Week 4 - Sept. 11th Post

Today’s Readings:

Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. (read through pg 87)

Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. "The Humanities, Done Digitally." The Chronicle of Higher Education. 5/8/12.

Kirschenbaum, Matthew. "What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?" ADE Bulletin. 150(2010): 55-61.

The readings for today were, for me, quite focused on the ideas of intellectual freedom for all scholars but, most especially, for scholars in the humanities (of course I’m most concerned with composition, rhetoric, and the digital humanities specifically). After reading Foucault, I’ve been sort of obsessed with the idea of hegemony and, to this point, I’ve been almost entirely focused on the implications of power struggles on my students. These readings, however, brought to light concerns with the power struggles that faculty face daily as we do our work as academics.

Kirschenbaum points out that digital humanities work has illuminated the lack of agency for most scholars in our field and that “the digital humanities today is about a scholarship (and a pedagogy) that is publicly visible in ways to which we are generally unaccustomed […] a scholarship and pedagogy that are collaborative and depend on networks of people and that live an active 24/7 life online” (p.60). He goes on to explain that “this [tension] is manifested in the intensity of debates around open-access publishing, where faculty increasingly demand the right to retain ownership over their own scholarship – meaning, their own labor – and disseminate it freely to an audience apart from or parallel with more traditional structures of academic publishing” (p.60). Such tension is felt as the digital humanities opens seemingly endless possibilities for collaborative and independent publishing while the traditional academy frowns on such creative and unusual means of communicating ideas. Fitzpatrick agrees, suggesting that “scholarly work across the humanities, as in all academic fields, is increasingly being done digitally” (Fitzpatrick p.4). Additionally, while such work is done digitally, only a handful of journals (like Kairos) are accepted as legitimate, scholarly endeavors.

This resistance to digital publication is somewhat surprising since, as Slatin and Lanham point out, such understanding of in addition to the development of the “responsive reader” (Lanham p. 268) allows the reader to more fully experience the text, which is something that Bolter and Grusin also bring up throughout their text. If the goal of academe is to share, reflect, and build upon on each others’ work, then it only makes sense to embrace digital publication. More specifically, in viewing academic work in this way (sharing, reflecting, and building), academic publication becomes the epitome of Bolter and Grusin’s remediation.

Such discussion reminds me very much of Faucault’s text about the Panopticon as a technology of power and as a means in which these “techniques of power are invented to meet the demands of production” (Eye, p.161). In Panopticonism, Foucault discusses the enforcement of power on the “abnormal” individual in order to better “deal” with them in an attempt to employ them in some sort of useful occupation. To me, the panoptic gaze of the publication industry tends to keep scholars who have unique and maybe even a little unusual ideas separated from the mainstream of academe through requirements that they publish in traditional journals in order to be potentially eligible for tenure. Of course, I realize that scholarly journals should be peer reviewed to maintain a level of professional legitimacy, but does the medium really make that much difference?

Just as Cooper and Selfe and Hawisher and Selfe caution us against using technology for technology’s sake without careful pedagogical consideration, so must we also take a step back with professional consideration to consider the state of publication affairs in modern academe. If, as Kirchenbaum points out, English departments are ideally suited for digital humanities because we (English departments) embrace text of all kinds, because we tend to maintain a rich lineage between computers and composition, because we idealize belle letters, and because we have a history of being open to cultural studies (p.60), then it only makes sense that we begin to embrace more current means (media) for academic publication.