Slides from keynote presentation to Social Media Knowledge Exchange meeting on Scholarly Communication in the 21st Century, University of Cambridge, 4 June 2015. Examines my changing relationship to scholarly communication, current pressures and drivers, and likely future trends.

1. DOING THE DIGITAL:
HOW SCHOLARS LEARNED TO
STOP WORRYING AND TO LOVE
THE COMPUTER
Andrew Prescott, University of Glasgow
AHRC Digital Transformations Fellow
Social Media Knowledge Exchange,
University of Cambridge,
4 June 2015

2. The computer laboratory at Westfield College, University of London,
c. 1980. This laboratory was a pioneering centre of computing in the
humanities. There is a long-standing interest of many humanities
scholars in the use of computers, dating back to the 1940s
experiments of Roberto Busa with the text of Thomas Aquinas.

3. Uncertain engagements with the
computer
✤ Special issue of Journal of Higher Education, Feb. 1965
✤ Franklin J. Pegues: uncertainty but cautious optimism: much work in
humanities not susceptible to treatment by computers. ‘It will be a sad day
for the humanities if scholars seek to undertake only that work which can be
computer- oriented’. ‘The machine must serve to free the humanist from
time-consuming labor and enlarge his horizons for greater and more
important accomplishments. In short, the machine can help the scholar be a
better humanist’.
✤ Alan Markman: Many critics ‘fear an impersonal machine, or they do not
wish to alienate themselves, their feelings and intuitions, from even the
most arduous first labors of research. How do I know a thing is worth
counting unless I examine it, they ask, or what principle of selection could
possibly obtain where all items, regardless of worth, are bundled together in
one category?’

4. Uncertain engagements with the
computer
✤ Alan Markman: ‘one day we shall surely have the literature of the world stored, in a
machine format, on magnetic tape. And as we know now, once it is there, it will be
available for searching, for retrieval, for any manipulation whatsoever which an
intelligent, perhaps ingenious, program can effect’.
✤ ‘Our future scholar might not even have to leave his own office. It is conceivable that
such a bibliography could, in a matter of minutes, be projected on a television screen
right in his own comfortable office. As a matter of fact, the actual pages he might want to
read could probably be projected on the same screen. At least one of the consequences
of all this is dreadful. There will be no excuse for ignorance in the future, since
knowledge, for which there is no substitute, will be ready to everybody's hand’.
✤ Alan Markman: ‘In no way do I see the computer as a threat to literary scholarship or as
a machine to be feared because it might dehumanize research. Far from it, it is
humanistic in the best sense of the word. Man made the machine, and men will use it as
a tool. By itself it is nothing’.

5. Indictments taken by a commission in West Kent relating to
the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381: The National Archives, KB 9/43.

6. Trespass prosecution by
John of Gaunt relating to
the destruction of the
Savoy Palace during the
Peasants’ Revolt of 1381:
The National Archives,
CP 40/490, m.252

7. Recorda file from the Court of King’s Bench, containing copies of
charges and evidence for trials in that court, 1382-3

8. My typewritten thesis: now freely
available as a searchable pdf from
ethos.bl.uk, even though I never
published it

9. Not an approach to be recommended: I have published six books
as editor or author, but I have never published a conventional
academic monograph - how far is this a viable position in career
terms?

10. Experimental image of badly burnt fragment of Old English Life of
St Mary of Egypt in British Library, Cotton MS. Otho B x, f. 54v,
taken with a Roche Kontron digital camera under ultra-violet light in
1993. Transmitted by phone wire from the British Library in London
to the University of Kentucky.

12. Imaging of the Beowulf manuscript using fibre optic backlighting to
reveal letters and words concealed by nineteenth-century
conservation work

13. Two sets of eighteenth-
century transcripts of Beowulf
made for the Danish
antiquary Thorkelin, now in
the Royal Library
Copenhagen, compared with
the original manuscript

14. Restoration of the first World Wide Web page (1989) as
it would have appeared in a line-mode browser, the first
readily accessible software for the web:
http://info.cern.ch

15. Portico, the British Library’s first website, as it appeared
in April 1995: webarchive.org.uk

16. The simplest possible illustration of what can be done: Kevin Kiernan uses images of
the Beowulf manuscript to examine whether a proposed reading fits the space in the
manuscript: ‘The nathwylc Scribe and the nathwylc Text of Beowulf’ in Poetry, Place,
and Gender: Studies in Medieval Culture in Honor of Helen Damico, edited by
Catherine E. Karkov. Medieval Institute Publications (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan
University, 2009), pp. 98-131.

17. But too often the ‘digital revolution’ is limited
to expensively acquired pdfs of journal articles.
Convenient, but hardly reshaping scholarship.

18. ✤ Since about 2007, all UK university libraries have spent more on electronic resources
than books and printed journals
✤ All universities have research repositories which are important in research
assessment exercises
✤ 2009 survey of 426 humanities scholars: 83% enthusiasts or advocates for
digitisation; 98% consider digital collections useful; 76% consider new questions will
emerge from digital resources. Only 3% critics or sceptics (Meyer and Schroeder
2015, p. 148).
✤ More enthusiasm in humanities than in social sciences: in 2008 survey of 526 social
scientists, only 33% enthusiasts or advocates of digitisation; 60% considered digital
tools useful, and 59% considered that new questions will emerge from digital
resources (Meyer and Schroeder 2015, p. 148).
✤ A survey of four US Campuses (Brown, Columbia, Indiana, Wisconsin) by Ithaka S&R
in 2014 found that 45% of humanities faculty were engaged in the creation of digital
sources, most intended for public use
✤ Much of focus in Ithaca S&R survey on source collections and editions of different
types, but social media activity significant

19. REF 2014 outputs by type: although REF welcomes outputs in virtually any form,
the overwhelming preponderance of journal articles and books is evident:
28628 books or chapters; 157021 articles; 757 physical artefacts; 1746 exhibitions
and performances; 1684 other documents; 761 digital artefacts
However, almost all the non book and article outputs in REF 2014 came
from Panel D, which covered most of the arts and humanities. Panel D
returned 731 physical artefacts; 1707 exhibitions and performances; 674
digital artefacts
Nevertheless, the REF confirms the dominance of books and peer-reviewed
articles as the gold standard for scholarly output (19527 books; 15339
journal articles for Panel D), and young scholars will be under pressure to
produce conventional forms of publication. Same pressures evident in
tenure reviews in North America

20. ✤ How did this happen?
✤ Development by libraries, followed by archives and museums, of online
catalogues and databases from 1960s onwards. As these were linked, they grew
into international resources.
✤ Major online cataloguing projects such as English Short Title Catalogue became
basis for microfilming projects which could easily be converted to digital resources
✤ Large-scale editing projects eg Hartlib Papers project, Old Bailey Proceedings,
supported by subject portals such as British History Online
✤ Use of e-mail lists by academic communities eg Humanist, ANSAX-NET, H-NET
✤ Increasing use of online journals through resources like J-Stor
✤ Rise of personal computer - Steve Jobs: ‘It's in Apple's DNA that technology alone
is not enough — it's technology married with liberal arts, married with the
humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing’.

21. ✤ But everything is far from rosy:
✤ There remain huge issues around funding and sustainability of digital
resources: difficult to get started with digital projects
✤ The development of digital resources frequently driven by commercial and
institutional imperatives of libraries and companies outside HE
✤ The institutional position of digital humanities units and staff working within
digital humanities remains unresolved
✤ There is big pressure for technically knowledgeable and oriented workers to fit
into a procrustean bed of publication patterns for promotion, REF and other
purposes
✤ Meyer and Schroeder (2015) describe how ’digital is a dirty word’. Humanities
scholars work with digital resources but give impression they have consulted
original sources
✤ Many resources (eg Google Books, NGram viewer) are used uncritically
✤ Use is conservative: no consensus as to how social media fit in

22. Drivers Behind New Forms of Scholarly
Communication in the Arts and Humanities
✤ Need to develop a critical digital humanities
✤ Increasing quantities of ‘born digital’ material: avoiding
the digitisation overhead
✤ The impact agenda
✤ Increasingly high costs of journal publication v. lower
entry barrier in social media
✤ And (above all?) new friendships and connections

23. A Critical Digital Humanities
✤ What selectivities are at work with Google Books and how does it affect
the way we use it as scholars? How can books disappear on the web?
✤ What difference does it make if Google changes it’s algorithms? We need
to understand the black boxes we are using.
✤ Huggett (2014): Data are not 'out there', waiting to be discovered; if
anything, data are waiting to be created. Information about the past is
situated, contingent, and incomplete; data are theory-laden, and
relationships are constantly changing depending on context.
✤ Dalton and Thatcher, Need for Critical Data Studies (Society and Space
2014): illustrate the ways in which data are never raw; expose the fallacy
that data can speak for themselves.

24. The Changing Nature of the Primary
Materials of Humanities Research
✤ The papers of the British prime minister William Ewart Gladstone
(1809-1898): approx. 160,000 documents in 762 volumes.
✤ Margaret Thatcher archive: 1 million documents in 3,000 boxes
occupying 300 metres of shelving
✤ Enron Corporation Corpus, acquired by Federal Energy Regulatory
Commission during enquiry into corporation’s collapse. Approx.
600,000 e-mails generated by 158 employees; about 423MB (zipped).
✤ Electronic records from the Executive Office of the President during
the second presidency of George W. Bush: 82 TB of data; 200+
million e-mail messages; 3+ million digital photographs; 30+ million
other electronic records

27. Thomson and Craighead, Flat Earth (2007)
http://animateprojects.org/films/by_date/2007/flat_earth

28. https://medium.com/genres-of-scholarly-knowledge-pro
duction/digitising-the-historical-record-8a6ff90e3fec

29. Presentation using the fourteen screens in Humlab, Umeå University,
December 2014

31. REF definition: ‘an effect on, change or benefit to the economy,
society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment
or quality of life, beyond academia’.
Assessment of impact accounted for 20% of funding in REF2014;
anticipated to be 25% in REF2020
Impact plans integral part of research grant applications for many
funding bodies

32. The impact agenda encourages new forms of co
-creation and working with communities which
can result in very imaginative research outputs

33. tangible-memories.com

34. ✤ Preoccupation of universities with impact will mean that they take an increasing
interest in how research is promoted and disseminated through social media
✤ But there isn’t any consensus on how we can most effectively use social media in
promoting our research: it tends to be ad hoc self-promotion and community building
✤ Blogs pose dilemmas: can generate big audiences quickly but:
- can we announce things too quickly?
- are blogs appropriate for extended argument (is something else like
Medium or McGuffin better?)
- Version control?
- The discussion in blogs can be very important but how do we capture and
use it?
✤ Use of Twitter increasingly essential to promote research, but does that restrict its
value in building a community?
✤ How do we structure and project a social media presence? Shawn Graham,
‘Mapping the Structure of the Archaeological Web’, Internet Archaeology, 39 has
useful comments on projecting web presence: intarch.ac.uk
✤ Role of research portals like Researchgate: researchgate.net. These are starting to
influence hiring and firing
✤ And where do we fit new media in, like Periscope? Or Slack?

35. Ruth Ewan, The Liberties of the Savoy (2012)

36. www.bookworks.org.uk

37. Liberties of the Savoy video: https://vimeo.com/54517074