1. Being a Scholar Now:
Digital, Public Scholarship in a
Legacy-Bound Academy
Jessie Daniels, PhD
Data, Social Justice and Humanities Conference
University of Michigan
October 3, 2014
4. ”Disciplinary and
subdisciplinary
specialization, and the
emphasis on internal
academic communication,
peaked in the late twentieth
century. North American
social science is
increasingly oriented
outward and focused on
pressing public problems. "
~ Craig Calhoun 2010
50. Thank you!
If you’d like to continue the
Twitter: @JessieNYC
conversation:
Editor's Notes
Simply put, the shift from analog to digital is about code.... coding information into binary code of 1’s and 0’s.
When this happens, information - data - is easier to move around, edit, analyze.
Image from here: https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/D83AI8LmcuyqyfnvS6qk1Q
Please feel empowered to live Tweet if you’re so inclined.... I might suggest these hashtags for our conversation today.
One of the luminaries in my discipline of sociology, says that specialization has ‘peaked’…and that now we are moving toward a more outward focus on pressing public problems. I tend to agree, and part of this is fueled by the transition from “legacy” to “digital” modes of scholarship.
Joe and I both conceptualize what we’re doing with the RR blog as a form of intellectual activism, the work of digitally-engaged scholar-activists.
For more on intellectual activism, see PHCollins’ latest book.
digital technologies are also changing activism.....
March to protest the unlawful, unjust arrest of six African American teens in Jena, Louisiana, referred to as the “Jena 6.” The marches of thousands of people were organized largely online in 2006-07).
And, Occupy Wall Street which sociologists tend to lionize as a ‘real’ social movement....would not have been possible at the scale at which it took off w/out organizing via Internet.
image from: http://images.mnn.com/sites/default/files/occupy_wall_street.jpg
And, Occupy Wall Street which sociologists tend to lionize as a ‘real’ social movement....would not have been possible at the scale at which it took off w/out organizing via Internet.
image from: http://images.mnn.com/sites/default/files/occupy_wall_street.jpg
digital technologies also changing what it means to be a scholar-activist....
Back in…
Blogs were on the rise, as the latest big thing….and they were heralded as a technology that made possible the “citizen journalist” + there was a lot of talk about the ‘little people rising up’ through blogs.
2004 was also the year that “blog” was picked as word of the year. Remember that, because I’m going to come back to it at the very end….
Joe R. Feagin and I began discussing establishing a scholarly blog in about 2004-2005.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4059291.stm
Joe R. Feagin and I began discussing establishing a scholarly blog in about 2004-2005. We finally did it in spring, 2007.
Early screenshot fromRacism Review, 2007.
http://www.racismreview.com/blog/2007/04/08/imus-gendered-racism/
The backend... which, if we were going to approach advertisers, is what we would show people.
This is what a “new post” looks like in the back-end of WordPress... mostly identical across blogs on this platform.
The key here is that blue button on the right.... “Publish”
The big numbers.
The smaller numbers, which in many ways, I’m more pleased about.
Open access also means new approaches to knowledge production… as I discuss in this piece about how I took a tweet from a conference, transformed it into a blog post, then a series of posts, and then into a peer-reviewed article.
At the LSE Impact Blog: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/09/25/how-to-be-a-scholar-daniels/
Key takeaway:
To address a whole host of pressing public problems, we must begin to reimagine scholarly communication for the public good in the digital era.
If academics can find a way to be digitally engaged and more fluent in the digital lexicon of the 21st century in which we find ourselves,
then, there is hope I believe for academics to be a force for the public good -- that is, an engaged citizenry & a more democratic and EQUAL society.
If, instead, academic disciplines chooses to remain invested in a dying legacy system of higher ed – I’m afraid that we will fade into irrelevancy and heightened systems of inequality. And, that will be too bad, not just for academics, but for the wider public sphere and current society which faces a host of problems that scholars could help address.
The reimagined future of scholarly communication is up to all of us.
In academia, as elsewhere, we’re faced with competing forces of commercialization vs. democratization (as Robert Darnton, DPLA noted in a recent talk at the GC).
The political economy of austerity - up to and including slashes in funding to public institutions of higher ed, the adjunctification of the academic workforce, and the attacks on funding such as the Coburn amendment - point to this broad conflict between forces of commercialization and forces of democratization.
I think that we, as academics, sometimes conflate the “commerce v. democracy “ struggle with the transformation from “legacy” to “digital” forms of scholarly communication.
Given this context, what are academics to do to resist the forces of commercialization?
It might be useful to think about the way scholarship is changing in the digital era - as a shift from 20th c. models of creating “knowledge products” - to 21st century model of creating “knowledge streams.” With products - you count their impact once - with “knowledge streams” – you can also count various aspects of distribution - such as number of downloads, unique visitors to your blog, number of Twitter followers - which can have a much wider impact.
Using digital tools, such as TimelineJS – to illustrate a visual chronology of the struggle against stop-and-frisk…this series, and the next two that we have planned, are really meant to show case how scholarly communication is changing, and this one in particular, is an example of how the possibilities for being a scholar-activist are really expanded in new ways because of the affordances of digital technologies.
Including interviews with journalists… like Jamilah King, of Colorlines, and Prof. Eli Silverman… CUNY professor who testified at the Floyd v. City of New York trial…, and Chino Harden, who has been on the front lines of youth activism against stop-and-frisk.
In academia, as elsewhere, we’re faced with competing forces of commercialization vs. democratization (as Robert Darnton, DPLA noted in a recent talk at the GC).
The political economy of austerity - up to and including slashes in funding to public institutions of higher ed, the adjunctification of the academic workforce, and the attacks on funding such as the Coburn amendment - point to this broad conflict between forces of commercialization and forces of democratization.
I think that we, as academics, sometimes conflate the “commerce v. democracy “ struggle with the transformation from “legacy” to “digital” forms of scholarly communication.
Given this context, what are academics to do to resist the forces of commercialization?
“Reading the Riots” is an excellent case-in-point …. of an academic-journalism partnership…to understand the riots of summer 2011, though not a clear activist connection.
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/dec/05/reading-the-riots-methodology-explained
I want to draw a parallel... use language that they use in journalism to describe the kinds of changes they are dealing with...and apply it to academia. In journalism, they talk of “legacy” news organizations -- such as The Philadelphia Inquirer (now defunct) ~ which was based on print publication and newsstand purchase or home delivery option for economic viabililty. “Legacy” journalism.
We have our own “legacy” model of academia with distinct characteristics...
There are many lessons that we can take from the transformations in journalism.... from “legacy” to “born digital” news organizations.
I highly recommend C.W. Anderson’s new book, Rebuilding the News, as a kind of harbinger for some of what lay ahead for higher ed in the digital era.
When I asked Anderson recently if he saw any parallels between journalism and higher ed, he said, “how could I not? They are everywhere.”
(Describe...then) I would argue that this is mostly going away, but in piecemeal fashion.
What did this look like?
This was the only option for publishing.
NYPL
Image from here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eyefruit/792178/
We typed words & paragraphs on paper.
Image from here: http://www.toledoblade.com/Opinion/2006/08/15/As-changes-in-technology-speed-up-what-will-workplace-of-2056-be-like.html
That technology had some problems.
Image from here: http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6237/6209984672_61af9b2c7f.jpg
This was “cut and paste.”
Image from here: http://cms.colum.edu/demo/Backstory-1983.jpg
This is where we would go to find & read information.
NYPL Rose Reading Room
Image from here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikebeuselinck/122394082/
Lovely, but mostly gone now.
Card Catalog
Image from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/prettydaisies/869135605/
Periodicals room - mostly off limits.
Image from here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/iamthebestartist/6861258876/
Social Sciences Citation Index tracks the number of times a particular work by an individual author is cited by others in the peer-reviewed literature.
People would take rulers, literally, to measure a scholar’s entry in the SSCI. Please write your own Freudian joke here...
There is definitely change coming in higher ed / academia ~ it’s a great time if you can be fluid, learn new things, adapt.
I predict it may be less fun for you if this you are attached to old ways of doing things.
Image from here: http://pandodaily.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/change-ahead.jpg?w=584&h=438
There has been an expansion of digital technologies. For some, this has been ‘transformative’ because it is so different than the analog.
For others who were “born digital” these are simply the way things are.
Whichever group you fall into, these digital technologies have already begun transforming scholarly communication.
Simply put, the shift from analog to digital is about code.... coding information into binary code of 1’s and 0’s.
When this happens, information - data - is easier to move around, edit, analyze.
Image from here: https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/D83AI8LmcuyqyfnvS6qk1Q
Digital technologies + the open web are also changing academic publishing….
There is a lot wrong with academic publishing.... and lots of people are seeing that now. What’s wrong with it?
http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/31858/title/Opinion--Academic-Publishing-Is-Broken-/
Academics stash their research in places, like JSTOR, that most people can’t get to it. This of course, harkens back to the point Burawoy raises – about the public’s patience with funding ivory tower research that is locked in databases the public can’t access – and whether the public’s ‘patience’ with this system is at an end.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/01/locked-in-the-ivory-tower-why-jstor-imprisons-academic-research/251649/
Some even argue it’s immoral...
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2013/jan/17/open-access-publishing-science-paywall-immoral
Academic scholarship is being transformed in the digital era. In contrast to the 20th c. legacy model, the emerging, 21st c. model of academic scholarship is digital, open, connected to the public sphere, worldly.
This has profound implications for our understanding of public sociology.
However, this is not a complete transition from a “legacy” past that is behind us, and a “digital” present or future.
The legacy and the digital are imbricated and overlap in the here and now.
Thanks & let's continue the conversation online.
