Let’s start by being clear on what Morris is calling for. You have to read through to the fifth paragraph to understand exactly what Morris wants:

“If university officials were to learn that a student had conducted extensive online research about the personal life and daily activities of a particular faculty member, posted angry and threatening comments on his Facebook wall about that professor, shopped online for high-powered firearms and ammunition, and saved a draft version of a suicide note on his personal network drive, would those officials want to have a conversation with that student, even though he hadn’t engaged in any significant outward behavior? Certainly.”

In other words Morris is calling not for data mining, as his title suggests, but rather for total surveillance of all student internet activity with an eye towards mining that data. What Morris is suggesting is not only that Universities monitor student email and conversations on University servers and equipment (student email addresses, Blackboard conversations), but all student internet activity. He is talking about monitoring internet search traffic, i.e. what students search for on Google, what students post on any site, i.e. Facebook Wall, blog comments, etc., what students shop for online, i.e. any purchase you make or any purchase you look at making, and even open up and look at any files you have stored (his suggestion that the University would mine a suicide note written and saved on a computer would involve opening and analyzing said file). And I assume, even though he doesn’t mention it Morris would like to monitor and then mine all IM traffic, and Skype calls. Calling this data mining hides the fact that the first step is actually surveillance, collecting the data, where the end goal is then mining what has been collected.

Technologically Morris doesn’t know what he is talking about and ethically he equates himself with some of the world’s most oppressive governments. In short this proposal reads as if it is written by a despotic leader who has spent too many hours watching poorly conceived science fiction.

In the first iteration of this post I wrote several lengthy paragraphs explaining how the surveillance Morris outlines here is not as technically trivial as he seems to make it, and it is obvious from this piece that Morris has little to no sense of how this technology works (someone please explain to him the difference between http and https cause he seems to think that all internet traffic is the same). Morris’s piece argues that technology is a “crystal ball” (his word not mine) that would allow us to predict and control the future. The technology he describes here is neither as trivial nor accurate as he suggests. But ultimately I decided to cut out all of the technical bits which demonstrated Morris’s ignorance (perhaps he has been watching too much Minority Report or Person of Interest) and instead focus on the more important issue: the ethical one. Morris is arguing that the government should monitor, without cause, all the internet traffic of some of its citizens. (Maybe I’ll write the technical stuff later.)

Let’s put it in no uncertain terms: Morris wants total surveillance of all student traffic on the internet all the time. In other words he is calling for the wiretapping of all private digital communications. Since in this particular circumstance, and in many he outlines the students attend a public school, and the police would be the ones doing the monitoring (or at least involved), what is being suggested here is that private citizens have the entirety of their online communications surveilled by the government. And this monitoring would happen regardless of the student, everyone, all students, no probable cause, no reason for suspicion, just surveil everyone 100% of the time. Total state surveillance. Perhaps Morris has a different measure of what is reasonable, but in my America the government is limited in the degree to which it can monitor its populace without a subpoena (I know, FISA, but we can save that for later).

Morris’s logic goes something like this. In rare circumstances a student will commit an act of violence, in order to prevent this we should curtail the civil liberties of all students. What’s worse though is the bizarre logic deployed to justify this type of surveillance. Morris notes that companies already engage in this kind of monitoring (Credit Card companies, Amazon, Netflix, Facebook, etc.)

Let’s take these “justifications” one at a time. Effectively in the first instance Morris is arguing because a small percentage (an extremely small percentage) of individuals might commit a crime we should extensively violate the rights of all citizens. Now Morris lines the argument up by beginning his piece with a colorful fictional scenario: imagine a student “his sweating hands firmly clutched the grips of the twin Glock 22 pistols.” These sort of hypothetical, the world is really dangerous scenarios, are often used to justify curtailing liberties, after all who wouldn’t want to prevent the kid with twin Glock 22 pistols. But, in reality it doesn’t work this way. Sure we could limit all sorts of social ills through restricting citizen behavior (let’s start with curfews) but we don’t.

Or put perhaps in terms that would directly apply to Morris. We know from research that police officers are more likely to commit spousal abuse than the average individual. Thus we should in order to prevent the scenario of a cop with twin Glock pistols killing his wife institute a policy of monitoring all cops all the time. All internet activity by all cops should be monitored. We should know if they visit any sites that might indicate violent tendencies. Also we should put cameras in their homes which record how they act at home so that in case they raise their voice, engage in behavior that indicates violence, we could intervene. I am sure Morris would not be for this scenario, but it is the equivalent of what he suggests, the only difference is who is monitored and who is doing the monitoring.

His second justification is that companies do it anyway, so why shouldn’t Universities. I find it odd that we would want to look to these companies for guidance on respecting student privacy, at precisely the moment when their is a large public conversation developing around the degree to which they don’t respect privacy, and that the government should intervene to establish guidelines. Just because students willingly share information online is hardly a justification for violating their privacy, monitoring all of their internet communication. Furthermore the scale at which Morris suggests students should be monitored in no way equates with what is being shared (mostly publicly) in particular online venues. In the first case students chose to share particular pieces of information on Facebook, making them (again mostly) public for others to view, and remain empowered to not share other aspects of their online communication. Private online communication is still possible. Second in the case of corporations students (at least theoretically) willingly enter these relationships with corporate entities, trading privacy for some other benefit. With government monitoring there is no opt out, use the internet to communicate and you will be monitored. Finally the response by these corporations is in no way comparable to what happens with these private companies. A credit card company calls you to verify that you indeed did purchase a $800 dollar pink stuffed elephant, a minor inconvenience, but the government detaining you for hours of questioning because you called your professor an asshole on a Facebook wall, hardly constitutes the same level of inconvenience.

Imagine the depth of invasion this constitutes. Emails about private family matters. Monitored. Concerned about a medical condition, searching the internet. Monitored. Have a drug or alcohol problem, reaching out to a support group. Monitored. Organizing a political protest. Monitored. You name it. Monitored. This is why we have restrictions on what type of surveillance our government can conduct. We should find it a little more than disturbing that Morris’s position aligns him with the STASI, or if you prefer, more contemporary situations despotic regimes: “In order to preserve the safety of our citizens we must monitor all of their communications.”

Perhaps people are lulled into believing that this type of surveillance constitutes a minor inconvenience, because one would only be monitoring online communication. But imagine the outrage that would ensue if Morris was suggesting that police begin routinely searching all dorm rooms in order to insure that no illegal items are on campus. Ultimately I would argue that monitoring my online communication is far more invasive then searching my physical property. Heck just knowing what someone has searched for on Google in the last month can often tell you a lot more about them than looking through their apartment.

Morris’s argument is the classic, but severally flawed one, that we should give up privacy to maintain security. As Daniel Solove has argued this is a fundamentally misinformed approach. In the first case, because one rarely achieves security, and in the second because this type of ubiquitous surveillance itself constitutes a serious harm to the community. As Solove points out, privacy is not just an individual good, it is a public one as well. A community without privacy is an unhealthy one. Individuals need control over what type of information is made public (even if they don’t always exercise said right), and what types of information monitoring bodies can collect about them, not only for individual health but for public health as well. A community with no sense of privacy is a dysfunctional one. Imagine a community where all communications are monitored by the government (again this is either very directly what Morris is calling for, in the case of the public university, or by proxy in the case of the private where the institution de facto serves as the local governing body). One doesn’t have to have read Foucault to understand the degree to which severe government monitoring adversely effects the population, 1984 or Brazil will work just fine for this.

Let’s take even the best case scenario that Morris offers here, that we are going to use this technology to monitor all students, looking for ones who might have mental issues. How is this data going to be used? Are the flagged students going to be expelled? are students who the predictive algorithm decides are risks going to have mandated counseling? Will this be permanently attached to their file? Will there be a no-class list equivalent to the no-fly list? And given the issue of liability institutions are liable to err on the “conservative” side questioning any and all students that might pose the slightest risk, for fear that if they don’t they would be liable in the future? (And again, keep in mind the technology doesn’t work this way, looking for “mentally unstable” people is not nearly the simple analysis Morris implies it is.)

Even if this surveillance would work the way Morris thinks it does, it is not even the best way to accomplish what he wants. Rather than actually try and address the larger issues, or develop a more reasonable plan, Morris purposes the “magical” technological fix. Which of course is neither magic nor a fix. Compare this to a plan which would call for increased funding of mental health clinics, building a positive relationship between Residence staff and students so that those with concerns would speak to someone. Sure staffing a mental health clinic is costly, but it is more effective, and what Morris doesn’t want to tell you cheaper than the solution he purposes. As Morris himself admits, “In the aftermath of nearly every large-scale act of campus violence in the United States, investigation has revealed that early-warning signs had been present but not recognized or acted upon.” If these early warning signs exist why do we need more monitoring?

But lets be clear, Morris isn’t after safety or mental health. This is about something far more nefarious, this is about control. And to understand this argument it is important to situate this claim within the context of higher education in California where Morris works. The mental health angle here is just a ruse, a rhetorical strategy to convince people that students need to be monitored for community safety. This is something those with power have been wanting to do for a long time, wholesale monitoring of the population, and given the recent tense situations between students and the California system, situations often mediated by the police, certainly part of the story here is a feeling on the part of police that all students must be monitored and controlled all the time.

If you doubt my reading here all you have to do is turn to his paragraph on FERPA. Morris argues that yes FERPA might be a concern, you would be monitoring student’s private conversations, but “luckily” for those who want to monitor there is an exception to the rule that would allow this type of monitoring. In other words Morris treats FERPA as a technical/legal hurdle that can be circumvented not something that expresses a legitimate concern about protecting student privacy. Morris deals with the letter of the law (“look it’s easy to get around”) without addressing the reason the law is there in the first place (“protecting student privacy is a philosophically and ethically important community principle”). Notice nowhere in the essay does he recognize that this type of surveillance might constitute a privacy concern (the only mention of a limit is in taking care to make sure that students maintain a right to due process). Student privacy is treated as a hurdle to be overcome not a value to be respected.

I am an educator because I believe college can be an incredibly important step in individuals becoming productive members of their community. At philosophical times when people ask me what I do I respond, “I work with students to help them become the people they want to be.” I find it loathsome, and counterproductive to suggest the best way to help students become citizens is to monitor their behavior all the time. What types of individuals would be produced from such a community, a community under constant surveillance?

Choisir entre supprimer le français et supprimer la philosophie… Quel beau choix ! Enlever plutôt le foie ou le poumon ? Plutôt l’estomac ou le coeur ?

Plutôt les yeux ou les oreilles ?

Il faudrait inventer un enseignement strictement monolingue d’une part – car tout peut être traduit en anglais, n’est-ce pas ? – et strictement dépourvu de toute interrogation (par exemple sur ce qu’implique la “traduction” en général et en particulier de telle langue à telle autre). Une seule langue débarrassée des parasites de la réflexion serait une belle matière universitaire, lisse, harmonieuse, aisée à soumettre aux contrôles d’acquisition.

Il faut donhc proposer de supprimer l’un et l’autre, le français et la philosophie. Et tout ce qui pourrait s’en approcher, comme le latin ou la psychanalyse, l’italien, l’espagnol ou la théorie littéraire, le russe ou l’histoire. Peut-être serait-il judicieux d’introduire à la place, et de manière obligatoire, quelques langages informatiques (comme java) et aussi le chinois commercial et le hindi technologique, du moins avant que ces langues soient complètement transcrites en anglais. A moins que n’arrive l’inverse.

De toutes façons, enseignons ce qui s’affiche sur nos panneaux publicitaires et sur les moniteurs des places boursières.

Rien d’autre !

Courage, camarades, un monde nouveau va naître !

Jean-Luc Nancy, professeur émérite d’une vieille Université française (pas pour longtemps).

What’s that you say? You can’t read it because it’s in French? Well luckily for you, despite the best efforts of the Albany adminstration there are French Studies Faculty left. So, you can read it in translation:

To choose between eliminating French or Philosophy . . . what a fabulous choice! Should one rather take out the liver or the lung? The stomach or the heart? The eyes or ears?

We need to invent teaching that is, on the one hand, strictly monolingual – for isn’t it true that everything can be translated into English? – and strictly lacking in all forms of questioning (for example concerning what is implied by “translation” in general and from one language to another in particular). A single language unencumbered by the static [parasites] of reflection would be a great subject for university study, smooth, harmonious, easily submitting to the controls of acquisition.

We should propose eliminating both of them, French and Philosophy. And everything existing in proximity to them, like Latin or psychoanalysis, Italian, Spanish or literary theory, Russian or History. Perhaps it would be wise to introduce in their place, as requirements, certain computer languages (like Java), as well as commerical Chinese and technological Hindi, at least until such languages are able to be completely transcribed into English. Unless the inverse were to happen first.

In any case, let’s teach what is displayed on our advertising billboards and on the stock exchange monitors. That and nothing else!

Courage, comrades, a new world is about to be born!

Jean-Luc Nancy, Emeritus Professor of an old French (not for long) university.

Translation by Professor of French and English David Wills (fair disclosure David was my dissertation director).

In general I think it can be a productive activity to encourage students to take a step back from relying on social media. I say this not because I think social media is a bad, or even harmful technology, but rather because I think that changing behavior can lead students to certain realizations about whatever it is they are studying. Showing students is usually a better pedagogical method then telling them. I won’t go into all the reasons in detail here, if you want you can check out the longer article I wrote for Flowtv.org on the student saturated media environment, but in short I would say that what seems strange and unfamiliar to us, is normal to most of our students. That is there is nothing particularly strange or unusual to them about Facebook, texting, Twitter, YouTube etc. As an educator one particularly effective tactic, I think, is to take the familiar and make it look strange. Or as Siva Vaidhyanathan explained on Twitter recently, students are like fish swimming in an ocean of media, my job is to get them to notice the water.

So it might seem like I would support Eric Darr, the provost of Harrisburg, and his plan to cut off social media for a week. Except I don’t. Actually I think it is a bad idea (maybe with good intentions, but a bad idea nonetheless). Let me explain.

In short I think this sort of experiment needs to be done carefully at a local level not globally with a broad brush. As Eric Stoller characterized the decision, having the Provost decide the matter for the whole University seems a bit “heavy handed” (Note: the “heavy handed” quote which is attributed to me in the Chronicle article originates with Eric, although I agree with it.) In this instance it becomes an abstracted authority telling his subordinates, what is and is not healthy, or at the least creating an experiment where the participants have no say in the matter. Whether or not it is Eric’s intent the message easily becomes “students cannot live without social media, they should try it for a week.” And again whether or not this is the Provost’s intent, it ends up coming off like a “kid’s these days” situation. Try substituting another “batch” of technology to see how problematic this becomes. For a substantial portion of the faculty, dissertations were written on a typewriter maybe we should ban all computers for a week and make graduate students work on typewriters, or we used to communicate in handwritten letters, for a week all communication must be handwritten, or people used to walk everywhere before there were cars, maybe we should have students practice a car free week.

This is not to suggest that anyone of the above couldn’t be a productive project, but I think they would only be productive given the right context. If you were studying urban planning it might be useful to have students not use cars for a week, or if you were studying linguistics and machine technology maybe only letter writing would be appropriate, but without a context I think the experiment is bound to fail, probably creating more frustration and anger than anything else.

In essence Harrisburg (or Eric, it’s difficult to tell) has grouped together a wide range of technologies and banned them all, without really recognizing their difference, and recognizing the differences between these technologies is one of the crucial things we should be teaching. On the first level who decides what is “social media” and what is not, is foursquare blocked? what about last.fm? World of Warcraft? or discussion boards? or heck even blogs with comments? I am not sure that I could decide what is and what is not social media and I am supposed to be an expert in it, how is a school going to decide? Second on the practical level it is near impossible to block all social media sites. Even if you could create a working definition of social media it would be impossible to create an exhaustive list of sites, there are simply too many to count.

Furthermore, how does one even go about enforcing this? A University wide ban is not likely to stop students from using social media, rather what it is likely to do is teach students how to set-up proxies and route around the IP blocking the University is planning on doing (not that this wouldn’t in and of itself be a good thing for students to learn. I wonder how many Tor downloads will happen that week?) Or students will likely just go off campus to access the net, making the ban an inconvenience but not an experience in giving up social media. What is more is that it is likely to disproportionately effect students over faculty and disproportionately  effect some students more than others. Faculty members who go home at night, or students who live off campus will be less affected. And what is worse is there is likely to be a class divide here as students who can afford to work at places like coffee shops will access the net there, or students who can afford Smart Phones will just rely on those devices for social networking.

There is one other concern here worth noting, one that I tried to raise in The Chronicle article but which unfortunately came across probably too soft. I think we should start by recognizing that social media isn’t an online form of communication, rather social media is how students communicate. In other words Eric isn’t asking students to give up communicating online, he is asking them to give up a large portion of the way in which they communicate. Imagine if the experiment was to have no one on campus talk to each other? There are actually fairly serious concerns here that shouldn’t be treaded over lightly. For many students their social media networks of friends are crucial to their daily lives, whether as the primary means by which they stay in touch with people or at the most significant level as a medium by which they connect with their support groups. Asking students to give up social media is not just a technical ask, it is a social and psychological one as well, one which I think those who don’t use it as a primary means of communicating probably underestimate.

But it is all to easy to critique without offering a solution. So, here is my solution, how I go about asking students to go on a social media fast.

1. I do it within a specific class context, making it an assignment. Since I teach social media, media is both the object and means of study, any ask I make is within the context of the class. In the same way asking students to give up cars for an urban planning class would make sense, asking students to give up a particular social media site within the context of class makes sense. This also presents the opportunity to discuss and process the experience.
2. Create buy in. Just telling students to live without social media seems to authoritarian, explaining to them, again within the context of the class is a far more effective way to handle the situation. If students are bought in to the assignment then they are more likely to do it. An assignment like this cannot possibly be monitored, so you need students to want to willfully do it. Do all my students follow through? No, but a majority do. (Incidentally the person who commented on The Chronicle that I would leave it up to a class vote, sort of missed this point. You can demand a lot of things from students, the one thing you can’t demand is that they learn. Their mindset going into any assignment will greatly determine what they get out of it.)
3. Make the assignment after, or during studying the object. This again creates context. After discussing Facebook and the way students use it, asking them to give it up for a week will make more sense.
4. Pick specific social media, not all social media. When I assign students to give up Facebook for a week they are still free to use email, discussion boards, even Twitter. By being specific you get students to pay attention to the specifics of each site rather than treating them all as equal, which they are clearly not. I might have students give up search engines for a day next semester.
5. Have a specific timeline and a reason for the duration. Make it a challenge.
6. Recognize that students will be differently affected by this assignment, especially if you are asking them to give up their support networks.
7. Join them. I never ask students to give up something that I am not also willing to give up.
8. Have them write about it, during and after. I want them to process the experience, they learn more this way and learn more from each other this way.

P.S. You should also read Eric Stoller’s take on this from a student life perspective.

Earlier this year Marc Andreesen was interviewed by TechCrunch on the future of publishing,in particular journalism. Andreesen’s response was, provocatively, “Burn the Boats.” What he was referring to was the moment Cortez, fleeing from Cuba, and landing in Mexico, ordered his troops to “burn the boats,” preventing any possibility of return. The lesson: don’t defend lost ground, at times there is no going back, and making decisions to insure that one does not consider a return is a good move. Andreesen’s point was that old print based media forms are dead, and it does no good to try and re-envision them for the 21st century, rather journalism institutions need to boldly move to future web based models, giving up on their print based biases.

In a similar regard I would like to suggest that academics “Burn Their Boats” or in this case, more specifically “Burn the Books,” making a definitive move to embrace new modes of scholarships enabled by web based communication, rather than attempting to port old models into the new register. Rather than providing the book with a digital facelift for 21st century scholarly communications, academics should move past book based biases which structure scholarly communications and instead imagine and execute born digital scholarly forms, which leverage the evolving digital media landscape.

Let me be clear, I like books, in fact it was my love of books, or more specifically my investment in what books can accomplish that led me to graduate school. My PhD is in English after all. Indeed I collect book, and although I don’t do it much anymore I have at times spent time tracking down and acquiring first editions for some of my favorite works. I am not in fact suggesting that we actually engage in book burning, nothing of the sort, although if I did actually burn some of my books I think it would make moving easier. Instead I am suggesting that we burn our love affair with books, and that out of reverence to the book, we stop treating it as the only or indeed primary means of scholarly communication. Not only are there better ways, but if academia wants to remain (or more skeptically, become) relevant we ought to recognize that the book is no longer the main mode of knowledge transmission.

Faced with the transformation to the digital, the newspaper industry chose to protect a business model, instead of preserving their social function. My fear is that academics are making the same mistake. Now granted this analogy is not perfect, there are contours and shapes, and nuance and details that matters here. They are not a direct equivalence, but I think the underlying logic is the same. It concerns me that academics and intellectuals, with some exceptions, seem to be repeating this mistake, following the digital facelift model, asking how they can continue to do what they do now, but do it in the digital space, rather than asking how what they do has been fundamentally changed in the age of the digital networked archive. Administrators have a tendency to preserve the business function (how can we offer our classes online vs. how does the online reshape the very idea of a class), and academics end up defending the political and ideological function (the importance of books and peer review).

It is probably worth distinguishing here between the materiality of the book, and the ideologies and biases we associate with the book. That is at the most basic level a book is a dead tree processed and bound together in leaves of paper and stained with ink. But, many of the things that we have come to associate with the book are not in fact coterminous with its material structure but rather biases developed over the Gutenberg Parenthesis. I won’t fully develop this idea here but this is what I often call librocentricism, or a book biased way of thinking, where the book stands in for certain prejudices and ideas about knowledge. As a way of thinking about this notice how the word book often stands in for, or comes to mean, the entirety of the matter, as in The Book of Nature, to “throw the book at someone,” or The Book of Love. Again there is a lot more to this idea, and I would no doubt need more than a blog post to develop this, but I think it is easy to recognize, even if the full complexity of the argument would take time, that “book” comes to be an epistemological framework for knowledge, not just a material one.

One quick example of how this works, before I move to some ideas for restructuring scholarship: syllabi. A syllabus is often structured like a book, a beginning, a middle and an end, indeed even with chapters (sections), where the traversal (completion of the weeks or reading of all the pages), promises to deliver the knowledge product.

The idea that knowledge is a product, which can be delivered in an analog vehicle is precisely what I want to call into question. What the network shows us, is that many of our views of information were/are based on librocentric biases. If you printed out all the information on the net, roughly 500 billion GB it would stack from here to Pluto 10 times. While the book treats information as something scarce, the net shows us precisely the opposite, information is anything but scarce. Books tell us that one learns by acquiring information, something which is purchased and traded as a commodity, consumed and mastered, but the net shows us that knowledge is actually about navigating, creating, participating (to be sure some people still trade in knowledge, buying and selling secrets, but this is of a substantially different order than the work we as academics do, especially humanities based academics).

Knowledge is no longer print based, nor governed by the substrate of paper, indeed while in many ways we might continue to harbor librocentric biases, as we move away from structuring knowledge to end up on paper, these framing structures will prove less and less necessary, indeed may actually impede on our ability to participate in knowledge conversations.

I am not saying that we should whole sale give up on books, actually perform a book burning freeing ourselves from all of the pages we have in our respective offices, but rather something slightly different, we should start conceiving of our scholarship as if if will not end up in books, indeed it still might, but begin by asking ourselves what would scholarship look like if were not designed to end up in books.

Here are some ideas, or suggestions for this change over:

• Stop Publishing in Closed Systems: If I can only convince you of one thing, I hope it will be this. If you publish in a journal which charges for access, you are not published, you are private-ed. To publish means to make public, if something is locked down behind a firewall where someone needs a subscription to view it, it is not part of the “common knowledge” base and thus might as well not exist. Academic journals are treating knowledge as if it is a scarce commodity, it is not, don’t let them treat it as such. If someone wants to publish something you wrote, ask them if you can keep the copyright, license under creative commons, and if they say no, don’t give it to them, and find someone who will. Look for journals which publish only online and only for free.
• Self Publish: Publishing and editing are hacks based on the scarcity of paper, no need to carry it over to the new medium. Once publishing was the most efficient way to reach the largest audience, no longer is that the case, so lets get over our publishing fetish. Publishing online allows you to engage a wider audience, both faster and more efficiently than any print based journal. We think of an academics role as presenting polished finished work and ideas, but this need not be the case. We should switch to presenting our ideas in process, showing our work, not just the final product.
• End the .pdf madness: A .pdf document is not a web based document, it is a print based document distributed on the web. One of the principle advantages of the web is the way it connects, operates as a network of connections within an ecosystem of knowledge, one can search, copy, paste, edit, link with ease, none of which is true of a .pdf. The .pdf is just a way of maintaining print based aesthetics and structures on the web. In the same way you wouldn’t think of publishing a book without the appropriate footnotes, don’t publish to the web without the appropriate live links.
• Get Over Peer Review: Peer Review is another hack based on the scarcity of paper. Given the cost of producing knowledge and the fact that academic journals or academic presses could only afford to produce so many pages with each journal, peers are established to vet, and signal that a particular piece is credible and more worthy than the others. This is the filter than publish model. But the net actually works in reverse, publish then filter, involving a wider range of people in the discursive production. Some of the most productive feedback I receive on my work comes not from peers who have a rather narrow sense of what counts and what doesn’t but from a wider range of people, with a diverse perspective. Why do academics argue for small panel anonymous peer review? One thing we know is diversity of perspective enriches discourse. 
• Aspire to Be a Curator: I think we have to give up being authorities, controlling our discourse, seeing ourselves as experts who poses bodies of knowledge over which we have mastery. Instead I think we have to start thinking of what we do as participating in a conversation, and ongoing process of knowledge formation. What if we thought of academics as curators, or janitors, people who keep things up to date, clean, host, point, aggregate knowledge rather than just those who are responsible for producing new stuff. Do we really need another book arguing that throughout the history of literary scholarship the important field of ‘x’ has long been ignored. No. But, we could actually use some really good online resources and aggregators for particular knowledge areas.
• Think Beyond the Book: Think of the book as one form, not the form. Indeed think of things that move beyond the book. What if you are writing didn’t have to be stable, didn’t have to have a final version, what if you could constantly update, change alter, make available your work. There will be no final copy, just the most recent version. While the constantly in beta mode might concern those who aim for perfection, it can also be liberating when you realize that nothing is fixed, taking advantage of the fluid. What happens when we give up on, or at least refuse to be limited by librocentricism? What if a piece didn’t have to be 20 pages for a journal article or 250 for a book, there are economic constraints that place limits on the size of academic writing, how much better can we be when we get rid of these. Or what would an academic argument as an iPhone app look like?

Let me be clear, I am not saying that the book is dead, in one regard it is already dead, in another it continues to haunt us and will never die. And we should be glad for this haunting there are many features of the book from which we benefit. What I am saying though is the centrality of the book is gone, and academia would do well to recognize this, to move into new directions, new grounds, where many already are. We should not continue to constrain our thinking by this librocentricism which no longer structures or limits the way that knowledge is produced, archived, or disseminated.

(P.S. Below is a photo I took at my visit to The Chronicle last week. Apparently these are all the books they received from academic publishers in the last week (that’s right just one week), which nobody wanted. In other words at an academic institution like The Chronicle, not one reader could be found for any of these books. They were giving them away for free. Seriously, we should stop this madness. Won’t somebody please think of the trees?)

(Below is the full video where I elaborate on the points/ideas above.)

Burn the Boats/Books, part 1 from DWRL on Vimeo.

Burn the Boats/Books, part 2 from DWRL on Vimeo.

What Dan made me wonder/realize is that by using iPads for educational purposes schools, both higher ed and secondary/primary ed, would be opening themselves up to censorship by Apple. In other words as I tweeted this morning:

Consider, that Apple’s track record here is not all that great. The way currently the App Store is administered, applications have to receive approval from Apple to be listed. Now supposedly this was initially done for quality assurance purposes (to make sure apps won’t crash your device) and in limited cases to insure that apps don’t duplicate existing core apps (listening to music, email) or interfere with AT&Ts money interest. But as the app store developed Apple extended their approval process into the role of censorship. From Apple’s Program License Agreement:

“Applications may be rejected if they contain content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, sounds, etc.) that in Apple’s reasonable judgement may be found objectionable, for example, materials that may be considered obscene, pornographic, or defamatory.”

So, Apple might block anything that in their reasonable judgement they think is “obscene, pornographic, or defamatory.” This as far as I am concerned is a dangerous situation, Apple as moral censor. Now certainly it is within their legal rights to do so, but the question is whether or not it is a good idea for us to enter this contract (and by us I mean both users and developers).

Most famously this restriction affected developers of “pornographic content” with Wobble being one of the more hyped, removed, reinstated apps. This also means that the range of iPhone sex apps must have stick figures rather than more illustrative pictures. So, say for instance you are teaching a course on human sexuality, or a sex education course, is Apple going to restrict what you can and can’t do with the iPad content wise?

Okay you might be thinking this is a liminal case, teaching sex in schools is always a touchy subject and Apple will be necessarily treading on shaky ground here. I think most people probably feel no threat from Apple as long as they limit their censorship to “pornographic content,” but as their policy indicates it extends further than that. There is political content that Apple not only would be willing to censor, but has already censored. (Worried yet?) The at this point most famous case of political censorship by Apple is of Mark Fiore, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his political cartoons. His app was censored by Apple. Now upon him winning the Pulitzer his app has subsequently been made available, but a situation where someone has to win a major award to overcome Apple’s censorship doesn’t exactly strike me as conducive to intellectual discourse.

Now consider the possible futures. Will Apple censor political apps that one might want to use in your classroom? What happens when Apple goes international with the iPad in education movement? Will the German laws restricting what can and can’t be said about Nazism limit what content Apple makes available? What about in China? Currently this is not an issue because the devices we use are independent from the content (or at least with respect to most computers), the company doesn’t get a say in how I use their device.

This initially might not seem like a big concern, for as many people pointed out on Twitter today, Apple is not going to censor documents that one accesses on the iPad, Apple only restricts what applications you can run on their devices. So presumably one could buy an ebook reader app for the iPad and run any Textbook that is published in ePub through the reader, Apple will have no say in the matter.

But as Dan’s Tweet points out this is a concern. For in the first place many books are published as apps so they will not get a work around. Especially with regard to textbooks which are likely to be published as apps requiring updates every year, following the software leasing model, rather than purchase a song model (textbook industries will love this as it yields greater revenue). Or as many of the educational materials people use will be “rich textbooks” not just ebooks, but packaged content with videos, quizzes, and “interactive content” so just publishing to .epub or .pdf won’t constitute a work around. Imagine the scenario where you want to include this M.I.A. video in your course content about police state violence, and racial profiling. (YouTube already removed this video, so it is not to far fetched too imagine Apple would deem it too violent.)

But take this even a step further, beyond “bookish” content, there is a range of material that I would want to make available to my class which Apple might chose to ban (and I am not even talking about the illegal stuff here). Consider, I have (and probably will continue to) teach Super Columbine Massacre RPG! Clearly this is content someone might find “obscene” or “defamatory” how do I know what Apple’s judgement on this is going to be? Is this really a decision I want to turn over to Apple? Indeed by allowing a locked down device into the classroom, especially if one makes it the center piece of a technology in the classroom movement this is precisely what will happen. Apple will have control over what type of content students can place on these devices.

I realize, as many pointed out on Twitter, that this is a decision many school boards already make, censoring course material, believe me I live in Texas, I get it. But there is something substantially different about a community deciding what is and is not appropriate for its students, and a corporation making these decisions. And, for higher ed, where we are not subject to the same school board politics, this would certainly be accepting a larger set of restrictions than we are used to. Again having one corporation serve as a media hub for both software, hardware, and now content, strikes me as a future we ought to resist.

(I need a “Just Say No to iPad in Education” banner.)

My initial thought: I would pay $1000 for one of these tomorrow, but only if they unlocked the damn thing. This (I am typing on it now, more on this later) is perhaps the most frustrating computer experience I have ever had. Frustrating not because the iPad is difficult to use, it is anything but. Rather, it is frustrating because it is such an artificially unnecessarily crippled device. Or as I have said to those who have seen me carrying one around, “It’s like being given a Ferrari, only to discover that is has been equipped with a VW bug engine.” The iPad looks nice, and shows what is possible, but only shows, never really delivers. Like I posited earlier this is an appliance not a computer, but if this was open, operating a full OS . . .

In this respect I think David Pogue’s schizophrenic review, one I sort of initially thought was a little cheeky, to clever by half, is pretty much dead on. If you buy one wanting a computer you will be disappointed, but if you buy one wanting a device for consuming all your digital content, it is well worth the price tag. Consider it is a video game platform, an ebook reader, and a way to surf the web. Quite a bargain in some respect. (But, and I stress this is strictly a consumption based device right now, you really have to fight it to use it to create and compose.)

On being an ebook reader:
Initially I thought that the iPad with it’s backlit screen could not compete with the Kindle or Sony eReader and eink, but after using the iPad I think the difference is not all that large. I have read for several hours at a stretch on the iPad and it doesn’t produce the eye strain I am used to associating with screen reading (Instapaper was one of my favorite uses of the iPad). To be sure, eink is still better, but the difference is nowhere near as large as I expected. Add to that the much easier (theoretically) ability to annotate your reading, and I could for see a future where I carry a slate style computer around to do most of my reading, especially journal articles and student papers. Furthermore the ability to do creative things, think beyond the book, embed video, dynamically update, nonlinear presentation, makes it promosing. I downloaded one “instructional app” a Stastics program that is textbook, plus quizzes etc, and it definitely points to a future for class content distribution that is much better than the current model. Plus I could carry around all my student papers, syllabi, important documents in one small form object. I do this already on the iPhone via Dropbox (minus the student paper part) but having it on a larger screen would make them far more useable. With an iPad I could truly go paperless.

Interface:
This is where the iPad really shines. Multi-touch screen interface changes the way you interact with a computer. Sitting down at a computer with a mouse and a keyboard just seems primitive now. The web surfing experience is so vastly superior. It’s honestly difficult to describe, the zoom in zoom out, slide objects around tactile nature of viewing. The iPad begins to change not only he way you interact with he web, but what can be done in terms of design and presentation. The best way to describe this is think Minority Report (note to Apple Minority Report serves as a proof of prior art so don’t be assholes and try and patent all of his). Very few applications have taken advantage of this yet, but the ones that harness the power of multi-touch really are a different sort of experience. I have been using iThought for mindmapping lately and there is a huge difference between clicking on a branch and moving it (as in with Nova Mind or other desktop based applications) and actually grabbing/touching the branch and moving it to where you want. The future is in touch screen interfaces, and I can’t wait for more of them.

Keyboard
The keyboard is not bad, I can use it for most of my typing. I am still slower than on a laptop with a full keyboard, but getting better, and I am sure I could retrain myself given another month or so. I also think that a case which would prop it up a bit or using the external keyboard could help. Certainly the keyboard would not limit me from using this as my primary computer, especially if I kept a full size keyboard at work for long composition, but I did write this whole blog post on the iPad.

Battery life:
Battery life is wicked good. I can easily go a whole day without charging it, more like two days.

Data:
This is where the iPad really sucks. There is no desktop, no place to store all of your data. For example if you want to build a Keynote presentation (the Keynote app is horribly crippled by he way, many of the features I am used to are not there) this can be incredibly frustrating. So you are in Keynote and you want a picture for your slide. You have to exit Keynote, go over to Safari open it up find the photo you want, copy it (if you want more than one you have to save them to iPhoto, if it is jut one you can save it to the clipboard), close Safari, go to Keynote and import the picture from the clipboard or iPhoto. Now say you need to give credit for the photo, you have to close Keynote again open back up Safari copy the URL, close Safari, open Keynote back up and then paste the URL into your credits slide. Seriously frustrating. I know the next release of the OS promises to allow multi-tasking, but the real issue here is not having a desktop to which you can save all the images, video, text, etc, you want. Or an open design platform so somebody could design me a clipboard with a 50 item cache. Applications for the most part can’t talk to each other and can’t pass data back and forth. So you have to develop all of these work arounds to have access to files. Right now the best way i think is thru Dropbox, but your Keynote presentation can’t save to Dropbox it can only save locally. So, you have to email it to yourself, and then from your home computer upload it to Dropbox. See, ridiculous, frustrating.

Locked Out:
This above is really a problem because of the way the iPad is locked down, you can only have apps which Apple wants you to have (can we talk about the fact that Apple denied a cartoonist application because it might be offensive, do we really want one company building that kind of media influence). I get what Steven Johnson is saying, that the device can be seen as generative, that the app store provides a certain amount of stability and funding guarantee for developers. So that what we have seen is an incredible explosion of iPhone apps, which is likely to be reproduced on the iPad. The problem with Johnson’s argument is that an open system is not mutually exclusive with an app store. Apple could provide an app store for the iPad, one with safe approved apps, and still allow others to install apps they didn’t get from the app store. This is how the iTunes music works. You can by songs from Apple, from Amazon, or upload your own, all of which iTunes can handle. Apple as large media conglomerate, hardware and software distributor scares me. How many people would leave their Apple’s behind if Jobs went to a App Store model for laptops and desktops? Many of my favorite Mac apps are ones that probably would not have gotten approved.

What developers would build for the iPad will no doubt be amazing, and this for sometime will probably continue to drive popularity, but also developers might start to balk at Apples tight control. I really want to see what developers could do if they had root access to this thing, my guess it would be pretty f’in amazing.

What’s Next:
I wont be buying one. I am going to wait. Having said that, I think if I was a developer or teaching web design directly I would. Why? Because it really changes the way you can compute and having a device that provokes this type of thinking is useful, a device that points to the future. But I still stand by the fact that I wouldn’t want these for my students as their computing devices. I would hate to see what type of student would develop if this were their only or primary means of computing. Instead I am holding out hope that the the competitors will will quickly get an open one to market. As for me I am going to go learn android so when a slate running android gets to the market Ill be ready to use it as my primary device.

University administrators and faculty should pay attention to the message of Dan Brown’s “Open Letter to Educators.” Students need to ask themselves, as Brown does: “What does it mean to receive an education?” Brown’s most important observation is how the university, as an institution, is failing to change in ways that make it relevant to what he describes as “a very real revolution.” He notes that technologies popular in higher education today—like email, on-line databases, and blackboard—represent minor adjustments that fall woefully behind the curve of the real sea changes threatening to undo “the University” as an institution of learning. Brown, moreover, correctly identities how shifting class relations challenge the current structures of higher education. I agree that the internet has, in many ways, proven itself a democratizing force in our society and many others. Brown’s limited insight, however– contained as it is in his box of “information”–prevents him from seeing numerous other layers to this problem. I will talk about one.

The university, as a concept, could very well disappear just like Brown predicts…for many Americans, but not for all.

As institutions of higher learning seek ways to economize by eliminating and devaluing the spaces of learning that have been so central to “the University,” they are coming to resemble exactly what Dan Brown sees in them—exchange sites of information, marketplaces easily replaced by much cheaper flows of information accessed on the internet. As they pack more students into lecture halls and fill the rosters of on-line classrooms, universities save billions of dollars in the short run, but diminish the value of their degrees. Classrooms and other spaces in the university lose their meaning in this race to the bottom. The competition for more bodies per professor, however, does not threat the university as a concept. This is where Dan Brown’s class analysis could use some help. The “State University”—specifically, the notion of affordable education is eroding. Financial and intellectual elites (rich people and academic-types) tend to be suspicious of each other, but one thing they seem to agree on is what the space of the University represents, and they will not stop paying for it…they will continue to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to send their children to ivy league universities and small private liberal arts colleges. Princes and sheiks in foreign countries will continue packing their children off to the United States for higher education. These spaces, since they come at a very high price, are rarified worlds that diverge ever more from that of state universities. Administrators of these universities know that parents aren’t paying to send their children to these expensive schools for “information.” They are sending their children to become the producers, manipulators, and interpreters of information. When university classrooms, libraries, courtyards, and student commons are designed and utilized to their greatest effectiveness, they become spaces where students learn not for the sake of absorption (passively), but for the sake of generating new knowledge, developing new conceptual models, discovering new worlds of meaning not introduced by their professors. The professor to student ratio is critical in this respect, because the professor-as-critic-and-listener is just as important, if not more important, than the professor as instructor. I therefore recommend that viewers heed Dan Brown’s “Open Letter to Educators,” but think more carefully about what is disappearing with the university.

And for what it’s worth here is the video that sparked this conversation.

I want to explicate some of the issues I raised in the last post, address some of the comments, walk back my position on at least one point (yes you are all right the word “bad” was not a fair characterization), and dig in on a few others.To keep these posts stylistically similar let me again start with two observations.

1. One of the essays I most enjoy teaching in my media studies classes is Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. When teaching this essay I often begin the class by saying Benjamin understood why Ebert was wrong. That is Ebert, rather famously claimed that while video games might demonstrate a high level of craft, they will never rise to the level of art. Of course what Benjamin argued in The Work of Art, at the time in relation to photography, was that the question should not be “Is Photography Art?” but rather the more important question: “What does having photography do to our concept of art?” (By extension the question of video games should be what does having video games do to our concept of art.)
This is similar to how I think about the concept of digital humanities. I think we should not be asking, can the humanities be digital, or how does the digital allow or not allow us to do humanities, but rather, what does having the digital do to our idea of the humanities (and by extension what it means to be human). Anything short of this strikes me as less than interesting, but more importantly a missed opportunity.

2. Okay, I can tell I am really going to get in trouble for this one but . . .

The following is not originally my observation, I wish I could take credit for it as I generally agree and think it is really astute, but it’s not mine. (But I will let the original source remain anonymous as it was an “off the record conversation,” but if said person wants to claim it, I will note credit here.)
Generally speaking (painting really broad but accurate brush strokes here) Digital Historians, and Digital Literary Scholars have had significantly different approaches to incorporating “the digital” into their respective scholarship. Digital Historians have leveraged the digital to expand and engage a wider public in the work of history. As examples of this think of Omeka, or leveraging social media to engage in crowd sourced projects. That is, Digital Historians have often begun by asking “how does the digital allow us to reach a larger/public audience?” Now this could be because many of the folks working in Digital History come from a public history background . . . But in the case of literary studies the “digital” projects have not, as much, changed the scope of the audience. So that if you look at digital literary projects they often look remarkably similar to projects in the pre-digital era, just ones which have been put on steroids and run thru a computational process. Seems to me that the Digital Historian model is a better one.

Okay so onto the post. . .

I can’t help but notice that most of the talk, or at least critique, in the comments centers around the last paragraph, largely ignoring the analysis which led me to that paragraph. (To be fair I sort of invite this, saving my central and controversial claims for that section, but still . . .) That is, the early part of the post has as its supposition that “Universities are still valuing the wrong stuff,” and by Universities I mostly arguing about humanities scholars, but that’s only because the context was the MLA. When I look at what type of digital scholarship in the humanities is being recognized and valued by the institutions within which we operate it seems that that scholarship is mostly conservative, does little to question, upset, or threaten the dominant paradigms. And, that what I see to be as truly important work has yet to receive recognition. The fact that someone like Brian can be without a job and largely a “real nobody” while he is such a significant “virtual somebody” is just one example of this.

In his comment on the original post Tim Lepczyk suggests that a large part of the problem here is in defining what I, or anyone, means by the digital humanities, or humanities 2.0. I think this is spot on, and this is probably one of the most slippery parts of my argument, one I haven’t entirely worked out. As he points out there has been a certain amount of baggage from prior text analysis that is ported over in the upgrade to digital humanities. I definitely see humanities scholars as collaborating with computer scholars, IT folks, and people from a range of places within the academy and outside the academy. (Indeed one of my favorite presentations at the MLA addressed one particularly thorny aspect of this issue, @nowviskie’stake on intellectual property and labor in the age of collaboration.) But I think if what the digital does is just take the old disciplines and make them digital, leaving disciplinarity and the silo structure of the University in tact, it will have failed. I want to see the digital transform not just the content or practice of the disciplines, but the very idea of disciplinarity.

But, it is not entirely true as Brian Breman argues that I am advocating a “this changes everything,” approach to the digital humanities. In fact my major fear, the thing that keeps me up at night, is the idea that “this changes nothing.” Indeed that was the impetuous for the original post, despite the digital, nothing changes. It seems to me that the digital affords us (both as academics and as a wider members of a society) to do something really different, to re-organize many of the founding assumptions we have about how to organize knowledge, how to organize people, and even the nature of what it means to be human. But, I see us not necessarily taking advantage of this opportunity. In fact I see this as a fading opportunity, as our culture makes the “change over” from one intellectual substructure (dead tree) to another (digital network) it seems that we are porting over a host of prejudices about knowledge production and dissemination that are worth rethinking. (As just one example of this I think about intellectual property and knowledge ownership.) So, I would love if “this changes everything,” but unfortunately I think (as my original post claimed) that this has changed little, especially within the walls of academia. This is not to suggest that there are not some significant revolutions/projects taking place both within and outside of academia, but that a lot of what is being done/counting as digital scholarship does little to question the founding principles of academic knowledge production, especially within the field of “literary studies” (principles which we can at this moment, perhaps, but for a very short time re-negotiate).

On the most radical I’ll raise the question this way: The rate at which some of the digital scholarship has been so smoothly/effortlessly incorporated into the walls of the academia should perhaps give us pause to question whether or not it actually signals any change at all. Again to paint broad brushstrokes, but ones which I think are relatively accurate, scholarship tends to fall into two categories: 1. That which does little to call into question the walls of the ivory tower, or what is worse strengthens those walls, a digital humanism which would build an ivory tower of bricks and mortar and supercomputers crunching large amounts of textual data producing more and more textual analysis that seems even more and more removed from the public which the academy says it serves re-inscribing and re-enforcing a very conservative form of humanities scholarship. 2. A digital humanism which takes down those walls and claims a new space for scholarship and public intellectualism. Now while these two positions are not as mutually exclusive as I am painting them here I am more than willing to sacrifice the first for the sake of the later.

In the longest comment on the last post, @mkirschenbaum, suggests that when we think about the internet we need to think not about the Derrida of The Postcard or Of Grammatology, but rather the Derrida of Given Time. This is perhaps the most succinct phrasing I have heard of the problem. We spend too much time thinking about the structure of the link or data and not enough time thinking about the social relations and ethical questions opened up by this space.

And in this regard I agree with in part @sramsay’s comment that “new tools can facilitate a new type of public intellectualism.” The printing press was not just a faster version of the scriptorium, it was the “gadgets of the early modern period and the networks of communication in which they flourished” that changed the intellectual and wider cultural landscape. The printing press was not a mere tool by any means. But, it was precisely at the level beyond the printing press as gadget that I want to look, and to which I think we need to focus our efforts. On one level the printing press was just a gadget and the real, the important change, came at the level of the social negotiation about how that gadget would be deployed. Authorship, intellectual property, authority, piracy, etc. were all social/legal/cultural negotiations that occurred and were not decided at the level of the gadget, even if the gadget did speed up the rate of connectivity. If academic scholarship, just to take one example, says “what can I author now on the web,” without first calling into question the notion of “authorship” and recognizing the degree to which it might be heterogenous to the way knowledge can be organized on the web we will have missed a golden opportunity.

I think I should have been perhaps clearer, or not so glib in my paraphrasing of the question from my panel. I think to say that it was a “bad” question was wrong. What I should have said was that I think to answer the question straight up is not the most productive way to look at the problem. Instead by answering the question backwards, saying what if we thought about the “digital” as not merely an adjective (gadget to be applied to the humanities) but something much more, what does having the digital do to our conception of the humanities, seems to me the place we should place our focus.

And so this is where I am really going to dig in. @tanyaclement, correctly so, calls my analysis out, saying that like the MLA I am perhaps focusing too much on social media, “Clearly, there has been a lot of focus on “Digital Humanities” this year because of the rise of twitter and, as such, DH has now been associated with social media almost exclusively. This is unfortunate.” Where I am going to disagree with this is at the level of “unfortunate.” I think this is a fortunate thing (if only it were the case). The more digital humanities associates itself with social media the better off it will be. Not because social media is the only way to do digital scholarship, but because I think social media is the only way to do scholarship period. Yes it is true that there are hosts of scholars having scholarly discussions who are not on Twitter, but you know what, they better be, or they risk being made irrelevant. No this doesn’t mean that every scholar has to have a Twitter account, but it probably wouldn’t hurt, but it does mean that every scholar better be having their discussions in public on the web in these digital spaces for all to participate in.

I realize that this stance displays a certain amount of irreverence to the very people on whose shoulders which I stand in order to make this argument, but on the same time it displays a hyper-fidelity to their work, thinking about how it can be carried into this new digital substructure, used to shape this (perhaps) new way or organizing knowledge.

Yesterday this argument took a different sort of turn when Ian Bogost published The Turtlenecked Hairshirt: Fetid and Fragrant Futures for the Humanities. In part Bogost was weighing in on the question of Digital Humanities and its arrival, non-arrival, but was actually, it seems to me, making a much broader critique. Regardless, as he observes in the comments on the post, much of the discussion centers around a conflict between digital humanities and new media. Along these lines Matt asked if this is not just a debate over semantics, and perhaps less generously, a territorial pissing match. Throwing around the term “digital humanities” as an empty signifier, backlash against the digital humanities.

Let me be clear, I have no desire to engage in an academic territorialization argument. Honestly I couldn’t care less, having left an English department I am quite happy to not have to engage in those discussions. My position was a much larger one, addressing the question of whether or not “digital humanities” has arrived, and in a connected manner what this means for the future of the humanities. It appeared to me that much of the discussion at MLA was about the arrival of the “digital humanities” and in a related theme the extent to which this can serve as a “cure” (as Ian puts it) for what ails the humanities.

So let me put it a different way, maybe the digital humanities has arrived, maybe it is becoming central and important in the way that humanities scholars do their work, but the digital humanities that has arrived (the slow work that @tanyaclement mentions) is the kind of arrival that changes nothing, a non-event. The only type of digital humanities that is allowed to arrive it the type that leaves the work of humanities scholars unchanged. Seriously, don’t tell me your project on using computers to “tag up Milton” is the new bold cutting edge future of humanities, or if it is the future of the humanities it is a future in which the humanities becomes increasingly irrelevant and faculty continue to complain at boorish parties how society marginalizes them, all the while reveling in said marginalization, wearing it as a badge of honor which purportedly proves their superiority on all matters cultural.

As Ian observes, “It’s not “the digital” that marks the future of the humanities, it’s what things digital point to: a great outdoors. A real world. A world of humans, things, and ideas.” That is what I was after in my original post, the idea that the digital that I am hoping for, hoping will challenge and change scholarship hasn’t arrived yet, for all the self congratulation about the rise of the digital, little if anything has changed. Humanists are still largely irrelevant in the broader culture discussions, and it seems to me purposely chose to remain so.(Actually I am not certain the degree to which this is really about “literary” humanists, as it seems this issue plays out differently in history. But that might just be the perspective of an outsider.)

And this is the brilliance of Brian’s paper (content not withstanding) he made his material more relevant than all the other papers that weren’t published, he engaged the outside (even if it was a paper that was a lot of inside baseball on the workings of the academy) because he opened his analysis and thinking to a wider audience (and as @amandafrench and @bitchphd remark did it with a real-time spin that enhanced at both the level of content and delivery). Again The real influence should be measured by how many people read his paper, who didn’t attend the MLA. Or maybe, the real influence of his paper should be measured by how many non-academics read his paper. Scholars need to be online or be irrelevant, because our future depends upon it, but more importantly the future of how knowledge production dissemination takes place in the broader culture will be determined by it.

1. Clearly one of the themes that has developed in the MLA post-mortem has been the rise of social media and the influence of technology at the conference. Both The Chronicle and Inside Higher Ed noticed the prominence of Twitter at the convention, or the apparent prominence of Twitter. It seemed that unlike last year where the majority of conversation about/on Twitter and the MLA was confined to to one session, this year, although noticeably less than other conferences, Social Media was clearly playing a role.

What is more, as The Chronicle noticed this seemed to be a part of a larger trend in the Digital Humanities. Ultimately I agree with Mark Sample (@samplereality), who posted an analysis of the MLA Tweets and Matt Kirschenbaum(@mkirschenbaum) who argued via Twitter that this meme/theme was some what overstated. As Matt observed, the MLA has a history of at least being marginally receptive to “technology and literacy” panels even if they have not been placed in the center of the discourse. (Rosemeary Feal deserves mad props for her outreach here. Tweeters aren’t always the most reverent or polite bunch, self included, but I am nothing compared to @mladeconvention.) Given that Matt won the MLA book award for best first book, it is hard to ignore the fact that digital humanities is becoming more prominent and more mainstream, if still marginal. But I also think there is somewhat of an echo chamber effect here. That is, of course those who write online and are engaged with technology are more likely to notice that technology is being talked about. I think if we polled all of the attendees at the MLA a vast majority of them would have no idea that a conversation (at times academic, at times not) was taking place via Twitter. Indeed I would venture to guess that a majority could not really describe to you what Twitter is/was.

2. One of the other “much talked about items” at MLA was Brian Croxall’s (@briancroxall’s) paper, or non paper titled, “The Absent Presence: Today’s Faculty.” I say non-paper because Brian, who is currently on the job market and an adjunct faculty, didn’t attend the MLA, instead he published his paper to his own website. (I am told the paper was also read in absentia.) I won’t recap the whole thing here, you should just go read it. But two things stand out in the article: 1.”After all, I’m not a tenure-track faculty member, and the truth of the matter is that I simply cannot afford to come to this year’s MLA.” 2. “And yes, that means I do qualify for food stamps while working a full-time job as a professor!”
For several reasons Brian’s paper hit a nerve. Indeed The Chronicle picked up the story, a piece which for a few days was listed as the most popular story on The Chronicle’s website. His paper became, arguably, the most talked about paper of the convention.

In part Brian’s story (how the paper became popular, not the content-or at least not yet, more on that in a minute) is in part a story of the rise of social media, and its influence. And this is where I think the real story in the Digital Humanities is, not the rise of the Digital Humanities, but rather the rise or non-rise of social media as a means of knowledge creation and distribution, and the fact that the rise has changed little. Digital Humanities if it is rising is rising as “Humanities 2.0″ allowed in because it is non-threatening.

So if you imagined asking all of the MLA attendees, not just the social media enabled ones, what papers/talks/panels were influential my guess is that Brian’s might not make the list, or if it did it wouldn’t top the list. That is because most of the “chatter” about the paper was taking place online, not in the space of the MLA.

Let’s be honest, at any given session you are lucky if you get over 50 people, assuming the panel at which the paper was read was well attended maybe 100 people actually heard the paper given. But, the real influence of Brian’s paper can’t be measured this way. The real influence should be measured by how many people read his paper, who didn’t attend the MLA. According to Brian, views to his blog jumped 200-300% in the two days following his post; even being conservative one could guess that over 2000 people performed more than a cursory glance at his paper (the numbers here are fuzzy and hard to track but I certainly think this is in the neighborhood). And Brian tells me that in total since the convention he is probably close to 5,000 views. 5000 people, that is half the size of the convention.

And, so if you asked all academics across the US who were following the MLA (reading The Chronicle, following academic websites and blogs) what the most influential story out of MLA was I think Brian’s would have topped the list, easily. Most academics would perform serious acts of defilement to get a readership in the thousands and Brian got it overnight.

Or, not really. . .Brian built that readership over the last three years.

As Amanda French (@amandafrench) argues, what social media affords us is the opportunity to amplify scholarly communication (actually if your read only one thing today on social media and academia today, read this). As she points out in her analysis (interestingly enough Amanda was not at MLA but still tweeting (conversing) about the MLA during the conference) only 3% of the people at MLA were tweeting about it. Compare that to other conferences, even other academic ones, and this looks rather pathetic. Clearly MLAers have a long way to go in coming to terms with social media as a place for scholarly conversation.

But, what made Brian’s paper so influential/successful is that Brian had already spent a great deal of time building network capital. He was one of the first people I followed on Twitter, was one of the panelists at last years MLA-Twitter panel. He teaches with technology. I know several professors borrow/steal his assignments. (I personally looked at his class wiki when designing my own.) Besides having a substantial traditional CV, Brian has a lot of “street cred” in the digital humanities/social networking/academia world. More than a lot of folks, deservedly so. It isn’t that he just “plays” with all this social media, he actually contributes to the community of scholars who are using it, in ways which are recognized as meaningful and important.

In this regard I couldn’t disagree with BitchPhD more (someone with whom I often agree) in her entry into the MLA, social media, Brian’s paper nexus of forces. Bitch claims that, “Professor Croxall is, if I may, a virtual nobody.” Totally not true. Unlike Bitch he is not anonymous, or even pseudo-anonymous, his online identity and “real world identity” are the same. He is far from a virtual nobody. Indeed I would say he is one of the more prominent voices on matters digital and academia. He is clearly a “virtual somebody,” and he has made himself a “virtual somebody” by being an active, productive, important, member of the “virtual academic community.” If he is anything he is a “real nobody,” but a “virtual somebody.” In the digital world network capital is the real “coin of the realm,” and Brian has a good bit of it, which when mustered and amplified through the network capital of others (@kfitz, @dancohen, @amandafrench, @mkgold, @chutry, @academicdave —all of us tweeted about Brian’s piece) brings him more audience members than he could ever really hoped to get in one room at the MLA.

And so Brian isn’t a virtual nobody, he isn’t a “potential somebody” he is a scholar of the the digital humanities, one that ought to be recognized. But here is the disconnect, Brian has a lot of “coin” in the realm of network capital, but this hasn’t yielded any “coin” in the realm of bricks and mortar institutions. If we were really seeing the rise of the digital humanities someone like Brian wouldn’t be without a job, and the fact that he published his paper online wouldn’t be such an oddity, it would be standard practice. Instead Brian’s move seems all “meta- and performative and shit” when in fact it is what scholars should be doing.

And so in the “I refute it thus” model of argumentation I offer up two observations: 1. The fact that Brian’s making public of his paper was an oddity worth noticing means that we are far away from the rise of the digital humanities. 2. The fact that a prominent digital scholar like Brian doesn’t even get one interview at the MLA means more than the economy is bad, that tenure track jobs are not being offered, but rather that Universities are still valuing the wrong stuff. They are looking for “real somebodies” instead of “virtual somebodies.” Something which the digital humanities has the potential of changing (although I remain skeptical).

In the panel at which I presented, an audience member noting the “meme” about the rise of the digital humanities asked if all of this “stuff” about digital humanities just reflected our fascination with gadgets, or how we balance our technology with humanities, how does the digital affect the humanities in a non-gadget way? (I paraphrase but that’s the thrust of the question). After a few of the other panelists answered, I suggested that the question was bad (this is often a rhetorical trope I employ). I said instead of thinking of the word digital as an adjective which modifies the humanities, the humanities 2.0 model, I am more interested in how the digital effects not how we do the humanities, but rather how the digital can fundamentally change what it means to do humanities, how the digital might change the very concept of “the humanities.” I don’t want a digital facelift for the humanities, I want the digital to completely change what it means to be a humanities scholar. When this happens then I’ll start arguing that the digital humanities have arrived. Really I couldn’t care less about text visualizations or neat programs which analyze the occurrences of the word “house” in Emily Dickinson’s poetry. If that is your scholarship fine, but it strikes me that that is just doing the same thing with new tools. Give me the “virtual somebodies” who are engaging in a new type of public intellectualism any day. Better yet, if you are a University and want to remain relevant in the next moment, give these people a job.

More Later.