Historians, Academic Publishers, and the Ongoing Digital Publishing (R)evolution

But does it have a Reading Room?

During the last two weeks, two major national events exploring the frontiers of e-publishing took place on opposite coasts of the U.S.  On October 21, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) held its first Plenary Meeting at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. And on October 26-28, the Books in Browsers conference took place at the headquarters of the Internet Archive in San Francisco.

The DPLA event was built around the six winners of the DPLA's beta sprint competition to identify "ideas, models, prototypes, technical tools, user interfaces, etc. . . that demonstrate how the DPLA might index and provide access to a wide range of broadly distributed content."* The DPLA also announced a $5 million grant from the Sloan Foundation and the Arcadia Fund to promote "an intense two-year grassroots process to build a realistic and detailed workplan for a national digital library, the development of a functional technical prototype, and targeted content digitization efforts." Jill Cousins, of Europeana, the European Union's digital library project, announced a partnership with DPLA focused on coordination between European and US libraries, museums and archives. The agenda of the plenary meeting can be found here. A video of the entire event, as well as a variety of reports about it and documents from it, are available here.  The speakers at the event were, not surprisingly given the origins and scope of the DPLA process, largely from the worlds of libraries, archives (analog and digital), and academia.

The Books in Browsers conference, in contrast, was much less academic and much more geared toward the digital publishing industry.  A complete agenda can be found here. The common participant in both events was the Internet Archive itself, represented at both events by its founder, Brewster Kahle. Notably absent, at least from the agenda, were academic publishers.

What is--and what should be--the relationship of historians to these events...and to the greater digital publishing revolution in the midst of which we find ourselves?



A number of those presenting at the DPLA plenary meeting are historians--or at least history-affiliated scholars: Peter Baldwin, Professor of History at UCLA; Bob Darnton, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the Harvard University Library; and Amanda French, THATCamp (The Humanities and Technology Camp) Coordinator at the Center for History and New Media.

But most historians and other academic humanists have not been much involved in these conversations about the future of digital publishing.  And academic presses--the institutions on which we largely depend for the dissemination of our work--seem to be even further removed from these developments.**

In my experience, historians and other academics in humanities disciplines tend to be rather conservative when it comes to considering structural changes in the conditions of our research or our employment. There are good reasons for this. For at least the last quarter century, most of the pressure for change has come from economic and political forces which are at best indifferent to our interests and often quite hostile to them.  But the changes that might be brought about by digital publishing might potentially be to our enormous benefit.  

Historians are, of course, very dependent on publishing.  It is a central means for circulating our work.  It is also among the most important ways that we credential ourselves professionally. And for many of us, especially in intellectual history, it also provides us with much of our data. More than scholars in any other field, historians focus on the production of books. And it is books--especially academic books--that have been put most at risk by the changing economics of the publishing industry.

Finding a publisher for an academic book has become more and more difficult...though we in U.S. history haven't seen the worst effects of the cutbacks in university press lists (talk to someone in, e.g., German or Russian Studies!).  And as the conditions of employment in the academy worsen, the imperative to publish or perish if anything grows.

The digital publishing revolution does present some dangers. To the extent that the traditional book is threatened with extinction, we ought to be defending it.  There are still things that it offers that other reading technologies don't.

But the upsides of the digital publishing revolution are potentially greater.  We are living in a moment in which the forms of academic communication--which have in the past usually changed fairly slowly and organically--seem open to experimentation and rapid innovation.  Digital technologies offer new means of disseminating work (traditionally conceived) that solve some of the economic problems associated with traditional publishing.  And they also offer the possibilities of entirely new kinds of academic work (including, of course, blogs).

The perceived crisis in traditional academic publishing--as well as the creativity that has begun to emerge in these new forms--has also led more and more departmental and university review committees to treat non-traditional forms--and non-traditionally disseminated forms--of academic work seriously.  Our central technology of quality control--peer review--cuts across the digital divide; it can be used to bolster any of these new forms.

But it is essential that historians and other humanities scholars involve ourselves more actively in the process of creating this new world of digital publishing.  There are, of course, far bigger players in this game, most of whom are at best unaware of our professional needs.  If, when the dust settles, we are stuck with digital forms that do not suit us--or face a market dominated by a few huge corporate players who have no interest in our distributional needs--we may find that these changes don't serve our purposes at all.

As the first Publications Chair of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History, I find myself having to think about these issues very concretely. In the past, a new professional organization like ours would have been faced with one big question: do we publish a journal?  Now, instead, we are faced with a more exciting, open-ended, and complicated one: what does our publication program look like? 

I would love to answer that question in ways that will put S-USIH on the cutting edge of academic publishing (taking into account our very small scale, of course).  As an organization that started as blog, we perhaps have the right pedigree to do this. But I need to further educate myself about what others are doing and what we might conceivably take on. Blogs, after all, are so 1999.

Along with a number of other S-USIH bloggers, I look forward to participating, this coming January, in THATCamp AHA.*** And Tim Lacy and I are still on the lookout for anyone interested in becoming the third member of S-USIH's Publications Committee (prospective members need to join S-USIH, of course).  Those with a knowledge of, or interest in, the changing world of digital publishing are very much encouraged to offer their services to the PubComm (though I should add that we have not by any means ruled out trying to start a journal). 

But I hope that even those who are not tempted to sign up for the S-USIH PubComm will educate themselves about the changes--good and bad for historians--taking place in the world of digital publishing. I'm convinced that we can make those changes better for us than they'd otherwise be...and quite possibly create a publishing landscape that is a marked improvement over the one we have faced in recent years, both in the quality and availability of scholarship and in the opportunities it offers us for professional advancement. 
______________________________

* This blog has discussed DPLA a number of times in the past.  The most recent video update (dated September 14) from DPLA chair John Palfrey can be viewed here.  The forty final submissions to the beta spring can be seen here.

** Among the several dozen Co-Chairs and Conveners of the six "workstreams" that will define the shape of the DPLA project going forward, only one comes from a university press:  Margeurite Avery, Senior Acquisitions Editor in Science, Technology, & Society (STS), Communications, Library and Information Science, Internet Studies, and Information Policy at MIT Press.

*** Those unfamiliar with the THATCamp concept are encouraged to listen to this episode of the Making History podcast, featuring THATCamp coordinator Amanda French.

X-post: Michael Kramer Forwards "Five Hypotheses for Digital History"

Here's the original post, put up for Michael Kramer's course at Northwestern University titled "Digitizing Folk Music History: The Berkeley Folk Festival." Below are his five hypotheses.

-------------------------------------------------------------
This is an initial attempt, quickly written and subject to revision, at five hypotheses for digital history:

1) Digital history will ultimately be about far more than just the application of computational power to archival materials. While materials will be increasingly treated as data, analyzable on unimaginable scales quantitatively, this will not be enough to constitute a rewarding historical subfield. Qualitative analysis of an original and convincing sort will be needed to link digitally-produced findings to existing historiographic debates and discussions and offer new insights.

2) The move to the screen and future modes of receiving history will demand far greater attention to design, display, narrative, and storytelling than existing historical writing. This is both exciting and daunting. It asks historians to continue to imagine themselves as writers, but also to think of themselves as curators. It demands far more cooperative work on presentation of history. It will require us to push past formulaic article and monograph writing and think much more carefully about the range of narrative possibilities for relating interpretations of the past to others. The way history “looks” will change dramatically.

3) Digital interactivity poses new possibilities and demands for historians. The relationship between interactivity and interpretation, which many historians think about considerably in the classroom, now has a role to play in the scholarly presentation of findings online. Indeed, findings themselves may need to be far more contingent, and even may be produced through the design of interactive tools that allow visitors to manipulate materials. Existing definitions of the authorship of history itself come into question here as historians increasingly have the capacity to create not final texts, but rather environments for collective historical inquiry of materials and fellow (whether compatible or competing) interpretations.

4) As with the digital generally, digital history raises issues of copyright and intellectual property. Not just in terms of the question of authorship mentioned in hypothesis number three, but also in terms of the use of materials in the public realm for historical inquiry. How will we publish, share, and allow others to interact with materials without fundamentally altering existing copyright practices? What do we owe copyright holders as historians and what do copyright holders owe the public when it comes to historical inquiry?

5) Digital history is at once a continuation of long-running historical traditions and a break with certain practices and assumptions. As historians, we have the opportunity to consider digital history through our classic dual lens of change *and* continuity. The field is not a fundamental break with past modes and technologies of history-making, but it is something new, worth exploring even if it bangs up at times against professional and institutional constraints.

X-post: Michael Kramer Forwards "Five Hypotheses for Digital History"

Here's the original post, put up for Michael Kramer's course at Northwestern University titled "Digitizing Folk Music History: The Berkeley Folk Festival." Below are his five hypotheses.

-------------------------------------------------------------
This is an initial attempt, quickly written and subject to revision, at five hypotheses for digital history:

1) Digital history will ultimately be about far more than just the application of computational power to archival materials. While materials will be increasingly treated as data, analyzable on unimaginable scales quantitatively, this will not be enough to constitute a rewarding historical subfield. Qualitative analysis of an original and convincing sort will be needed to link digitally-produced findings to existing historiographic debates and discussions and offer new insights.

2) The move to the screen and future modes of receiving history will demand far greater attention to design, display, narrative, and storytelling than existing historical writing. This is both exciting and daunting. It asks historians to continue to imagine themselves as writers, but also to think of themselves as curators. It demands far more cooperative work on presentation of history. It will require us to push past formulaic article and monograph writing and think much more carefully about the range of narrative possibilities for relating interpretations of the past to others. The way history “looks” will change dramatically.

3) Digital interactivity poses new possibilities and demands for historians. The relationship between interactivity and interpretation, which many historians think about considerably in the classroom, now has a role to play in the scholarly presentation of findings online. Indeed, findings themselves may need to be far more contingent, and even may be produced through the design of interactive tools that allow visitors to manipulate materials. Existing definitions of the authorship of history itself come into question here as historians increasingly have the capacity to create not final texts, but rather environments for collective historical inquiry of materials and fellow (whether compatible or competing) interpretations.

4) As with the digital generally, digital history raises issues of copyright and intellectual property. Not just in terms of the question of authorship mentioned in hypothesis number three, but also in terms of the use of materials in the public realm for historical inquiry. How will we publish, share, and allow others to interact with materials without fundamentally altering existing copyright practices? What do we owe copyright holders as historians and what do copyright holders owe the public when it comes to historical inquiry?

5) Digital history is at once a continuation of long-running historical traditions and a break with certain practices and assumptions. As historians, we have the opportunity to consider digital history through our classic dual lens of change *and* continuity. The field is not a fundamental break with past modes and technologies of history-making, but it is something new, worth exploring even if it bangs up at times against professional and institutional constraints.

FYI: Digital Public Library Of America

Randall Stephens, Editor of Historically Speaking and Chair of the History Department at Eastern Nazarene College, interviewed Robert Darnton, History Professor and director of the Harvard University Library, on creating a "Digital Public Library of America." Excerpts are at the link to the Historical Society's blog, but a video in two parts provides the entire interview. Check it out! - TL

FYI: Digital Public Library Of America

Randall Stephens, Editor of Historically Speaking and Chair of the History Department at Eastern Nazarene College, interviewed Robert Darnton, History Professor and director of the Harvard University Library, on creating a "Digital Public Library of America." Excerpts are at the link to the Historical Society's blog, but a video in two parts provides the entire interview. Check it out! - TL

Tim's Light Reading (12/2/2010)

[Updated: 9:05 am, 12/2]

1 (of 5). Piss Christ Redux: Ignorance of History as Anti-Intellectualism

Some of our Culture Wars history appears to be repeating itself---though in a weird, reverse chronological order. In a move reminiscent of debates over Serrano's 1989 Piss Christ, protests by Bill Donohue of The Catholic League, with support from new House Speaker John Boehner, caused part of an exhibit to be pulled at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery a few days ago.

The purportedly offensive art, constructed in 1987 by David Wojnarowicz (right, since deceased) and titled Fire in the Belly (video link requires age verification), involves---among other graphic images---a scene where ants crawl over a crucifix. Fire in the Belly was part of an ongoing exhibit titled "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture." Donohue designated the video "hate speech" (although I'm unclear whether he found all or just parts objectionable). Here's the press release where the Gallery explains its action.

At what point in the arts does censorship become anti-intellectualism? What's the relationship? It seems clear to me that anti-intellectualism is necessary but not sufficient for censorship. As such, other factors can be involved (social norms, moral outrage, etc.). Even so, in this case I'm inclined to think it's a very important, if not primary, necessary condition. I assert this in line with commentary given two days ago by Blake Gopnik in Washington Post. Gopnik summarized the historically-uninformed nature of Donohue's opposition:

The irony is that Wojnarowicz's reading of his piece puts it smack in the middle of the great tradition of using images of Christ to speak about the suffering of all mankind. There is a long, respectable history of showing hideously grisly images of Jesus - 17th-century sculptures in the National Gallery's recent show of Spanish sacred art could not have been more gory or distressing - and Wojnarowicz's video is nothing more than a relatively tepid reworking of that imagery, in modern terms.

In my view, this kind of historical ignorance is simply another form of anti-intellectualism (i.e the unreasonable strain). The rest of Gopnik's commentary is pretty interesting, historically speaking, as well.

2. The Recent History of Publishing in the Academy

Scott McLemee at InsideHigherEd considers changes in the quality and quantity of academic scholarship over the past forty or so years. He opens by referencing a recent fall 2010 issue of The Journal of Electronic Publishing (JEP), but jukes to a consider the 2010 book, The State of Scholarly Publishing: Challenges and Opportunities (edited by Albert N. Greco). The book contains an essay William W. Savage, Jr. that constitutes the heart and soul of McLemee's piece. Here's the quote around which McLemee built his article:

In a passage that may seem literally incredible to younger scholars today, [Savage, Jr.] cites a piece of advice by one professor in the early 1970s – an epoch when “faculty who worried about publishing too much, thereby alienating colleagues and damaging their own careers” still wandered the earth. To be safe, this scholar suggested publishing “an article a year and a book every five years.” That would be enough to satisfy the administration, “but not so much as to threaten [your] colleagues unduly.”

Contrast that with the agenda laid out here (which considers publishing and teaching together).

3. Zombies in the Academy

Continuing a theme I started here last year, I offer this CFP for a book project (unrelated to my post) that seeks to "take up the momentum provided by the resurgence of interest in zombie culture to examine the relevance of the zombie trope to discussions of scholarly practice itself. We propose to canvas a range of critical accounts of the contemporary university as an atavistic culture of the undead." I am very much tempted to send a proposal. It sounds like fun, yes? The proposal due date is Dec. 15, 2010.

Btw-1: Here's a blog hosted by the Zombies in the Academy folks.
Btw-2: Yes, this is a real CFP. Andrew Whelan, a sociologist, does indeed exist at the University of Wollongong in Australia.]

4. Chinese Logic

Since learning of Mortimer Adler's (faulty? simplistic? sensible?) arguments, in Truth in Religion (1992), for the irreconcilability of Eastern and Western philosophy (primarily in chapters two and three), I have been passively interested in the history of logic. This recent blog post by Catarina Dutilh Novaes (right) at New APPS indulges my latent questions about this subject. In the post Novaes lays out questions and issues she plans to study on "the roots of deduction" during a five-year project. The central question seems to be "why the axiomatic-deductive method emerged in ancient Greece but not in ancient China"?

5. An Excellent Quote on the Internet, Reading, and Indexing

For the December 2006 edition of Prose Studies, Paul Tankard of the University of Otago (Dunedin, New Zealand), wrote the following about 'indexes'---in the context of writing about lists as both literary devices and as signs of certain truths (bolds mine):

In saving the reader the trouble of actually reading, of experiencing in real time the full discursive being of a text, indexes contribute to the "death of the author." We see this in that huge electronic index which threatens to consume all text, the Internet, where sounds, images, and "grabs" or "bites" of text circulate independently of any author, where searching the indexes is not restricted by the covers of individual books, and where texts flow in and out of each other. However, this is not a new thing. Alphabetically organized anthologies...have always been popular --- although perhaps like printed indexes, they are not so much meant to undermine reading as re-reading. (p. 351)

And yes, I am acutely aware of the irony of my quoting this text in this format. - TL

Tim's Light Reading (12/2/2010)

[Updated: 9:05 am, 12/2]

1 (of 5). Piss Christ Redux: Ignorance of History as Anti-Intellectualism

Some of our Culture Wars history appears to be repeating itself---though in a weird, reverse chronological order. In a move reminiscent of debates over Serrano's 1989 Piss Christ, protests by Bill Donohue of The Catholic League, with support from new House Speaker John Boehner, caused part of an exhibit to be pulled at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery a few days ago.

The purportedly offensive art, constructed in 1987 by David Wojnarowicz (right, since deceased) and titled Fire in the Belly (video link requires age verification), involves---among other graphic images---a scene where ants crawl over a crucifix. Fire in the Belly was part of an ongoing exhibit titled "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture." Donohue designated the video "hate speech" (although I'm unclear whether he found all or just parts objectionable). Here's the press release where the Gallery explains its action.

At what point in the arts does censorship become anti-intellectualism? What's the relationship? It seems clear to me that anti-intellectualism is necessary but not sufficient for censorship. As such, other factors can be involved (social norms, moral outrage, etc.). Even so, in this case I'm inclined to think it's a very important, if not primary, necessary condition. I assert this in line with commentary given two days ago by Blake Gopnik in Washington Post. Gopnik summarized the historically-uninformed nature of Donohue's opposition:

The irony is that Wojnarowicz's reading of his piece puts it smack in the middle of the great tradition of using images of Christ to speak about the suffering of all mankind. There is a long, respectable history of showing hideously grisly images of Jesus - 17th-century sculptures in the National Gallery's recent show of Spanish sacred art could not have been more gory or distressing - and Wojnarowicz's video is nothing more than a relatively tepid reworking of that imagery, in modern terms.

In my view, this kind of historical ignorance is simply another form of anti-intellectualism (i.e the unreasonable strain). The rest of Gopnik's commentary is pretty interesting, historically speaking, as well.

2. The Recent History of Publishing in the Academy

Scott McLemee at InsideHigherEd considers changes in the quality and quantity of academic scholarship over the past forty or so years. He opens by referencing a recent fall 2010 issue of The Journal of Electronic Publishing (JEP), but jukes to a consider the 2010 book, The State of Scholarly Publishing: Challenges and Opportunities (edited by Albert N. Greco). The book contains an essay William W. Savage, Jr. that constitutes the heart and soul of McLemee's piece. Here's the quote around which McLemee built his article:

In a passage that may seem literally incredible to younger scholars today, [Savage, Jr.] cites a piece of advice by one professor in the early 1970s – an epoch when “faculty who worried about publishing too much, thereby alienating colleagues and damaging their own careers” still wandered the earth. To be safe, this scholar suggested publishing “an article a year and a book every five years.” That would be enough to satisfy the administration, “but not so much as to threaten [your] colleagues unduly.”

Contrast that with the agenda laid out here (which considers publishing and teaching together).

3. Zombies in the Academy

Continuing a theme I started here last year, I offer this CFP for a book project (unrelated to my post) that seeks to "take up the momentum provided by the resurgence of interest in zombie culture to examine the relevance of the zombie trope to discussions of scholarly practice itself. We propose to canvas a range of critical accounts of the contemporary university as an atavistic culture of the undead." I am very much tempted to send a proposal. It sounds like fun, yes? The proposal due date is Dec. 15, 2010.

Btw-1: Here's a blog hosted by the Zombies in the Academy folks.
Btw-2: Yes, this is a real CFP. Andrew Whelan, a sociologist, does indeed exist at the University of Wollongong in Australia.]

4. Chinese Logic

Since learning of Mortimer Adler's (faulty? simplistic? sensible?) arguments, in Truth in Religion (1992), for the irreconcilability of Eastern and Western philosophy (primarily in chapters two and three), I have been passively interested in the history of logic. This recent blog post by Catarina Dutilh Novaes (right) at New APPS indulges my latent questions about this subject. In the post Novaes lays out questions and issues she plans to study on "the roots of deduction" during a five-year project. The central question seems to be "why the axiomatic-deductive method emerged in ancient Greece but not in ancient China"?

5. An Excellent Quote on the Internet, Reading, and Indexing

For the December 2006 edition of Prose Studies, Paul Tankard of the University of Otago (Dunedin, New Zealand), wrote the following about 'indexes'---in the context of writing about lists as both literary devices and as signs of certain truths (bolds mine):

In saving the reader the trouble of actually reading, of experiencing in real time the full discursive being of a text, indexes contribute to the "death of the author." We see this in that huge electronic index which threatens to consume all text, the Internet, where sounds, images, and "grabs" or "bites" of text circulate independently of any author, where searching the indexes is not restricted by the covers of individual books, and where texts flow in and out of each other. However, this is not a new thing. Alphabetically organized anthologies...have always been popular --- although perhaps like printed indexes, they are not so much meant to undermine reading as re-reading. (p. 351)

And yes, I am acutely aware of the irony of my quoting this text in this format. - TL