This weblog is in part a response to a Reading Group (funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Grant for Collaborative Undergraduate Research in the Humanities at Allegheny College) organized around Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy (New York: New York University Press, 2011). In our discussions, we focused on the emerging role of digital publication in academia, and the (resulting) potential of alternative forms and models of scholarship as a result of this digital technology. Part of what was behind these conversations, for me at least, was thinking about scholarship and research in ways that explore more collaborative forms of authorship, and that involve shifting from a mindset of a final product to that of valuing the research process as well. For those of us in the Humanities whose scholarly work tends to be solitary and product oriented, this was a conversation that was both potentially liberating and also terrifying and threatening--the idea of collaborative authorship and of disseminating work before it is finished goes against everything I have come to know about scholarship in the Humanities.
In our reading group we spent a good deal of time discussing the current peer-review system that is central to promotion and tenure decisions, and we discussed ways in which the system could be revised to accommodate the shifts in how scholarship happens in a digital environment. It requires us to think differently about--or rethink-- the nature of authorship, about the kinds of texts we produce, about the way they are disseminated, and, as Fitzpatrick also points out, how they are read (89). As a tenured member of one of the larger departments at my college, I have the privilege and luxury of feeling (potentially) liberated by the possibilities of being at least temporarily unleashed from a solitary, singular research process. In addition, this Weblog is also in response to--and a result of-- an Andrew W. Mellon Collaborative Undergraduate Research in the Humanities grant I received this past summer, 2014. One of the goals my student and I set was to create a blog that somehow reflected the work the student did over the summer as she supported my research project. This, then, is in part the result of that collaborative research interaction. It is an experiment, it is interdisciplinary, and it is, most definitely, a work in progress/in process.
In our reading group we spent a good deal of time discussing the current peer-review system that is central to promotion and tenure decisions, and we discussed ways in which the system could be revised to accommodate the shifts in how scholarship happens in a digital environment. It requires us to think differently about--or rethink-- the nature of authorship, about the kinds of texts we produce, about the way they are disseminated, and, as Fitzpatrick also points out, how they are read (89). As a tenured member of one of the larger departments at my college, I have the privilege and luxury of feeling (potentially) liberated by the possibilities of being at least temporarily unleashed from a solitary, singular research process. In addition, this Weblog is also in response to--and a result of-- an Andrew W. Mellon Collaborative Undergraduate Research in the Humanities grant I received this past summer, 2014. One of the goals my student and I set was to create a blog that somehow reflected the work the student did over the summer as she supported my research project. This, then, is in part the result of that collaborative research interaction. It is an experiment, it is interdisciplinary, and it is, most definitely, a work in progress/in process.
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