It’s been an eventful couple of months. A travelful couple of months, even. If you were able to see my Google Calendar, you’d see a whole lot of teal striping on it; that’s my travel calendar, which reminds me that since the beginning of May, I’ve been in

• New York for three days, for an MLA committee meeting;
• Hanover, NH, for just slightly over a day (with about a day of traveling on either side), for a workshop on the digital humanities;
• the greater Washington DC area for five days, first for THATCamp and then for a journal startup meeting (culminating in what appeared to be a genuinely nasty bout of food poisoning or viral ick);
• Istanbul for five days (with a day-plus of traveling on each end), for a workshop on electronic textuality;
• followed immediately by three days in Salt Lake City for the AAUP (presses, not professors);
• followed immediately by the ADE West meeting. This one is sort of cheating, as it was in Claremont and so only involved walking, but I did give a talk and lead a breakout session, so I’m counting it;
• and now the last five days in New York, apartment hunting for the sabbatical I’ll be spending here starting next month.

But wait! There’s more!

• I’m taking off from New York today, headed to London for DH2010;
• after which I’ll come back to New York for two days, which I partly booked as an apartment-hunting failsafe, but also partly because it made no sense to go all the way back to the west coast for two days, when immediately after I’m headed to
• Charlottesville, for SCI8

After which I get to go back to Claremont and spend three weeks figuring out what to send to New York for this sabbatical, how it’s getting there, how I’m getting there, and etc.

And I have the feeling that once arrive at the lovely walk-up I’ll be renting and climb those three flights of stairs with my most crucial belongings, I may not ever want to climb back down.

As the 2009-10 president of Pomona College’s Phi Beta Kappa chapter, I was supposed to deliver the address at our commencement weekend initiation ceremony. I accidentally double-booked myself, though, by agreeing to speak at a one-day conference at Dartmouth; somehow, I’d forgotten than the initiation ceremony was Friday evening, rather than Saturday evening. Needless to say, I felt awful when I suddenly realized what I’d done — and of course the realization came in the middle of the night, waking me up from a dead sleep.

Anyhow, this is how I managed to get myself out of this goof: the first such presidential address delivered via video. Fortunately, the topic I’d planned worked well with the mediation. And now I get to share it with you.

(Incidentally, the bad audio sync is semi-intentional; when I realized that the sound and image were off just a fraction, I figured hey, the YouTube aesthetic seems appropriate here.)

What follows is a rough transcript of the talk I gave this past weekend at the annual meeting of the Association of American University Presses. The panel was organized and chaired by Eric Zinner, Assistant Director and Editor-In-Chief at New York University Press, and the presentations before mine were by Monica McCormick, Program Officer for Digital Scholarly Publishing at New York University Press, and Shana Kimball, Co-Director of the Scholarly Publishing Office at University of Michigan Libraries. Their presentations had focused on library-press collaborations, and Monica in particular had mentioned the difficulty she had with hearing press representatives refer to what they do (in contrast to what libraries do) as “real” publishing, pointing out the equal realness of library-based publishing initiatives. I began by connecting my remarks to that comment, saying that authors themselves are producing a number of online publishing ventures that are similarly real, and that need to be treated as such if they’re going to be adequately understood.

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I come to the question about digital publishing that we’re discussing today from the perspective of an author, rather than a publisher, which is to say that your mileage as editors and publishers will no doubt vary. But I want to begin by being clear we are in the age of DIY publishing, even in scholarly circles. More and more journals are being founded in platforms like Open Journal Systems, which allow their scholarly editors to do the work they have done all along, while making the results of that work freely and openly available to the scholarly community and the broader world beyond. And more and more scholars are developing online presences via platforms like blogs that allow them to reach and interact with an audience more quickly, more openly, and more directly, without the intermediary of the press. Read the rest of this entry »

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!

My friend Liz Losh has let me know that this Friday UC Irvine is hosting a conference to celebrate the addition of Richard Rorty’s papers to the Critical Theory Archive. These “papers” include years worth of word-processing files, recovered from 3.5″ floppy disks, and so the conference is taking the opportunity to think through the changing nature of the archive as its materials become increasingly digital in addition to Rorty’s own significance for that archive.

Sadly, I can’t attend — I’m not only booked that day, but in fact double-booked — so I hope to follow the conference on Twitter and in the blogosphere, and hope that those discussions continue to add to the archive itself.

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.

Finding myself yesterday felled by some nasty bug or another, I wound up spending the day in bed. And I can now say with certainty that the iPad is the best device yet invented for the lying-around-sick day.

I had a range of video options available to me, both TV series I’ve imported via iTunes and streaming video from the ABC Player, and I spent a while listening to music via the iPod app, but mostly (and contrary to some people’s expectations), I read.

I read the second half of a book I’d started in the iBooks app, and I read all of a book I downloaded in the Kindle app. (Okay, they were really light reading. But still!) Both were utterly pleasant to read, and the backlit screen did not bother me at all. In fact, when I was quite unceremoniously awakened at 1 am by the onset of this bug, and once I’d processed that I wasn’t dying but nor was I going back to sleep, either, I picked up the iPad and read for a while with the light off. It was wonderfully reminiscent of reading in bed with a flashlight as a kid, but way more convenient.

Both applications function well. And as I pointed out last week, both have a nice range of markup tools built in, though the Kindle’s annotation capability is more advanced than that of iBooks. And Kindle’s definitely got selection (and, by and large, price) on its side. But I still feel as I did on my initial encounter with the two apps — the iBooks landscape orientation, which presents two facing pages of text, is vastly preferable to Kindle’s, which presents one very wide column. And this matters a great deal when you’re reading in bed, as the landscape orientation presents a lower center of gravity, and thus a more stable means of holding the iPad, than does portrait.

In any case, I read up a storm, I listened to some music I hadn’t heard in a while, and I kept mostly on top of my email, or at least the most important things that landed in my inbox. And I discovered that on-screen typing, at least in the landscape position, becomes much easier very very quickly. (Though I’m annoyed beyond belief that the apostrophe key is on the numbers-and-punctuation screen of the keyboard. Most contractions typed without an apostrophe will auto-correct, but of course possessives won’t.) And web-browsing on the iPad — well, I wouldn’t exactly call it “magical,” but it’s awfully nifty.

Anyhow, I’m happy to be back up and around, and sitting at the desktop again, but a day of putting the iPad through its paces has me pretty convinced of its place in my device ecosystem.

The recent flurry of posting around here — not to mention actual progress on my revisions — has meant that I’ve got a couple of things I’ve let slide, one of which is now officially several weeks overdue. Guilt has gotten the better of me, so I’m off to finish it. I’ll be back as soon as my conscience is assuaged.

I’m finishing up the revisions on chapter 2 today, and have been thinking about the section “from text to… something more.” I’ve expanded my thinking about multimodal scholarship a bit, including the addition of these paragraphs:

Resistance to allowing scholarly production to take non-textual form runs deeply in many fields, and particularly in those that have long reinforced the divide between criticism (art history, literature, media studies) and practice (studio art, creative writing, media production). But one of the explicit goals of many media studies programs over the last ten years has been finding a way within the curriculum to bridge the theory-practice divide: to give our production students a rigorously critical standpoint from which to understand what they’re doing when they’re making media; to give our critical studies students a hands-on understanding of how the forms about which they’re writing come into being. And yet it remains only the rare scholar who brings criticism and production together in his or her own work – and for no small reason: faculty hired as conventional scholars are only rarely given credit toward promotion for production work; faculty hired to teach production are not always taken seriously as scholars. In fields such as media studies, we are being forced to recognize, one tenure case at a time, that the means of conducting scholarship is changing, and that the boundary between the “critical” and the “creative” is arbitrary, if it exists at all. My colleague Alex Juhasz, for instance, has written critically about YouTube but has also done a tremendous amount of work on YouTube, work that is inseparable from the critical analysis. Eric Faden, in a slightly different vein, is a film scholar working almost exclusively in the form of the video essay. In the coming years, more and more scholars in fields across the humanities will be taking up such unorthodox means of producing scholarship, in order to make arguments in forms other than the textual. Other scholars, including Tim Anderson and Tom Porcello, are working on audio in audio form, and in digital media studies, the list of scholars both writing about and producing interactive work includes Ian Bogost, Mary Flanagan, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, and too many others to name here.

Numerous possibilities exist for these future argument forms across the humanities: exciting historical work is already being done in digital form, through the production of interactive archives and exhibits; visual anthropology has long used documentary film production in ways that other scholars in the field might adopt. Scholarly analysis, in other words, can take the form of video, producing a visual response to a cultural object or phenomenon; it might take the form of audio, layering sound in order to focus our attention on that which we ordinarily miss in the world around us; it might take the form of an interactive game, in which we encounter an interpretation of a scenario in the rules that govern it. It’s not too much of a stretch, after all, to argue that if authorship practices have changed, the very nature of writing itself has changed as well – not just our practices, but the result of those practices.

What other examples of specific scholars or more general scholarly methods might I include here? I need to keep this section fairly tight, but I don’t want to overlook anything that would make the point that much more clear.