Here’s a modest proposal for reforming higher education in the humanities and creating a generation of knowledge workers prepared not only to teach, research, and communicate in 21st-century modes, but to govern 21st-century institutions.

First, kill all the grad-level methods courses.

Kill them, that is, to clear room for something more highly evolved — or simply more fruitful — to take their place. Think: asteroids clobbering dinosaurs. Choking weeds ripped from vegetable gardens. The fuzzy little nothings and spindly cultivars in this scenario, squinting cautious eyes or uncurling new leaves into the light, are:

• those research methodologies and corpora (often but not exclusively gathered under the banner of the “digital humanities”) that address hitherto unanswerable questions about history, the arts, and the human condition;
• and the new-model scholarly communications platforms we can already recognize as promising replacements to our slow and moribund systems for credentialing and publishing humanities scholarship and archiving the cultural record on which it is based.

What do these critters need to grow up? The same thing our colleges and universities so desperately need: a generation of faculty and alternative-academic scholar-practitioners who have been trained to work in interdisciplinary contexts and who can not only take advantage of computational approaches to their own research, but who have been instilled with enough of a can-do, maker’s ethos that they feel empowered to build and re-build the systems in which they and future students will operate.

Although a small number of extra-curricular experiments (like the Praxis Program) and curricular interventions (like Michigan State’s Cultural Heritage Informatics Fieldschool) offer new and concrete models for emulation, there’s little hope for wholesale, bottom-up, grass-roots reform of methodological training in the humanities. With vanishingly few exceptions, required first-year graduate methods courses are dinosaurs and weeds. Some are an abbreviated introduction to journals databases and the mysteries of inter-library loan. Others have little to do with research and production “methodologies” at all, and are instead a crash course in the jargon and en-vogue theories of a given discipline. The intra-institutional level of coordination in developing and teaching these courses, even among closely-allied humanities departments, hovers around zero. Within single departments, they are catch-as-catch-can, shaped almost wholly by the individual faculty who teach them (often as they themselves were taught a generation or two before) and sometimes vacillating wildly in content from year to year as instructors rotate to make more equitable the “burden” of a course generally construed as service. Is it any wonder they’re a mess?

And is it any wonder that we continue to produce graduate students unready to engage with new technologies and opportunities for interdisciplinary and computational work — baffled and frustrated at the conditions of the academic job market and its underpinnings in a dying scholarly publishing industry — and under-prepared for or uneducated about hybrid and non-traditional academic careers?

Here comes the asteroid we require. (And in offering a trajectory for it, I want to acknowledge my debt to conversations with participants in the Scholarly Communication Institutes held at UVa Library, with Scholars’ Lab faculty and staff, and with our Graduate Fellows in Digital Humanities and Praxis Program students.)

Funding agencies, both private and public — like Mellon, Sloan, and (in the US) the NEH and NSF — should be approached by a respected humanities organization that itself possesses a mandate for and a track record of inter-institutional and interdisciplinary collaboration. I think here of groups like CHCI, the international Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes — especially in partnership with centerNet, its digital counterpart — or the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). The organization should offer, with sufficient funding, to serve as a broker for a prestigious and competitive RFP (request for proposals). The RFP would be issued to universities with core strengths in the humanities, adequate support for digital scholarship, and a desire — able to be expressed at the institutional level — to create broad-scale curricular change in the way graduate students are inducted into and trained for 21st-century humanities. Probably no more than 3 or 4 schools would win funding, which would be contingent on this:

• the planned, top-down, apocalyptic wiping-out — one academic year from delivery of the award — of existing graduate methods courses in (say) four to six core humanities departments;
• the formation of a small but representative, collaborative, and interdisciplinary team charged with creating the year-long common methods course that will replace them;
• a commitment by participating academic departments, in the light of the new common course, to re-think the training that they consider to be absolutely unique to their disciplines and to offer an avenue (1-credit classes? discussion groups? new approaches to departmental teaching or to comps and orals requirements?) for students to acquire it;
• and a rigorous program proposed for assessing and publicizing the successes, failures, and overall impact of the experiment, so that lessons may be learned and new programs inspired.

The common methods course would be required of all incoming graduate students in participating departments. Grant funding could support staffing of curriculum design and assessment phases, offer incentives (including course release or professional development) for faculty participation, or pay for teaching assistants. The program would be designed and team-taught by its planning group, which should include faculty from relevant departments, representatives of the offices of deans and provosts, and — importantly — local #alt-ac professionals, trained in the humanities, but working as scholar-practitioners in R&D or academic support roles in libraries, labs, publishing units, and centers. It should also engage faculty from departments like CS and Architecture, whose students may not participate directly in the program, but who would have important lessons to share about research methods and collaborative practices.

As its primary focus, the course must cover current humanities research skills, corpora, and trends — both digital and archival or material. But it should also address issues like: intellectual property and open access; the intersection of scholarship with the public humanities; publishing, preservation, and scholarly communication; funding and material support for research and teaching; interdisciplinary collaboration; matters of credentialing and assessment (peer review, tenure and promotion), faculty self-governance; and the under-interrogated policies that cover and shape the humanities in the modern college and university.

This is a tall order — but we can no longer afford to produce humanities PhDs who have only a foggy notion of how universities work, and how they are impacted by external technological and social forces. The first time a humanities scholar encounters a budget spreadsheet or performs a calculation should not be when he or she becomes department chair. And no new member of the professoriate should feel utterly out of depth in decision-making processes that impact the teaching, research, and service mission of his or her institution. Likewise, the health of the humanities depends on our production of graduate students who do not simply replicate the faculty of yesteryear, but who are prepared to take uncharted paths in and around the academy, working together to ask new research questions and to fashion new systems or adapt the ones we treasure to altered conditions.

Graduate training in the humanities starts anew every year, on Day One. How, at a moment when we feel so much is at stake, can we allow it to remain so purposeless?

Last night, I joined the tail-end of an interesting conversation on Twitter about the utility of NC (“non-commercial”) clauses in Creative Commons licensing. Some time ago, I quietly dropped the non-commercial specification from my own blog and Flickr stream, switching my license from CC-BY-NC to CC-BY. Yesterday’s exchange of viewpoints has prompted me to explain why.

The CC-BY-NC license I first adopted permitted attributed use of my content but restricted that use (without further, explicit permission from me) to non-commercial republication venues. CC-BY, on the other hand, means I’m only asking that my name appear in some way attached to my words (or images, or other intellectual property). US law asserts that the moment I have “fixed” my thought into some expression I have tacitly copyrighted it — meaning that any republication (beyond fair use and without my explicit permission) is pretty much a form of theft. Unattributed re-use would be plagiarism.

Baby, I’m givin’ it away.

When it comes to scholarly communication, I stand in Jeffersonian discomfort with the notion of “monopolies of invention” (a subject I’ve addressed before). In the humanities — where we are constantly and rightly concerned with our ability to reach broad audiences and articulate the public good of investment in the liberal arts — assertions of exclusive ownership may well “produce more embarrassment than advantage to society.” Commercial exploitation? We should be so lucky.

So, why did I adopt an NC designation, only to change it? I had had a fuzzy notion about non-commercial use being more in line with the impulses that were driving me toward the “copyleft” approach of Creative Commons in the first place. That is, I wanted my information to be free — so what could be more perfect than asking others to distribute it freely?

On further reflection — prompted in part by the experience of my colleagues in trying to reconcile disparate licenses of well-intentioned contributors to the Hacking the Academy project — I came to understand that my “non-commercial” requirement was actually weakening the Commons.

First, I realized that I was discouraging or at least slowing down any possible re-use of my content by requiring that people ask my permission. Yes, there is, as Kathleen Fitzpatrick muses, something unsettling in deliberately relinquishing control over one’s intellectual property — especially for academics working within a system that almost only rewards individual achievement, and which teaches us to polish our ideas until they are bright and perfect gems, to be carefully and deliberately placed for best effect. But I could only (and that with some difficulty) imagine edge cases in which I would not automatically grant permission for re-use of content I had published here. Which led me to my second conclusion.

More restrictive licenses, for me — for the kind of thing I write and work on, for the paths and audiences I imagine for that work, and for the kind of #alt-ac scholar I want personally to be — read like progressive degrees of arrogance. This goes beyond an admittedly flip, knee-jerk “we should be so lucky” reaction. Does an NC license imply that I believe my content to be of recognizable commercial value of which I should be in full and solitary control? (Well, I did blog it, after all.) No, it’s more the sheer, unthinking presumption I now see in well-meaning “NC” restrictions.

I’m just not bright enough to presume to predict financial aspects of future publishing models. Limiting my default scope to non-commercial ventures seems presumptuous and naïve. Current presses and projects I admire are struggling, and if any of my content, bundled in some form that can support its own production by charging a fee, helps humanities publishers to experiment with new ways forward — well, that’s precisely why I CC-licensed it in the first place. I also want to minimize my participation in any system that could lead to an “orphaned works” problem. Perhaps there’s a very clear answer to the question of who gives permission on my behalf if I am dead or incapacitated and my heirs are unreachable or unresponsive. My guess, however — since I am no writer of importance — is that, in my absence, any little roadbump on the path to permission will virtually assure my content not be republished. If it’s already becoming evident that more restrictive enfranchisements slow down re-use of Creative Commons-licensed content, and that US copyright law is geared to support the interests of big business — how hard do we expect future small-potatoes humanities editors to try?

However, it would also be naïve to assert that no-one stands to get rich on humanities content. George Williams is right to cite price-gouging in textbook publishing (and I would add bundled journal subscriptions) as a factor that gives pause to potential droppers of the NC restriction. But (and here I’m back to questioning the ethos-to-ego ratio of the humanities scholar), do I really think that drips and drabs of my own content will make a difference in these vast machines? The textbook will go on without me — and that means without my work and whatever good its inclusion might have done, for me professionally and for the spheres of knowledge and praxis I want to advance.

To take a more pragmatic stance, CC BY-ND is about as much control as I’d ever want to exert in those situations. The “ND” stands for “no derivatives,” meaning that — if attached to a CC-BY license — future publishers (commercial and non-commerical) would be able to re-use my work only if it is clearly attributed to me and not altered in any way. This would be my opportunity to contribute a coherent thought to a collection and come closer to assurance (thus addressing one of my imagined “edge cases”) that my words are not twisted in support of a project or ideology with which I’d disagree.

Fundamentally, I’ve concluded that CC-BY is more in line with the practical and ideological goals of the Commons, and the little contribution I want to make to it. I still have a residual clingyness about my words that I can only assume comes from eight years spent in pursuit of a doctoral degree. I’m getting over it, though, and am even more cavalier about my non-textual work — software, interface design, and sketches or photographs. If Flickr would allow me to remove the “attribution” clause from my snapshots, I’d be giving them away even more freely than my words. I’d be placing most of them explicitly in the public domain.

For humanities scholarship, and for the kind of institutional and administrative mutterings I publish here, I truly believe — there’s no where to go but out.

Here’s where I am. It’s nearly Hallowe’en, and kids have settled into school routines. I have little ones in my own house and big ones in the Scholars’ Lab — the youngest of whom are newly, this year, exactly half my age. Other kids are dead, and it’s still bothering me a good deal. Mornings in Virginia feel cold now, and acorns are everywhere underfoot. We’re tracking leaves inside.

It’s a melancholy way to begin a post, but it situates us.

It’s October 2010 in the social scene of the digital humanities, and (yes, I’m feeling wry) our gathering swallows Twitter in the skies.

I tweet a lot. It’s a mixture — the writing and the reading — of shallow, smart, and sweet. I answer lots of email, too, lots of messages from strangers asking questions. We’re doing a good job, my team, and people are asking how. I stuck my neck out on a thing or two, and people are asking why, or for more. This fall, I worked with friends to launch a website that I’m proud of — which is for strangers, asking questions. I’ve stopped answering to the phone.

There’s a bit of a joke around the SLab, about the degree to which the boss-lady is not service-oriented. It’s funny (as they say), because it’s true. But it’s only true insofar as I let it be — and most local colleagues realize that I put on this persona consciously, as a useful corrective or (at least) a countering provocation to that strong and puzzling tendency I have noted as a scholar come to work in libraries: the degree to which the most beautiful quality of librarianship — that it is a service vocation — becomes the thing that makes the faculty, on the whole, value us so little. Service as servile. The staffer, the alternate academic, the librarian, the non-tenure-track digital humanist, as intellectual partner? Not so long as we indulge our innate helpfulness too much. And not so long as we are hesitant to assert our own, personal research agendas — the very things that, to some of us once expected to join the professoriate, felt too self-indulgent to be borne.

I’ve written about these things. Others have, too. And — even though service under any banner is undervalued in the academy, and a fully-fledged digital humanities center administratively embedded among library services is a rarity — near and far, DH stays nice. (Just think: how many other academic disciplines or interdisciplines work so hard to manifest as “a community of practice that is solidary, open, welcoming and freely accessible” — a “collective experience,” a “common good?”)

Here’s the irony. And it’s how we’ll move from a dwindling Virginia October to the eternal September of the digital humanities.

If, on the local scene, I strive to give a habitation and a name to the administrator (yes, even that!) as driven intellectual partner — for outreach and service to the DH crowd, I’m your girl. The kinds of things I volunteer to organize and do (hosting training institutes, grad fellowships, and friendly un-conferences, helping raise the big tent, and providing signposts or lacing bootstraps for bootstrapping), together with my role as VP and Outreach Chair for the ACH, put me in a position to observe and appreciate the depth of generosity in DH. A truly remarkable and frankly heartwarming percentage of the digital humanities community gives unstintingly of its precious time in these ways, solely for the purpose of easing the path for others. And it’s not all organized initiatives. To a degree I have not noted before, the DH community has become conscious that we operate in a panopticon, where our daily voicing of the practice of digital humanities (and not just on special days — every day) helps to shape and delimit and advance it. That voicing operates wholeheartedly to welcome people and fresh ideas in, if sometimes to press uncomfortably (one intends, salutarily) against the inevitable changes they will bring. Some of us take this unending, quotidian responsibility too seriously.

I hear, and hear about, our back-channel conversations.

“Eternal September” is a notion that comes from Usenet culture — the early peer-to-peer newsgroups and alt.* discussions that were, for many of us, an introduction to networked discourse and digital identity. Because Usenet activity centered around colleges and universities, a large influx of new students each September had disruptive effects on its established, internal standards of conduct, or netiquette. About thirty days in, newbies had either acclimatized to Usenet or they had dropped away, and the regular roiling of September could be left behind for another eleven months. As the mid-1990s approached, Internet access became more common and less metered by the academic calendar. Once AOL began offering Usenet to its subscribers, September was eternal.

The Wikipedia article for Eternal September reads “See also: Elitism.”

I mention this because I am not unaware of the awkwardness of my position. I have worked in humanities computing for fourteen years. I direct a department dedicated to digital scholarship, I’m a steering or program committee member or executive councillor or associate director of several DH groups, and an officer of (arguably) its primary professional society. My dissertation and almost all of my publications and public presentations have been in the area of digital research, scholarship, and pedagogy. (Still, I still have a hard time thinking of myself as a DH insider, or as part of the establishment. This comes, I’m sure, of a profound respect for the two living generations of computing humanists under whom I trained — and because I matured in the field before Twitter and THATCamp made everybody instant pals.)

That said, I am positioned to hear the private rumblings of many of the people most inclined — indeed, perhaps most known for their inclination to be generous to colleagues in the digital humanities, old and new, and that over the course of years and sometimes decades. I also hear from some I’d consider new to this field, but experienced in ways that make them sensitive to the tides of online collectives. What I most hear is a tension between goodwill and exhaustion — outreach and retreat. I’m sympathetic to the weariness of these people, treading water, always “on.” I feel it, too. But it’s their voicing of frustration and possible disengagement that alarms me.

DH is not in Usenet’s eternal September, precisely. That is, truly rude or tone-deaf or plainly infelicitous tweets, comments, and postings are few enough that they’re of little import, even when they grate. I also remain hopeful that we’ll soon figure out, among so many bright and sensitive readers, the right balance of promotion for our programs (large or small) with genuine expressions of enthusiasm for our work — the rhetoric of always-on. And, for the most part, niceness itself is catching (which may be part of the problem). Fatigue will come in waves, to different segments of the networked community at different moments. So it goes. But the Eternal September of the digital humanities most threatens to exhaust us all when our newer colleagues, who are most visible online, make two assumptions: they think that all of this is new; and they think that the current scene is all there is.

Most of us are newer and more insular than we realize.

What does it mean to practice as digital humanists? Some cold mornings, I don’t care. We are here to help each other figure it out along the way — by enacting community, building systems of all sorts, doing work that matters in quarters predictable and unexpected. We are devoted now like nothing I’ve seen before. But have you begun to sense how many good people are feeling deeply tired this autumn?

Some of you are hiding it. Some of us should take a breath.

There’s a scene, in the filmed version of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, in which Tyler Durden leads our Everyman narrator on an expedition for biomedical waste. They’re raiding the trash bins of a liposuction clinic for lipids that can be rendered into soap. This is expensive soap, boutique soup — value-added soap. It’s the kind of soap probably only bought by the kind of woman who frequents a liposuction clinic.

“It was beautiful,” we hear. “We were selling their own fat asses back to them.”

This week, a powerful letter was distributed to all faculty of the financially-imperiled University of California system — the libraries of which are now faced with a 400% price increase if they would like to continue to provide access to 67 important scientific journals distributed by the Nature Publishing Group. One of these is NPG’s flagship journal, Nature. The price increase would bring the annual cost of a single NPG journal from approximately $4500 to over $17,000. When, in conversation today, I’ve shared this number with my librarian colleagues at home and abroad, I’ve heard a lot of incredulous laughter. But laughter turns to quiet musing (“would that work here?“) when I go on to say that the California letter threatens complete boycott, in clear terms and with the support of a system-wide advisory group on scholarly communication, of all UC faculty involvement in the production machine of the Nature group, if the costs for these journals cannot be brought in line with reality.

The UC/Nature story was covered swiftly and well by Jennifer Howard of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Her article was followed today by a set of must-read musings by Dorothea Salo, from the perspective of a repository librarian and open-access advocate. And, of course, all of this is contextualized by any number of scholarly committee and task force reports, and by the work of thinkers like Kathleen Fitzpatrick. I thought I had nothing to add, at this early stage of the UC system’s game. However, I’ve already noted enough bafflement on the part of humanities faculty and graduate students at the affair to think I should talk in a pithy way about Fight Club soap — and then share a conjecture about the bizarre, perennial surprise that seems to be attendant on these conversations.

The position in which libraries find themselves vis-a-vis Nature, Elsevier, et al is laughable — once you’ve shed a tear for all of the humanities collections (monographs and periodicals) that have already been cut in response to previous gouging by journal providers. Large companies have cornered the market on access to scientific research which universities see as mission-critical, and can therefore name their own prices. The first victims of the hard decisions forced on collections stewards at many institutions have been less costly, lower-profile, slow-knowledge, lower rate-of-use, disorganized and a la carte humanities publications — with the dire results we have seen across the academy over the last decade. Libraries have cancelled standing orders with university presses. Many presses and journals, having lost their best (sometimes almost only) clients, have responded by reducing the number of worthy book manuscripts and articles that make it into print. Others have folded entirely. A generation of humanities scholars, still struggling to meet the “or perish” tenure and promotion expectations of a bygone era, feel they have nowhere to publish. Students and faculty have lost access to whole threads of our shared, cultural conversation — conversation that continues in humanities publications their schools now cannot afford. Other threads (genres of work, areas of inquiry) have been cut short entirely.

Ready to laugh again? Let’s look at the statistics provided by the California Digital Library in its letter to faculty, and then let’s talk about soap. Articles published by UC faculty in NPG’s flagship journal, Nature, numbered 638 over the past six years. And that’s just Nature. Sixty-six other journals are part of NPG’s proposed rate hike. Approximately 5,300 articles by UC faculty have appeared in them in the same timeframe. But that’s not the kicker. Pause now for a moment to imagine the countless, unquantifiable hours of UC faculty labor that have gone not only into the research for and writing of these articles — but also into their vetting. How many UC faculty have spent how many hours engaged in peer review or serving on advisory committees to the journals that their libraries now cannot afford? How much intellectual labor already paid for by the University of California system is now being sold back to UC’s own libraries at exorbitant costs? How much Fight Club soap are we willing to buy?

And how long have we all seen this train wreck coming?

I’m a humanities PhD who has worked in an administrative position in a major research library for nearly three years. I’m still new enough to feel productive cognitive dissonance and the occasional wave of culture shock. Often this centers, for me, around the beautiful service ethic of librarians, and their desire to make things easy, and make things work for the faculty and student researchers they serve. It’s a different kind of monasticism from the “life of the mind” for which I was trained, but I recognize devotion of all sorts, and I bet you do, too.

There is, however, a distinct danger in this impulse — to provide a level of self-effacing service that does not distract the researcher from his work. With the best of intentions, it can lead to a strategy of hiding the messy stuff, or laying a smooth, professional veneer over increasingly decrepit and under-funded infrastructure. And then there’s the degree to which the service mentality prevents librarians from engaging with faculty as true intellectual partners — developing the kind of relationships that foster frankness. (Of course, we need to be met half way. Why is it that librarians’ advocacy for open access initiatives has provoked such discomfort among faculty at so many institutions that the word on the street is now: don’t speak up, don’t be pushy, know your place?)

Combined, these factors can mean librarians fail to blow the whistle on journal pricing and subsequent collections implications until it’s too late. (Witness the shock and anger of many faculty bodies at recent cancellations of humanities subscriptions or closures and consolidations of whole libraries at institutions around the country.) The University of California’s statement, its coverage in the Chronicle, and the open discourse that I hope it promotes among researchers and librarians is a great social positive — even beyond the impact I predict it will have on pricing models by monopolistic journal providers and the visibility it will provide for open-access alternatives like those outlined in the UC letter. We shouldn’t let this crisis go to waste, or overlook what it can reveal about the way we work together in higher ed.

We’re in untenable and intertwingled positions, all of us. I advocate the talking cure. Why should the first rule of Journal Club be, for librarians and faculty alike, not to talk about Journal Club?