Getting Serious About Digital Humanities | Peer to Peer Review

Barbara Fister, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN -- Library Journal, 05/27/2010

Dan Cohen recently published an intriguing essay on the curious value that accrues when an almost-ready scholarly manuscript is turned into a book. He recalls a day when he and his co-author Roy Rosenzweig looked at a printout of the manuscript for Digital History, which was almost ready to go into production. Cohen wondered whether it wouldn’t make sense to simply publish it online.

The intellectual work was done. It could be made available to the public at little or no cost, and it would take no more work than a few mouse clicks. In what way did going through the traditional process of publishing it with a university press make it any more valuable?

Rosenzweig thought for a while, then provided an answer. This final step, and its attendant labor, time, and cost, recognized the social contract that authors and readers enter into with a published work. As Rosenzweig put it, "we agree to spend considerable time ridding the manuscript of minor errors, and the press spends additional time on other corrections and layout, and readers respond to these signals—a lack of typos, nicely formatted footnotes, a bibliography, specialized fonts, and a high-quality physical presentation—by agreeing to give the book a serious read.”

Examining the terms of the social contract
A university press, of course, does more than correct a few errors, format manuscripts, and print books.

It first selects from a deluge of submissions the manuscripts that are worthy of that social contract (and which will attract enough readers to justify the cost of publication). Then it helps an author make it ready for peer review, it facilitates the review process, and makes sure the results of revision are not a mishmash of unresolved conflicts. It sees to the design of the book, inside and out, provides marketing, and gets it distributed. And the press has to do all this on a nickel because the dime it used to have to publish books got reduced in a budget cut. For the most part, university presses are expected to be self-supporting, unlike the scholars whose work they shepherd into publication.

But even if it’s somewhat incomplete, Rosenzweig’s analysis of the added value of formal publication is intriguing. There is a sense that, when a book is put together carefully and well, it has all the trappings of intellectual heft and will reward the serious reader more than any other form of scholarship.

The corollary is that readers will reward the well-wrought book by reading it with care, taking the time to follow a complex argument, to examine the evidence, to quibble with the parts that are troublesome, and to incorporate that which seems valid and useful into their understanding of the branch of knowledge that the book addresses.

In fact, the format doesn’t guarantee careful reading. Scholars often mine the bits they find useful and ignore the whole, or they may use reviews and glosses to substitute for the hard work of line-by-line attention. If the book is successful enough, it doesn’t have to be read at all. The name of the author, once established by virtue of an influential book, may become a form of shorthand for the ideas inside the book which, resting on its laurels, can be left on the shelf, unopened.

That kind of fame is rare, but in the humanities, it’s the brass ring everyone reaches for. Cohen speculates about the way this book-as-social-contract no longer works. The boilerplate of this contract—which is generally no more closely examined than the click-through terms of service on a software package—has enormous and disastrously archaic influence on the way we assign value to scholarship.

Cohen points out that there’s no end of supply. Scholars have plenty to say, but there’s no increased audience for their product; in fact, getting attention is harder than ever. The stale notion that scholarship only counts if it’s on a block of paper between boards with the logo of a university press on the spine is like trying to insist that reputation has to be purchased with gold sovereigns, a currency that is no longer in circulation.

Demand-side economics
Cohen uses the economic terms of supply and demand. Scholars are now able and willing to supply scholarship in many new forms. “Robust academic work has been reenvisioned in many ways,” he writes, “as topical portals, interactive maps, deep textual databases, new kinds of presses, primary source collections, and even software. Most of these projects strive to reproduce the magic of the traditional social contract of the book, even as they experiment with form.”

But the demand side is much less imaginative. Cohen refers to John Updike’s equating of printed books with authorship and the shift to the digital book as the end of thoughtful, careful writing and reading, a prejudice that many scholars hold without really thinking about it. Cohen wonders why the effort hasn’t been made to transfer the supply of rigorous digital scholarship into an equally rigorous readership.

Far fewer efforts have been made to influence the mental state of the scholarly audience. The unspoken assumption is that the reader is more or less unchangeable in this respect, only able to respond to, and validate, works that have the traditional marks of the social contract: having survived a strong filtering process, near-perfect copyediting, the imprimatur of a press.

We need to work much more on the demand side if we want to move the social contract forward into the digital age. Despite Updike’s ode to the book, there are social conventions surrounding print that are worth challenging. Much of the reputational analysis that occurs in the professional humanities relies on cues beyond the scholarly content itself. The act of scanning a CV is an act fraught with these conventions.

Can we change the views of humanities scholars so that they may accept, as some legal scholars already do, the great blog post as being as influential as the great law review article? Can we get humanities faculty, as many tenured economists already do, to publish more in open access journals? Can we accomplish the humanities equivalent of FiveThirtyEight.com, which provides as good, if not better, in-depth political analysis than most newspapers, earning the grudging respect of journalists and political theorists? Can we get our colleagues to recognize outstanding academic work wherever and however it is published?

The curious thing is that the actual reputation of young scholars is often traded using the modern currency of being seen, being read, being taken seriously by peers, and a lot of that happens in a digital, fast-moving current of ideas that washes through conference hallways and across digital pathways. The attention economy is flourishing in scholarly disciplines. It’s only when a scholar goes up for tenure or for a job at a more prestigious institution or for a coveted fellowship that suddenly the old currency is required. 

What is the library's relationship to this social contract? It seems we have a couple of supply and demand problems on our hands. We supply more information than ever, but have focused more of our efforts on how to find it than on helping our attention-deficient students and scholars find that which deserves a serious read. Our information literacy efforts tend to focus on how to find as many sources through as many paths as possible and (if there’s any time left) how to evaluate a source by noting whether or not it bears the marks of having been published through traditionally respected channels. We act as if demand is unlimited.

In fact, we know that students apply filters that aren't based on quality, but rather on noise reduction by using as few search tools as possible. As Cohen points out, scholars use a different but no less blunt instrument to reduce noise. They combine their knowledge of who carries weight in their field with a set of imprimaturs—particular presses, particular journals, particular institutional affiliations—and trust that anything that has made it through those traditional gauntlets must worth their attention.

These filters may be more sophisticated than those students use, but scholars could just as easily be accused of laziness as their efficient students. They miss a wealth of new scholarship that doesn’t conform to mid-twentieth century ideas of what quality scholarship looks like. This week Jennifer Howard pointed out in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required) the fact that books get reviewed in scholarly journal, but digital projects of equal value are ignored.

Scholars simply don’t know how to review them, and this lack of inquisitiveness and unwillingness to solve the problem creatively is compounded by the fact that reviews themselves are worth mere farthings in the old-school gold-standard economics of prestige.

Open for debate
We need to open minds before we can achieve the goals of open access, and arguing that the economics of scholarship are broken hasn’t made much of an impression on the humanities. After all, if those scholars had a quantitative bent they might be working in a different field.

It’s worth noting there’s a very simple reason that the humanities, in which ideas are often worked out at book length, haven’t embraced digital publishing as quickly as fields in which the article is the primary means of communicating ideas. You can print an article from a database; you are generally not allowed to print books, or even parts of books, nor can you download them to your hard drive, file them away for later, or email them to a colleague. Publishers by and large expect every copy of a book to be paid for, and they typically insist that library versions have printing and copy-and-paste options disabled. (Penn Press is more innovative than their competition and agreed to having a free open access version available. It hasn’t hurt sales.) If publishers had prohibited the printing or downloading of articles from databases, we’d still have massive print periodical collections.

Sooner or later, publishers have to realize they can’t start the digital revolution without us. But for now they seem to be holding on to the “later” option, hoping their audience will change the way they work with texts. Good luck with that.

Libraries could do more to challenge the current state of affairs in the humanities. What support can we provide to help the innovators create, present, and set new scholarship free? If we want to take up that challenge, we will need more than initiative and imagination about digital scholarship. We’ll have to figure out how to shift our attention from license agreements to social contracts that are badly out of date.

Barbara Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, a contributor to ACRLog, and an author of crime fiction. Her next mystery, Through the Cracks (see review), published by Minotaur Books this month.

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