Site Note

Posted on January 15, 2008 by Timothy Burke

We’re doing some fiddling and moving of stuff behind the scenes. There may be some delays in accessing Easily Distracted in the next few days as the DNS updates.

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One-A-Day: Simon Winder, The Man Who Saved Britain: A Personal Journey Into the Disturbing World of James Bond

Posted on January 14, 2008 by Timothy Burke

Quite often, I read a book and think to myself that I need to find a class where I can teach the book. Sometimes that’s easy: there’s quite a range of work I can throw into my class on the history of consumerism and commodities, for example.

Simon Winder’s book of essays about the historical moment in British history, specifically British imperial history, that led to Ian Fleming and James Bond, is one of those books, and I don’t really have a course into which it would readily fit. I could teach it the week of my Honors seminar on modern Africa that deals with decolonization, but it is ever so slightly too far away from that. So the book gives me a slight extra motivation to teach a course on the history of the British Empire or on the cultural history of European colonialism, both classes I’ve toyed with teaching in the past.

Not because it’s an absolutely great book. Both stylistically and substantively, it has some real problems. Winder is basically focused on how British society worked through the years from 1945 to 1975, both in terms of the economic and social pain of postwar life within the United Kingdom itself, the grey dullness and complacency that so many returning expatriates and ex-colonial bureaucrats complained about, and the complicated transformation of British identity through the end of empire. He sees Fleming as a distinctive kind of upper-class degenerate trying to work through his revulsion at postwar, postcolonial England by escaping to Jamaica and creating Bond, and he ties the consumption of Bond novels and films as both a reaction to postwar Britain and a tool for making a new kind of British identity in global culture.

It’s a very funny book in many respects, but it also has a very distinctive, stimulating take on decolonization. Particularly if you’re familiar with either British history or with imperial history (or both), it’s often laugh-out-loud amusing, but Winder also has a kind of barely-checked outrage simmering under the surface.

It is, unfortunately, a horrible mess in other ways. There’s about half a book here, and the rest is repetition of the same jokes, arguments, and details. It would be an unkind book to hand to an American reader who likes James Bond but knows nothing about British or imperial history. I even think a young British reader who likes Bond would find some of it baffling. The book often shades into being shrill as well. I’m not one for indulging in the usual hobby of bashing non-academic writers for allegedly simplifying matters best left to academics, but I don’t think it takes a Ph.D to acknowledge that the disastrous partition of India and Pakistan was both the result of extraordinary bungling by key British leaders and a complex event with deep and far-reaching causes. Winder really only sees it as an occasion to describe the entire British political class as vicious dunderheads. There’s a lot of that from Winder, where even when I was quite enjoying the splenetic dressing-down of various historical figures, I couldn’t help but think it was a bit much.

That’s why I want to teach the book, however. One of the things I learned early in my career is that extremely good, careful works of scholarship are mostly not good for teaching undergraduates, or they’re only good if they’re heavily interspersed by wrong books, crazy books, fun books, wildly original books. Winder’s book is such a good read at most points that I completely forgave him the unevenness, the overlooking of some angles on Bond as a cultural property, and the occasional heavy-handedness of his perspective on empire. In a class where there was some context to help my students read the book, I can see it generating a memorable discussion.

Posted in Books, The Mixed-Up Bookshelves | 1 Comment

NITLE Reflections

Posted on January 14, 2008 by Timothy Burke

One thing I did notice at the NITLE meeting is a big variation even within the universe of small liberal arts colleges about the level of interest and investment at an institutional level in collaboration through digital media. I’m willing to wager that some of the most interested or engaged institutions are spending about as much as some of the least interested in raw dollar terms on information technology, but that in some cases, all of that money is just going to keeping the basic core services up and running rather than into innovation in instruction, research, publication or library services. That difference doesn’t necessarily have to do with IT or library staff and their level of engagement and knowledge, though in some cases it might. I think in a lot of cases, it’s a difference in the local faculty culture and in the extent to which senior administrative staff care about or even know about information technology. The more that senior staff see information technology as an expensive obligation rather than a place where interesting and open-ended innovations in the core mission of higher education are happening, the more that the money spent is likely to be largely a matter of making the hamster wheels continue to turn.

It has to be about internal motivation because there is not a lot of external pressure for innovation. As I noted in my comments in the NITLE panel that was devoted to some really interesting work that Wesleyan University has pursued in the last eight years, students don’t really know what they’re missing if faculty are teaching well with traditional materials. I think most of the stuff about the current generation of college students being “digital natives” is complete hooey, to be honest. Yes, they’ve grown up with computers and online media being natural presences in their lives, but for most of them, their use of digital tools is pragmatic and limited rather than exploratory and creative. Students at elite liberal arts colleges may be even less oriented towards digital tools and media than most in their generation: these institutions seem to me to have a vaguely antiquarian appeal that draws students who imagine their intellects and avocations in slightly “old-fashioned” ways.

So the students are not going to complain if there are cobwebs growing on the IT infrastructure and the pedagogy of most professors until and unless that gets in the way of core functionalities like email or accessing digitized readings kept in a content-management system. Via 11D, I read an interesting article that suggests a slow change in the prestige professions in upper-middle class life, but I think mostly parents are not going to push educational institutions to make creative, assertive use of information technology. Certainly most faculty are not going to build an institution’s use of IT into the way they calculate reputation capital.

So an institution like Wesleyan can make an expensive, interesting, and very skilled push into innovation in this area and find itself out a lot of money and with zero external recognition of what they’ve done. They can end up making resources that K-12 and community college students around the country (and their counterparts around the world) make productive use out of that go practically unrecognized at their peer level. (Hey, all you people into social justice: that strikes me as a bigger achievement than kicking Coke…)

But at the same time, the tipping point that maybe moves one institution with comparable resources into a much more forward-thinking and creative profile strikes me as very easily reached: it really only takes a small number of people in several staff areas, a small number of faculty, some appreciative students, and some support at the top to get things rolling.

Posted in Academia, Information Technology and Information Literacy | 8 Comments

Delayed Liveblogging of NITLE, “Scholarly Collaboration”, final session

Posted on January 14, 2008 by Timothy Burke

Session on digitization.

Eric Luhrs, Lafayette University, “Maximizing Digitization Efforts at Small Liberal Arts Colleges”.

Small institutions have low barriers to digitization: bureaucracy is very informal, collaboration is easier, faculty are more accessible to IT and library staff engaged in digitization

Decentralizing the process is crucial: big digitization programs are centralized, workflow tools follow this. Luhrs and his colleagues wanted more flexibility.

MetaDB workflow. Digital Initiatives Librarian defines metadata, students enter technical metadata, librarians and archivests provide administrative and descriptive metadata, faculty subject specialists access non-circulating material, Digital Initiatives librarian exports the completed records. Dublin Core metadata set.

Advantages of the process they’ve settled on: allows them to distribute tasks around campus and off-campus, multiple users working, automate where possible, superior interface for storing and editing medata, no licensing hassles, nothing proprietary

Strong relationships, need a clear vantage point on purpose to manage project, don’t design without consulting or talking to people

Very clear perspective, very matter-of-fact and pragmatic. I really like this–not telling faculty that they’ve got to do it one way and no other, but also keep marching ahead steadily on a goal. I think so many digitization and collaboration projects either succeed or fail on this kind of “hidden” procedural work, on the nitty-gritty. It’s not a matter of knowledge per se, it’s about attitude–a kind of can-do, real-world execution.

One thing I think about a lot is how to get faculty in the right position with digitization or other digital projects: to cut channels for their expertise and also to understand what they’re actually going to do or want to do with a project once it’s completed. One of the problems is that if you ask faculty, ‘What do you want?’ they’ll often tell you something idealized, something that they think that they ought to want, not what they’re actually likely to do. But you also want to avoid being so open to faculty input that you give the kind of faculty who are inclined to be a nuisance the opportunity to impede forward motion.

In questions, Luhrs also talks about some of the fine-grained issues with some of these applications and procedures.

This is something that gets talked about a lot with software design, but it still fascinates me how much most software applications do things which are profoundly antagonistic and completely unnecessary to actual users when you get down to the fine details.

————-

Paul Barclay, Lafayette College

Faculty perspective on some of the digitization that Luhrs was describing. Barclay is trying to figure out where the proper place for scholars to enter into the picture, and says it’s absolutely not at the point where decisions about metadata, digitization format, process and so on are being made, because the cultures of use and practice around evidence and archives among scholars are so radically different.

The problem for me is that there are moments where decisions about metadata have implications for the logic of how we find evidence and data in archives or repositories, and if you don’t understand (and maybe participate) in the construction of metadata, you’re kind of a permanent victim. of archiving processes that are intended to help the end-user.

Barclay gave the Lafayette digitizers a big box of images from Taiwan, and he talks about how some of the structuring that flowed from the digitization associated images together that were sometimes unexpected from his perspective. But the process was actually pretty collaborative, and in what seems to me to be a healthy way.

It seems to me that Luhrs did a very good job of “translating” the processes and procedures for Barclay so that he knew what do do and how to do it, without having to necessarily understand the technical particulars.

John Trendler, Scripps College, “Visual Resource Collection at Scripps”. Again the importance of managing details properly, importance of creating low barriers to collaboration, making it possible for serendipitous connections between staff and faculty. Same lessons about getting well into a project before making key decisions about hardware, software, process, procedure rather than making those decisions inflexibly before you start. Many detailed tech lessons, worked out over time.

Based on this, if your college were about to begin digitizing visual materials on an extensive basis, I’d say to contact Trendler for some of the specs and procedures that Scripps has adopted. Very well scaled to a small institution.

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Liveblogging NITLE, “Scholarly Collaboration and Small Colleges in the Digital Age”, 6th panel

Posted on January 12, 2008 by Timothy Burke

Andrea Nixon, Joel Cooper, Egohsa Awaah, “Ethnographic Study of Visual Materials Use at Carleton College”.

Trying to extend the work of Foster and Gibbons on resource usage in libraries and archives.

Student and faculty interviews. Students: they wanted to see where they were working and studying (used location logs). Expectations for assignment, resources and support. Faculty: expectations from information technology.

Research was done by student research team, information professionals, and a study lead.

Data was transcribed, clips were entered into Transana.

Maps of student study made from location logs. Trying to find out what’s meant by visual literacy among users. Assignments from faculty need to define the nature and timing of support. Rethinking student support.

I’m not getting a clear sense of the kinds of specific issues with visual materials and tools that they might have looked at, though. I confess to some curiosity about that in particular–what do students use, what do they know, how do they look at images, how well do faculty prepare them to do so, etc.

————

Paul Burnam, “Ohio Wesleyan’s Strategic Planning for Scholarly Communication”

Five-Step process for “raising awareness and changing attitudes” around scholarly communication.1. awareness 2. understanding 3. Activism: change tenure/promotion system to incorporate digital publication; 4. ownership: faculty, administrators, librarians all have a role; 5. transformation: everyone pitch in on change

I like what they’re trying to get to, but I guess this is why strategic planning per se often leaves me cold: it tends to end up with a long description of a process that the planners want to unfold point by point that ultimately has a lot of whistling-past-the-graveyard, e.g., it makes the difficult business of tranformation sound like something methodical and ordinary, and advises changes in generic terms that are ultimately going to have to be adapted to the very specific character of some individuals, departments, long-term patterns of practice, and so on within an institution. Better to go with a broad declaration of principle and then roll up your sleeves and grope your way through the messy business of change. Strategic planning of this kind tries to make an academic community into the kind of “legible object” subject to bureaucratic management that James Scott has written about. And mostly, academic cultures of use and practice just aren’t.

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Liveblogging NITLE, “Scholarly Collaboration and Small Colleges in the Digital Age”, 5th panel

Posted on January 11, 2008 by Timothy Burke

Dan Schnaidt, Wesleyan University, “Repositioning the Academic Media Studio”.

Building infrastructure of faculty collaboration in digital contexts at Wesleyan, “back-end engine”, since 2000.

Focus on creating “learning objects”: usable anytime, reusable content, cost-effective.

Schnaidt notes that the term is kind of technical and doesn’t connect well to humanists in particular. “Institutional depository” is an alternative, but doesn’t work very well either.

The more raw the media elements are, the more reusable; the more fully assembled, the less so.

Wesleyan did this with soft money, grant support.

Learning objects created range from $5-50K in total cost. (Not cheap!) Faculty were not paid to participate.

No tenure-track faculty participated, tenured faculty did.

Objects they made: simulations, interactive game (Ricardian Explorer), tools (Lightbox), collections (Virtual Instrument Museum, Scroll Singers of Naya, Ukiyo-e Technique), field research (Palenque, Afghan North, Virtual Village)

People with a fieldwork component to their work really found the learning objects approach potentially useful

Learning Objects Studio.

Personal note: really impressive range of projects, very professional looking. I’m really envious.

Overall assessment:

Poor faculty response, significant external use, weak internal use. Faculty motivation is a key issue.

Upshot: internal funding isn’t going to happen, because it’s expensive and isn’t used heavily internally.

The Learning Group project coordinators realized they’d become a publishing unit and didn’t have: editors, peer review, permissions, or distribution channels beyond Merlot/search/word of mouth

Personal comment: here we’re seeing the heart of the dilemma around faculty culture and digital resources. The fact is that most faculty teaching in elite institutions, including small colleges, are sufficient in their teaching practices and their information use. They don’t need to use digital resources, or the really interesting kinds of objects this group was designing. Not because their teaching wouldn’t benefit from or be enhanced by these kinds of objects, but because the students don’t know what they’re missing and have no way to find out what they’re missing. If you make the objects and don’t have the pedagogy, it goes nowhere. So if you build this stuff, you’re really building it for external use, as a gift to the world, and usually a gift specifically to institutions and users who are asymmetrically related to the faculty and institutions involved in building digital resources. E.g., to K-12 students, to community colleges, to universities in the developing world, to underresourced colleges. And no matter how much some of my colleagues in history and anthropology may talk the talk of social justice and digital divide, when it gets down to being involved in giving a digital gift, they ask: what’s the incentive? Why should I, if that means I won’t publish my next monograph in a timely fashion? Who will notice or care if I give a gift of this kind? (The Ithaka Report was mentioned several times during the presentation, it gets at some of these issues.)

Another thing to consider, however: we’re also not pedagogically literate about how to use this kind of material and we don’t often create them to be used as the center piece of a small liberal arts class. Suppose I had students look at the Palenque learning object. It’s great for giving the students a vivid visual and experiential feel for the place. But ok: it’s thus just a supplement to something else that’s being used to create discussion-based learning for that session. That’s part of the problem with some of these objects: they’re supplemental, optional, not just because faculty don’t work to enhance their teaching but because that’s how they cast themselves. At least some of these objects have to have the character of scholarship, e.g., to have an argument, to enter into the conversation about a particular area of knowledge forcefully, to be knowledge rather than a supplement to knowledge.

They tried to solve some of this by moving to smaller projects, tying themselves to Wesleyan University Press, charging accurately for the labor of creating the projects, looking to revenue streams that will compensate for the publication of these objects. WUP brings reputation capital, market discipline, editorial support, relationship to authors (they hope).

Library as another key partner.

Academic Media Studio: charging for services, capturing overhead. Scholarly collaboration is not free, costs money, build that in.

Posted in Information Technology and Information Literacy | 2 Comments

Liveblogging NITLE, “Scholarly Collaboration and Small Colleges in the Digital Age”, 4th panel

Posted on January 11, 2008 by Timothy Burke

Panel on faculty collaboration.

Scott Williams and Adam Johnson (Scripps and Harvey Mudd) on the IONiC/VIPEr (Virtual Inorganic Pedagogical Electronic Resource) project, collaborative project in inorganic chemistry.

Decided to look at how to improve pedagogical and collaborative approaches to inorganic chemistry in small institutions. Good context: broad distribution of inorganic chemistry in departments in many institutions, but also deep and varying specialization, plus inorganic chemists at small colleges tend to be highly isolated in that there is usually no more than one at a small institution. Inorganic chemistry is defined by what it’s not: not organic. So very broad field.

Personal note: this seems to me to be something true about many fields in small colleges. Which of course makes a successful collaborative and pedagogical framework of real interest if it’s sufficiently pliable to use in other contexts.

Community of practice: online libraries in many fields, try to build discussions between faculty about teaching inorganic chemistry, what has been successful and not.

Shows a Marratech interface–chat with video conferencing, some of the collaborators in the project appearing on the other end.

Whenever I see videoconferencing, I always feel like somehow it’s 1971 and I’m watching people who are in an Apollo capsule talking to Mission Control.

Building a repository: learning objects like labs, interesting problem sets: the stuff that works in teaching. Compensate for the lack of a good inorganice chemistry textbook with sharing of resources.

Want comment threads, rating systems, synchronous interaction.

Difficulty of keeping a good project idea going after people come home from a meeting: a really good point. They tried to use formal videoconferencing on a weekly basis to keep the collaborators’ attention to the project.

Lessons learned: need a group of people prepared to collaborate, who interact well. Collaborators need a personal investment.

Chemistry seems to be a discipline where there is a great deal of interesting stuff going on with digitally-enabled collaboration. I was really taken by Jean-Claude Bradley’s presentation at Swarthmore on Open Notebook Science at Drexel last semester, for example. But this also raises an issue about why people reinvent the wheel so often–it does seem to me that this group is going about creating some of what they’re doing from the ground up. That’s good in some ways and bad in other ways. I suppose I worry not just about the duplication of labor but also about creating inflexible collaborative architectures that don’t play nice with other collaborative architectures which then later on force faculty and students to choose which architecture they want to work within. The difference here is between focusing on teaching in one case (IONiC/VIPEr) and research and dissemination on the other (UsefulChem, Open Notebook Science, etc.) but in a way we don’t really want those radically separable.

Alternatively, I wonder if discussion of teaching is sometimes best done in a highly granular way: around a given individual class, in some resource devoted to that in specific. But maybe that’s me thinking as a humanist, because our courses and classrooms tend to have a much wider divergence than, for example, courses in inorganic chemistry.

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Liveblogging NITLE, “Scholarly Collaboration and Small Colleges in a Digital Age”, 3rd panel

Posted on January 11, 2008 by Timothy Burke

Third panel is on the use of Web 2.0 in the classroom.

Alexandra Juhasz of Pitzer College is talking about her use of YouTube in a class, both viewing and production work. (You can see the work under the tag MediaPraxisme at YouTube.)

Juhasz feels that as a learning environment, YouTube was primarily a failure in her class’ experience.

Going public via YouTube was almost entirely a negative experience for the students. Also felt that the architecture of YouTube makes it impossible to form a community. Juhasz felt very uncomfortable as a pundit and trying to operate in a mainstream context, the course was mostly framed as something to mock when it was covered by MSM. (Though she points out that once they got into interviews, the reporters actually understood the course pretty well.) Early on the students were trying to learn how to make videos (like many YouTube posters) but of course YouTube comments aren’t a very nurturing environment.

Very interesting insights from the students into the idea of the classroom as a private or sanctified space, as sequestered from a generalized or public context. Also to some extent the antagonism between doing intellectual work and public work.

Students learned to make ideas visual–and compact.

I’m really, really struck at the parallels between what this class learned and what I think the students at Swarthmore’s War News Radio have learned about the translation point from intellectual work and communicative work in broader contexts, about how important it is to learn how to represent complex questions in compact ways that are native to a particular media form.

Class ended up discovering the more obscure, less viewed corners of YouTube.

Definitely makes me think about the problems involved in teaching about games and play as well: subjects which the public imagine as frivolous (which are in fact frivolous or entertaining in some sense) they believe cannot be or should not be studied. My basic response is still, “How can you think that something that billions of people do (and pay to do) isn’t interesting? How can you think that there is nothing to study or talk about there in a liberal arts classroom?”

Juhasz felt that the students got tired of being stuck with entirely amateur forms of knowledge, were tired of the disorderly, anarchic environment within YouTube, wondered what (or whether) education is ever compatible with entertainment, but also wondered a lot about their own preconceptions of YouTube and entertainment were preventing them from thinking about the possibilities.

Funny video comparing YouTube and Sakai.

Great presentation, very interesting. The class strikes me as having been a “beautiful failure”, the essence of liberal arts education–do something, find out if it works, both as a class itself and in the thing you’re studying. Use a class to investigate and produce knowledge that’s both practical and intellectual.

——–

2nd presentation, Geoffrey Proehl, University of Puget Sound, about a dramaturgical wiki, in reference to a production of Midsummer’s Night’s Dream.

Found early on that an existing dramaturgical website wasn’t really doing anything that couldn’t have been done in a more conventional publication format, wanted to think about a “virtual workspace”. Need to co-edit texts, many participants in co-editing. Potential collaborators may have difficulty coordinating in the same time and place in pre-digital dramaturgical labor, the wiki overcomes a lot of these issues. Big benefits to the dramaturgs themselves, maybe not that big an impact on the actors themselves.

Personal note: This is a simple thing, but it’s often overlooked, how important digital collaboration is for making asychronous work possible, for people who cannot be in the same space at the same time to work together. There’s always the old question, of course: what do you gain through presence that’s missing?

For another collaboration, when they were at a stage where it felt too raw and unfinished to put it in a public space, they sequestered it behind a Blackboard password.

———–

Jason Brown, Pomona.

Talking about faculty desires for tools and how little they have to do with the reality of staff capability and technological infrastructure.

CPanel as possible solution for what faculty need in terms of web access, but also WordPress as a great way to give various faculty what they may need for web pages. WordPress, he argues, is easy to deal with, flexible, tons of plug-ins.

Fantastico in CPanel as a way to deal with multiple installs.

Thinking about outsourcing the entire server; virtual private server as a way to deal with it.

Personal note: Hi, Eric and everyone else at Swarthmore ITS! I am understanding much more right now about LiquidWeb. Yes, I am another one of those dumb faculty who has opinions in advance of knowing what’s going on. Sorry, kthnx.

Personal note: some people are really, really good at putting together presentations. Jason Brown is one of them.

Funny but also some serious thinking about the issue of outsourcing in general. All email at Pomona is outsourced to Microsoft or Google, so as he sees it, the issue of whether to do it is over, and it’s now about what can be done within that context. Important to produce for the scholarly and knowledge commons right now even within outsourcing.

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Liveblogging NITLE, “Scholarly Collaboration and Small Colleges in a Digital Age”, 2nd panel

Posted on January 11, 2008 by Timothy Burke

The panels split into two different sessions, so I’m in a session on developing open-source collections and resources.

First presentation is Robert Kieft and John Anderies talking about putting a reference source of Quaker biography into a wiki format. Bob observes that the library still is and will remain a “book mine”, but that he anticipates stable commercial arrangements, stable technological platforms, to support extensive digitization of resources held by libraries within the next two decades. His recommendations: colleges need to develop a common infrastructure for supporting digital resources, and ditch our institutional parochialism around libraries and information. Must collaborate with research universities and national institutions involved with libraries and archives. Our local collections need to be much more attentive to regional and national uses. Must satisfy our users’ desire to work in networked contexts. Must obtain the financial resources to do all of what we need to do. Must publish the unique or unusual holdings in library collections to the web.

The DQB (Dictionary of Quaker Biography): intended to publish Haverford’s unique resources to a digital and networked environment. John Anderies describes the original published resource: home-grown created in the 1950s and 1960s, large, frequently cited and used. Problem: it’s 50-60 years out of date, heavily uses secondary sources, perhaps too narrow in its focus, and can be consulted only at three institutions in the world. Goal of digitization: safeguard the printed copies, preserve the text. Allow text to grow, improve, be corrected. Make it more authoritative and scholarly. Disseminate the content, allow more uses, promote distributed participation, especially to partner up with other Quaker repositories. Connect to relevant content in other repositories, formats.

Using a wiki format, very much on the Wikipedia standard. Outreach to a lot of other repositories (esp. geneaological) but also integration with the local catalog and links to other digitization ongoing at Swarthmore, Haverford and Bryn Mawr.

Issues so far: the work of automating entries, integrating fielded data, automating citational information, connection to authority sources, and overall editorial policy & oversight over contributors. How much to follow the precedents being set by other wiki users, particularly Wikipedia?

———–

Chris Blackwell presented on building an open-access Homeric resource.

Digital editions of Homeric texts, translations, images of manuscripts, direct access to the “scholarly primitives”, collaborative infrastructure for building end-user applications using the data. Using GPL and Creative Commons licenses for what they do.

Using a lot of resources that are in the public domain. Interesting chart on textual variations in editions of texts, sharp post-Gutenberg fall-off generally–but Homer, Iliad, is completely different: the most variations in editions visible in antiquity, consistent reduction in variation ever since. Trying to use the resource to reopen the multitextual character of Homeric texts, to allow all the variations to exist in the same resource space.

“As many Homers as you can”: a snarky comment made by a critic of the project that they’ve adopted as a credo. Reversing the trend towards having the single authoritative “correct” version. Using XML to encode polytonic Greek characters to improve forward (and backward) mobility to multiple platforms.

Personal note: I think this is a really clear and interesting idea about why to put a resource in a digital format that extends somewhat beyond the more straightforward (though crucial) priorities in the Quaker Biography project. Here we’re really moving into rethinking what we do to texts and resources as scholars.

Also very interesting: it’s a post-tenure project for the participants, but they have not been able to get faculty from Ph.D-granting institutions to participate.

That could be incidental, but I don’t think so: it points to the extent to which scholars who stand at the center of older practices often being actively disinterested in anything that would unsettle their monopolies.

The photographs of original texts in the project are amazing in both quality and interface design and usability.

—————

Dana Ward of Pitzer College talked about producing online resources on anarchism.

Came out of a content-based approach to teaching Internet literacy in the relatively early history of the Web. Decided to focus that approach on anarchist literature, which he was already collecting and studying. Lots of ongoing student participation. Talks about the kind of interesting discoveries that students can make when they’re working with primary materials in a way where they have the opportunity to make original connections, find patterns that haven’t been previously discussed or understood, and so on.

Personal note: looking at the archive, it looks to me like a much older style of building online resources: more top-down in its creation and maintenance, not really set-up for robust kinds of collaboration coming from other angles, though student work and learning were a crucial part of how it got built. In a curious way, these kinds of archives can be almost easier to retrieve information from, but the moment an active steward is no longer around to keep it going, coordinate entries, they have a tendency to grow cobwebs and fall into disuse. There are a lot of resources that look and feel like this one that were useful in the early history of the Web and now can’t be found or used.

I also think there’s a complicated issue about archives that are maintained by advocates or protectors of the material they archive. I’m not saying professional archivists loathe or are not interested in the work they collect and maintain, and the Wikipedia model of adversarial content creation often produces a weak kind of compromise knowledge as opposed to something distinctive. But there’s a way in which an archive of materials on anarchism maintained by people with a sympathetic interest in anarchism has a heuristic that doesn’t track the movement of anarchism in and out of related (even antagonistic) social and political movements. (For example, an archive on anarchism, if it were maintained in a wiki model, might connect to libertarianism at various moments. This one does that through material on Bookchin, for example, but that’s “left-libertarianism”.) Anyway, nevertheless, any archive is a good archive.

I also like the pedagogical aspect of the project, the kinds of interesting things that can happen when students are working with raw or primary material without the filtering of a secondary authority.

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Liveblogging NITLE, “Scholarly Collaboration and Small Colleges in a Digital Age”

Posted on January 11, 2008 by Timothy Burke

Some notes from a NITLE meeting on scholarly collaboration and digital resources that I’m participating in today.

First panel, the panel I’m presenting on, is on collaborative writing of scholarship in online formats. Kathleen Fitzpatrick started it off with a really smart presentation that puts books and other forms of publication in historical contexts, and argues that the future form of digital publishing lies in breaking with the codex form of the “book” to develop a net-native format and structure for disseminating long-form knowledge. Very cool points made along the way: hypertext is actually very painful to read in a purely physical sense.

I would add: a lot of hypertext only sounds like a good idea when its prophets are writing about what it should be. In practice, it not only falls short of the promises, it reveals that the promise is false. Kathleen mentioned Joyce’s afternoon. Like Kathleen’s students, I’d say that counter to the promise of inclusion and involvement, this hypertext is possibly the single most hostile and alienating fiction composed in the last century in terms of the way it constructs the relationship between author and audience.

Kathleen’s key argument is that net-native scholarly collaboration is going to have be situated within the actual social worlds that produce scholarship, rather than being an interface that just simulates the book. Argument that CommentPress (the WordPress template used by the Institute for the Future of the Book) is moving towards accomplishing this goal.

Kathleen mentions that CommentPress is trying to think about how to manage long-form work, but this is crucial to me: there still seems to me to be a difference between the scale and type of a “book” and the coffee-house world of academic blogs. Long-form texts are simply hard to consume using most digital readers, but I also think they’re hard to follow. I think we need to not overlook the virtues of the book (including individualization, privacy, sequestration from social networks of the experience of knowledge consumption and production).

A full version of Kathleen’s extremely interesting presentation can be seen at Media Commons.

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I’ll put my own presentation up a bit later.

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Laura Blankenship talked about putting her dissertation online. Laura started by talking about how putting the dissertation online alleviated some of the fears that are endemic to the process of restarting a dissertation, when most people might feel that online exposure would make those problems worse. The blog audience she had attracted was a supportive community that she thought could be portable to an online process of writing and publication. Online writing as a way to create communities and networks.

A personal side note: this points to a weakness of my own presentation. I talked about particular scholarly networks as they exist, and whether they can support online collaboration, but Laura is completely right that putting content up can create networks which seemed not to exist prior to the availability of content.

Laura also talked about the difficulties of the blog form itself: its reverse chronological character, and the effort of “housekeeping” the format itself. Also the question: now that it’s done, what does one do with it? Do you try to keep it moving into new formats? Create continuing use or participation?

For myself, this is how I feel about wikis also: they’re way more effort to keep “clean” than some of their most enthusiastic promoters let on, at least for creating a reusable resource built around a particular project.

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