Digital Ways of Knowing, Neoliberal Logics
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What does it mean to be a scholar in the digital era within the context of neoliberal institutions? In this presentation, Jessie Daniels explains some of the implications.
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Digital Ways of Knowing, Neoliberal Logics
- 1. Jessie Daniels, PhD Hunter College and The Graduate Center, CUNY ESS | Digital Sociology Mini-Conference 19 March 2016 “Being a Scholar Now: Digital Ways of Knowing, Neoliberal Logics”
- 4. expansion of digital technologies
- 5. what is ‘digital’ & why does it matter?
- 19. how we produce knowledge is changing
- 22. 2004
- 28. Unique Visitors (each month): ~ 200,000 Total Visitors (since 2007): 2.7 million
- 29. Individual Blog Posts: 1,790 Comments from readers: 10,563 Subscribers: 10,268 Authors: 150
- 31. how we measure success is changing
- 32. Open Access Increases Impact
- 34. sociopolitical context of academia
- 45. View of Faculty • “mobs in cyberspace” • “holy warriors”
- 46. Scholar-Activism within the Academy “What we are left with is the question of how a traditional university can be governed in an age of the vast but unaccountable Internet Empires like Twitter and Facebook.” ~ (DeMillo, 2015 p. 261)
- 47. pre-21st century, analog, closed, removed from the public sphere, monastic “legacy scholarship”
- 49. 21st century, digital, open, connected to the public sphere, worldly “digital scholarship”
- 50. digitallegacy
- 57. Scholar-Activism within the Academy
- 59. Twitter: @JessieNYC Thank you! If you’d like to continue the conversation:
Editor's Notes
- Image from here: http://www.thecanyon.com/assets/css/images/grandcanyon1.jpg
- Please feel empowered to live Tweet if you’re so inclined.... I might suggest these hashtags for our conversation today.
- 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
- The shift from analog to digital & the explosion of different sorts of technologies are already affecting how we do our jobs as sociologists.
- Rather than comb through a card catalog, we look things up on Google Scholar.
- The whole notion of a “library” is now one that’s digital, distributed..... a real game-changer when it comes to libraries in the digital era. http://dp.la/
- It’s important to have the physical building which we still use..... ...but as scholars, we *expect* ~ even demand ~ that there are digital tools within those libraries that we can use from any location.
- Digital technologies have changed how we keep track of citations, bibliographies......and, with tools like Zotero, we can create bibliographies, keep track of citations, and share them with others who have similar interests.
- It’s changed how we write.... this is Commentpress....
- Another DH scholar who used Commentpress - for her book Planned Obsolescence - writes that these new platforms are changing the way we think about publication, reading and peer review.
- 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
- Another resource about this.... http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/open-access
- Digital technologies + the open web are also changing academic publishing….
- 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/
- 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/
- 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.
- The backend... which, if we were going to approach advertisers, is what we would show people.
- The big numbers.
- The smaller numbers, which in many ways, I’m more pleased about.
- 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”
- all these changes in scholarship, pedagogy + publishing means that there are ways that the ways we measure success is changing, too.
- http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0013636 From the abstract: “Articles whose authors have supplemented subscription-based access to the publisher's version by self-archiving their own final draft to make it accessible free for all on the web (“Open Access”, OA) are cited significantly more than articles in the same journal and year that have not been made OA.”
- We’re shifting from ‘metrics’ to ‘altmetrics.’
- We are also living in a global (certainly US, UK + Western Europe) context of ‘austerity’ - which is the lie that we’re out of money but reflects the reality of economic inequality and that the rich and super-rich will not invest in public goods and services, like higher education. Image from here: http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/gty-154440996-4_3_r560.jpg
- 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 embrace democratization and resist the forces of commercialization?
- The politics of austerity mean that the funding landscape of higher ed is changing.
- A different landscape in the UK, where there is an overall committment to funding higher ed. Still REF means that the funding is tied to demonstrated “research excellence,” part of which relies on evidence of “impact” on wider publics. Lots of good information on this effort, at the LSE Impact Blog: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/
- Political attacks on higher ed in the US are changing the landscape of funding... “...Coburn managed to prohibit any funds for NSF-funded political science unless it was somehow “promoting national security or the economic interests of the United States.” He’d tried to put the ax to NSF’s political science funds before, and failed. But that tighter definition allowed him to argue that the funds could exist, as long as they weren’t squandered.” Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2013/04/national_science_foundation_and_tom_coburn_the_republican_effort_to_cut.html
- No longer any broad commitment to funding state-funded public institutions of higher ed, at least when you look at data from state budgets, like this one from GA.... Image from here: http://likethedew.com/2011/05/05/georgia-falling-behind-funding-higher-education/
- ....and a very similar downward trend in funding from Washington State. Every state in the US is following a similar pattern. This means that faculty have to be more entrpreneurial in securing their own funding for research (much like journalists are now considering ways to be entrepreneurial as a response to changing business model in news). Image from here: http://budgetandpolicy.org/schmudget/cuts-to-higher-education-dimming-future-prosperity
- And, of course, there’s very bad news in academia regarding the way we hire (or don’t hire) faculty. 73%=76% of all instructional workforce in higher ed = adjunct faculty. Image from here: http://www.schoolleadership20.com/forum/topics/25-telling-facts-about-adjunct-faculty-today
- Given the grim prospects for legacy tenure-track jobs in the academy, a lot of people w/ PhDs are going to do other things with those skills. Image from here: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/how-many-phds-actually-get-to-become-college-professors/273434/
- In academia, as elsewhere, neoliberal regimes want to use technology to further their goals. 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 embrace democratization and resist the forces of commercialization?
- In academia, as elsewhere, neoliberal regimes want to use technology to further their goals.
- (Describe...then) I would argue that this is mostly going away, but in piecemeal fashion. What did this look like?
- 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.
- 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 embrace democratization and resist the forces of commercialization?
- 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 embrace democratization and resist the forces of commercialization?
- 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 embrace democratization and resist the forces of commercialization?
- 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 embrace democratization and resist the forces of commercialization?
- Given this context, what are academics to do to resist the forces of commercialization? I argue that owning the content of your own professional identity is key to this... For most faculty, their "web presence" is a page on a departmental website that they have no control over and cannot change or update even if they wanted to. "Reclaiming the web" means owning your own domain name and managing it yourself, a move Jim Groom has put forward for students + I argue should be the default strategy for faculty. Too often academics, + especially sociologists want to "resist" commercialization by "refusing" the digital and I think this is misplaced and reflects a misunderstanding of the forces at play here. "reclaiming the web" - and owning our own words, our own professional identity is just one step.
- Academics (at that handful of us with tenure) can also say “no” to publishing in places that don’t allow you to own your own work by retaining copyright. Even un-tenured or outside-tenure folk can ask the questions about access. Perhaps even more important for those without the usual institutional affiliations to insist on making their work OA, so that others in the wider world can access it.
- Thanks & let's continue the conversation online.