Open, Transparent, Tactical

I attended two sessions in a row concerned with the openness and the digital humanities. The first, Open Professoriate (#openprof), was concerned specifically with exposing the work of the academy to the public through social media. The second, Methods of Research in New Media (#606), had the broader goal of addressing new media methodologies, but came around addressing openness as a method. Though some of the same topics were raised that always come up (will this count for tenure, etc), I thought the speakers addressed academic openness from some really interesting angles. I am going mash the two sessions together here rather than follow the talk schedule.

One of the primary virtues of openning the professoriate was the potential to connect with and work with the public. Amanda French shared her experience of using social media to draw attention to a recent publication, arguing that putting our work online will earn more readers but only if there is no pay wall. David Parry seconded this suggestion by arguing that we must make public and open the default for our scholarship. This kind of openness would require that we see ourselves as accountable to the public and, as was brought up in the question sessions, address the public as a partner.

Openness, however, is not as easy as it sounds. Erin Templeton raised several questions about what we mean by "open" and asked how "openness" is challenged or compromized by openness itself. In her discussion, Templeton collapsed many versions of "open" in an attempt to complicate the optimism of the term. She spoke specifically of such practices as Yale's online courses, which offer the academy to the public, but in unidriectional communication. She also asked how open can a professor be online if their activities are surveilled by their department chairs and college deans.

She also discussed how few humanists are doing their work in public, suggesting that the small group that is "open" might mistake themselves for the whole show. The reality of this issue was made unavoiably apparent during the rest of the conference with allegations about a cliquish digital humanities star system. Matthew Kirshenbaum's response to that emergent discussion is particularly insightful in its honesty. He admits that "star systems" are how academic movements tend to happen, but the real key will be to see if digital humanities can avoid the pitfalls that come with it.

This conversation, however, fed nicely into Marcel O'Gorman's talk in which he argued for the value of closed systems. Quoting Cary Wolfe, O'Gorman suggested that for innovation to occur it is perhaps necessary to work in small groups, doing the kind of deep reading humanists have always done, just in digital spaces. This lead David Perry to revise the opposition between open and closed to propose transparent as the value we should seek putting or work online. The call for openness is not necessarily a call to include everyone all the time, but to show our work. It also recalled Mark Sample's provocation from the day before regarding the need for digital humanists to practice tactical alliances, to collaborate even with the those in the enemy camp, but remain fleet-footed and mobile.

At the same time, it matters less if we are tactical in our openness if we are not also tactical in what we are doing in public. Sam Cohen raised an extremely important point in the discussion about openness when he pointed out the supposed "crisis in the humanities" is not fundamentally about being open, closed, or transparent, but about the revaluation of culture and the changing role of the university. As the web comes to resemble the mall from Minority Report more than a public square and the university is restructured to run like a business, Gold asks in all seriousness, "do you think Newt Gingrich will read your blog?" And he has a real point.

The talks this weekend suggest we are continuing to come around from the early utopian potential of digitally enabled public intellectualism in the virtual public square. The call now is to redefine openness as transparent, tactical collaborations that are accountable to the public and skeptical of institutions. This involves recognizing that openness is not enough in itself to take advantage of what Alan Lui sees as the digital humanities's great opportunity to "serve the humanities." We have to continue to find ways for the open professoriate to answer Lui's question, “Where is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities"?

***UPDATE*** (1/16/11) I want to thank Matt Gold for alerting me to a couple of mistakes. I had mistakenly attributed a talk to him that was actually given by Sam Cohen. All fixed now. Sorry for the confusion. 

To Code, or Not to Code.

That was the question posed by Matthew Kirshenbaum which summed up today's session, Labor in the Digital Humanities. Despite the broad range of questions framing the roundtable, the question that dominated discussion was how much technical ability is too much.

With a brief statement by William Thompson that described digital humanities as a 'confluence" of ways of knowing and one that is not necessarily harmless. As we continued, the particular "harm" that became the theme of the session was how technical proficiencies influence employment expectations.

Mark Childs, who joined the session via Skype, a first for the MLA, discussed the kinds of resistence he received from teachers asked to integrate technology into their pedagogy. The form of resistence he focused on were attitudes toward the digital, particularly ones that saw technology, such as podcasting, as possibily replacing the instructor.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick then discussed the influence of free and easy publishing platforms on academic research. She explained that print formats allowed researchers to outsource many processes, copy-editting, publicity, typesetting, etc, to the publisher. In a DIY publishing context, all that becomes part of the writing process and added labor.

Tanya Clement shows us an Antlion

Tanya Clement next presented the "Antlion" a hybid animal she used as a symbol for the hybrid identity of the Scholar-Programmer. While the Scholar-Programmer typically sees herself as a scholar first, often turning down more lucretive careers to enter the academy, they are often treated as service workers, with unclear paths for career advancement, and ambiguous value as a scholar.

Carl Stahmer picked up the Antlion image and confirmed Clement's description with his own experience working in multiple digital humanities contexts. He summarized his position by saying "don't get stuck coding," having found that as his technical knowledge and experience increased the less he could see himself as a scholar or researcher. There is, as he emphasized, literally not enough time to be involved in all sides of DH projects and it is important to pick the part you want to be on.

Amanda French concluded the panel by explaining the ramifications of typical grant-funding structures on DH labor. The positions are available and usually well-funded, but they are also temporary as most projects are unsustainable due to how much they have to pay for labor. French went on to suggest solutions for working the system to gain more coding knowledge, such as using grant funds to pay for technical classes rather than for labor.

In the end the confluence of French and Stahmer's remarks lead to a discussion that questioned how digital humanists should become. While it seemed everyone agreed on the value of humanists involved in technology critique and practice, there was real concern over the burden of becoming proficient enough in programming, for example, given all the other demands on a humanist's time. This concern lead into larger questions about crisis in the humanities, which seems like the unavoidable undercurrent at this year's convention after just one day.  

The Next Big Thing

Hello, Los Angeles! This is the first post for the University of Washington's MLA 2011 blogging contingent. We would like to thank the Simpson Center for the Humanities for sponsoring our trip allowing us to publish this blog reporting on the convention.

I will let my colleagues introduce themselves in subsequent posts, but for now I wanted to say a little about myself and my specific interests in this week's events.

My name is Tim Welsh. I am a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Washington and HASTAC Scholar for 2011. My research is on 20th-century fiction and new media, specifically console video games. I have been asked to report on the presence of the digital humanities at this years convention. While there is certainly interest in DH generally, the place DH takes at this year's conference is particularly interesting following last year's surge of attention. As William Pannapacker wrote in summary of MLA 2010, "Among all the contending subfields, the digital humanities seem like the first "next big thing" in a long time, because the implications of digital technology affect every field." So, of course, the question I will be in some small part trying to answer is whether or not digital humanities continues to look like "the next big thing."

This year, Mark Sample reports that there are 40+ panels on digital humanities topics. I will be attending and tweeting(@twel) at one or more sessions per day, following up with a summary post. In addition to sessions, I am interested in how digital humanities are being practiced at the convention. So, I hope to have a post here and there about how digital technologies are augmenting or participating in this week's events.

That's all for now. I will have another post soon introducing the session I am attending this afternoon. Thanks for finding us. You can track our conversations by following us on twitter @uwmla2011.