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The weekend before last I was in Charlottesville at the University of Virginia for a Mellon-funded conference on the future of scholarly edition publishing. The workshop took the form of a series of project reviews, with a brief overview and then several commentators on each project. All papers were pre-circulated, and an edited volume (including transcripts of the discussion both in-person and on Twitter) will be published online by Rice University Press shortly.

In the end, I’d say that a few key themes emerged:

1) Editing as a category of work in itself

If you think of humanities scholarship using the metaphor of a technology stack, with raw primary collections on the top and published, peer-reviewed articles and monographs at the top, there’s a lot of work in the middle that becomes more complex and more visible in the digital mode. I’d never thought of it until this conference, but the model of the scholarly edition serves as a good model for this middleware-of-sorts, where connections between items build epistemic environments that are intrinsically valuable without pushing fully into argument and analysis.

As became clear, many fields see editionmaking as valid in its own right (i.e. worth giving tenure for), and it seems a much more resonant way to understand many digital humanities “projects” than the scholarly monograph (and offers a path forward for Digital Humanities work beyond the particular focus by funders and others on the rhetoric of “tool-building”). Moreover, editionmaking is interesting because it happens in a number of professional roles; museums, libraries and archives are as intimately involved with the production of scholarly editions as university faculty, unlike other forms of scholarly output.

2) Need to broaden audience for the humanities

“Crowdsourcing” was the general term that kept coming up, but I think it was a placeholder for something broader that might be called “participatory engagement” with audiences both traditional and more popular. In a number of side conversations, it became clear to me that substantial work is to be done to figure out the best ways to funnel enthusiasm into productive work which would out the corpus of available humanities data and metadata without overdetermining the scholarly analysis; as we’re not understanding with our Historical Maps work at NYPL, much of the work here is to determine how to atomize the work involved into granular enough pieces, and how to apply casual gaming mechanics so that the work becomes compelling.

Two other key points here: one is that this was the first discussion of crowdsourcing and the humanities I’ve been involved with in which the idea of engaging undergraduates tipped from intriguing possibility to serious area for experimentation among the participants. Greg Crane’s framing of sentence treebanking by undergraduate students as both pedagogically valuable *and* a useful contribution to the field made tangible what we’ve been seeing with the various classes who’ve been using our maps rectifier: there’s a sweet spot to be explored where participatory archives can both teach and facilitate scholarship in the best tradition of scholarly editions.

The other thought that emerged was that the broader engagement that I and others (notably Cliff Lynch) have been describing as a move from “public humanities” to “citizen humanities” (and for which “crowdsourcing” seems to serve as a useful shorthand) could have very tangible benefits as increased visibility to and participation by the public translates into more public funding. The general perception of the academic humanities as far removed from the daily lives of the general public that is only heightened by isolationist jargon and publishing mechanisms that create rather than break down silos represents a massive failure to make the case for the value of that work to society, and federal/state funding (or the relative lack thereof) follows that lead.

3) How to transition from a moment of physical print publication to the twin production and public engagement phases of digital publishing.

I can’t recall who made this point, but the crux of the shift in scholarship is from a moment of ink being fixed on paper to a conversation, an ongoing process of evolving engagement with the ideas in a text. We had a great discussion on Twitter about the idea of scholarly texts as version-controlled software, where Sharon Leon responded to a comment I made about successive editions as version releases by tweeting, “I’m sure lots of people would like to think that, but there are many bug fixes posing as versions out there.”

Regardless of the quality of the changes, the mapping scholarly conventions like citation onto a world of mutable texts is at the heart of changing norms for digital scholarship, and one for which the example of scholarly editions might well be instructive. One could well think of editions not just as being authored but as being maintained; there’s always potential for more curation, more talmudic commentary around the material at the heart of an edition. If one removes the requirement for a moment of print fixity in order to facilitate dissemination, then the edition becomes a curated data store, always potentially evolving in a way that resonates with the culture of the web itself.

Comments 2 Comments so far. Leave a comment below.

Amanda French,

April 6, 2010 at 11:38 am

Your post makes me think that I for one should be a lot more careful how I throw around the word “crowdsourcing.” I don’t quite know what the difference between “public humanities” and “citizen humanities” is, but either of those, as well as “participatory humanities,” is a term that better captures the potential of what we’re talking about. “Crowdsourcing” still has that etymological relationship to “outsourcing” that makes it sound like we’re just trying to pawn our work off on unpaid exploited amateurs, whereas instead it’s an anti-elitist move to invite an often eager public into the work, and the play, of the humanities.

- Josh Greenberg,
  
  April 6, 2010 at 8:35 pm
  
  Well, this is a tricky issue; I’ve been pushing the “crowdsourcing” idea pretty hard myself, because the term does real work in a quick and dirty way. However, you’re right that the valences of the word can be problematic, and it doesn’t capture the more participatory aspects of public humanities.
  
  On the distinction between “public” and “citizen” humanities, I’ve personally been playing with the terms to indicate a move to a more collaborative, rather than upstream/downstream, relationship between professional humanists and the amateur/public audience. The language comes by analogy from the move to “citizen science” from “public understanding of science” over the past few decades…still working out the argument there, though, so not entirely solid yet.

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April 6, 2010 Epistemographer | Notes from “The Shape of Things to Come” | Urban Humanist

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