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New-form Scholarship and the Public Digital Humanities

Jesse Stommel (@Jessifer)

“The work of public engagement comes not after the scholarship, but as part of the scholarship.”

~ Steven Lubar, “Seven Rules for Public Humanities”

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“Our advanced technological society is rapidly making objects of most of us and subtly programming us into conformity to the logic of its system.” ~ Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“I am hopeful, not out of mere stubbornness, but out of an existential, concrete imperative.” ~ Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Hope

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Increasingly, the web is a space of politics, a social space, a professional space, a space of learning, a space of community. And, for better or worse, more and more of our work is happening there.

Scholarship

“The social contract of the book is profoundly entrenched and powerful—almost mythological—especially in the humanities.” ~ Dan Cohen, “The Social Contract of Scholarly Publishing”

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“I am not suggesting that the future survival of the academy requires us to put academic publishing safely in its grave, [but] I do want to indicate that certain aspects of the academic publishing process are neither quite as alive as we’d like them to be, nor quite as dead as might be most convenient … It’s thus important for us to consider the work that the book is and isn’t doing for us.” ~ Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence

Much so-called “academic rigor” is, in fact, parasitic.

Public Scholarship

“I no longer believe that when I publish articles in journals with minuscule circulations I am contributing to the field—if by ‘field’ we mean the thousands of well-meaning individuals who go to work each day in places called schools.” ~ Sam Wineburg, “Choosing Real-World Impact Over Impact Factor”

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“The problem is writing articles instead of making sure the articles actually change the world.” ~ Martin Bickman, “Returning to Community and Praxis”

Making scholarly work legible to the public and helping it find an audience is a form of outreach, community building, and advocacy. But doing public work is not just about making academic work public.

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“The work of research that is not legible to others always feels, rhetorically, like lifting stones uphill: constantly establishing premises rather than moving on to the deep exploration of that one particular thing.” ~ Bonnie Stewart, “What counts as academic influence online?”

Public Digital Scholarship

“Intellectuals have a responsibility to analyze how language, information, and meaning work to organize, legitimate, and circulate values, structure reality, and offer up particular notions of agency and identity. For public intellectuals, the latter challenge demands a new kind of literacy and critical understanding with respect to the emergence of the new media and electronic technologies, and the new and powerful role they play as instruments of public pedagogy.” ~ Henry Giroux, On Critical Pedagogy

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“Post-print publishing keeps its focus on moving objects: digital artifacts and networked conversations that can be plumbed at the level of the code behind them, tracked in their progress through the web, or catalogued next to works beside which they would not normally sit.” ~ Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Stommel, “Hybrid Pedagogy, Digital Humanities, and the Future of Academic Publishing”

Twitter as Scholarly Platform

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Writing is, for me, a pedagogical act. The impetus for my research and publishing is to do my pedagogy in different, more open, and sometimes larger spaces. It isn’t that my scholarship and teaching are connected, but rather that they are coterminous. For me, Twitter is the space where this is most fully realized.

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“The rot we’re seeing in Twitter is the rot of participatory media devolved into competitive spheres where the collective “we” treats conversational contributions as fixed print-like identity claims.” ~ Bonnie Stewart, “Something is rotten in the state of…Twitter”

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It isn’t that a single tweet constitutes scholarship, although in rare cases one might, but rather that Twitter and participatory media more broadly disperses the locus of scholarship, making the work less about scholarly products and more about community presence and engagement.

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“As a medium, Twitter is decentered–that’s why gatekeeper journalists and conservative luddites continue to warn us about the dangers of the messy, uncontrollable, fragmented nature of twitter conversations.” ~ Dorothy Kim and Eunsong Kim, “The #TwitterEthics Manifesto”

Open-access Publishing

“To be published or to be read, that is the question scholars increasingly face. Although publications with reputable university presses or journals continue to be the cornerstone of the tenure and promotion process, many remain inaccessible to a broad audience, bound up, as they often are, in paper volumes or locked behind paywalls required by the outmoded business practices of scholarly publishers.” ~ Christopher P. Long, “To Be Published or To Be Read”

all learning is necessarily hybrid

Hybrid Pedagogy is an open-access journal that

: is not ideologically neutral; : connects discussions of critical pedagogy, digital pedagogy, and online pedagogy;: brings higher education and K-12 teachers into conversation with the e-learning and open education communities;: considers our personal and professional hybridity;: disrupts distinctions between students, teachers, and learners; : explores the relationship between pedagogy and scholarship;: invites its audience to participate in (and be an integral part of) the peer review process; : and thus interrogates (and makes transparent) academic publishing practices.

We are a group of (mostly) humanists who run a peer-reviewed digital journal as part of a project that stretches well beyond the digital humanities into educational technology, composition studies, labor advocacy, and critical pedagogy.

The Goals of Hybrid Pedagogy are to

: interrogate academic publishing practices by making them transparent; : share models that can be duplicated, reconfigured, and reworked by other digital publishing projects; : offer scholars strategies for making their pedagogical, editorial, and outreach work legible as scholarship; : reveal publishing as overtly pedagogical; : make pedagogy more public, an open dialogue not a monologue.

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In our efforts at scholarly publishing, I would argue for the exact opposite of objectivity -- for an intense subjectivity. Not just open peer review but collaborative peer review, where works are read and produced by and for a community of scholars.

Hybrid Pedagogy uses a Collaborative Peer Review process, in which editors engage directly with authors to revise and develop articles. Editorial work is done both asynchronously and synchronously in a Google Doc that evolves through an open dialogue between author and editors.

Hybrid Pedagogy is less focused on publishing articles as content repositories and more on reimagining scholarship as pedagogical, publishing as a way to create conversations and bridge academic and non-academic communities.

The Humanities

The HUMANITIES is an approach more than a discipline. An engagement with what it is to be human. Generosity is at its core.

The Digital Humanities

The DIGITAL HUMANITIES is as much about reading humanities texts with digital tools as it is about using human tools to read digital texts. At the center of the digital humanities should be an emphasis on individual and collective agency, which means advocating for marginalized teachers, scholars, and students. This is how DH can and should innovate, not through competition, clearcutting, and hype cycles, but by listening intently to more (and more diverse) voices.

The Public Digital Humanities

The PUBLIC DIGITAL HUMANITIES is built around networked learning communities, not repositories for content, and its scholarly product is a conversation, one that engages a broad public while blurring the distinction between research, teaching, service, and outreach.

The work of the Public Digital Humanities is “not about us, or for us.” ~ Steven Lubar, "Applied? Translational? Open? Digital? Public? New models for the humanities”

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“We are the true ‘small pieces’ of the Web, and we are loosely joining ourselves in ways that we’re still inventing” ~ David Weinberger, Small Pieces Loosely Joined: a Unified Theory of the Web

“We often ignore the best resource for informed change, one that is right in front of our noses every day—our students, for whom the most is at stake.” ~ Martin Bickman, “Returning to Community and Praxis”

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The Public Digital Humanities starts with humans, not technologies or tools, and its terrain must be continuously co-constructed.

bit.ly/publicdh !

!

@Jessifer