"Uren" Blog 5

“You need a team,” Marc Parry writes in “The Humanities Go Google,” referring to the task of data mining a thousand books for thematic and stylistic trends. I've found myself curious about how true this is generally. Even without an enormous undertaking, even when considering a mere paper, say, I'm thinking that other people are as responsible as I can rightly claim to be for my thoughts and how I process and communicate them. For a long time it's felt dishonest to me to present an argument without pointing out where I think I picked it up. DFW, usually, if it concerns fiction. Jim Collier if it's about academia. And so on. At any rate, like Michelle, I've thought about our look at collaborative learning—and I want to add social-constructivist theory—in SC-T's pedagogy class. Some time later, I talked to Jen Schrauth about this: I've been thinking about the ethics of staking a claim to thoughts and texts and it's made me want to publish anonymously. I've actually held on to stories from my MA thesis because I want to formulate a vision for my career going forward before I haphazardly start down a trajectory that looks a lot like it shares a deep structure with stuff I don't like that much (e.g. consumerism, understanding people according to stuff and stuff according to ascribed value). In the case of scholarship, I (perhaps romantically) like the idea of open source, digital publishing. It just seems to have a lot more in common, philosophically, with stuff that leads me to read and write what I read and write in the first place: community, conversation, experimentation, etc. So there's some personal stuff that the prompt for this post isn't really asking for.

Yesterday afternoon I listened to part of an interview on The Thomas Jefferson Hour about a project out of Dickinson State University to collect material on Theodore Roosevelt for an online presidential library. The project has required the involvement of many organizations, from national parks to Harvard. The result will be, in the next ten years, the digital equivalent of other presidential libraries. I'm also familiar with Jason Mittell's online, open source activity as a TV scholar and (see his blogroll for the similarly minded) Flow, a site of UT's RTF program that joins academic inquiry with “real world” conversation to facilitate meaningful discussion of media. If scholarship isn't a conversation among the curious and variously informed about matters that impact our lives, then I don't know what it is or why it matters. So I'm drawn to these movements to relocate the sites of academic writing, to open projects to input, to bring that conversation that must be the substance of scholarship into the digital age by placing it in the community available online. Obviously there's a place for the solo scholar who meditates for extended periods of time on issues she wishes to grapple with prior to entering conversation or even embracing a community—in fact, one knock against trends in academia regarding tenure and, subsequently, publishing is that they occlude deep and extensive reflection; they mandate production the way a factory mandates production. However, I remain optimistic. Some of us may operate best alone, but isn't it cool that the rest of us don't have to?