Category: higher ed

a skunk in the library

Posted on by Bethany Nowviskie

[This is the text of an invited talk I gave at the University of Nebraska in April. I’d like to thank my amazing hosts in the UNL Library and CDRH!]

I’m going to back into my talk today, perhaps in part to counter the way I have imagined all of you instinctively backing slowly away from the brilliant and hilarious and slightly horrifying posters I’ve seen advertising it.

My title is “A Skunk in the Library: the Path to Production for Scholarly R&D.” Now, why (oh, why) the skunk? It’s because I’ll be introducing you to the R&D unit within my department, the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia Library, as a quintessential “skunkworks” operation – and I’ll describe what I mean by that in just a second. It’s also because I am not unconscious of the wrinkled noses that can result from an airing of some of the ideas I want to share with you.

To that end, I plan to save plenty of time this morning for conversation, because above all that’s what my gestures here will call for. And I’ll be asking you to help us think together through something of importance to librarians and software developers and scholars alike – namely, the role of libraries and library-embedded digital humanities centers in helping to beat what we might call a “path to production,” both for innovative scholarship and for its supporting technical and social frameworks.

IT staff in the audience will hear that phrase, “path to production,” and think immediately of a set of well-established Web development and release practices. I’ll rehearse those a little bit here, so that we’re on the same page, before I complicate (or possibly just pervert) them. Continue reading “a skunk in the library”

announcing #Alt-Academy

Posted on by Bethany Nowviskie

Readers of this blog will know that, for more than a year, I have been working with a group of wonderful people to bring an edited collection collection of essays and a distributed, online community into focus.  (You can see some of my past #alt-ac writing here, or follow the conversation on Twitter.)

Today, I’m very pleased to announce the release of #Alt-Academy, an open-access collection of essays, dialogues, and personal narratives on the subject of alternative academic careers for humanities scholars:

http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/alt-ac/

Initial contributors include Willard McCarty, Julia Flanders, Anne Whisnant, Rafael Alvarado, Julie Meloni, Lisa Spiro, Doug Reside, Tanya Clement, Hugh Cayless, Tom Scheinfeldt, Amanda Gailey, Dot Porter, Joe Gilbert, Wayne Graham, Eric Johnson, Dorothea Salo, Sheila Brennan, Jeremy Boggs, Sharon Leon, Brian Croxall, Arno Bosse, Miranda Swanson, Joanne Berens, Amanda Watson, Patricia Hswe, Amanda French, Christa Williford, Suzanne Fischer, Patrick Murray-John, Vika Zafrin, Shana Kimball, and James Cummings.  Gardner Campbell and Tim Powell will provide invited commentary in the coming weeks, and the project’s general editor is Bethany Nowviskie.

As a MediaCommons project, #Alt-Academy takes a grass-roots, bottom-up, “publish-then-filter” approach to community-building and networked scholarly communication around the theme of unconventional or alternative (“#alt-ac”) careers.  24 essays and multimedia contributions are currently available under a Creative Commons license. See our “Welcome” and “How It Works” pages to learn how you can comment, contribute, or volunteer to edit an #Alt-Academy cluster.  Continue reading “announcing #Alt-Academy”

where credit is due

Posted on by Bethany Nowviskie

This is the unedited text of a talk I gave today at the NINES Summer Institute, an NEH-funded workshop on evaluating digital scholarship for purposes of tenure and promotion. It references and builds on a (considerably less obnoxious) essay I wrote for a forthcoming issue of Profession, the journal of the MLA, and which was provided to NINES attendees in advance of the Institute. The cluster of articles in which the essay will appear includes work by Jerome McGann, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Tara McPherson, Steve Anderson, and Geoff Rockwell and was edited by Laura Mandell, Susan Schreibman, and Steve Olsen.

Evaluating Collaborative Digital Scholarship (or, Where Credit is Due)

So, as you’ll divine from the image on the screen, [SLIDE: awkward family photos] today I’m addressing human factors: framing collaboration (an activity that often happens across class lines in the academy) within our overall picture for the evaluation of digital scholarship.  I’m pulling several examples I’ll share with you from my contribution to the Profession cluster that Laura and Susan made available, and my argument may feel familiar from that piece as well.  But we thought it might be useful to have me lay these problems out in a plain way, in person, near the beginning of our week together.  Collaborative work is a major hallmark of digital humanities practice, and yet it seems to be glossed over, often enough, in conversations about tenure and promotion.

I think we can trace a good deal of that silence to a collective discomfort, which a lot of my recent (“service”) work has been designed to expose — discomfort with the way that our institutional policies, like those that govern ownership over intellectual property, codify status-based divisions among knowledge workers of different sorts in colleges and universities.  These issues divide DH collaborators even in the healthiest of projects, and we’ll have time, I hope, to talk about them.

But I want to offer a different theory now, more specific to the process that scholars on tenure and promotion committees go through in assessing their colleagues’ readiness for advancement.  [SLIDE: skeleton reading Baudelaire] My theory is that the T&P process is a poor fit to good assessment (or even, really, to acknowledgment) of collaborative work, because it has evolved to focus too much on a particular fiction.  That fiction is one of “final outputs” in digital scholarship. Continue reading “where credit is due”

why, oh why, CC-BY?

Posted on by Bethany Nowviskie

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 of my intellectual property 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. Continue reading “why, oh why, CC-BY?”

mambo italiano

Posted on by Bethany Nowviskie

(Below, you’ll find remarks I contributed to an MLA panel discussion from which a case of pneumonia kept me away. The text was read in my absence by Steve Ramsay. I’d like to thank Steve, not only for that, but for cheering me through my disappointment at missing the conference by providing the earworm I now pass on to you. And here’s a promise: when I stop coughing and get my breath back, I’ll record the talk — and sing like I was a-gonna, at MLA.)

This is a call, in a session on the “history and future of the digital humanities,” for us to take instead a steady look at our present moment. I will offset immediately any concern that the intervention I mean to make in today’s conversation is as grim as we are perpetually reminded Our Present Moment to be, by telling you that these remarks are being published on my blog under the title, “Mambo Italiano,” complete with links to a clarion-cutesy Rosemary Clooney, an offensive clip from The Simpsons, and some French guy dancing with low-rent Muppets.

I’m at home in bed. Your grim reality at present, at the 2011 MLA convention, is that shockingly few of the job-seekers you’ll meet this week in elevators and at cash bars have a prayer of securing the stable faculty positions for which they have trained. Still others have been made to feel ashamed of discovering divergent desires on what was meant to be a straight and narrow path to tenure. A look toward the future of digital humanities requires that we be clear-eyed about the crisis facing our graduate students and the hundreds of unemployed and under-employed academics attending this conference right now — and about the impact their working conditions and career trajectories may have on DH and on the broader humanities.

To these people, and to faculty in a position to shape the graduate curricula that produce more and more of them, I say:

Hey goombah!
I love-a how you dance rumba.
But take-a some advice, paisano,
Learn-a how to mambo.
If you gonna be a square, you ain’t-a gonna go nowhere. Continue reading “mambo italiano”