In the category of things that I used to post to the blog that now land on Twitter instead: the link. In an effort to maintain a better archive for myself, I’m experimenting with moving these things back here again.

Today, Chris Kelty’s post on Savage Minds, “How Not to Run a University Press (or How Sausage Is Made)”. In this post, Kelty thinks through the reported demise — or, more accurately, the institutional doing-in — of Rice University Press. Among the issues he raises, perhaps the most significant is the university’s refusal to understand that publishing requires actual labor and financial support:

If you judge the experiment in digital publishing on these facts, it’s sure to look like a failure, but the failure is not in the vision or ideas articulated by the press, but a simple failure to maintain good business judgement. It speaks volumes about how university administrators and many others (including many academics) see academic publishing: as something where no labor is required, only a great big print-a-book machine, a warehouse and some stamped envelopes.

This assessment resonates strongly for me, as in chapter 5 of Planned Obsolescence I focus on the role of publishing within the university, and the university’s responsibilities with respect to publishing. My fear is that universities will take on this responsibility without committing resources to it, assuming (as Rice appears to have done) that because the new mode of publishing is digital, it must be cheap.

The fact is that while the costs involved in publishing can be reduced in some areas, the costs of labor cannot — and, if anything, digital publishing requires more, and more kinds of labor.

This is perhaps not the moment at which institutions want to hear that they have to make additional investments in something that feels optional, but they really need to hear this:

• If you expect your faculty to publish, you must provide the means for them to do so.
• If you expect scholarly publishing to turn a profit, or even break even, you may want to stop holding your breath.
• If you allow commercial entities to take over scholarly publishing, because they can afford to do so, you must expect their predatory, monopolistic practices to encroach on the access you have to your own faculty’s work, and to diminish the impact that their work can have both inside and outside the academy.

There is no solution to this conundrum except for institutions to recognize that they must become responsible for supporting scholarly communication, and that this support will require treating the technologies and the labor involved in publishing as part of the institution’s infrastructure.

My “five years ago today” feature reminds me that the aforementioned time has spanned since the uproar over Ivan Tribble’s infamous screed hit the Chron (now available at a new URL). There are certainly many more academic bloggers than there were in 2005, and there are even some whose blogs are taken seriously as the key venues in which they’re publishing their work. But I’m curious about the degree to which attitudes about blogs have changed — both whether they have, and why. Is it only the rise of social networking systems that privilege immediacy (c.f. Facebook, Twitter) that have lent the relative leisureliness of blogs a kind of seriousness? Is it that we’re using blogs differently, now that we’ve got other outlets for the top-of-the-head thoughts that used to land in venues like this one?

There’s a fascinating exchange around open access publishing and the reasons scholars might resist it developing right now, beginning with Dan Cohen’s post, Open Access Publishing and Scholarly Values, which he wrote for the Hacking the Academy volume, a crowd-sourced book he and Tom Scheinfeldt are editing (to be published by the University of Michigan Press’s Digital Culture Books). Dan argues for the ethical — as well as the practical — imperative for contemporary scholars to publish their work in openly distributed forms and venues.

Stephen Ramsay then published a response, Open Access Publishing and Scholarly Values (continued), in which he points out that the ways we substitute what we now understand as “peer review” for real evaluation and judgment by our peers, particularly at the stage of tenure and promotion reviews, so overwhelms this ethical/practical imperative that we never even really get to the stage of deciding whether publishing openly could be a good thing or not.

I’ve left a comment on that response, which got lengthy enough that I thought I’d reproduce and expand upon it here. Steve writes, in the latter paragraphs on his post,

The idea of recording “impact” (page hits, links, etc.) is often ridiculed as a “popularity contest,” but it’s not at all clear to me how such a system would be inferior to the one we have. In fact, it would almost certainly be a more honest system (you’ll notice that “good publisher” is very often tied to the social class represented by the sponsoring institution).

My response to this passage begins with a big “amen.” At many institutions, in fact, the criteria for assessing a scholar’s research for tenure and promotion includes some statement about that scholar’s “impact” on the field at a national or international level, and we treat the peer-review process as though it can give us information about such impact. But the fact of an article or a monograph’s having been published by a reputable journal/press that employed the mechanisms of peer review as we currently know it — this can only ever give us binary information, and binary information based on an extraordinarily small sample size. Why should the two-to-three readers selected by a journal/press, plus that entity’s editor/editorial board, be the arbiter of the authority of scholarly work — particularly in the digital, when we have so many more complex means of assessing the effect of/response to scholarly work via network analysis?

I don’t mean to suggest that going quantitative is anything like the answer to our current problems with assessment in promotion and tenure reviews — our colleagues in the sciences would no doubt present us with all kinds of cautions about relying too exclusively on metrics like citation indexes and impact factor — but given that we in the digital humanities excel at both uncovering the networked relationships among texts and at interpreting and articulating what those relationships mean, couldn’t we bring those skills to bear on creating a more productive form of post-publication review that serves to richly and carefully describe the ongoing impact that a scholar’s work is having, regardless of the venue and type of its publication? If so, some of the roadblocks to a broader acceptance of open access publication might be broken down, or at least rendered break-down-able.

There seem to me two key imperatives in the implementation of such a system, however, which get at the personnel review issues that Steve is pointing to — one of them is that senior, tenured scholars have got to lead the way not just in demanding the development and acceptance of such a system but in making use of it, in committing ourselves to publishing openly because we can, worrying about the “authority” or the prestige of such publishing models later. And second, we have got to present compelling arguments to our colleagues about why these models must be taken seriously — not just once, but over and over again, making sure that we’ve got the backs of the more junior scholars who are similarly trying to do this work.

It comes back to the kinds of ethical obligation that both Dan and Steve are writing about — but for the reasons Steve articulates, the obligation can’t stop with publishing in open access venues, but must extend to working to develop and establish the validity of new means of assessment appropriate to those venues.

As I’ve mentioned around here a few times, I’ve been in the midst of a review this spring, and now that the results are official, I can finally say out loud and in public that, as of July 1, I’ll be a full professor.

Needless to say, I’m happy with the outcome, but a little dazed by it, too. I’m not sure where the last twelve years have gone, exactly, but they seem to have gone well. (I’m hoping against hope that the next twelve will go more slowly, but I’m not exactly holding my breath on that one.)

Anyhow, I’ve got a lot of thoughts stemming from the review, and I’ll hope to sort out that jumble and be able to write about some of what I’ve learned soon.

In the meantime, yay!

As I’ve mentioned around here before, I’m in the midst of a promotion review, and am in the anxious waiting phase: everything I can do is done, things are taking place behind the scenes, and I’m trying not to think about it. I was having a conversation with a couple of friends last night, and one asked, “are you nervous?” And I immediately said no. Oh, no. Well, not really. Not very. Maybe a little. Honestly, I’m not sure. I don’t think so.

I’m also in the middle of scoring a bunch of applications for a Thing in My Field. We have a five-point scoring scale. This will shortly become relevant.

So I go home after that conversation last night, and go to bed a little too late, and then wake up at 4 am — literally, 4 am — with my heart pounding, having launched myself out of a most disturbing dream:

I was sitting in some faculty meeting in an enormous 70s-style science auditorium, with the seats with the curved wooden backs and extremely raked seating. There’s no one sitting to either side of me for several seats, and no one in the row behind me. Until a full professor whom I like a lot but haven’t had much contact with lately (but who came up in conversation in a whole other context a few days ago) sat down in the row behind me, several seats to my right. And said:

“Hello, Kathleen. You know we’ve been discussing your case.”

At which I thought, hey, that’s great, I forgot she’d be involved, she’ll be supportive of me, awesome! But she leaned slightly toward me and added:

“You know anything two or lower is not a passing score.”

I was too stunned to respond — and couldn’t have, anyhow, as a disembodied voice somewhere to the left of me immediately chimed in:

“For her, anything ten or lower is not a passing score!”

And then I woke up, heart pounding. Thinking, well, okay, I guess I am a little nervous about it after all.

I had a hard time going back to sleep afterward, perhaps needless to say. The vast majority of the review thus far has been extremely positive, but there’s one smallish bit of it that was, well, not. And my assumption was that the disembodied speaker to my left was a representative of that not, determined to ensure that there was no room on the scale for me to pass this review.

But a conversation I had with someone this morning leads me to believe that the disembodied voice (which came from slightly behind me, as I was facing right when it spoke on my left) may have actually been me. My unconscious, at least. Not being afraid I wouldn’t pass the review so much as not being satisfied with merely passing, needing somehow to blow the top off of the scale, to make that last little holdout bit of this process see my awesomeness, too. That I won’t be happy unless, as dooce might say, I am named the valedictorian of promotion reviews.

There are only a few weeks left. I really don’t know how it’s all going to turn out, but I’ll know soon enough. In the meantime, I’m going back to scoring those applications, and to believing I’m not nervous. And to finding a way to be happy with passing, if I do, wherever on the scale I may fall.

There’s been a lot of discussion in various internet settings over the last week, some of it pretty contentious, about the definition of the Digital Humanities and its relationship to digital media studies. (See, for instance, the debate started by Ian Bogost’s post, as well as that provoked by Dave Parry’s first and second takes on the issue.) Some of this debate arose, I think, from a sense of annoyance among folks who’ve been working in DH for years that suddenly, now, with the rise of social media and the visibility of those working in and on those forms, a bunch of attention is being paid to something called “digital humanities” — but the thing going by that name isn’t quite the same thing that it’s been for the past few decades, and the thing that DH has been is now being overlooked (or worse, dismissed) in favor of this new interest in digital media.

As someone who works in digital media, but feels a profound connection to the idea that I have of the digital humanities, I’ve found myself a little puzzled at moments, both by the debate and by the emotion behind it. I’ve intermittently had that sense of realizing, mid-argument, that you and the person with whom you’re arguing are using exactly the same words but are nonetheless speaking two different languages. And as Matt Kirschenbaum noted — correctly, I think — the fact that these battles over the definition of such terms are based in stereotypes indicates that they’re nearly always, and certainly in this case, institutional turf wars.

This is not at all to say that such battles don’t matter — in fact, for those embroiled in them, institutional turf wars often matter enormously. But what I’ve spent the last few days pondering is why — what the real stakes of such wars of definition are, and whether there’s a better way of thinking about the questions of institutional structure that underwrite them. The result is an awfully long and somewhat rambly blog post, safely tucked below the fold, in which I work through my thoughts on these questions.
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You go!

In the coming year, I’m going to be going up for a promotion review, and along with all the other attendant stress work, I need to develop a list of potential outside reviewers for my case. (I’m replacing “stress” with “work” here in no small part because this review has far lower stakes than the last; if it doesn’t go well, the worst that will happen is that my feelings will be hurt.)

Here’s the thing, though: for this particular review, all the outside reviewers have to be full professors. And while there are a fair number of full profs in media studies, broadly construed, most of them are in film studies on the one hand, or have come out of communication on the other — which is to say that either their object or their methods bear very little in common with mine.

So I need to develop a list of full professors who are working in digital media studies from a humanities-based critical/theoretical viewpoint, and I’ve decided to attempt to crowd-source this list, not least because I know that there are several folks out there not far behind me who will have need of this list in the not-too-distant future.

The more inclusive and extensive the list, the better, I think, so I’m including folks whose work literally grows out of media studies along with those whose work (like mine) has come to media studies from a more traditional humanities discipline. I’ll begin with a few that occur to me right off the bat:

Cathy Davidson, Duke University
N. Katherine Hayles, Duke University
Henry Jenkins, University of Southern California
Anne Balsamo, University of Southern California
Alan Liu, University of California, Santa Barbara
Anna Everett, University of California, Santa Barbara
Jeffrey Schnapp, Stanford University
Neil Fraistat, University of Maryland
Jerome McGann, University of Virginia
Johanna Drucker, University of Virginia

I know I’m missing some obvious names, and there are probably many less obvious ones as well. Who should be added to this list? Are there other ways to approach such a list that I’m not thinking of?

I’m standing in the airport, after the usual delirious experience of waking up at 3.30 am to be ready for my 4.30 am cab. The flight I’m about to board, as usual, will take me to Houston, but then from there, I’m on first to Amsterdam and then to Trondheim, Norway, where I’m serving as first opponent on a dissertation defense. Last night, I went back into Jill’s archives to remind myself of what this process is like; it sounds like it ought to be a fascinating experience.

And that’s aside from the fact that it’s taking place in Norway. Unfortunately, given the time and the distance, I won’t be able to pop in on folks I know there, but I hope to see a little bit of the place.

And to relax some. Given that I just wrapped the draft of the book up on Friday, this trip is pretty much what constitutes my summer vacation, and I intend to make the most of it. I have a tiny bit of work with me, but 80% of the reading I have with me is for nothing but fun.

More from the other side.

Cathy Davidson has an excellent post up at HASTAC thinking about the meaning of tenure and ways of imagining valid tenure standards for an increasingly interdisciplinary future. Along the way, she announces that HASTAC will be working with the MLA on reimagining tenure guidelines, and that they hope to work with other disciplinary organizations as well.

But the key moments of her post come after that announcement, as she ponders what the basis for tenure decisions ought to be:

The basic question is not have you published that book. The fundamental question is, based on one’s first six or seven years in the profession, is one likely to be a lifelong, energetic, idea-filled, responsible, creative, innovative contributor to the profession, even when the Damocles’ Sword of tenure is no longer swinging above.

And:

How in the world can a “floor” requirement ever predict future performance? That is, if you establish a quantitative measure, such as one book for tenure, two books for full professor, what in the world are you saying about future contributions? You achieve the measure and then you stop? Really? Is that the ideology of tenure?

The point of the tenure evaluation is supposed to be using a scholar’s past performance as a predictor of continuing performance — on some level, the existence of the first book is meant to stand in for all the future books that will follow. For too many scholars, though, the book requirement becomes a literal end in itself, a finish line that, once crossed, leaves the scholar without future direction or motivation.

So what if we were to say, forget the book, or whatever number of articles one were to set, and instead focus the standards for tenure on the demonstration of an active, ongoing research agenda? How many different forms might meet these new standards? What new kinds of scholarly engagement might we foster?