In a rich man’s world: Global DH?
Posted: November 2, 2012 Filed under: Digital Humanities, Economics, Essays, General, Projects and Societies, Research, Universities | Tags: digital humanities, economics, Global Outlook 5 Comments »The following map is from Melissa Terras’s infographic, Quantifying the Digital Humanities.
Physical Digital Humanities Centres
The map shows the distribution of physical centres in the Digital Humanities (as this is defined by members of ADHO communities) across the globe. As Domenico Fiormonte has argued, it can also serve as a proxy for other types of activity in the field, including, broadly speaking, the residency of members of ADHO affiliated Digital Humanities societies (see Fiormonte, fig. 1).But as Fiormonte also points out, the “blank” areas on Terras’s map can serve as an inverse proxy for other data. Linguistic diversity, for example, or Gross National Income as mapped by UNEP. Read the rest of this entry »
Shit humanists say: A response to “English Profs want to control the internet”
Posted: October 2, 2012 Filed under: Digital Humanities, Essays, General, humanities, Research, Universities | Tags: approaches, Conferences, Methodology, rhetoric, Twitter 4 Comments »This is a response to “English Profs want to control the Internet”, by somebody who apparently doesn’t want their name front-and-centre. It is slightly modified from the comment I submitted, but since this is actual and it is in a moderation queue, I decided to post it here as well. I wouldn’t mind returning to the topic, to be honest.
I find the genre of this piece (“humanists say the darndest things”) about as tiring as the debate about tweeting conferences. It is pretty easy to make fun of ongoing conversations in any discipline you don’t normally follow, especially if, as others have pointed out, you don’t actually read the things you are linking to, let alone the broad context in which they are being written. Yesterday the Chronicle was reporting on scientists who peer review their own articles by creating fake email addresses and even entire identities. Yet I can resist the temptation to suggest that this must mean that all natural and medical sciences are one large circle jerk.
On being lazy and ignorant: Job ads that restrict the pool of applicants on the basis of time from degree
Posted: September 14, 2012 Filed under: Economics, Essays, News/Current events, Universities | Tags: adjuncts, best practice, Colorado State, Harvard, hiring committees 1 Comment »The last few weeks have seen the appearance of controversial ads for entry level positions in Harvard’s Comparative Literature Department and the English Department at Colorado State (since revised).
The ads are controversial because they restrict the position to applicants who have had their PhD in hand for less than three years (two years or less in the case of Colorado State).
These conditions are particularly cruel because they seem to discriminate against students who completed their PhDs immediately before and in the first years of the 2008 depression–a period that has seen particular retrenchment in University budgets and hiring practices. Read the rest of this entry »
Blogs, Wikis, and LMSs. Some notes on my practice
Posted: August 25, 2012 Filed under: Applications, Classroom practice, Digital Humanities, Digital pedagogy, Essays, General, Moodle, Teaching, technology | Tags: blogs, digital pedagogy, lms, students, techniques, Tips, wikis Leave a comment »Ryan Cordell and I had been exchanging tweets on the use of blogs, wikis, and the like in class. Since 140 characters is good for many things, but not this, I promised him I’d write up a quick description of the practice I’ve developed over the last few years.
The context for this is the Moodle Learning Management System (LMS), which I’ve been using in its 1.x and 2.x versions. There’s no reason why you couldn’t do this with loose wiki, blogging, and microblogging systems. But I’m still reluctant to require students to release their school work publicly.
Should I keep this blog? Should I retweet yours? Scholarly responsibility and new publication models
Posted: August 24, 2012 Filed under: Applications, Digital Humanities, Essays, General, Research, Scholarly publishing, Textpattern, Wordpress | Tags: blogs, Ernesto Priego, instititonal repository, Matt Schneider, retweeting, Twitter Leave a comment »I’ve been engaged with on-line scholarly publication for almost two decades. For a while in the middle of the first decade of this century in fact, my most popular and most often cited publication was a 1998 webpage describing my plans for an electronic edition of the Old English poem Caedmon’s Hymn Read the rest of this entry »
Going LoC(o) with Zotero: Scratching the inner librarian
Posted: August 17, 2012 Filed under: Applications, Digital Humanities, Essays, General, Research, Teaching, Universities, zotero | Tags: call numbers, cataloguing, digital humanities, librarianship, Library of Congress, students, Teaching, Tips 2 Comments »
Photo of my home office in 2005 (used for my Pseudo Society talk at Kalamazoo, “Using Computers to Improve Efficiency in Research and Teaching”)
I have always been a very messy person, especially in my work area. Here for example, is a not unrepresentative photo of my home office in 2005 (since one normally doesn’t take pictures of messy rooms, this is the only one I have: I took it to use as a slide in my 2005 Pseudo Society talk at the Kalamazoo Congress on Medieval Studies, “Using computers to improve efficiency in research and teaching”).
Perhaps oddly, however, this same messiness has never extended to my bibliography. Ever since I began university as an undergraduate in 1985, I have kept very careful bibliographic records. Read the rest of this entry »
Been there, done that: Art history as a model for the effect of technology on disciplinary development
Posted: July 29, 2012 Filed under: Essays, History, Notes, Reading, Reviews, Universities, Visionary Cross | Tags: 3D scanning, anglo-saxon studies, art history, digital humanities, disciplinary development, photography, technology, Visualisation Leave a comment »Evidence of why it is useful to read outside your main areas of disciplinary interest…
I’ve been reading my way through Revisualizing visual culture (Ashgate 2010), on a number of titles I bought from the Ashgate stand at the the recent DH 2012 conference in Hamburg. Most of the chapter thus far have been relevant to work we are doing with the Visionary Cross project, especially now that we are starting to get usable 3D meshes (as time allows, I hope to post some other small posts about the various chapters in this and my other recent reading). Read the rest of this entry »
Ideas have consequences: Prometheanism, the university as corporation, and the leadership debacle at the University of Virginia
Posted: July 1, 2012 Filed under: Essays, Governance, Reading, Universities | Tags: Andrew J. Policano, competitive differentiation, economics, Gary C. Fehtke, helen dragas. teresa sullivan, public no more (book), university of virginia Leave a comment »One of the books I am currently reading is Public no more: a new path for excellence for America’s public universities. This is a book by Gary C. Fethke and Andrew J. Policano, two business school administrators who explore how market-focussed techniques that apparently are common in U.S. business schools could be applied to the larger enterprise of running a public research university.
One of the thrilling things about this book is just how far out of line it is with what I (and the authors) imagine to be mainstream thought on the purpose of higher education, its relationship to societal and personal benefit, and the definitions of quality and success. The authors take a fundamentally and completely market-based and competition-driven approach to their analysis, and seem genuinely unable to see any value in (or at times even literally understand) more traditional approaches. Read the rest of this entry »
Chasing the (long) tail: Was the Readabilty subscription model really a failed experiment?
Posted: June 15, 2012 Filed under: Applications, Digital Humanities, Essays, Research, Scholarly publishing, Universities | Tags: charity, digital humanities, economics, readability (app), reading experience, scholarly publishing Leave a comment »More on the changing business models (see my earlier entries, “Won’t get fooled again: Why is there no iTunes for scholarly publishing” and “Does Project Muse help of harm the scholarly community…“).
Readability is an app developer whose main product is software for improving the long-form online reading experience. I’ve not used it (yet), but it seems to involve a combination of applying an optimised style to existing content and suppressing the surrounding ads and navigation clutter (contrary to the comment feed on their blog, Readability doesn’t seem to extract and resell content without producer’s permission: it seems to be more like a specialised kind of browser plugin for viewing content you already have access to).
The original business model appears to have involved collecting subscription money ($5/month) from users who wanted a better reading experience and then distributing that money (minus a commission, I imagine) to the publishers who registered with them. There are aspects of this that you might quibble with–for example, had they thought they could communicate with the owners of every site their user base tried to read using their app? But on the whole it seems like an interesting and innovative idea: extracting some part of the capital required to produce content by selling a better experience in its consumption. And since I’d have thought they probably didn’t need to offer to share the money with the publishers (given that they were only reformatting the content), this is a business model that actually seems to have been constructive rather than purely exploitative.
And apparently one that doesn’t work. Read the rest of this entry »
Does Project Muse help or harm scholarship by refusing to list freely available journals? On the role of the aggregator
Posted: June 13, 2012 Filed under: Essays, Journal Incubator, Projects and Societies, Research, Scholarly publishing | Tags: digital humanities, economics, internet, open access, project muse, scholarly publishing 2 Comments »Yesterday, I posted an essay reflecting on the stratification of content development and delivery processes in the music, commercial publishing, and scholarly and scientific publishing industries (Won’t Get Fooled Again).
At the end of the piece, I discussed the developing role of aggregators at the distribution and marketing end of the process. While there is no equivalent to iTunes in the scholarly publishing world, the aggregators fill a similar function to a certain extent with the institutional customers (particularly libraries) that are responsible for most of the purchases in this area.
Won’t get fooled again? Why is there no iTunes for scholarly and scientific publishing?
Posted: June 12, 2012 Filed under: Essays, Journal Incubator, News, Research, Scholarly publishing, Universities | Tags: economics, music industry, peer review, pete townshend, publishing industry, scholarly publishing, self-publishing 1 Comment »In the inaugural BBC John Peel Lecture, The Who‘s Pete Townshend described the music publishing business as being historically like “a form of banking in many ways”:
In cooperation with record labels – active artists have always received from the music industry banking system more than banking. They’ve gotten…
1. editorial guidance
2. financial support
3. creative nurture
4. manufacturing
5. publishing
6. marketing
7. distribution
8. payment of royalties (the banking)
(A full transcript can be found here; video here (full) and here (excerpt))
Mutatis mutandis, much the same can be said for other forms of publishing as well: scientific/scholarly and commercial book publication, even film development and distribution. In each case, historically, the distributors of the content also generally have been responsible to a greater or lesser extent for nurturing and supporting its development. Individual segments of the market have dropped or added to Townshend’s list of functions (adding peer review, for example, in addition to editorial functions, or focus-group testing final product before distribution). But on the whole, Townshend’s list is pretty complete. In the pre-Internet era, publishing was generally the province of highly vertically integrated organisations: the same group tended to oversee the production process from the submission of the original manuscript, idea, or prospectus to the final distribution of sales income.
Publish or perish: Should graduate students publish before graduation?
Posted: June 11, 2012 Filed under: Essays, Reading, Universities | Tags: educating scholars (book), graduate students, graduate studies, job search, publish Leave a comment »The Graduate Education Initiative (GEI) discussed in Educating scholars: Doctoral education in the humanities was focussed on improving graduate education.
Two important premises of the project were that improvement would involve reducing time-to-degree (TTD) and both reducing and shifting attrition among entering cohorts (so that less people dropped out and those that did dropped out earlier). Driving these premises lay the startling statistics about TTD and attrition in Humanities PhD programmes: about 50% of entering students left their programmes before completion, and about 1/2 of those who stayed failed to complete their degree by the end of their seventh year (the mean TTD across departments was 7 years, 3.5 months).
Speeding up time to degree, however, brings with it potential costs as well: perhaps humanities graduate students are taking so long to write their dissertations because the work is intrinsically time-consuming, or because they are concentrating on quality over speed, or because they are writing articles and otherwise polishing their resumes in preparation for the job market. Does speeding up TTD at the cost of these activities improve graduate education?
Those who can’t teach do? The importance of “failure” to the survival of the humanities
Posted: June 8, 2012 Filed under: Essays, Reading, Research | Tags: alt-ac, andrew w. mellon foundation, Books, economics, educating scholars (book), education, employment, graduate studies, PhD, universities, yale university 1 Comment »Educating scholars: doctoral education in the humanities has an interesting set of chapters addressing the question of what happens to PhD students after they leave their programmes, with or without a degree.
The study of focussed on graduates of prominent departments in ten elite universities who were in programme in the period between 1991 and 2001 and so is looking at both a fairly strongly marked class of student and a strongly marked time period: the students they are following had what they describe as high “departmental prestige” when they entered the job market; and, while predictions of the faculty shortage in humanities that in part prompted this study (4) never actually appeared, their subjects do appear to have graduated into an academic job market that was more open than that immediately before or afterwards.
So with all these provisos in mind, what happened to the students? A number of sets of figures stand out.
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