So there's a fairly good chance you know more about Casey Neistat that I do. He's something of a YouTube sensation with over 9 million subscribers. He also had an HBO series (I guess you'd call it). In my "copious spare time," I've been hunting around, trying to catch up on the world of digital... Continue Reading →
academics and their "ivory tower" audiences
James Mulholland argues in The Guardian that "We must recognise the value of the esoteric knowledge, technical vocabulary and expert histories that academics produce." And ends with the following pithy advice, "So academics, stay in your offices. Write books that few people will read. The results might be more significant than any of us first recognise."... Continue Reading →
building communities in the humanities
I was participating in a discussion this morning around a proposal to build a kind of DH-themed interdisciplinary community on our campus. One of the central concerns that came up was that faculty in the humanities don't tend to collaborate, so was it really feasible to imagine a scholarly community that was centered on such... Continue Reading →
the ethics of digital media research
Dorothy Kim has an piece titled "Social Media and Academic Surveillance: The Ethics of Digital Bodies" on Model View Culture. I have to admit I don't find her particular argument regarding these concerns to be especially convincing. However, that isn't to say that ethical issues surrounding research using digital-social media don't need to be addressed. As... Continue Reading →
university presses and scholarly networks
The Nation recently published a thoughtful piece by Scott Sherman on the plight of university presses. It's a familiar story by now. For some time now, these presses have only been able to count on sales of 300-400 copies of new scholarly monographs. That, combined with the larger economic pressures that many universities are facing, has... Continue Reading →
scholarship, impact measurement, and genre
Impact measures are becoming an increasing issue at UB just as they are at many institutions. For those who don't know, in terms of scholarship this typically means citation analysis, or even more bluntly, how many times do you get cited. It doesn't take an advanced degree in critical thinking to imagine some of the... Continue Reading →
digital impacts, scholarship, and general education
I'm bringing together a couple conversations I've been following online and that also have become juxtaposed at least on my campus: general education, with its attendant adjunct concerns, and impact metrics for research as they intertwine with digital activity. So the second one first. Ian O'Byrne, Gideon Burton, Sean Morris, Nate Otto, and Jesse Stommel have a podcast discussing digital... Continue Reading →
Drucker, digital scholarship, and humanities research
There was a fair amount of uproar (at least on my Facebook stream) over Johanna Drucker's LA Review, "Pixel Dust: Illusions of Innovation in Scholarly Publishing." The uproar was around Drucker's surprising skepticism regarding digital-scholarly innovations, surprising given her position in digital humanities, and her apparent misunderstanding of some technical concepts, or in the case of bit... Continue Reading →
building imaginary scholarly platforms
I ended my last post conceiving of journals as a scholarly platform and wondering if another kind of platform, beside the kind invented over 100 years ago, might be better. To raise this question, the first step, as they say, is admitting one has a problem. What kinds of problems might exist with humanities article... Continue Reading →
