Hacking the Academy

This week's reading was like a mini-"Debates in the Digital Humanities," only better organized (I think we gave last week's reading hell for seeming like an afterthought after the first two readings we did in the Debates book). There were a lot of interesting things to dissect, which I'm sure we'll get to in class, but I want to address two things.

First, not to bore you with another "when I was a freelance writer" story, but when I was starting out in the freelance writing world, the target was always more print-based than digital publishing (or, as we called it back then, "getting on a website"). I was still of the mindset that real writing was done for magazines that put out editions in print (it took me forever to adjust to the idea of a magazine being a solely online venture, but I caught on to that notion quicker than did the editors of print media, I will say). I can't tell you how many times I sent something to the New Yorker in the vague hope that it would somehow leap off the (electronic) page and make me famous (because I honestly thought that getting published in The New Yorker was how you got famous).

In Hacking the Academy, this ties into the peer-review old-school style of getting published versus the new-fangled open-source online publishing that a lot of scholars in DH advocate. In practice, then, I've been open-sourcing my work for years: like I said last week, the bulk of my published "work" is online, and much of it lost to the cosmos of websites crashing (I liked the article which cautioned against scholars assuming that, just because they publish something online, that means it's preserved forever; "forever" in online terms could be as fleeting as the very same week, if someone on the website side of things fucks up, blows all their money on Vegas, or accepts a friend request from a spambot intent on infecting the world with ads for boner pills). I think it's telling that some scholars think in these terms, for while books may rot, be burned, water-logged, or otherwise compromised, we like to think that books are a permenant way of preserving knowledge. In this sense, the notion of DHers that online means always online (that what you publish online can be kept safe from the changing whims of departamental heads, because it's online) is rooted more in the past than the present: we're projecting the myth of knowledge preservation in book form upon the online variation, and it doesn't hold water. Does this immediately invalidate the research published online, as somehow not being "worthy" of being kept in books (on the face more physically preservable than websites)? That is the assumption that DHers are working against, which comes from the side of the academy that doesn't understand (or want to understand) the possibilities of digital preservation.

Secondly, one of the sources of heated debate amongst DHers and more traditional academics is the notion of "open-source" online publishing, that is posting work online (not through the hurdles of peer review that could take months or even years and eventually result in a book that, for all its merits, would likely have a small audience even within the stated target audience of academics devoted to the subject at hand). Blogs are cited as a way to get the word out, and even though I dispute the notion of Twitter as being anything other than something that celebrities get on to annoy the rest of us, I agree that in the right hands it could be a tool for promoting more helpful things than just another picture of Kim Kardashian looking constipated in yet another selfie. I would caution against citing Wikipedia as an ideal form of this open-source, however; with all the controls in place, there are still the obvious mistakes or outright manipulations that give Wikipedia a bad name in academic circles (I cite the example I ran across when, looking up SS chief and architect of the Holocaust Heinrich Himmler, I read that, according to whoever wrote up the bio, Himmler was "a pretty cool dude." I hope that the editors of the site caught that in time to correct it). Wikipedia is a great resource, of course: by its very nature it both highlights the pros and cons of open-source and user-controlled data outlets.

I took away from the book a sense that traditional scholarship needs to change, to keep up with the demands of a world increasingly digital. It also needs to be vigilant not to lose the aspects of it that make it valuable (some sort of peer review is available online, even if it's in real time and not kept from the public eye like traditional peer review). I believe that education shouldn't be elitist in how it's applied. I've known people in life whose lack of formal education doesn't reflect their natural desire to learn and grow in intelligence, or indeed to posess more of it than some people for whom educational outlets are limitless. I think DH could be a conduit for a more democratic distribution of education, and having some sort of open forum where DHers can debate each other's work, not hidden from the public but openly engaging it, is called for. The academy could do with some hacking.