Friday

Future of Digital Scholarship at Emory University

Post a Comment Post by Laura Mandell | April 17, 2009 – 2:17 pm | Permalink |  Print This Post |

I am attending a meeting at the Emory Conference Center on the Future of Digital Scholarship.  It is an amazing conference focused on how to prepare humanities scholars for the future, and I will just give you some highlights as the conference progresses.  This morning, Stephen Ramsay gave a presentation called “The End of the World: Digital Humanities and the End of the Discipline.”  The title gives you the main argument, but the devil is of course in the details, and here follow the most interesting:

Stephen’s argument is based on the demise of the monograph.  In writing a book, he pointed out, scholars NOW spend huge amounts of time formatting, securing permissions, creating the index, suggesting cover design, and copyediting.  What do presses do? he asks.  Well, they do peer-review — outsourced to scholars.  They don’t actually print your book — that too is outsourced.  They do marketing, except shortly they will be asking you to blog your own book.  In short, we are doing all the work for publishers while giving them the money for it.  Why?  An imprint absolves scholars on P&T committees from actually having to read the work in question.

This system is going away, Steve says: “We need courses in database and document design not because it is the way publishing is going but because it is the way that WRITING is going.”

Holly Willis, Director of the Institute for MultiMedia Literacy at USC (recent winner of a HASTAC/MacArthur Innovations award) spoke eloquently this morning about new kinds of scholarly practice: curation, remix and mashup, information design, dynamic interaction, and visualization (paths, ways of understanding relationships that are not textual).  The USC journal Vectors pairs high-end interaction designers with scholars who bring what is essentially an article or book chapter to publish.  Their work is created as a database or manifested in an interactive spatial and temporal environment: all the scholars who have participated in this process find it to be transformative of their research and thinking, not just a matter of adding bells and whistles.

David Germano presented an argument that we need to re-envision “the dark sheep” of academic life, “service,” as scholarship.  As editor of the Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library , his commitment is to a people and a place not to a field. He has worked to reconceive Tibetan Studies around a series of services, web services, that engage people around the world to feed information into a system that itself creates relationships among all the information bits.  For those people as well as for contributing academics, the dark PRIVATE archives of scholarly activity see the light of day, reconceived as an information service.  Scholars provide streams of information inviting others to engage in creating new interpretive configurations of it.  We have to, David claims, break out of the culture of individualism in the academy and begin operating in the participatory knowledge movement, a vision of information as globally distributed and shared.  Universities should not deliver knowledge in hierarchical fashion but rather should offer a space where people can contribute their knowledge to others; they should become a space for distributed knowledge production.

Twitter has been asking for immediate publication of our discussions, so here it is.