The biggest challenge for humanities scholars in the digital age isn’t how to rework traditional forms of scholarship. It’s how to get their work recognized in a publishing-and-reward system not fully equipped to handle it, and how to change that system as digital scholarship becomes more mainstream. A select group of scholars, publishers, librarians, funders, and representatives of scholarly societies gathered here last week to talk about what the organizers called “new-model scholarly communication” and better ways to promote it.
The meeting was the ninth and final session of the Scholarly Communication Institute, which took shape in 2003 with money from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Over the years, the institute has focused on changes in scholarly communication in fields such as architectural history and visual studies and on how to create centers for forward-looking humanities research. This year, the group took a broader view. It focused on describing what the institute’s director, Abby Smith Rumsey, called “a shared mental map” of what scholarly communication looks like now.
“What we’re talking about is an era of remaking and rebuilding scholarly communication,” Ms. Rumsey said. What’s needed now is “a different set of skills, a different kind of energy.”
Even the term “digital humanities” was called into question. One participant, William Cronon, proposed a broader phrase: “the humanities in and for a digital age.” Mr. Cronon is a professor of history, geography, and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the president-elect of the American Historical Association. After the meeting, James Grossman, the historical association’s executive director, described it as a “mass brainstorming environment” that gives people from different walks of academe a chance to swap ideas to take home and put to use.
Participants talked about the growing push to get tenure-and-promotion committees to recognize and give credit for projects that don’t look like traditional monographs or journal articles. They agreed that they wanted to see more attention paid to non-tenure-track and alternative academic, or “alt-ac,” careers that combine scholarly, publishing, and technological skills. They pushed for scholarly societies to take a bigger role as “hubs of change” and how that could benefit not just scholars but also the societies themselves. And they discussed how university presses and libraries might adapt to publish and archive evolving forms of scholarship.
One session was given over to lightning-round presentations on new models of scholarly publishing and dissemination. Ellen Faran, the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, talked about “rethinking the book for digital vernaculars” from a publisher’s point of view. As an example she used the press’s first video book, Learning From YouTube by Alexandra Juhasz, a professor of media studies at Pitzer College.
Kathleen Fitzpatrick, the director of the Modern Language Association’s new Office of Scholarly Communication, put out a call “to expand the forms the dissertation can take” and spoke about the association’s goal of creating a dynamic online community for its members. Dan Cohen, an associate professor of history at George Mason University and director of its Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, talked about the center’s new project, PressForward, which seeks to aggregate the best online scholarship—"the full range of connecting good materials with audiences,” Mr. Cohen said. In another session, he spoke of the need to “right-size scholarship” and get away from the emphasis on making everything book- or article-length.
Opportunities Amid Uncertainty
Representatives of foundations and scholarly societies described some opportunities they see in the present gloomy financial environment. Don Waters, the program officer for scholarly communications and information technology at the Mellon Foundation, said cutbacks in traditional sources of funds might have one unintended benefit: moving scholars “to fully liberate themselves from a stifling and outdated Cold War framework” of research support.
With a nod to the alt-ac theme that wound through the meeting, Mr. Waters also said it was time to think hard about what the increase in adjunct and nontraditional academic labor means. “Do we have a sufficiently robust and critical view of the divisions of labor in higher education?” he asked. “Does this pattern of change represent a death spiral, as many critics claim,” or is it something else?
He reminded his audience that, although the focus tends to be on technology these days, “compelling teaching and research agendas” matter most. “It’s the scholarship, stupid,” he said.
Steve Wheatley, vice president of the American Council of Learned Societies, reinforced Mr. Waters’s point about finding opportunities amid uncertainty. “Every scholarly career is something of a start-up,” he said. Despite dwindling financial resources, he said, “I think there’s one great wind at our back"—the great shift in how information is created and shared.
Some of the best glimpses of how scholarly communication is evolving came via a panel called “Views Onto the Future.” It gave a rising generation of scholars, librarians, and publishers a chance to describe what they do and what matters to them. “I’d like to see 10 prominent humanities departments speak loudly and publicly about uncoupling the traditional scholarly monograph from a strict one-to-one relationship with tenure and promotion,” said Miriam Posner, a Mellon postdoctoral research associate at the Emory University Libraries.
Lauren Coats, an assistant professor of English at Louisiana State University, said it was important to have broader conversations about new work—especially with people “we might not want to talk to, but whom we need to engage with"—and figure out how to make it less risky. “As as assistant professor who is thinking about tenure, I’m interested in the idea of reducing the opportunity cost for people in all stages of their career to participate in the digital humanities,” she added.
At the same session, Tom Scheinfeldt, the managing director of George Mason’s Rosenzweig Center, called for more attention to be paid to Web-driven scholarly communication. “I think we still have a tendency to fight against the Web and its way of doing things and to try to adapt the Web to our way of working,” he said. The most successful online projects “are the ones that do it the Web way, that follow the Web’s native capabilities and cultures, and don’t try to shove old modes into the new ways of working.” For the rising generation of scholars, “this is the scholarship, to deal with the challenges of the Web and new technologies,” he said.
“This isn’t just a transition we need to rush through,” he added. “This is the state we’re in.”
