involved.  Too often the discussion about distance education has been dominated by snippets from op-ed columns or sound bites, but the issues are actually very complex, and technologies of remote instruction inevitably impact faculty at all types of institutions because the informal learning practices of students are very difficult to control.

The growth of university-sponsored MOOCs has spurred a national conversation about institutional practices in higher education. Yet even as the “massiveness” and “online-ness” of MOOCs seems novel, this kind of “course” does little to promote innovation in teaching or learning. Unfortunately many distance learning efforts often replicate modes of scientific management from the industrial age that are poorly adapted to collaboration based on social and ubiquitous computing.  Others remain willfully blind to the problems of plagiarism, cheating, harassment, and invasion of privacy that may characterize online learning environments.  Yet we can't divorce ourselves from huge archives of knowledge or ignore the desires and voices of our students without regrettable consequences, so we need to figure out sensible and respectful strategies to adapt.

As a candidate I combine the perspectives of theory and practice developed over a decade as a scholar of the digital humanities and new media theory.  I have published peer-reviewed criticism about digital pedagogy for over twelve years, and the rhetoric of distance learning is one of my major research areas. My forthcoming book from MIT Press, The War on Learning: Gaining Ground in the Digital University, explores the assumption that digital media deeply divide students and teachers and that a once covert war between “us” and “them” has turned into an open battle between “our” technologies and “their” technologies.  It covers current trends that range from gamification to iPad distributions with a critical eye, and the work is grounded in substantive theories about new media, procedural rhetoric, embodied interactions with technology, and co-presence.

I also direct a writing-intensive interdisciplinary "core" program that satisfies the university's composition requirement devoted to the study of Culture, Art, and Technology.  Having come from a Humanities Core program in my previous position, I am sensitive to how the mission of a traditional English department may be under pressure to change radically in response to technology, globalization, and deskilling with little infrastructural support or long-term vision for preserving the values of an institutional culture.

I am an organizing member of two national efforts to support progressive experiments with networked learning: Reclaim Open Learning and Dialogues on Feminism and Technology. With my colleagues, I believe that it is important -- in a time of pressure for rapid adoption of new instructional technologies -- to consider the theoretical frameworks, historical legacies, pedagogical philosophies, and objects of study that have shaped our profession, even as higher education continues to be transformed by social interactions shaped by computational media and distributed networks.

As a longtime digital humanities practitioner who has engaged in many debates, I have had to negotiate conflicts created by new forms of digital labor and intellectual property with attention to complexity.  I am committed to representing the concerns of many different types of stakeholders and will continue to emphasize the mature scholarship and multi-campus collaboration that has characterized my career.  Feel free to e-mail with questions about my candidacy.

Day of DH

Today for Day of DH I thought it worthwhile to write an actual blog post for the first time in many months.  Like others who have switched over to short format postings on platforms such as Twitter, most of my blogging activities have been suspended in recent years, although I still write for DML Central and a few other places.  Since becoming Director of the Culture, Art, and Technology program at UC San Diego during a time of devoting myself largely to conventional print publications, it has been difficult to find time for even one posting despite having written over a thousand such entries in previous years.

Of course, blogging has been important for expressing solidarity with a distinctive kind of digital politics, even if -- as Geert Lovink points out -- so often that politics only merits a "zero comments" response.  On Wednesday, Lovink presented a talk about "Wikileaks beyond Julian Assange" at UC Irvine, which raised a number of interesting questions about how anonymity and celebrity function as part of particular algorithmic rhetorics.  The talk also reminded me why I continue to argue for more "hacktivism" in the digital humanities, as I do so here in the Debates in the Digital Humanities collection.

Lovink noted that Wikileaks was made possible by the confluence of the decreasing costs of maintaining a megabyte of data and the increasing strength of technologies for anonymous encryption, such as those documented by Andy Greenberg in This Machine Kills Secrets.  However, Lovink argued that Assange had fallen prey to the "hacker as hero as trap," and that photo ops with Lady Gaga Issue detracted from online advocacy desperately needed for the pending court case against famed Wikileaks informant Bradley Manning.   Although Harvard Professor Yochai Benkler may make the argument for leniency publicly in "The Dangerous Logic of the Bradley Manning Case," what Lovink calls the "global fallout" of this particularly Wikileaks case, primarily involving the release of diplomatic cables, has been featured in news coverage in India, Zimbabwe, and many other countries.  (To understand the narrative of stakeholders, Lovink recommended Wikileaks: The Secret Life of a Superpower from the BBC.)

Like any Internet meme Wikileaks has spawned many imitators.  As Lovink observed, websites with leaked documents now range from the Al Jazeera-sponsored The Palestine Papers to Porn Wikleaks, which is devoted to providing the real names of actors in adult films located from an HIV/AIDS testing database, to the GuttenPlag Wiki that locates plagiarized passages in the dissertations of German political leaders.   Some links are now defunct among Lovink's list of copycats, such as the now defunct Murdoch Leaks website.  Yet, as Lovink also pointed out, the work of Wikleaks continues with The Syria Files, even after the defection of Daniel Domscheit-Berg.  Wikileaks also clearly inspired The Afghanistan Papers, Balkan Leaks, and Global Leaks.

Although Lovink appreciated the aesthetic gesture of works like "Delivery for Mr. Assange," he was concerned that the narrative of the cyber-outlaw obfuscated the work of coalition building and the importance of how Wikileaks once functioned in a larger ecology of free software and online activism.  For example the temporary allegiance between Wikileaks and Anonymous,  Lovink argued, indicated that tensions between journalism (the supposed mission of Wikileaks) and activism (the supposed mission of Anonymous) and that leaking information and mining information to leak could involve two very different kinds of user practices.

Having taught a course on Digital Journalism, I know that major news stories often depend on affiliations with media organizations that are well-financed enough to fund lawsuits that force information to be released.  With media conglomeration and free culture norms weakening newspapers and broadcast news, investigative journalism is rapidly becoming defunded, so anonymous submission of leaked material becomes the only way to break big stories.

What does this have to do with the digital humanities?  Large corpora of documents that are not carefully curated -- such as those on leak sites -- invite intrepid digital humanists to do creative data mining, and

MLA 2012: Debates in the Digital Humanities

Hacktivism and the Humanities: Programming Protest in the Era of the Digital University
Elizabeth Losh, University of California, San Diego

In June 2009, Cathy Davidson wrote a blog entry for the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC) soliciting applications for a Program Coordinator. In her recruitment, she described HASTAC as a “voluntary network” of scholars who reach beyond academia to expand what the digital humanities could and should be. In doing so, Davidson defined its sphere of influence in broad moral and political terms that included “the role of science and technology and the state of our planet” and “issues of equity and ethics.” However, she concluded her post with a different kind of call to action from her initial “help wanted” message, one that spoke directly to hackers wanting to topple the Iranian regime that had just crushed pro-democracy protests and had shut down the microblogging and text messaging services.

Davidson alerted her audience that Western digital rights advocates had “received an SOS from pro-democracy activists in Tehran asking us all to use basic hacking tools to flood the propaganda sites of the ruling regime with junk traffic in order to bring them down and thereby open Twitter channels again.” Accordingly she reposted the following orders for electronic civil disobedience:

NOTE to HACKERS - attack www.farhang.gov.ir - pls try to hack all iran gov wesites [sic]. very difficult for us,? Tweets one activist. The impact of these distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks isn?t clear. But official online outlets like leader.ir, ahmadinejad.ir, and iribnews.ir are currently inaccessible. (Jardin)

What is the connection between Davidson’s eloquent defense of a broader notion of the digital humanities and her reposting of a rushed message that is peppered with misspellings, abbreviations, and infelicities of style? In both cases DH functions as a site of political activism, recognizable as being in the tradition of campus protests about civil rights or anti-militarism that defined how political commitment and dissent were staged in the built environment of the university in the past while also being part of a new vanguard of networked cultures in which protests in temporary autonomous zones could be rhizomatic, sporadic, and even ironic in their rhetorics.

By urging readers to launch distributed denial of service attacks aimed at the Iranian state, Davidson links HASTAC with another frame of cultural reference, that of “hacktivism” or the writing of code to promote or subvert particular political ideologies. In addition to protesting human rights violations, hacktivists have used their programming skills as a form of civil disobedience to promote free and open software, privacy, free speech, freedom of movement, governmental transparency, information ethics, political self-determination, environmental protection, and a range of other online and offline causes. However, because hacking tends to be a virtuoso performance by seasoned programmers, the ability to wield tools that expose vulnerabilities in security, privacy, or accurate data representation is often seen as the sole purview of an elite group of highly computer-literate cognoscenti very different from the print-cultured readers of her blog.

In thinking about the relationship between “hacktivism” and the humanities, it is worth noting that some academics are already risking tenure and even arrest because of their acts of electronic civil disobedience. To understand these phenomena that test academic freedom either to bring politics into academia or academia into politics, I argue it is helpful to examine theories of “hacktivism” or the nonviolent use of digital tools in pursuit of political ends. In the context of the digital humanities, I argue that hacktivism theory can broaden and deepen our understanding of the use of digital tools and of the politics of that tool use and to question the uncritical instrumentalism of so many DH projects.

Of course, some might argue that Davidson’s appeal for hackers to bring down Iranian government sites shows a naïve understanding of how human rights discourses function in the era of the Internet. In practical terms, denial of service attacks on state-run online media may only intensify suspicions that outside agitators are interfering with the internal politics of a country with a long history of unwelcome intervention. Furthermore, such attacks on the state’s propaganda infrastructure do little to promote the work of activists who bear witness through channels independent of the authoritarian state or provide evidence with persuasive power rather than just disruption of user experience.

In response to the Iranian situation, some digital humanities projects took a fundamentally different approach from the cyber-attacks promoted by Davidson. HyperCities, an initiative that describes itself as “a digital research and educational platform for exploring, learning about, and interacting with the layered histories of city and global spaces,” supported the efforts of UCLA Iranian-American graduate student Xarene Eskandar to create a collection of geotagged social media artifacts that documented Iranian election protests with markers on electronic maps, online videos, links to microblog postings, and explanations of the significance of a range of other digital ephemera from Tehran. More recently, the group created Hypercities Egypt, which included a Google map of Cairo that pinpointed a new anti-government tweet every four seconds. HyperCities director Todd Presner maintained that this retasking of a mapping tool designed to teach about urban history in ancient Rome or Weimar Berlin was completely consistent with the project’s mission, because “HyperCities Egypt gives users a sense of living — and reliving — history.”

Such software also shares information about rapidly unfolding events organized by smart mobs in the present with future participants. Although the HyperCities team sees disseminating real-time data as continuing the scholarly work of building digital archives, such tools may also become of interest to those outside academia who hope that visualized trends could also be deployed to try to predict the future. This is precisely the situation that Laila Shereen Sakr, a.k.a. VJ Um Amel, a USC graduate student has found herself in once the State Department took interest in her project, R-Shief, a suite of tools designed to visualize the shifting real-time patterns of popular opinion in the Middle East to provide “real-time analysis of opinion about late-breaking issues in the Arab world.” By using aggregate data from Twitter and the Web, R-Shief attempts to dissect phenomena such as how people in Egypt are reacting to the latest changes to the constitutional process, how Libyans perceive the presence of NATO forces, what Bahrainis think about the presence of Saudi military, and how pro-regime supporters in Syria are using social media. Being able, literally, to picture such complex social and political interactions could encourage more meaningful dialogue about democracy and civil society both in and about Arabic-speaking countries Shereen Sakr argues. She also embraces open-ended methods of inquiry that recognize contemporary means of communication as “technically mediated, messy, real-time, and fast” and notes that it is already challenging to write a “history of the present,” because “distance is critical to be critical.” Yet through tech@state now she has also been asked to engage in futurecasting so that public diplomacy efforts could maximize rhetorical impact and minimize security risk. Shereen Sakr might seem to be an unlikely ally to the nation-state, given her interest in hacking and hacktivism as part of the USC Critical Code Studies group and her public promotion of the Occupy Data movement, but with a paucity of regional experts and trained analysts of social media, her digital humanities projects have become of great interest to government agencies far beyond the N.E.H.

New uses for digital testimony and evidence even puts the digital humanities in dialogue with movements for decriminalization and political abolitionism. For example, Sharon Daniel’s “Public Secrets” and “Blood Sugar” websites about imprisonment and addiction were created with programming resources from the online journal Vectors and thus partially funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Yet many NEH competitions specifically forbid endorsing any particular political point of view and would seem to promote a form of technocratic neutrality antithetical to the ethos that I am describing here.

At its most extreme, outright electronic civil disobedience could be described as the most militant form of political resistance in DH . Many scholars date theories of electronic civil disobedience in the academy to the early work of Critical Art Ensemble as an artist-activist collective. Electronic Disturbance Theater put many earlier principles of the CAE into digital practice with a series of “virtual sit-ins.” For example, EDT organized digital protests on the virtual real estate of official websites in Mexico, the U.S., and the European Union. No actual damage was done to the infrastructure of the sites or to their security mechanisms; the intent was merely “to disrupt access to the targeted website by flooding the host server with requests.”
Nonetheless, after EDT member Professor Richardo Dominguez held a well-publicized virtual sit-in on March 4, 2010 to protest tuition hikes that used computer servers owned by his employer, University of California, and targeted websites of the UC Office of the President, he found himself under investigation and at risk of losing his recently earned tenure. While faculty and students marched on the state Capitol building, Dominguez had instructed some four hundred EDT supporters to help occupy the ucop.edu domain. Because of the timeline of accusations, some claim that it was actually the development of the controversial “Transborder Immigrant Tool” or TBT that caused Dominguez to face possible disciplinary consequences for expropriating public resources and criminal prosecution for violating existing computer law. After all, Fox News was running stories explaining “hacktivism” to their viewership soon after reporting that Dominguez’s group was helping illegal immigrants by recycling cheap mobile phones and equipping them with new software to guide them in making the risky trip across the border to water caches left by humanitarian groups.

The use of computing resources in more conventional digital humanities projects may seem less obviously open to debate, but Dominguez’s case should function as both a cautionary tale and as an aspirational story to those operating in the mainstream of this emerging area. In other words, projects involving text encoding, archiving, or G.I.S. generally use university computer resources as well, and controversies about ownership, access, and control may have consequences for DH projects also. Although the battles over who uses a given server and under what circumstances may seem less contested for a database of Jane Austen novels than a database of covert water caches in the desert, academics involved in all kinds of projects must grapple with the politics of combative IT funding situations.

According to a story in The Chronicle of Higher Education about a new cohort of “digitally incorrect” professors determined to flout convention in defense of hacktivist principles, such misunderstandings may occur more often now that the university must assimilate “the first generation of new-media artists who migrated to academe.” These faculty dissenters use tools of tactical media as imagined most broadly by theorists like Geert Lovink to include not only software, but also other kinds of small-scale media appropriation, such as “pirated radio waves, video art, animations, hoaxes, wi-fi networks, musical jam sessions, Xerox cultures, performances, grassroots robotics, cinema screenings, street graffiti” (Lovink 189).

At the 2011 annual convention of the MLA, noted humanities scholar Alan Liu made a plea for more political engagement within the digital humanities and specifically for taking hacktivism and tactical media activism more seriously: “In the digital humanities, cultural criticism–in both its interpretive and advocacy modes–has been noticeably absent by comparison with the mainstream humanities or, even more strikingly, with “new media studies” (populated as the latter is by net critics, tactical media critics, hacktivists, and so on).” Liu argues that these predictable catalogues of digital humanities products (“tools,” “data,” “metadata,” and “archives”), modes of institutional membership (“associations,” “conferences,” “journals,” and “projects”), and stock issues (“the digital divide,” “privacy,” and “copyright”) add up to little critical thinking about neoliberalism at best and collaboration with for-profit educational outsourcing at worst.

Davidson and Liu are certainly closer to the center of the digital humanities as it is currently defined, and Shereen Sakr and Dominguez are probably located farther away on its peripheries, but they all argue for the formation of new modes of institutional critique, particularly – in Liu’s case – as impersonal and dehumanized distance learning threatens to transform public education for the worse. Yet the history of the digital humanities told by Tara McPherson describes founding fathers who turned to humanities computing not because they were in love with the aquarianism of Ted Nelson, but because were in full retreat from race, gender, and class in the post-free-speech academy. Nonetheless, the history of new media more generally is now filled with stories of gender and race, since even supposedly neutral algorithms and computer chips were shaped by material culture and the labor practices of female programmers and Native American workers, as N. Katherine Hayles and Lisa Nakamura have explained.
In addition to opening up blackboxed systems of nation and sexuality, many hacktivists also tinker with the materiality of technology and the contingent character of current consumer comforts. For example, CAE and EDT hacktivists have created projects on genetically modified food and nanotechnology in cosmetics. Digital humanists may be similarly incorporating criticism from studies of material culture, social practice, or media archeology, but I would argue that hacktivism pushes this consciousness raising further.

Perhaps it is not heretical to say that the digital humanities is more about bit rot and obsolete file formats than it is about “clean” data and perfect visualizations. As Matthew Kirschenbaum has observed in a recent NEH White Paper, DH maintenance and preservation practices are “localized and idiosyncratic,” much – as I would argue – hacker practice is. Furthermore, because digital humanities projects force scholars to care about mundane matters like maintaining servers and replacing routers, this peculiar breed of academic must also come to understand the instability and materiality of the archive not its permanence and abstraction. Even digital files in the “cloud” exist somewhere in time and space, and high-tech satellites or data barges are built and decay in systems of property and territory. As more digital humanities projects, such as the recent Digging into Data challenge, require international collaboration, the geopolitical, legal, logistical, and material risks are even greater.

In the end, both the hacktivist and the more mainstream digital humanist must be sensitive to the vulnerability and imperfection of digital knowledge systems to pursue their avocations on a day-to-day basis. As Galloway and Thacker argue “the exploit” lets us understand procedures and protocols. In considering the need for supporting a truly hacktivist digital humanities, perhaps we can imagine both new forms of activism and new publics for DH, and in thinking about the relationship between forms of symbolic representation that humanists care about and forms of political representation that activists care about, perhaps we all need to break some systems to understand how they should be built.

DML/Kairos Webinar

If you missed the webinar with David Parry, Mark Marino, Katherine Harris, and me, you can click on this link and see the archived version.

It began as a Twitter conversation between Harris and Parry, which can now be followed with the hashtag #infoarts. As people involved in teaching writing, we asserted that the main issues have less to do with tools and more to do with linking facts and creativity, as Harris argued. Parry noted that moving from "information" to "knowledge" involves engaging students rhetorically in "information arts" rather than "information science." I argued that thinking about information flows is central for this kind of teaching and cited Siva Vaidhyanathan's Critical Information Studies Manifesto.

In particular, we discussed the limitation of using the term "digital literacy," because it is 1) excessively text-centered, 2) often perceived as remedial by students, 3) invites turf battles between different departments and academic units, and 4) ignores the importance of digital rights. Mark also questioned the assumption that "digital natives" were competent at search or able to understand how to author metadata and use social bookmarking tools, and Parry claimed that teaching these skills involves thinking about a new kind of reading, the reading that a computer does, so that students learn to "write for the machine." (Parry also observed that reading web stats was useful for students to "dig into.")

The conversation contained a number of assertion that might seem at odds with traditional pedagogy. For example, Harris insisted on the value of "play" and making students "comfortable with being uncomfortable," Parry argued for both "loose" or "unstructured" assignments oriented around time limits rather than page limits, as well as the importance of "failure," and Marino describes his class as on of the "workaround" and "Zen patience." Our unconventional assignments include telling a lie on Facebook or photographic surveillance cameras in their daily lives.

We also grappled with some hard questions about student privacy, academic labor, corporate interests, and the unintended consequences of engaging with the "real world." (See Parry's blog entry on "It's Not the Public Internet; It is the Internet Public" for more.)

As Harris pointed out, by describing a "Food and You" class with a public audience and lots of face-to-face tasting time, we aren't talking about distance learning in the conventional sense.

Virtual Auschwitz

In yesterday's New York Times, an article on how "Auschwitz Shifts From Memorializing to Teaching" notes that the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, which is slated for a major renovation and overhaul of its exhibits, will avoid incorporating digital technologies in its galleries.

There will be few bells and whistles, Mr. Cywinski insisted, few if any videos or touch-screens in the main galleries, which would be impractical for masses of people.

Unlike the Museum of Tolerance at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which is known for its interactive passport experience and banks of multimedia portals, curators feel strongly that the mute testimony of piles of hair, luggage, and shoes needed to continue to have a central place in what many describe as a "shrine." Apparently the abstraction of online installations like the Digital Monument to the Jewish Community in the Netherlands in which Anne Frank is reduced to a mere flickering pixel on the display seems inappropriate to the caretakers of the heavily touristed site in Oświęcim, Poland where visitors come in pilgrimage.

Reading the story I think of the words of my former UC Irvine colleague Ruth Klüger, who was so critical of the "museum culture" that surrounds the genocide of the Jews. For Kluger, as a survivor, it was impossible to imagine that anything be learned from the Holocaust; it defied any pedagogical logic that she could see.

My own grandparents spent their honeymoon in the Weimar Republic. In seeing the sites of what was then still cosmopolitan Berlin, they elbowed their way through a crowd to see Hitler. In retrospect, their cultural tourism seems in obvious bad taste. But thinking about that particular historical moment of peeking at the bogeyman of totalitarianism and the racial state, I think about all the digital Hitlers that we peer at on the Internet, whether the Führer is walking on sunshine with parading admirers or complaining about consumer electronics in one of the thousands of videos in the Downfall meme.

A Dan with a Plan

On of the highlights of last week was touring the Center for History and New Media with Director Dan Cohen and interviewing him for a scholarly multimodal hypertext about civic participation and new media that I have been working on for the past year in conjunction with the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Vectors journal. (Other participants include Henry Jenkins, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Ian Bogost, Chris Kelty, Christopher Soghoian, Chris Swain, and Wendy Chun.)

Cohen showed me the file folders and work stations where the Papers of the War Department are being digitized. Of course, fire destroyed the office of the War Department and all its files in 1800, along with details about the day-to-day workings of the early federal government that included primary sources about Indian affairs, veteran affairs, pre-1798 naval affairs, and a number of militia and army matters. For the past two centuries both professional and amateur historians have been reconstituting the 55,000 documents in the collection. The Center is also using this archive as a case study for developing an online transcription tool that uses crowd-sourcing to improve letter recognition, which is funded as part of the We Are the People project.

Away Game

The HASTAC 2010 conference, like previous conferences from the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory emphasized new modes of digital learning, online collaboration, and scholarship in the age of big data. This year the plan was to hold a "virtual conference" featuring discussion carried on through Google Wave. The schedule indicates that there were a number of Virtualpolitik colleagues on the roster, including Craig Dietrich, Vanessa Vobis, and Nicole Starosielski from the 2009 NEH-Vectors Summer Institute on Broadening the Digital Humanities.

In the main message about "The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age," David Theo Goldberg of the UC Humanities Research Institute and Cathy Davidson of HASTAC explore when "virtual means collaborative" and draw attention to their own historical context in which "the White House asked the public: what does 21st century learning mean to you?"

In explaining why they "frame the conversation in terms of thinking not of learning," they argue that "thinking is the largest category." As Cathy Davidson notes, "education" and "learning" may be related categories, but "thinking" is central to the humanistic enterprise. David Theo Goldberg observes that "technical components" of "reading, writing, and 'rithmatic don't always prioritize "other modes of encouraging" thinking, which might include "modes of judgment" or "modes of reflection." They explained that their mission comprised more than "technical or technicist things," because their collaborative work reshaping educational institutions was about "capacities not simply technical skills."

They also introduced the issue of "modes of attention. Davidson talked about the famed "gorilla suit" study and Goldberg noted how the rise of PDAs could have consequences for the neuropsychology of attention that represent "opening and closing" of opportunities that involves rethinking of simple "expanding vs. trading" models.

Davidson said they were "both skeptical about 'digital natives'" and the assumption that young people were naturally more facile with technology, as noble savages who did not need any instruction. But she did note that when working with a class on the concept of "digital literacies," she observed a "look of terror" when they were asked to contemplate a "world without the Internet" and a "lack of digital sources," which she believed reflected on their "thinking about thinking." For Goldberg, what is critical is the "notion and nature of literacy itself" and the "self-reflexivity" and "ability to use capacities" that the term implies.

As a pragmatist, Davidson also discussed the importance of "assessment" in understanding the "ecology of knowledge systems," which might be "associative," "iterative," and "process-oriented," in ways not imagined by the No Child Left Behind legislation mandating standardized testing but misses the fact that what is "in the outcome itself" can't be so easily captured.

Goldberg also explored the "notion of contribution" in telling about how he had asked graduate students to produce collaborative products in a seminar and engage in syllabus building collectively, much as they would be expected to participate in "teamwork throughout life." For him the "radically individualized" idea of standardization is proved false by lived experiences in "collaboration and laboring together," even if the "common end" may not always be clearly defined from the beginning.

At one point Davidson even suggested that Mozilla might be putting forward the "philosophy of our time."

Then Goldberg explained how "institutions" could serve "as mobilizing networks," so that "institutional walls" were understood as "reforming" even as they are "crumbling." and the classroom becomes about "engagements between the virtual and the material" world.

Goldberg did acknowledge, however, that there could be conflict about this mixing of frames of reference, as was the case in the controversy about the presence of laptops in the classroom, which had even become an issue at the DML. In defense of laptops, Davidson described how "somebody needs to Google jockey this" in certain live classroom interchanges to highlight how "diverse the answers are" when the "affordances in the classroom" are fully explored. Goldberg argued for awareness of the "temporality and closing off" involved in such pedagogical moments, and cited how Eszter Hargittai controls students' laptops from podium. (In my own use of smart classrooms, I like having all students' laptop screens projected, although I have no direct control over their displays.)

Mark Your Calendars!

Coming off the collaborative spirit of the recent THATCAMP SoCal digital humanities unconference, UC Irvine history graduate student Jana Remy, Chapman's Mary Litch, and others wanted to keep the organizational coordination going. (See Virtualpolitik write-up of THATCAMP here.)

Remy explains that the DHSoCal website is intended to "provide a central calendar and discussion space for the Digital Humanities in Southern California" The group is "inviting scholars involved with Digital Humanities to participate in the site and add their local events to the calendar." Remy is a fan of free tools to keep costs low: the calendar site is on Blogger, and the registration form is on Survey Monkey. You can also check them out on Twitter at @dhsocal.

We Suck at Trending

Today Patrik Svensson, the director of HUMlab at the University of Umeå, presented at UCHRI. He had been asked to provide some "provocations" to stimulate a lively lunch discussion about directions for the digital humanities, although participant Tom Boellstorff pointed out that in the academy "we suck at trending."

Svensson started by noting the radical dissimilarity of the most frequently used words by Digital Humanities, which is described as "the annual joint meeting of the Association for Computers and the Humanities, the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, and the Society for Digital Humanities / Société pour l’étude des médias interactifs," and the Association of Internet Researchers. Although both groups have been around for over a decade, their vocabularies seem to show little common ground. The DH crowd, which comes out of humanities computing initiatives focused on text-encoding and digital archives, lists "text," "electronic," "humanities," "digital," "analysis," "language," "markup," "encoding," "data," "TEI," "corpus," and "linguistic" as its top words, while AoIR emphasizes social computing and human-computer interaction with "Internet," "online," "social," "web," "digital," "community," "virtual," "research," "media," and "communities" in its top ten terms. Words like "scholarly" matter more to DH; words like "play" matter more to AoIR. Apparently "politics" and "gender" matter more to AoIR, while DH looks to talk about "attribution" and "authorship."

In other words, to use the definition of "information literacy" developed by the Association of College and Research Libraries, DH is about evaluating the scope and credibility of information as discrete sets of self-contained data and seeing how this data can be mashed up in new ways, and AoIR is about "the economic, legal, and social issues surrounding the use of information." This may explain why "Critical Information Studies" manifesto-writer Siva Vaidhyanathan was a keynote speaker at AoIR, but was probably only mentioned once in passing at DH in my paper on hacktivism and the humanities. As someone who has attended both conferences more than once, I would tend to agree with the accuracy of Svensson's snapshot of terms in characterizing the differences, although there are certainly crossover people like Matthew Kirschenbaum and Kathleen Fitzpatrick who try to straddle both worlds.

Several of Svensson's articles were used as reference points during the discussion, including "Humanities Computing as Digital Humanities," "The landscape of digital humanities," "From optical fiber to conceptual cyber infrastructure," and "Envisioning the digital humanities." Although Svensson was trained in linguistics and was once a member of a more conventional English department, he has become interested in "seeing spaces" and "meeting people" as well and embracing the fieldwork so central to the STS movement in academia and the combination of "doing and reflecting" involved in building labs and integrating database computing into lived environments.

He also showed a number of position statements that advocated for, despaired about, and defined the digital humanities. These included Brett Bobley's HASTAC Q&A that described the digital humanities as a "game changer" that has to engage with how "technology has radically changed the way we read, the way we write, and the way we learn." I was pleased to see both Christine Borgman and Ian Bogost mentioned prominently in Svensson's digital humanities overview, since both will be attending the Richard Rorty Digital Archive event at UC Irvine. Borgman argues in "A Call to Action in the Digital Humanities" that it a "pivotal moment" in which the DH community is likely to "fall behind," if they don't embrace new modes of knowledge-making being tried outside of the humanities. At the other end of the spectrum of cynicism Svensson presents, Bogost agrees that the problem has to do with the humanities itself, specifically "its members" who pursue what he calls "The Turtlenecked Hairshirt":

It's not "the digital" that marks the future of the humanities, it's what things digital point to: a great outdoors. A real world. A world of humans, things, and ideas. A world of the commonplace. A world that prepares jello salads. A world that litigates, that chews gum, that mixes cement. A world that rusts, that photosynthesizes, that ebbs. The philosophy of tomorrow should not be digital democracy but a democracy of objects.

If we want the humanities to become central, it is not the humanities that must change, but its members. We must want to be of the world, rather hidden from it. We must be brutal. We must invoke wrath instead of liberation. We must cull. We must burn away the dead wood to let new growth flourish. If we don't, we will suffocate under the noxious rot of our own decay.

Svensson also cited a range of other sources from an official ACLS Report on Cyberinfrastructure arguing for the importance of access to "the world's cultural heritage" to the wonderfully snarky blog post of Virtualpolitik pal Dave Parry who points out the "non-rise of the digital humanities" that I also saw in action at the MLA and the problem of fixating on "text visualizations or neat programs." (The comments to Parry's blogpost are interesting to mine, since they include a 1997 MLA paper from Kirschenbaum and jokes about CB radios from MLA VP Michael Bérubé.) In this conversation he also observed that Lisa Nakamura had also been an important critical voice in ridiculing the latent cyberutopianism of the digital humanities.

Svensson argued that it was critical to acknowledge "the importance of physical space" and practices of mutual respect. To this Boellstorff observed that there were certain constraints on interdisciplinarity that could be also understood as "accountability for knowledge practices" and -- although he granted UCHRI director David Theo Goldberg's correction that there were "e-social science" initiatives in Europe -- he argued that a "digital social science" was rarely part of the conversation in the U.S. Boellstorff explained that lately he had been thinking about indexical relationships and Peircean semiotics and how the "digital" might literally be seen to "point." He described how this came from his own research on "virtual embodiment" and how it might relate to the Heideggerian notion of "being in the world." Boellstorff also reminded participants that digital humanities discourses also tend to be marked by language about temporality, particularly expressions of the "proximate future" described by Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell.

Kavita Philip wanted it acknowledged that much of the attention to the digital humanities was being driven by funding and the "capital does things" but should not be treated as a "transcendental signifier." She also insisted that Bogost had not responded to feminist critiques from Marisa Cohn and Anne Balsamo when he was at UCI in 2007. Although this actually doesn't quite match my recollection as moderator of the event, I would agree with Philip that certain forms of reactive cultural politics sometimes do return with the digital humanities like a kind of return of the repressed, as the moment when a recent THATCAMP became completely gender-segregated at a certain point in the day may have made manifest. In connection with this discussion, Boellstorff also described the irony of how heavily skewed female certain areas of scholarship in digital ethnography had become.

The discussion closed with more examination of the enviable physical spaces of HUMlab and how they might encourage practices associated with the "notion of trading zones." As to whether the humanities at UCI would choose to build this kind of built environment, given architectures of control that generally prohibit play and interdisciplinary experimentation in publicly funded research universities, only the proximate future can say.

THATCAMP SoCal

Today's THATCAMP Socal at Occidental College brought together a number of people working on digital humanities projects in the area. I have often argued that Southern California is a site of "regional advantage" in the digital humanities, so it was nice to see that dynamic on display during the day's "unconference," although Virtualpolitik friends Kathleen Fitzpatrick and Steve Anderson were unable to attend at the last minute.

The day started with general introductions and planning for sessions. In the first session on "Geographic Systems in the Humanities," UCHRI's Barbara Hui talked about her Litmap project, where she has provided definitions and explanations of the theoretical concepts behind the work, which includes a mapping of The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald, which connects a reading of the book with an ability to visualize the map of the narrative. Hui recommended Beginning Google Maps Mashups for novices starting to work with Google maps. Her mashup uses AJAX and PHP too. Many in attendance talked about the era before ESRSI, when there was a "steep learning curve" in mapping projects, and recommended resources at Lookback maps. Hui plans to attend the O'Reilly conference Where 2.0 at the end of the month.

Other mapping projects were described by Holly Willis, who talked about the Departures project at KCET. Ronan Hallowell discussed the REMAP project and how geotagged photos might construct a compelling history of Los Angeles in a scholarly social network supported by Ning. There were also plugs for University of Virginia's Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship
and Literaturatlas.eu, a literary atlas of Europe or "literary metaspace." Others mentioned the UCSB geowiki that uses Second Life and information from a Zelda constructed map to show how cognitive mapping and other forms of game mapping, which might include frustrations as well as thoroughfares, could be shown. Finally, Jackson Stakeman showed parts of it only eats itself. Participants went off to their divided session thinking about the idea of "Graceful Degradation" in their own web design strategies.

Willis demonstrated the much anticipated 2.0 release of Sophie, a multimedia authoring tool created by Bob Stein, formerly of the Voyager Company and the TK3 reader. Sophie was created in Squeak first and now is available in a Java version, which was released on January 15. Having used earlier versions of the software, I appreciated improvements in the timeline and layers, although I cringed when presenters described it as having an "interface like PowerPoint." Willis also reminded attendees of the memory of the late Anne Friedberg, who had argued for "possibilities for authoring that are rich and exciting" and wondered if possibly "we don’t have the imagination yet to author in this environment." Willis took participants through the hierarchy of "books," "pages," and "frames" that organizes the software and showed how "halos" that allow rotation off the grid, "chain halos" that could be seen as "how text works," the systems Javascript interpreter, and the materials for a "comment page" that provides a window to the web. Although she apologized for the fact that some editing and Flash embedding were disabled right now, she talked about the robustness of HTML five. With an applet that still takes five minutes to load, the group talked about the limitations and virtues of the programming language Small Talk, upon which Squeak is based, and discussed how Java runs differently on different machines. They also ruminated about the "Alice and Wonderland" of this software, which could created a "book inside a book." As the session wound down there were more philosophical questions about "what is the difference between a book and a website" and the issue of providing an "extended reading place for extended thought." There was also speculation about "emotional responses to a book." People mentioned Frans Masereel's Die Stadt before moving on to a technical discussion of import and export annotation sets. As a reading experience, designers speculated that it would probably be easier to adapt for Android than for iPad users. Sophie is currently supporting five projects in the digital humanities.

I led a session about "curating our teaching," which ostensibly dealt with a very practical subject -- creating online teaching portfolios and thinking about dos and don'ts for the job market, but was meant to facilitate a broader discussion about self-presentation, institutional rhetoric, and the digital humanities. I think it did do that, but it was also part of one of the more remarkable parts of the two-track sessions at the conference, where participants had entirely gender segregated themselves, as this Twapper record of the conference Twitter stream shows. With only one exception the male participants were upstairs at "Data Visualizations + DH Platform" while I led the feminized" session on "Electronic Portfolios." Our group also talked about how "playfulness" can be misread by the serious academy and looked at examples like this video welcome by VP friend Mark Marino.



As we all moved upstairs for the final session on "Digital Pedagogy and Multimedia Literacy," Joshua McVeigh found himself leading an impassioned discussion about the video "3.5 til infinity," which was created by students at Stanford, who were on a trip to study natural selection and Darwin's legacy in the Galapagos Islands. It turns out that there are tons of "Darwin raps" of various kinds on YouTube. I often find myself wary of what I call the "Vanilla Ice Problem" when so-called "nerd rap" is celebrated by the digital humanities community. Stakeman raised a somewhat different issue about "too much focus on student product" in certain digital humanities discussions. As he put it, ""the digital humanities needs to do some sit-ups to get some more strength."

This led into an argument about how to grade such works and whether it was better to rely on rubrics that evaluate the final product by set criteria or a looser overview of process. I found myself disagreeing with rubric opponent Edward O’Neil as the IML multimedia rubric was discussed. Stakeman showed his own work with IML 346, where students were encouraged to take on Jersey Shore nicknames to protect their privacy as FERPA-protected students in an online environment. He also talked about the logistical problems of orchestrating the "first wave" of student input, which often consists of what he called "night before commenting." See a thread here. Although many used Commentpress to facilitate online class discussions there were also fans of Digressit in the room.

The last examples came from the universally praised Neon Tommy from Annenberg Digital News, which aggregates the work of highly skilled journalism students, and the possibly less successful mashups from content from Brave New Films, where students were encouraged to create opposing viewpoint videos based on "pasting and juxtaposition" like "Vietnam and Afghanistan."

French Theory Meets the Digital Humanities Meets the Higher Ed Reform Movement

In the academy, I often feel like a kind of chimera: a product of a critical theory, interdisciplinary humanities, creative writing, and instructional technology background that doesn't fit easily into established departments with long institutional pedigrees like "English" (in which I hold a B.A., M.F.A., M.A., and Ph.D.) or even newer academic disciplines like "Rhetoric" or "Media Studies" that are more likely to cite or review my work.

In many ways I have fared much better than my Critical Theory brethren, who also studied with Derrida and Lyotard at U.C. Irvine, because I started to take this thing called "French Theory" and apply it to the institutional problems and administrative snafus that I saw taking place in a rapidly changing cultural landscape in which the technocracy was losing control over what people were doing with read/write code, reconfigurable networks, and morphable digital files. As I explain in the acknowledgments of the Virtualpolitik book, I was actually first encouraged to do this by Jacques Derrida, when I was a student in his seminar. At a time in his career when he was thinking about friendship, linguistic difference, and mortality, he encouraged me to read regulations, legal decisions, and administrative manuals about videotaped testimony in child sexual abuse cases with the same care and attention to the nuances of language with which I might approach a poem or other literary text.

At the Networks and Enclaves conference, a number of speakers looked back to that historical moment to try to understand the condition of the academy today. As the event's organizer Catherine Liu put it: "What is happening with work? Academics have become pioneers in creating casualized labor."

The program began with Gary Hall of the Coventry School of Art and Design, author of Culture in Bits and Digitize this Book, who tackled the subject of "The Free, Libre, Open University" by using examples such as WikiNation, Culture Machine Liquid Books
New Cultural Studies: The Liquid Theory Reader, Liquid Theory TV, and other theoretical "media gifts" that he has been involved in.



Hall opened by considering the opinions of fellow open content advocate John Willinsky and the debate about “the unconditional university” imagined by Derrida. Hall argued that the "open university is actually very conditional" as it engages in publishing and disseminating work. Another reference point in Hardt and Negri's Multitude, in which the proletariat has become a variegated aggregation of migrants, workers, social movements, and NGOs.

He talked about the "shameful waste" involved in dominant models of the e-university, which depends on "sightless" Nings and other tool-based approaches. For Hall, examples of open university initiatives that incorporate tactical media or social critique are much more interesting. His examples ranged from the relatively straightforward and easily coopted modular offerings on Connexions to more radicalized sites of "cognitive capitalism" like EduFactory, which looks at the central role that universities play in capital economy. In thinking about the "ownership of knowledge and reproduction of the labor force," Hall noted the role of the circulation of unattributed documents like "Communiqué from an Absent Future" and pointed audience members to David Campbell's series of blog posts on "Revolutions in the Media Economy" and Franco Berardi's The Soul at Work, about which he noted that "the science of social transformation more like gasses than sociology," because there is no subject opposing other subjects.

Hall's oppositional "open university" or "open publishing" case studies also included The University of the Poor and The Really Open University. He also talked about the "instructional technology of the medieval university" and the role of proponents for autodidacticism like Jeff Jarvis who proclaims, "Who needs a university when we have Google?" He also mentioned Sir Learnalots Knowledge Blog, which peddles iPhone apps and Kindles to college students.

With a quick reference to Obama's Audacity of Hope, Hall drew attention to "the idea of the modern author as proprietor," which has been analyzed and deconstructed more in depth by Adrian Johns in Piracy: the intellectual property wars from Gutenberg to Gates. As he asked of Johns, "as a historian, does he have to already have decided what a pirate is in advance?"In this context, Hall defended the idea of "something like a pirate department" but more sophisticated than "the Laissez Faire as a Pirate Radio Ship," along the model of AAARG.org, where you "can’t tell if they are legitimate or not at beginning." Hall also alluded to the "legislator in Rousseau" and Zizek's commentaries on the return to communism as laziness. In closing, Hall quipped that "as with the French Revolution, it is still too early to tell."

In the question and answer period, participants ruminated on the fact that 60% of journals owned by five companies and that the university thrives on military involvement and free labor. Even if it is only on the order of "an hour a week," It might still be "like how people make money out of iPhone apps." Although "maybe we would want to have work that is more fluent, people in the humanities who learned to negotiate in the traditional system seek out corners and enclaves where things could happen" apart from the globalized capitalized network society.

In response to a talk by Evan Watkins about the propagation of "mini-mes," the consensus from the day seemed to be that humanities education was not inherently critical because college students could be turned into resources and business loves critical thinkers. After all, "business loves critical thinkers" and teaching has become an activity that "you can do it from your bathroom" in the age of distance learning.

Many also came to hear Francois Cusset, author of French Theory, from CNRS and l’Institut d’études politiques de Paris speaking about "Critical theory: trendy academic commodity or true counterpower?" He opened by noting that what is combined in French theory, as it is expressed in one word -- "textual criticism" and "social critique" -- becomes two different things as French theory is adapted in the United States. In looking at "reading and teaching online," Cusset asked "can you really be critical in online work?" For some there might be a "fantasized agora," but Cusset argued that even by the standards of Habermas "such a thing is over," as print media wanes. Cusset also explained that "media studies" per se "doesn't exist in France."

Cusset described his own fieldwork on the Internet looking at "websites of theory in Ameria" and "what theory can become when it is shared or co-produced" and the question if "the net can foster a critical higher education." He looked at sites like hydra.org, theoryzone.com, CTheory.net, and the Baudrillard Web to cull examples. Sometimes he was disappointed to merely find "fans of Deleuze and Guattari" or those in love with "enclaves as a utopian counterworld" much as many romanticize Hakim Bey's notion of "temporary autonomous zones." He also found those fascinated with the work of Sandy Stone, Donna Haraway, and others interested in "subjectivizing the stakes of theory" and "ways of mocking the theoretical father while praising him."

Cusset pronounced that now "theory-obsessed websites" are "a thing of the past"; like "doing literature online" there are not many contemporary experiments. As he asserted, "the web does not create new content," although its "new interface" might encourage inquiries into the "epistemologies of reading and seeing." For him, the more substantive issues have to do with bringing textual criticism and social critique back together because of the "need to disenclave the campus" and "share and coproduce knowledge" rather than allow it to be "locked up" existentially and physically in supposedly self-sufficient units. For him, it is "not collective autonomy," "optimizing connections between supply and demand," or "personal lives as personal databanks" that should constitute this work. In adopting technology, he emphasized that we should "not only use it but question it" along with the "global power system and ideological apparatus. In that context, as a kind of "Trojan horse" that might be the reverse of being inside the Internet, Cusset argued that there could be critical openings and conceptual rigor, as academics are "making it an object of study" and "the enemy we have learned to live with."

Stepping in for an ill Mark Poster, Peter Krapp argued that the contemporary university is obsessed with "results, throughputs, and assessment" in a "new enterprise for metrics and evaluation" for a "digitized and networked academy" that is remaking the "contract between the state and its people. As people cope with with the dissolution of the state, family, values, society, and culture, Krapp argued that they need much more than "just-in-time training and skills." His questions involved if "we critically teach online" when "you let Google build you a network" or cast as transformative "digital tickling across various receptors.

Tim Murray raised several issues about electronic publication, the curation of knowledge, and preserving and organizing institutional memory over time. For example, he raised the fact that "server space that costs money," resources often come from the library, there is "pressure to generate money with electronic publishing" through "partnering with university presses. As he put it, "my corners are stored in server spaces." It is not about "integrating nor failing to embrace open projects."

Murray discussed his own experiences with the Empyre listserv in discussing how that conversation "was not empowered by its skepticism," although it was "informed by intellectual history" at a time of "public projects on the web." He distinguished between "net as tool" and "net as object," in the scientific sense of creating an object, one that came with ideology.

In speaking about the digital rhetoric of the Obama White House, I enjoyed being paired with my UCI colleague Lucas Hilderbrand, who gave a talk about the "politics of access" involved in a coming out story disseminated by a video sharing project of Miranda July called Joanie 4 Jackie.

Citing the work of Wendy Chun about how Internet protocols "raise wals," "surveil," and "lock people in virtual worlds," organizers wanted to make the argument that "we live in an age of radical enclavement" in which it is important to "reach of to remote corners of space" and engage in the process of collectivizing.

There were many new economies referred to during the course of day in order to understand the position of the contemporary university: the "attention economy," "the distraction economy," "the license economy," "the reputation economy," "the gift economy," and many other "fantasy measurements of numbers."

The state of education specifically in California was also another important subject for discussion. Catherine Liu observed that public welfare strangely remains unverbalized in the current budget crisis crippling the University of California system, and she marveled at "how students don’t leverage the Internet" as they inhabit this "neoliberal university without the body."

On the second day of the conference, I was shocked by the meager attendance despite the presence of important commentators like Corynne McSherry of the Electronic Frontier Foundation discussing the "Google Books Settlement and Scholarly Works" and Lynne Withey of UC Press presenting on “Business Models for Open Access Publishing." The lack of interest from my peers in the School of Humanities in their own economic future truly was dispiriting.

Do You Want the Bad News First? Or the Really Bad News?

A massive, multi-year, Mellon Foundation-funded study of e-scholarship has just been released by Virtualpolitik friend Diane Harley. I consider it a must read among promoters of the digital humanities who want to promulgate Web 2.0 technologies. Seeing parts of the project in draft form has informed a lot of my thinking in the new Early Adopters book.

Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication contains some grim assessments about the institutional barriers to the production and evaluation of digital scholarship, online outreach, or networked knowledge in the academy.

Age and Institutional Factors

We found no evidence to suggest that “tech-savvy” young graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, or assistant professors are bypassing traditional publishing practices. In fact, as arguably the most vulnerable populations in the scholarly community, one would expect them to hew to the norms of their chosen discipline, and they do. Established scholars seem to exercise significantly more freedom in the choice of publication outlet than their untenured colleagues, although, in the sciences, high-impact publications remain important for garnering research grants throughout a career. There is some indication that faculty in newer and less established departments in the humanities and social sciences may be more amenable to risk-taking in publication practices since their particular institutions support such efforts to carve out the identity of niche departments.

New Publication Genres

As noted above, institutions already have experience in judging non-text productivity in the arts and some professional schools. Some individuals and departments in humanistic disciplines are discussing or implementing amendments to tenure and promotion criteria in order to draw analogies between existing forms of scholarly publication (e.g., books and articles) and new, multimedia, dynamic forms of publication. A number of interviewees identified the need to have a more nuanced tenure and promotion system that could judge “intermediate” forms of scholarship, such as archival websites, perhaps as something in between “service to the field” and a more formal peer-reviewed publication that advances a well-developed scholarly argument.

The fact remains, however, that: (1) new forms of scholarship must be perceived as having undergone rigorous peer review, (2) few untenured scholars are presenting such publications as part of their tenure packages, and (3) the mechanisms for evaluating new genres (e.g., nonlinear narratives and multimedia publications) may be prohibitive for reviewers in terms of time and inclination. Associate professors may well be the class that will exercise more freedom in the type of publication submitted for promotion to full professor (e.g., an encyclopedia or electronic resource instead of the second book).

Advice to Young Scholars

The advice given to pre-tenure scholars was quite consistent across all fields: focus on publishing in the right venues and avoid spending too much time on public engagement, committee work, writing op-ed pieces, developing websites, blogging, and other nontraditional forms of electronic dissemination (including courseware)

Blogs

Among most of our interviewees, blogs were simply off the radar as a source of scholarship and are generally viewed as a waste of time because they are not peer reviewed. “You have to have some standards! How in the hell are you going to judge the quality of what’s on a blog?” “...who has the time! There have to be some filters!” There was, however, limited
mention of “good” blogs in economics, astrophysics, political science, archaeology, and history (that often serve simply as more sophisticated versions of the subject listserv and are used in much the same way: for finding out about new developments or events in a field and for making general announcements). But again, the particular scholars we interviewed generally said they do not spend time following them (even those who maintain their own blogs). A number of faculty mentioned reading blogs related to a topic of their research (e.g., a historian consulting a blog about a particular branch of science or a political scientist consulting a well-known economics blog in preparation for an interview with a media outlet).

Conservatism of Young Scholars

There may be a trend among young scholars in all fields, and particularly graduate students, to be especially leery of putting ideas and data out too soon for fear of theft and/or misinterpretation. Given these findings, we caution against assumptions that “millennials” will change the landscape of scholarship by virtue of their facility with technology. There is ample evidence that, once initiated into the profession, newer scholars, be they graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, or assistant professors, adopt the behaviors and norms of their mentors to advance their careers. Of course, teenagers eventually develop into adults. Moreover, given the complex motivations around sharing scholarly work and the importance of peer review as a quality and noise filter, we think it premature to assume that Web 2.0 platforms geared toward early public exposure of ideas or data, or open peer review, are going to spread among scholars at the most competitive institutions. These platforms may, however, become populated with materials—such as protocols or primary data—that established scholars simply want to disseminate in some formal way without undergoing unnecessary and lengthy peer review. It is also possible, based on our scan of a variety of “open peer-review” websites, that scholars in less competitive institutions (including internationally), who may experience more difficulty finding a high stature publisher for their work, will embrace these publication outlets. Time will tell.

Social networking/Web 2.0

Although graduate students and younger scholars are much more “net savvy” than their established counterparts, and engage with YouTube, have personal websites, and social networking tools, this tends to be largely (if not exclusively) for personal and leisure use, not scholarly practice. Publishers experimenting with social networking reader tools (commenting, etc.) are not seeing them taken up in large part by the readership. Some attribute this lack of uptake to conservatism, time, interest, and fear of having ideas stolen. Young scholars tend to adopt the conventional practices of their subfields and mentors, despite the perception that they will change the world.

I would consider my own path to scholarly publication with a peer-reviewed book that started as a blog as a narrative that is likely to continue to be highly anomalous. MIT Press has obviously published a number of works by well-known academic bloggers and is invested in new media disciplines that test boundaries, but I also benefited from testing out ideas at conferences, as the report recommends on page eight, and cultivating face-to-face networks of like-minded academics. And I still write far more material for established journals and edited collections from other prestige publishing houses like Routledge or Continuum than I do for peer-reviewed electronic journals or online presses.

The particularly dispiriting section on "Public Engagement" that starts on page twenty-three is also worth reading. Harley's subjects bring out important aspects of the multiple publics that constitute the frameworks for public exchanges, and it is true that members of the media or gatherings of life-long learners often don't want to hear complex arguments or nuanced interpretations.

Harley will be presenting her findings at the Digital Media and Learning conference in San Diego in February, so I would encourage all Southern Californians interested in the digital humanities to attend her session.

It Will Find Us and It Will Videotape Our Kittens

Dear Reader,

What are you doing here today? Don't you know that there is a more interesting dust-up going on over at Ian Bogost's blog? Apparently there is quite a scrap about the true meaning of the digital humanities and the future of the humanities itself taking place over at his posting called "The Turtlenecked Hairshirt." I know that this is an argument that Bogost has been rehearsing for a while; he was even practicing it over a recent dinner, but it does have some of the most delightful invective about disengaged humanists who hide in obscure subfields that I have ever read.

Humanism does not deserve to carry the standard for humans, for frankly it despises them.

We don't make reform our mission because we secretly hate the idea of partaking of and in the greater world, even as we purport to give it voice, to speak of its ills through critical esoterics no public ear could ever grasp. Instead we colonize that world—all in the name of liberation, of course—in order to return its spoils to our fetid den of Lacanian self-denial. We masticate on culture for the pleasure of praising our own steaming shit.

We are not central because we have chosen to be marginal, for to be central would be to violate the necessity of marginality. We practice the monastic worship of a secular God we divined in order to kill again, mistaking ourselves for the madmen of our fantasies. We are masochists in hedonists' clothing. We are tweed demolitionists.

If there is one reason things "digital" might release humanism from its turtlenecked hairshirt, it is precisely because computing has revealed a world full of things: hairdressers, recipes, pornographers, typefaces, Bible studies, scandals, magnetic disks, rugby players, dereferenced pointers, cardboard void fill, pro-lifers, snowstorms. The digital world is replete. It resists any efforts to be colonized by the post-colonialists. We cannot escape it by holing up in Berkeley waiting for the taurus of time to roll around to 1968. It will find us and it will videotape our kittens.

Obviously, I am not above talking about French pop music, boy scout patches, signage to hospitals, cheek kissing, and Vanilla Ice. But the writing teacher in me knows that Bogost is right that all of us need to work harder to make our work readable, accessible, and something with which the public can actually be engaged.

Your Loyal Author