PRESENTER: Welcome to our
first colloquium of 2014
on scholarly communications.
Today, we're pleased to
welcome Kathleen Fitzpatrick,
the Director of Scholarly
Communications of the Modern
Language Association, and
Professor of Media Studies--
on leave-- at Pomona College,
and the Visiting Research
Professor of English at NYU.
She is the author of
Planned Obsolescence:
Publishing, Technology, and
the Future of the Academy,
published in 2011 by NYU
Press, and previously
made available for open
peer review online.
And The Anxiety of
Obsolescence: The American Novel
in the Age of Television,
published in 2006
by Vanderbilt University Press.
She's also the co-founder of
the digital scholarly network
MediaCommons, where she's left--
I'm sorry, where she has lead,
not left, a number of
experiments in open peer
review, and other innovations
in scholarly publishing.
Today's presentation is
one that speaks deeply
to this particular
institution, because we're
looking at the intersection
of humanity scholarship
and digital publishing,
digital archiving,
digital preservation, and
those two intersections,
again with open peer review.
We're delighted you're here.
And that you made that
trip down from New York
to be able to talk to us about
this and about your experience.
I know that Linnea has
asked that we leave time
at the end for conversation,
and we're deliberately
in this small room because
it facilitates conversation.
KATHLEEN FITZPATRICK: Good.
PRESENTER: Kathleen, we're
delighted to have you here.
Please come.
KATHLEEN FITZPATRICK:
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
- Thank you.
And thank you for coming
out on a cold morning.
I know your term is
just getting started,
and with the snow
and everything,
it has things a little
discombobulated,
but I'm hoping to
recombobulate as we go.
A couple of little things that
I should mention before I start.
And thank you for that
wonderful introduction.
Sadly, the middle term of my
title, as presented to you,
is actually no longer the case.
I had to leave my un-leave-ness
at Pomona College at the end
of last academic year.
So I have now no longer
that affiliation.
But I spent 13
fabulous years there.
And it was wonderful to spend
those particularly formative
years of my career at an
institution that was so
dedicated to the liberal
arts, and to the liberal arts
in a very traditional sense.
So I come from a
program that was really
attempting to think about the
place of new forms of media
within that very
traditional environment.
And that informs a whole lot of
what's going on in this talk.
What I'm going to be
talking about today
has to do with some issues
that are circulating
in the digital humanities.
And I never know, when I start
the digital humanities talk,
where everybody is with
respect to the field.
How much you have been
involved in what's
going on in it, how
much you've read,
how much it seems like a
sort of black box as yet.
And so I'm going to start with
a sort of horribly abbreviated,
but somewhat rapid
introduction to some
of the things that are going
on in the digital humanities.
What is it we mean when we
talk about digital humanities?
Before I veer off in another
direction, which for me
personally I find a
little bit more productive
for thinking about the ways
that fields in a large sense
are changing, rather than the
growth of a new field called
digital humanities.
So, in any event, I'm going
to start with this background
and then I'll move
on to talk about some
of the ways in which my own work
has encountered the digital,
and the issues that have been
raised for me in the process.
OK.
So what is it we're
talking about when
we talk about this thing
called digital humanities?
The definition that I
tend to fall back on
goes something like this.
The digital humanities
represents a nexus
of fields within which scholars
use computing technologies
to investigate the kinds
of questions that are
traditional to the humanities.
Or, as is more true of my
own work, in which scholars
ask traditional kinds of
humanities-oriented questions
about computing technologies.
So it's a two-sided
field in certain ways.
And the field periodically
feels that divide.
Those who are building
and using tools in order
to do the research, and
those who are doing research
into the tools.
On both sides of
this definition,
though, there is an
emphasis on experimentation,
and on implementing developing
knowledge in a hands-on way.
Work in digital humanities
thus includes a very wide range
of digital
methodologies, including
the development of
digital editions
and digital corpora
for scholarly study,
including projects
like the William Blake
archive or the Rosetti archive.
Work in digital
humanities also includes
the development of
technical standards
to support digital projects
like these, such as the texting
coding initiative, as well
as the development of tools
and platforms to support
digital humanities projects,
such as Omecca, which many
of you may be familiar with.
It facilitates the production
of digital exhibitions
of various kinds of
archival objects.
And Neatline, which is actually
a plug-in for Omecca, which
supports the creation of
interactive maps and timelines
based on those archival objects.
And there are projects in
the digital humanities,
in addition to these, that focus
on the creation of large scale
data visualizations,
such as photo trails.
And then there are rich,
interactive data-mapping
projects, including HyperCities.
Now each of these
different modes
of work, the visualizations, the
mapping, the corpora building,
the standards building, the
platform building-- all of them
make clear that digital
humanities research outputs
often can't be flattened
out into journal articles
or monographs, but really
have to live openly and be
used online.
And as a result of
that, there are also
digital humanities
projects that are designed
to help those scholarly archives
and tools become interoperable,
and also to facilitate
the peer review
of nontraditional
projects, so that they
can be reviewed by
experts in the field
and receive the sorts
of acknowledgement
and accreditation
that they require.
Including NINES.
This is the 19th century--
networked infrastructure
for 19th century
electronic scholarship.
That works to bring together the
different corpora and archives
of material in the 19th
century, to review those objects
in a very rigorous way, and
then to enable those collections
to work together.
Given this need for robust
collaboration and coordination
in digital humanities,
there are also
networks like DHCommons,
which are designed
to connect scholars in
the field with projects,
and with one another
through those projects,
in order to help them
share expertise and learn
from one another.
And then there are projects
like my own MediaCommons, which
I'll talk a bit more about
later, that are focused
on creating new modes of
scholarly communication,
and new forms of
scholarly community.
Projects like DHCommons and
MediaCommons provide, I think,
a useful bit of pressure
on that definition
of the digital humanities.
A network like MediaCommons
isn't computational per se,
but rather focuses on
using digital networks
to facilitate new kinds
of humanities scholarship.
So are there limits to this
term digital humanities?
Debates flare up in the
field quite frequently about
whether one must do x, where
x equals write code, or build
tools, or some other form
of computational activity,
in order to be considered
doing digital humanities work.
Personally, while I often find
these debates instructive,
I don't necessarily
find them particularly
helpful in delineating what is
and is not digital humanities,
in part because I'm not sure
that that dividing line is
necessarily helpful.
Bill Cronon, some
years back, when
he was the incoming president
of the American Historical
Association, noted in a
meeting that I attended
that in fact, the term
digital humanities
itself may be at the
root of the problem,
as it seems to
indicate that it exists
in opposition to some
retrograde, analog humanities.
When, in fact, as he
suggested, all of our fields
are being affected to
greater and lesser extents
by the digital.
A better concept, he said,
might be the humanities
in and for the digital age.
And this is the term that
I've sort of latched onto,
as you know from my title.
I prefer this concept
in a lot of ways,
because I think it reaches
out to all of our fields,
while permitting a really
great diversity in methods.
Some scholars may work in
computation-intensive modes,
while others focus on more
traditional end results.
Now my work over the
last several years
has been focused precisely on
getting those latter scholars,
who feel themselves to be most
analog, whose modes are served
perfectly well by the journal
article, by the monograph
and so forth, to understand how
it is that they are all already
digital, and how the digital
is changing their work,
whether visibly or invisibly.
Now one of the primary
arenas for that change
is, of course, in
scholarly communication.
And, given my job title,
it's probably not a shock
that I would say that.
I joined the staff of the
Modern Language Association
in July 2011 in order
to help the Association
and its members think
about the changes that
are taking place in publishing
across the profession,
as scholars increasingly
move from a sole focus
on the production of
books and journal articles
to a much more fluid and
mobile range of modes
of communication.
So I want to start
out by giving you
a bit of the background
that explains
how I came to these
issues, before I
turn to talk about where
it is I think we're headed.
So the short version
of the recap.
What feels like a very
long time ago now,
I finished a
dissertation that focused
on the relationship between
the contemporary American novel
and television.
I was lucky enough to
find a tenure-track job,
and so I started at
that point the process
of doing the thing you're
supposed to do, right, turning
that dissertation into a book.
And, as I had been
advised, I sent out
a bunch of queries
to university presses
to see who might be interested.
There weren't actually
that many queries.
It just sort of felt like it.
And I worked, and I waited.
And the three presses that
I was most interested in all
said that they were
interested, too,
and that I should send
the full manuscript
as soon as it was ready.
Now, unfortunately, as
soon as it was ready
took a little bit longer
than I was expecting.
Starting a new
assistant professorship
at a small liberal arts college
took a good bit of my. focus.
And then there's the writing
is hard part of the process,
right?
Turning that dissertation into
a book just was not as simple
a process as I'd
hoped it would be.
But it did finally get done.
And three years after that
initial round of queries,
I started writing back to the
presses that had initially
expressed interest,
not entirely realizing
that the bursting of
the dot.com bubble,
which had happened
in the interim,
was going to have
an effect here.
But it did.
The response from
all three presses
was pretty much the same.
This is a great
project, but we can't
afford to publish it right now.
So I scrambled a bit, and I
sent out some more queries.
It starts looking
like that pile now.
And I got more of
the same response.
And I finally did
get one press that
expressed interest, asked
to see the manuscript,
sent it out to
external reviewers,
got positive readers' reports,
and had an editor that was
enthusiastic about the project.
But after having held
onto it for nearly a year,
the press finally declined.
The editor had been
overruled on the board
by the marketing guys, who
said that the project posed
too much financial risk to
pursue in the current economy.
And I am sorry to report
that was, in fact, a quote
that came in my
rejection notice.
Now this particular
cause for rejection
prompted two immediate responses
among the people around me.
The first of which was
most clearly articulated
by my mother, who
said, they were
planning on making
money off of your book?
The fact is, they were, right?
Not much, perhaps.
But that the press
involved needed the book
to make money, at least
enough to return its costs,
and that it doubted
that it would,
highlights the serious
economic problems
that scholarly publishing
continues to face today.
There's no small irony,
though, in the fact
that I was facing this
situation as the argument that I
was making in this book was
precisely that the book is not
a dying form.
And that claims that it is often
serve quite conservative ends,
shoring up very traditional
cultural hierarchies
against infiltration
by mass culture.
And yet, here I
was, left wondering
whether the academic book
might in fact be facing
a kind of death,
one that had less
to do with any decline
in our need for it,
than in our ability to
support it going forward.
Well, as it turned out,
after another year and a half
of sending out
fruitless queries,
I finally did find
a fabulous press
to publish the book
with, Vanderbilt.
But the whole
intervening mess had
me wondering whether there
might be a better way.
After all, right after
I finished the revisions
on the manuscript,
feeling somewhat
impatient about wanting to
get some ideas out there now,
I started a blog.
And that blog, which
celebrated-- oh my goodness,
what year is this now?
I think it's 11
and 1/2 years old
now-- helped me develop
an audience, right,
a community, in
fact, well before any
of my traditional publications
started drawing any attention.
So while the first response
to that rejection that I'd
received was my mother's
somewhat bewildered disbelief,
the second response
that I started getting
was instead about possibilities.
As my friend, Matt
Kirschenbaum, asked me
in a comment on a
blog post that I'd
written about the
entire debacle,
why couldn't I
take the manuscript
and the positive
reader's reports,
and just publish the
whole thing online.
Now he backed down from that
possibility in this comment,
saying that he understood
why it wasn't realistic.
But I didn't, entirely.
I mean, why not start a new
kind of online publishing
network, one that might learn
from the dynamic communities
that blogging had created.
I mean, why not remake scholarly
publishing into something
that actually works.
Now, if you start
thinking that this
makes me sound like some
sort of naive optimist,
you may not entirely be wrong.
The connections that I had found
through this early community
of academic bloggers
really gave me hope.
These were supportive
colleagues,
working together in
thinking ideas through.
Blogging in those
early days helped
me forge what felt like a little
utopian intentional community.
And maybe, I thought,
some of the things
that I'd found there could
be generalized outward.
So, working with the
Institute for the Future
of the Book, my co-editor,
Avi Santo, and I
founded MediaCommons,
which became
a network in which
scholars in media studies
could share and
discuss their work,
develop new collaborations,
and new projects.
MediaCommons has been up and
running for the better part
of six years now, and has
developed a number of projects,
including In Media Res, which
asks five scholars a week
to comment briefly on some
up-to-the-minute media text,
as a way of opening discussion
about the issues that it
presents for media scholars,
students, practitioners,
and activists.
Similarly, The New Everyday is
an experiment in middle state
publishing, focusing
on articles that
are more formal than blog
posts, yet not quite as
fixed as the journal article.
#alt-academy remediates the
edited volume and journal
as a space for lengthier
discussion about a particular
issue.
In fact, there's a new cluster
of essays that's about to roll
out this week in #alt-academy,
which we're really looking
forward to.
And MediaCommons Press is
publishing longer texts
for open discussion.
Now, working on MediaCommons
has been extremely gratifying,
but it's made clear to me how
difficult changing a culture
can be.
Getting scholars,
administrators, publishers,
and institutions to invest their
time, effort, and resources
in new ways of working really
requires, in many cases,
changing the ways
that they think,
changing the things
that they prioritize,
and the ways that
they assign value
to the products
of academic labor.
And this kind of
change is never easy,
particularly given the
fundamentally conservative
nature of academic institutions,
and I mean conservative
here in the best possible way.
There is a tradition that
is worth upholding here.
But, nonetheless, that
conservatism causes
change to become very
difficult. In the main,
we academics are extraordinarily
resistant to changes
in our ways of working.
It's not without
reason, I think,
that a senior colleague
of mine once joked
to me that the motto of my
former institution-- one that I
think can usefully be extended
to many institutions--
could well be, we have never
done it that way before.
Or, as Donald Hall has
put it, scholars often
resist applying
the critical skills
that we bring to
our subject matter
to an examination
of the textuality
of our own profession, its
scripts, values, biases,
and behavioral norms.
Now this kind of self-criticism
is admittedly a risky endeavor,
right?
Those of us who have
been privileged enough
to succeed within
the existing system
are often reluctant to bite
the hand that feeds us.
Changing our
technologies, changing
our ways of doing
research, changing
our modes of production
and distribution
of the results of that
research, all of these, I think,
are crucial to the continued
vitality of the academy.
And yet, none of those
changes can possibly
come about unless there's
first a profound change
in the ways of thinking
scholars themselves.
Until scholars genuinely believe
that publishing on the web
is just as valuable as
publishing in print,
and even more
importantly, until they
believe that their
institutions believe it,
too, few are going to be
willing to risk their careers
on a new way of
working, with the result
that that new way of working
will remain marginal,
undervalued, and risky.
So what I'm ultimately
interested in,
then, is not just the set
of technological changes
that many believe are necessary
to allow academic publishing
to flourish into the future,
but the social, intellectual,
and institutional
changes that I think
are necessary to pave the way
for those new technologies.
In order for new
modes of communication
to become broadly accepted
within the academy,
scholars and their
institutions need
to take a new look at the
mission of the university,
at the goals of
scholarly publishing,
and the processes through which
scholars conduct their work.
We need to collectively consider
what new technologies have
to offer us, not just
in terms of reducing
the cost of publishing
or of increasing access
to publications, though these
are, of course, enormous issues
of great importance,
but in terms
of how these new technologies
will change the ways that we do
our research, how they'll
change the ways that we write,
and how they'll change
the ways that we review.
And it's the structures
of peer review
that I argue that we
need to begin with.
Not least because
over the course
of developing MediaCommons and
now MLA Commons at the MLA,
and the dozens of
meetings and conferences
and panel discussions
that I've participated
in around those two platforms,
every single conversation,
at some point, has come back
to the question of peer review.
And no wonder, right?
Peer review is
extraordinarily important.
It is in some sense the
sine qua non of the academy.
We employ it in almost
every aspect of the ways
that we work, from
hiring decisions,
through promotion
and tenure reviews,
in both internal and
external grant and fellowship
competitions, and, of
course, in publishing.
The work that we do as
scholars is repeatedly
subjected to a set
of vetting processes
that enable us to indicate
that the results of our work
have been scrutinized by the
authorities in the field,
and that those
results are therefore
themselves authoritative.
But I also want to point out
that the current system of peer
review is decidedly imperfect.
There is, in fact, a rather
extraordinary literature
available, mostly in the
sciences and social sciences,
on the problems with
conventional peer review,
including its biases
and its flaws.
In the sciences right
now in particular
there's a lot of soul searching
around peer review going on,
because of some extremely public
failures of peer review that
have required massive
retractions of journal articles
in recent days.
Now every scholar, however,
I would be willing to bet,
has had a more
personal experience
of some of those flaws than
this kind of public retraction.
There is, of course,
the review that
seems to miss the point
entirely, the review that
must somehow be
personally motivated,
or, perhaps worse, the review
that we never even actually get
to see.
And for such an
imperfect system,
peer review as we currently
conduct it, requires
an astonishing amount
of labor on our part,
for which no one can ever
really receive credit.
And so when my friend,
Matt Kirschenbaum,
said in his comment to me
that what ought to count
is peer review and
scholarly merit,
not the physical form in
which the text is ultimately
delivered, I completely
agree with him.
But, at the same time,
I feel quite strongly
that the system of
peer review that we
know today could
be vastly improved,
particularly in a
networked environment,
where projects have to be
interacted with in order
to be reviewed.
And so, for that reason, I
want to take a closer look
at what it is that we mean when
we say peer review, what it is
we expect peer review to do, and
how processes like these might
best work for work that
is being published online.
Now one of the problems with
using our current model of peer
review in digital publishing
is a fundamental misalignment
between the net native means
through which authority
is determined online, and what
Mario Biagioli has referred
to as the disciplinary
technology of peer
review, which is a
decidedly Foucaultian
mode of self-policing
that regulates knowledge
through discipline.
Now the problem
with transferring
this disciplinary technology
to the networked world
is in no small part
that the network
has its own technologies.
The placement of
conventional peer review
prior to selection
for publication
in the traditional
print based process
indicates that it's
meant to serve,
at least in part, a
gate-keeping function, one
that allows certain kinds
of academic discourse
to thrive, while excluding
other ideas from discussion.
Such gate-keeping is
arguably necessary in print,
in order to cope
with the scarcities
of print's economics.
Only so many pages and so
many books and journals
can be published each year.
In the digital, however, this
kind of scarcity is over.
Because anyone can publish
anything online, and at least
from a perspective that values
the free and open communication
of the products of
scholarly research,
not only can but should.
We face, instead, an
extraordinary and overwhelming
plenitude.
And so what digital scholarly
publishing ought to focus on,
I think, is not
developing a means
of applying the current
system of peer review
to new modes of
online work, in order
to create what you might think
of as an artificial scarcity.
But instead we might
usefully focus on how
we might cope with abundance.
As it is, increasing
numbers of scholars
are self-publishing their
work via their blogs,
or they're forming new
online publishing networks
like MediaCommons.
And, in many cases, these
kinds of publications
are having a greater impact
on the scholarly community
than their traditional peer
reviewed publications are.
It's certainly true in my case.
All of my first lecture
invitations, and citations,
and those other kinds
of public recognition
that we come to receive
as scholars, all of them
stemmed not from my journal
articles, or from my book,
which was still years
into the future,
but from the work that
I was doing on my blog.
But of course these new
modes of publishing still
demand some kind of assessment,
even if that assessment
comes after the fact.
And so it's for
this reason that I
want to argue that peer
review online really
needs to include some mode of
open post-publication review,
that doesn't necessarily
focus on determining
whether something
should be published.
I mean, the stuff is
all already out there.
But instead measures
how it has been
and how it should
be received, what
its place in the ecosystem of
scholarly communication is,
and what kinds of
responses it's provoked.
A system like this
would shift the center
of gravity of peer review from
regulation to communication,
transforming it into a
mechanism for facilitating
more fluid and productive
exchanges amongst peers.
And, not at all
incidentally, a process
in which the work of reviewing
itself becomes visible as work,
and the reviews
themselves can become
part of the scholarly record.
So what I argue in the much
longer version of all of this
is that we really
need to develop
a process of peer-to-peer
review, one that
begins to take advantage
of networked publishing
capacity for discussion
and dialogue,
as well as of what
Michael Jensen
has called the new metrics
of scholarly authority.
Now these new metrics
include countable,
quantifiable things like hits
and downloads, of course.
But they also include much
more qualitative measures
like comments and
inbound links, which
reveal the ways that web-based
texts get used, in order
to provide a post-publication
mode of beginning to filter
the wealth of content that
should be made available
via networked publishing.
After all, scarcity
does linger in
internet-based communication.
I was sort of fudging
this when I indicated
that scarcity was over earlier.
It's just a shift in the
location of scarcity.
Instead of there being
a material scarcity
around scholarly communication,
what has become scarce
is time and attention.
And so, what internet-based
scholarly publishing really
requires is less
gatekeepers deciding
what can be published,
than filters,
who help you figure out
where you should be placing
your attention at any given
moment, systems that allow
a community of scholars
who are working with
and responding to one
another to set and determine
their own standards, to
maintain those standards as they
see fit, and to
guide one another
to their determination of
the best work being produced
in their fields.
Now, in order to put
my money-- at least
my metaphorical money-- where
my mouth was on this issue,
I put the entire draft
of Planned Obsolescence
online for open review.
This wasn't a perfect process.
But it was an exciting one.
I found myself able to discuss
the text with colleagues that I
cared about at a
much earlier stage
than I would have been
able to otherwise,
and I had reviewers sort of
discussing the text with one
another and often really
disagreeing on points
of assessment in the text.
And I know a lot of
things about it now.
For instance, I know
that in the first nine
months after the
project launched,
it had over 31,000 page loads,
over 12,000 unique visitors
came by for the first time,
and over 3,300 of them
came back repeatedly.
44 unique commenters left
a total of 295 comments.
And the project
was written about
and linked to in more
than 20 other venues
that I found during
this nine month period,
including one review article
in a scholarly journal.
The thing was still
not published yet,
at least in some
definitions of published,
and yet there was this review.
And it was during
that same period,
it was taught in at least
four graduate seminars and one
undergraduate seminar,
that I know about.
And there's part
of me that wants
to place that list of
numbers alongside the fact
that the average scholarly press
monograph in the humanities
currently sells fewer,
and increasingly fewer,
than 400 copies
over its lifetime.
Now I recognize that
numbers aren't everything,
but they are still
significant, and particularly
when coupled with the
ability to see the reception
of that text in action.
As I just suggested in noting
that the review came out
before the book did,
an online review
process like this produces
some complications, not least
for our notion of
what publication is,
and what purposes it serves.
And I think there's
a reasonable question
to be asked about whether
the actual publication
date of my book
ought to be 2009.
And when NYU released the
revised edition in 2011,
that might be thought of as
a second edition of sorts.
There's also a
question to be raised,
I think, about the status of
the online version of the text
now that the print one is out.
I've gotten asked several times
which is the version of record,
and my sort of
shrugging response
has usually been whichever
one you're looking at.
And I think there's also
some interesting work
to be done on thinking
about the relationship
between the readers' comments on
the online version and the ways
that their comments wind up
incorporated in the final print
version of the text.
So a broadly implemented
system of peer-to-peer review
like this would inevitably
require us to really think
in very different ways about
our sense of authorship, what
it is we're doing as we
write, in no small part
because these new
modes of review
will almost certainly
necessitate, I think,
a turn from thinking
about academic publishing
as being a solo endeavor
focused on the production
and dissemination of
individual products,
to instead understanding
it as being a system that's
focused much more
broadly on facilitating
the processes of scholarly work.
I say this not least because
the time and effort that
are required to maintain a
process of peer-to-peer review,
such as the one that
my book went through,
will really require
that scholars place
some portion of their
primary emphasis
not on their own
individual achievements,
but instead on the advancement
of the community as a whole.
And here again,
my naive optimist
sort of rears its head.
This kind of collectivity is
obviously a utopian ideal.
And, to a significant
degree, it goes
against all of our
training as scholars,
particularly as scholars
in the humanities.
What we accomplish, we
accomplish alone, or at least,
so it seems to us.
We have all sorts of
theoretical grounding
to claim that this is not so.
Roland Barth told
us back in 1967
that no text is a
single line of words,
but that each is instead
a fabric of quotations.
We have, in some
sense at least, long
acknowledged the
death of the author.
But we haven't thought much
about what a proclamation like
this, or what the new networks
that we're working in today,
might mean for our
own status as authors.
Now I am not attempting
to suggest here
that the single author
text is going away,
or that we're all going to
have to get rid of the lines
on the CV that are the
result of our authorship.
Far from it.
But I do want us to
think about the ways
that digital networks,
as structures that really
facilitate and privilege
interaction, communication,
and interconnection, are going
to ask us to think differently
about what it is that
we're doing as we write.
As the example of the
blog might suggest,
communities best
engage with one another
around writing that's
open rather than closed,
that is not definitive,
that is still questioning,
that's looking forward
to new directions, that's
in process in some sense, rather
than having been concluded.
And I think that new
publishing systems that
foreground this kind of
process, new platforms
like MediaCommons,
like MLA Commons,
are likely going to encourage
us to think differently
about the phases of our
work as it has traditionally
progressed.
We may be encouraged to
publish-- for whatever
set of ideas that means
now-- to publish work earlier
in its development, at the
conference paper stage perhaps,
and to remain engaged with
things that we would ordinarily
have thought of as finished much
longer than we traditionally
have.
Now, admittedly, this makes
many scholars nervous,
both about letting the
messiness of our processes
be seen-- we don't tend to
put the rough work out there
before we have to-- but
also on the other end,
it makes scholars nervous
about the prospect of never
really being fully
done with something,
expecting that it's going
to continue developing.
And there's good reason to be
nervous about these things.
There's been a
lot of work that's
been done in digital
humanities recently
about how to call a
halt to a project,
precisely because
of this problem.
There comes a point at
which the scholar definitely
needs to walk away.
But, on the other hand, if
we think about-- particularly
with these more traditional
modes of writing and engaging
with an audience-- about what
it is we're trying to accomplish
in that process, to the degree
that scholarship is really
about engaging in an exchange
of ideas with one's peers,
these new sorts of open-ended
networked publishing structures
can really facilitate
that interaction,
but will best do so if we're
able to allow that discussion
to remain open-ended,
and then sort of fade
into the past as needed.
This foregrounding of
process over product,
however, I think it's going to
require authors to be prepared
to relinquish a certain degree
of control over their texts,
and of what becomes of them.
First of all, letting
go of the illusion
that their work springs
wholly from the individual
intelligence, and acknowledging
the ways that scholarship, even
in those fields in which
sole authorship has long
been the norm, has
nonetheless always
been a collaborative process.
We have always been
in conversation
with our predecessors and
speaking with the folks who
will follow us.
It has always been thus.
It's now we're able to see
that conversational structure
precisely because of the
ways that the web intensifies
these collaborative
relationships, allowing
other readers and our
predecessors even,
to argue back within the
same frame as our texts.
Now sometimes these new sorts
of collaborative technologies
may produce literally new
co-authoring relationships,
but not necessarily always.
Nonetheless, I do
think that we're
going to need to develop a set
of much more robust citational
practices that acknowledge
the participation of our peers
in the development of our work.
This is one of the
things that I found
that was an outgrowth of
the open peer review process
was recognizing how
many ideas I had
for the development of the text
that came from the comments
in that discussion, and knowing
that they needed to be cited,
of the text that came from the
comments in that discussion,
and knowing that they
needed to be cited,
in no small part because
there is a record of where
those ideas came from.
In the past, peer review
processes being closed,
brilliant ideas can come to
you from an anonymous peer
reviewer.
And other than that
one initial footnote
thanking the
anonymous reviewers,
there really isn't
a way to acknowledge
the origin of that
idea and to really
engage with that
reviewer as a scholar.
So open review
processes, I think,
are going to require us to be
a bit more open about where
those ideas have
originated from,
and how our work has developed
in that collaborative
relationship with our peers.
I would also suggest
that we're going
to need to think differently
about things like originality
in scholarly production,
recognizing that
in a networked environment
in which there is
an explosion of discourse
constantly being made
available, some of the most
important work that we do
as scholars may more closely
resemble contemporary editorial
practices, or even
curatorial practices,
bringing together and
highlighting and remixing
significant ideas
in other texts,
rather than
necessarily producing
our own new original text.
But the catch, of
course, is that we
have to find ways for these new
modes of authorship, modes that
are process-centered, that are
collaborative, that are remix
oriented, to count within our
current systems of evaluation.
Now there are lots of other such
changes that will be required,
I think, throughout the
entire academic community
if these new publishing
practices are to take root.
Publishers are going to
need to think differently
about their business
models, which
may need to focus
more on services
and less on objects, about
their editorial practices which,
I think, are going to require
a greater investment in helping
projects develop from a much
earlier phase, and about
the structures of texts, which
will probably become less
linear and which
will undoubtedly
become less uniformly textual.
They'll also need to think
in concert with libraries
about archival and
preservation practices,
ensuring that the texts that
are being produced today
remain available and
accessible tomorrow.
And universities in
the broadest sense
will need to rethink
the relationship
between the library,
the university
press, the
information technology
center, and the academic
units within the institution,
really re-imagining the funding
model under which publishing
operates and remembering
the institutional purposes
that such publishing
was invented to serve.
But also, and really
crucially, re-imagining
the relationship between
the academic institution
and the surrounding culture.
As these new networked systems
of knowledge production
become increasingly
prevalent and influential,
the university and the
scholars who comprise it
really need to find ways
to adapt these systems
to our needs, or we run the
risk of becoming increasingly
irrelevant to the ways that
contemporary culture produces
and communicates authority.
OK.
So all of this is explored
in much greater length
in Planned Obsolescence,
which, as I said,
did come out in 2011.
But just as I was
finishing this thing up,
I had this extremely strange
experience in which somebody
kind of came up to
me and said, hey,
these are some really
interesting ideas
you've got here.
Let's find out if they work.
So the Office of Scholarly
Communication at the MLA
was established by
the executive council
and charged with bringing
together and re-imagining
our existing book
publishing program
and our web editorial functions.
The new structure
is meant to grapple
with the growing understanding
that scholarly communication--
in this sense, it's much
broader than publishing,
per se-- is the very foundation
of what scholarly societies do.
It's their very purpose since
the Royal Society of London.
So given that, the new
office touches every part
of the organization
from member relations
to the convention,
and much more.
The office has two primary
responsibilities, one of which
is to think about the future
of our book publications
program as these books become
themselves increasingly
digital, and the
second is to think
about the born digital
platforms for the new kinds
of communication in which our
members will want to engage,
and will need us
to support in order
to facilitate their developing
scholarly practices.
The relatively easy
part of the first area
involves thinking about how
our print projects will best
circulate as e-books, as
well as taking projects
that have to this point
existed only in print,
and thinking about
how the digital might
enable new and better kinds
of interaction with them.
Along that lines,
we're currently
conducting our second round of
the new Variorum Shakespeare
Digital Challenge, in which
we've released the XML from two
of our recent volumes
of the Variorum
under a Creative
Commons license,
and are encouraging
scholars to download it
and to see what
they can do with it.
To create the most
exciting interface, or API,
or visualization, or mashup
that they can, to let us
see something of where the
future of the Variorum may lie.
Now there's a lot
more to be figured out
on this end of our
charge, of course.
There are enormous questions
about sustainable business
models and open access, but
at least we sort of know
what those questions are.
The other half of our charge
is a good bit more complicated
and a good bit more fuzzy.
Not only are these born-digital
platforms themselves always
in development.
They're sort of a moving target.
Their adoption really requires,
I think, a new perspective
on the function of the scholarly
society in the digital age.
It's possible, for
instance, that the locus
of value of the
scholarly society
is shifting from providing
members with closed access
to the products of the society,
to instead facilitating
the broadly open distribution
of the work that's
being done by its members.
This is a massive change, one
from a situation in which you
join a society in order
to receive its journal
and go to its
convention, to instead
one in which you join in
order to get your work out
to the world.
We've started thinking about
this born-digital platform
and how it might help
create relation new kinds
of relationships with
and among our members
by building MLA Commons, which
is a platform that we launched
a year ago at our
convention in Boston.
MLA Commons is designed to
support a very wide range
of forms of member-to-member
communication, collaboration,
feedback, and publishing.
And we're extremely
grateful to have received
a grant from the Andrew
W. Mellon Foundation
to support this work.
And we're also benefiting
from the pretty extraordinary
generosity of the CUNY
Academic Commons team,
who are, in turn, supported
by the Sloan Foundation,
in generalizing the model
that they built for our use.
The CUNY Academic
Commons is a sort
of robust platform
for communication
that links faculty
and graduate students
on all of the CUNY
campuses scattered
all over the city of New York.
They've now developed
that platform
into what they call
the Commons In A Box,
for which the MLA was one
of the first major partners.
The commons software is
entirely open source,
and so is available
online to be downloaded.
Its base platform is the
popular blog engine WordPress,
which has become something
of an industry standard,
running with the social
network plugin BuddyPress,
and a host of other
associated plugins.
And the commons team
has its eye on thinking
about what its coordination
of all of this software
might give back to those
developer communities.
And similarly, we at the
MLA have the long term goal
of generalizing the model
that we're developing.
And so we're in
conversation with a number
of other scholarly
societies right now,
thinking about how
we might together
build a federated commons of
commonses, that would allow
our many different members
to overlap and interact
as seems desirable.
So any member of the
MLA can currently
activate their account
on the Commons.
And with that account
they can create a profile.
The profile allows them
to join discussion groups,
to publish an individual
blog or a group blog,
to post and share documents,
to work collaboratively
on projects, a number
of other things besides.
Groups on the Commons can be
open or closed membership.
They can do their work
openly or in private.
And, in this way, the
groups on the Commons
can support both the
work of MLA committees
and of the divisions and
discussion groups that already
exist within the
Association, but also
of ad hoc groups of scholars
who can come together
around particular
kinds of projects.
This, in particular,
I think, is going
to help us facilitate
a transformation
of the Association into a much
more fluid structure, as groups
will be able to sort of
form, reform, and fade away,
as needed.
Blogs at MLA Commons
are open outlets
on which individual members
or groups of members
are able to share their
work and communicate
with a range of broader publics.
And the site provides a bunch
of other ways for members
to connect and communicate
with one another, as well.
So we're hoping, and
beginning to see after a year
now that it's actually
coming to fruition,
that there's going to be lots
of unfiltered, open content that
gets produced
through the network.
But we're also thinking about
the future of the Commons
as a formal publication
platform as well.
And so we've developed
a set of workflows
that are enabling
groups to implement
whatever kinds of
editorial filtering
they wish to engage in.
If, for instance, they want
to create a meta-blog of sorts
that highlights and
aggregates the best stuff
that's going on in their
sub-field for their members.
In this line we've
also reduced--
released a couple of
formal publications.
First, what we're thinking of as
an evolving anthology, Literary
Studies in the Digital Age,
which, unlike an edited print
volume, we're going to be able
to allow to grow and change
over time.
And, again, we're hoping that
our divisions and discussion
groups begin to serve a
sort of editorial function,
that they take on the
responsibility for doing
that filtering for their
members of the work that's
going on here.
And this might be,
we hope, the seeds
of the kind of
post-publication peer review
system for this openly
published work that
gets posted through
MLA Commons, giving
the authors of this
new kind of work
the recognition
that they require.
Through new modes of
publications such as this,
we're explicitly thinking
about how MLA Commons might
be a way that scholarly
societies can help further
the goals of open access, really
furthering the value that they
provide to their members by
helping them get their work out
to the world, where it can have
the greatest possible benefit
and produce the greatest
possible interest
in the research that's being
done in the humanities.
But given my continued belief
that the primary problem that
really needs to be solved in
scholarly communication today
is less a technical
problem than a social one,
we still have a number of
key challenges ahead of us.
Most particularly,
I think, we need
to keep our focus on
how we can continue
to create buy in amongst
the membership for using
the platform.
We've had to a certain
degree of success.
We've got about
12% of the members
of the MLA in the system now.
And getting 12% of the members
of the MLA to do anything
is a success.
But, nonetheless, other
scholarly societies
have attempted to
roll out platforms
for member communication,
only to discover
that if you build it, they
will not necessarily come.
Users face profile fatigue.
And those that are
most likely to adopt
these new modes
of communication,
in fact, often already
have their needs met
by their own existing channels.
So we're trying to
think of MLA Commons
as part of an extended
experiment, one that will allow
us to gather information about
what our members do and don't
need, and how we might
encourage them to create
exciting new forms of content
by demonstrating for them what
the platform can do and
by pushing at its edges.
So we're talking
a lot about how we
can get members to come
build the kind of community
that I found in my
early blogging days.
And my sense is really
that the platform
will come of age at the moment
when somebody does something
in the network that we
utterly did not expect.
In the end, I think
it's that space
of possibility, the
space for the unexpected,
of open exchange of genuine
communication that I think
might be the key to the
future of the humanities.
We hope over the
course of the next year
to continue expanding
that space of possibility.
As I mentioned,
we're in conversation
with other scholarly
societies about developing
a federated,
interdisciplinary humanities
commons that would allow for
exchange across society lines.
And I think that
this, in the end,
really is the key
to the humanities
in and for the digital
age, is recognizing
that at the root
of everything we
do as scholars of
the humanities,
that route has always
less been about producing
certain kinds of objects than
it has been about a broader
sense of the processes
of communication,
working with our
colleagues in ways
that facilitate the
development of new knowledge
across our fields.
Even more, even when they've
been produced and consumed
in relative
isolation, these forms
of communication that
we have engaged in
have always been
fundamentally social,
connecting scholars in a wide
variety of relationships.
As our means of communication
become increasingly
technologized, we
have a tendency
to assume that we
face a set of problems
with technological solutions.
But I would argue that
the challenges that
face the humanities today
have, as they have always had,
overwhelmingly social solutions.
And it's my hope that,
working together,
scholars, librarians,
technologists, publishers,
societies, and administrators
can all collectively
do something that none
of us can do alone,
which is to build a dynamic,
engaging, sustainable
humanities that is genuinely
of and for the digital age.
So thank you again
for having me here.
[APPLAUSE]
- So one of your comments is a
perfect lead-in to opening up
of questions, because you at
one point in your talk said that
technology was really terrific
for facilitating communication.
Isn't this room a different
form of technology?
It's also terrific
for facilitating
face-to-face communication since
you came to be with us today.
KATHLEEN FITZPATRICK:
Absolutely.
AUDIENCE: Thank you so
much for coming here.
KATHLEEN FITZPATRICK:
Oh, my pleasure.
AUDIENCE: You have taken us
literally from the beginning
to where we are today
in about an hour,
as you worked your way
through all of this.
And I invite my colleagues
to pummel you with questions
for a few minutes.
KATHLEEN FITZPATRICK: Excellent.
Bring on the pummelling.
[? Mary ?].
AUDIENCE: You have, as always,
a cascade of fascinating ideas.
And a particular bravo for
what you're doing at the MLA.
KATHLEEN FITZPATRICK: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: I think a lot
about what the sciences have
done as social communities.
Because I think you're entirely
right that the issue is more
social than technological-- of
such things as working in labs
with groups of people;
such things as putting out
pre-publication stuff
to a lot of colleagues--
KATHLEEN FITZPATRICK: Mm-hmm.
AUDIENCE: --and getting comments
before things are published.
I think about the public
library of science,
which is a terrific
endeavor, that
also has lots of good grant
money to make it work.
KATHLEEN FITZPATRICK: Indeed.
AUDIENCE: And what I'm
wondering is, what we
can learn in the
humanities about what's
worked in the sciences--
KATHLEEN FITZPATRICK: Mm-hmm.
AUDIENCE: --to do the
sorts of things that
have been so successful there?
So I think about the
fact that many of us
who publish, whether it's going
to be an article, whether it's
going to be a
book, intentionally
send our stuff out to
colleagues, including those
we know disagree with us--
KATHLEEN FITZPATRICK: Mm-hmm.
AUDIENCE: --so that we will hear
it first from friends, rather
than from reviewers or--
like you send something
in for publication, or when
something has already come out.
KATHLEEN FITZPATRICK: Right.
AUDIENCE: So you've
already gotten that news.
Thus, we already have something
that [? belongs ?] for those
of us who largely
work independently,
of getting a community formed--
KATHLEEN FITZPATRICK: Mm-hmm.
AUDIENCE: --before
something is published.
Technology, obviously, will
make that an easier thing to do.
KATHLEEN FITZPATRICK: Mm-hmm.
AUDIENCE: So my
question is, is there
a way of not exactly
cloning, but building
upon what we do as
individuals anyway,
and what the sciences
have done for years--
KATHLEEN FITZPATRICK: Yes.
AUDIENCE: --in
transforming [INAUDIBLE]?
KATHLEEN FITZPATRICK:
Absolutely.
I think there are
a number of things
that we can learn
from the sciences
and that we can build
on our own practices,
make sure that our own
values in communication
remain at the center of
what it is that we're doing.
Thinking about the writing group
idea that you were discussing.
You send your work out to a
select number of colleagues
to get response.
One of the things that we're
hoping develops on MLA Commons
is exactly that kind of
exchange among defined clusters
of scholars who are
working with one another
for whatever reason.
The group structure
in MLA Commons
has a number of
different variations.
As I mentioned,
there are open groups
that anybody can join that
do all their work in public.
There are private groups where
you have to request membership
and the work is not visible
to anyone who is not a member.
In addition to that,
there's a third kind
that's the hidden group
that functions just
like a private group,
except it doesn't
appear in any of the
lists of all the groups
that are out there.
And so it's literally
by invitation only.
And we're hoping that scholars
will use that hidden group
functionality to take the
writing groups that they
already have in place
online, and to develop
more fluid ways of exchanging
their material with one
another.
But thinking about the
sciences and the ways
that they've handled this.
So ArXiv-- with an X--
the preprint server
that was originally
founded at Los Alamos
as a way for high
energy physicists
to get their preprint into
distribution with one another
more quickly.
There, it was all
about speed, right?
Because the publishing process
took too long and there
was always anxiety on
the parts of the scholars
that somebody else was
going to be able to publish
the discovery first.
So if you can get your
preprint out there and get it
date-stamped, you
can lay claim to--
We don't have quite
those anxieties
about speed in that same way.
But nonetheless, the ability to
get that work out to colleagues
more quickly facilitated a
kind of support for the work
and a kind of
interest in the work
that what was self-sustaining
in a way, that produced more
enthusiasm and more energy.
And in certain fields now-- the
folks who post things on ArXiv
go on to publish them in
traditional peer-reviewed
journals.
But there are fields in
which ArXiv has become
the publication of record.
And that is now the
version that you cite.
So it's an informal network.
It grew by itself.
It requires a lot of
energy, and on the part
of Cornell, a lot of investment
now in order to keep it going.
But it's a really
vibrant community
that I think we
in the humanities
can learn a lot from.
The other thing from the
sciences that I would really
love for us to learn
from a bit more
is the lab-based
structure as a way
of bringing early-career
scholars into the profession
and working in a
collaborative form
from a very early
phase of one's career.
What happens with us in
the humanities right now,
you come in, and in your
freshman comp class,
you're asked to exchange papers
and work collaboratively,
and then that all stops
at a certain point
and you're sort of sent off
into your own library carrel
and we work alone after that.
If we could keep that
mode of collaboration,
of working with one another, in
the entire educational process,
rather than sort of ending
it and sending people off
to do independent
projects, I think
we might see a different
mode of working together
in later career phases.
There's a very
interesting program
for this kind-- or model
for this kind of work
in the humanities that's in
place in Germany right now.
The DFG, the sort of German
funding body for higher
education, has way
more money than the NEH
does by an order of magnitude.
But they fund what they refer
to with the unfortunate term
clusters of excellence.
But these are basically
clusters of faculty
at a range of career
stages, and Ph.D. students,
who come together around
a particular topic
and propose that topic
as if it were going to be
a lab for x number of years.
So I got to see one of
these groups function.
At the University
of Goettingen there
was a cluster on
popular seriality.
And there were five
faculty members
who were working on
things from comic books
to television serials to all of
the different ways in which we
publish and communicate
in serial form
in contemporary American
culture, who then advertised
for post-docs and
Ph.D. studentships.
And the Ph.D. students came into
that research cluster knowing,
at the outset, that this
was the work that they
were going to be doing.
It was very much the
lab model, in which
the faculty set the agenda
for what happened in the lab.
And the Ph.D. students
were working in that lab,
but toward, eventually, their
own independent projects
and their Ph.Ds.
And it would be really exciting
to think about how a model like
that might function in
Ph.D.-granting institutions
in the U.S. In the humanities.
What would it be for
a cluster of faculty
to come together around
an idea and say, now
we're going to take on
five graduate students who
want to work on this with us.
So something else to learn
from the sciences, I think.
Sorry.
That was a long-winded answer.
I hope I haven't pummelled
questions out of you.
Yes.
AUDIENCE: When we write
those traditional articles,
it's always collaborative
in the sense
that we've got to imagine a real
or virtual audience in mind.
We're always
wondering, what will
he or she think of
what I'm writing.
In a way, there's nothing really
new about collaboration review.
KATHLEEN FITZPATRICK:
Absolutely.
And that's one of the
things that I really
do hope to get
across is that what
might sound like radical changes
when I first present them are
really not all that radical.
They're sort of facilitating
the values that we already
have in our work,
that we've always
been in dialogue with the
work that's gone before us.
We might just be able to have
that conversation a little more
literally as a conversation
now, without the sort
of stretch of years between.
On the other hand, this
doesn't mean at all
that everything has to happen
with the speed of conversation,
right?
There's still a value in
taking time to ponder an idea
and to think through
it carefully,
and then to return
to that conversation.
And I think that one of
the benefits of the digital
is that it can facilitate
both the sort of greater
immediacy of conversation
with one's peers
and also the ability to return
to a conversation later on,
and to sort of revive a
conversation in later days.
So yes, I think absolutely.
This is not as
different from the ways
that we have worked as
it may at first seem.
Yes.
AUDIENCE: Would you
comment a little bit more
on the filter function?
KATHLEEN FITZPATRICK: Mm-hmm.
AUDIENCE: We talk
about the new scarcity
being time and attention.
KATHLEEN FITZPATRICK: Mm-hmm
AUDIENCE: And one of the
incredible challenges
is just to know
what to look at--
KATHLEEN FITZPATRICK: Right.
AUDIENCE: --and how to use your
time on a day-to-day basis.
Could you just
elaborate [INAUDIBLE].
KATHLEEN FITZPATRICK:
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
I think that that problem
of time and attention
is less new that it may seem
to us already, right now.
I mean, it feels like
this constant barrage.
And yet, if you look back at
C.P. Snow's two cultures essay;
if you look at Vannevar Bush's
As We May Think; both of them
were already dealing with
the question of information
overflow and how it is we
can possibly figure out
what's important to us when
there's just too much material
out there.
But I think what
the digital provides
for us is a means of rethinking
the nature of imprimatur,
basically.
The thing that lets us
know that something is
worth our time and attention.
Conventionally, in
traditional publishing,
this happens when an article
comes out from a journal
and we trust the journal.
Or a manuscript comes out from
a press and we trust the press.
The seal on the spine
of the book that
says that it's out
from this press
lets us know that it's part
of a line of other books
that are in a field that
we have been interested in,
and so probably this one
will be important, too.
And, also, an editor and
a couple of peer reviewers
have determined that
this is worth our time.
Similarly, a journal article.
We know who the editors are,
who the editorial board is.
We trust them on some level to
make those judgments for us.
As we move to the
filter function
from that gate-keeping
function, the point
of establishment
of that imprimatur
shifts from the
moment of publication.
Because anybody, as we
know, can publish anything
on the internet.
It can come from anywhere.
We've don't have that same
marker of trust in the venue
that we've had in the past.
What we have, instead,
is an imprimatur
that arises from the
moment of reception,
from the moment of community.
The vast majority of
stuff that I actually
bother to take the
time to read online
anymore is stuff that somebody
I know has recommended to me,
whether it came to me via
Twitter or, god forbid,
Facebook, or wherever.
Someone on the internet
said to me, hey, Kathleen,
I think you ought to read this.
And for whatever reason, I trust
their judgment on this issue.
And so it's a similar
form of placing my trust
in someone else's judgment.
It's just that that judgment is
coming at reception instead of
at publication.
And so I think the
filtering function
is very much like the
early days of blogging.
Blogging comes out of guys with
a lot of time on their hands
who spend a lot of time on the
internet finding neat things
and writing little blurbs
about those neat things
for an audience that
was following them.
And, I think, more
and more, we're
going to need that
in a scholarly sense.
We're going to need somebody
who is a 19th century
Americanist, who is
constantly paying attention
to what's going on in the field,
and who is gathering together
links and bringing them to
the attention of other people
who are following
them, and saying,
oh, these are the interesting
things that are happening.
And that those
links-- I was linked
by this very important blogger
in the field of 19th century
American studies-- is
going to be something
that we can point to as one
of those markers of impact
going forward.
I hope that helps.
So, in the back,
you were-- yeah.
AUDIENCE: I have about
three questions that I'll
try to ask you all at once.
The first is about the anonymous
quality of peer review,
as most of it is
conducted today--
KATHLEEN FITZPATRICK: Mm-hmm.
AUDIENCE: --and the
value of having that.
I reviewed four or five articles
for a peer-reviewed journal
last year.
KATHLEEN FITZPATRICK: Mm-hmm.
AUDIENCE: And when someone's
work is obviously not
being used from the
standard of determining
new knowledge to
the field, it was
possible to tell
them very kindly,
and to share some suggestions
about how they might move
their product, knowing
that I wouldn't come face
to face with them at this
conference. [INAUDIBLE].
KATHLEEN FITZPATRICK: Mm-hmm.
AUDIENCE: I'm interested
in what happens with that.
Secondly, it seems
to me that while we
like to think of the academy
and the scholarly community
as a very humane and kindly--
KATHLEEN FITZPATRICK: Mm-hmm.
AUDIENCE: --group of people.
It's going to be increasingly
possible to manipulate
responses, just asking
your friends to up, say
the sheer number of
comments on an article.
So I'm interested in that issue.
KATHLEEN FITZPATRICK: Mm-hmm.
AUDIENCE: As much as I like
the direction we're going--
KATHLEEN FITZPATRICK: Mm-hmm.
AUDIENCE: --I'm
interested in solving some
of the problems [INAUDIBLE].
KATHLEEN FITZPATRICK:
Absolutely.
AUDIENCE: And then
the third question
is around expectations
for undergraduates,
both more sophisticated, say
seniors writing a thesis, who
are less sophisticated.
KATHLEEN FITZPATRICK: Mm-hmm.
AUDIENCE: And taking literature
and the MLA as an example.
We make progress
when we get them
to use the MLA bibliography--
KATHLEEN FITZPATRICK: Mm-hmm.
AUDIENCE: --or the database.
Now there is, and has been for a
long time, but increasingly so,
these commons where the latest,
most important conversations,
in some cases, are taking place.
And what expectations can we
have for undergraduate research
in that kind of environment?
KATHLEEN FITZPATRICK:
Hoo boy, big question.
OK, so I'm going to
take those in order.
And I'll attempt to be brief.
On anonymity, I do want
to say that I still
believe that there is a time
and a place for anonymity,
particularly in
situations in which there
is a hierarchical difference
between the reviewer
and the reviewee, where someone
at an early career stage
is being asked to review the
work of someone much senior.
I think there is
a time and a place
for that kind of protection
of the identity of the person
who is raising
critical problems.
So I will say that up front.
I'm now going to
completely undercut that
by saying that I also
believe that there
are a vast number of
abuses of anonymity
that have taken
place traditionally
through the peer-review process.
And there's part of me that
really wants to ask us,
particularly those of us who
are in safe positions, who
aren't under threat,
whether because
of the dangerous
nature of our work
or because of the hierarchical
inequity within which we're
working, to sort of be brave
enough to take responsibility
for the things that we
are saying to one another;
to find a way to conduct that
critical review as we would
face to face; to disagree,
and to not have to have
a happy consensus; but
to do so in a way that
encourages development of
ideas in a positive fashion.
I don't want to be overly
utopian about this.
I have seen radical failures
of civility in recent days
on the internet.
And so I recognize that
this is a serious issue,
and that anonymity
has its purposes.
But I also think it can
be really dangerous.
And so, thinking
about ways that we
can balance these
things; thinking
about how we can create
enough trust with one another
to be willing to sign
our critical reviews;
and yet to know that we're
protected when we need to be;
is going to be a key
problem to solve.
And I do not claim
to have an answer.
Similarly, on gaming the system.
Every system can be games.
If you develop a
new system, somebody
is going to figure
out how to game it.
The one difference, I think, in
these open processes for gaming
the system is that the
gaming also becomes visible.
Right now-- I was in my first
or second year at Pomona,
and I had just gotten back from
a very top-tier, well-respected
journal in my field,
a rejected article.
And I'm standing in the
mailroom somewhat dejectedly,
and a colleague of mine,
a senior colleague,
came in and said,
what's the matter.
And I said, oh, I just got
another article rejected
by name of journal here.
And he looked at me
and said, why on earth
would you even submit
your stuff there.
You didn't go to the
University of Chicago.
And I thought, wait, what?
And I went and looked,
and lo, but, it
was a real University
of Chicago organ.
You know, those people
had sort of spread out
throughout their profession.
They all had ties back there.
And I thought, who knew?
Online, at least,
those kinds of in-group
focuses and ways of
saying, you know,
interestingly, it's only all
his friends that are commenting
on this piece become visible.
And so, at least we
have a way of sort
of being critical
of the process,
in addition to of
the object itself.
Finally, expanding-- oh, gosh--
demands on undergraduates.
This is an enormous question.
And I have no earthly idea.
I think it's increasingly
important for us
to focus on making sure
that our undergraduates are
as information-literate
as possible,
which is to say that
they recognize where
the stuff they're
reading is coming from,
and not just what it is.
But we need to help
them in that process
by creating these new modes
of authorizing information
and of suggesting that these are
the things that undergraduates
ought to be paying attention to.
You mentioned the MLA
international bibliography.
The bibliography is now indexing
scholarly web resources.
I hope that we'll be able to
expand that over the coming
year, so that more and more of
the kinds of information that's
being published
openly on the internet
is also findable through
trusted scholarly sources.
AUDIENCE: I'm going to
stop this for just a moment
and very formally thank
Kathleen for coming today--
KATHLEEN FITZPATRICK: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: --and engaging
in this conversation.
And to hope that you will have
more conversation with her
over lunch, as well.
KATHLEEN FITZPATRICK: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Thank you so much.
KATHLEEN FITZPATRICK: Thank you.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
