Keeping in the spirit of Sandy’s post on collaboration vs. “ownership,” I wanted to mention Fitzpatrick’s idea of peer review, share my hesitancy about her diagnosis of the problem and solution, and hopefully hear what everyone else thought about it.

In Planned Obsolescence, Fitzpatrick considers From Book Censorship to Academic Peer Review by Mario Biagioli (full text at http://innovation.ucdavis.edu/people/publications/Biagioli%202008%20Censorship_review.pdf) to describe how “peer review functions as a self-perpetuating disciplinary system, inculcating the objects of discipline into becoming its subjects” (Fitzpatrick 22). As Biagioli puts it, “subjects take turns at disciplining each other into disciplines” in academia (12). This concept makes sense across types of peer review; Biagioli focuses on the royal academies and the associated “republic of letters” as a way to conceptualize peer review beyond a singular project, and I am also thinking of contemporary practices that are designed to evaluate and recalibrate a power dynamic (like the time I realized that the department head in the back of a classroom was actually there to evaluate the instructor).

This entire process of peer review, but particularly familiar version that Fitzpatrick considers in her first and third chapters in detail, is wrapped up in notions of who counts as a peer. We have discussed the idea of collaboration throughout the semester, starting with the notion that DH projects often accommodate, even require, a variety of skills and contributions; Sandy’s post speaks to this point and flags the critical “decision point about whose contributions to include” in the first place as a good place to start for identifying a project’s collaborators and expanding our notion of a peer. All of this points to a more inclusive notion of the peer which, in turn, aligns with a field like DH that strives to be participatory and democratic in multiple senses of the words.

The peer review process that Fitzpatrick outlines in Chapter 3 seems like a good place to start putting this expanded idea of the peer into practice. She compares how digital commenting functions as one level of peer review for projects such as “Holy of Holies,” Iraq Study Group Report, her own article “CommentPress: New (Social) Structures for New (Networked) Texts,” Expressive Publishing, and a digital release of The Golden Notebook (112-117), describing a spectrum of options from an entirely open commenting feature where any reader could leave a comment to relatively closed off systems where only select readers could provide feedback. As I made my way through this chapter, the phrase “the wisdom of the crowd” (which we first encountered in the context of The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 as described in “This Is Why We Fight” by Lisa Spiro) kept coming to mind. From my perspective, this notion underlies Fitzpatrick’s model for online peer review, which strives to be a social, open process while “managing the potential for chaos” (117). (Granted, this chaotic or more generally negative mob/mass/crowd was much more familiar to me from French history, Romantic literature, early urban sociology, and general concern about trolling, but I have come around to the idea that the crowd can be a force for good in so many DH contexts.)

However, Fitzpatrick also notes that the author of  Expressive Processing experienced that “the preexistence of the community was an absolute necessity” (116) to make its comment structure useful. This experience logically translates to other projects: peer review that turns to the “wisdom of the crowd” can only be as helpful as its crowd. I see how the crowd might offer more variety of feedback and how a more expansive notion of peer review in general could magnify the voices of individuals who may not have gotten the chance to participate in the process otherwise, whether because they fall slightly outside of academic circles, have not yet acquired the prestige to “do peer review” for a publisher, or any other reason. But to become a member of that peer review community or crowd — one of the seven women with commenting privileges on The Golden Notebook, for example — in the first place, I see the same social and technical barriers to access that we have talked about in class. As a result, I am struggling to see how a more democratic comment structure in digital spaces changes the disciplinary power dynamic of peer review. In your reading, does Fitzpatrick’s proposed version of peer review (in certain contexts) adequately address this power dynamic?