Tag Archives: Planned Obsolescence

Takeaways: NEH + Mellon “Humanities Open Book” Project Directors Meeting

If you’ve reached the “Preservation” chapter in Planned Obsolescence, you might recall Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s observation that, unlike in print, where simply using a book can interfere with its ability to be preserved, in digital “the very point of… preservation is ensuring future usability” (144). You also might have noticed that she returns on a few occasions to work The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has done to advance thinking and to fund projects and tools at the intersection of digital preservation and access.

As has come out in some of my introductions of myself to the class, I happen to work at Mellon in the very program (Scholarly Communications) housing the projects Fitzpatrick hones in on. Though our grants to LOCKSS and Portico predate my time here, there’s a range of other projects on both our preservation and conservation and access and library services fronts that could be worth a Google or two.

I thought I’d use this space now, though, to offer a brief peek behind the curtain at another project we’re funding–jointly, with the NEH–that has digital preservation and access components to it (despite its existing in the publishing area of our portfolio). It’s called Humanities Open Book, and it’s designed to help university presses and libraries make the best out-of-print humanities titles in their back lists open-access and freely available to scholars and to the public. We convened a small group of HOB project directors just last Thursday to discuss the opportunities and challenges native to these sorts of digitization and publishing efforts, and I thought I’d share here just a bit of what I heard, and what I’m still thinking about, in a kind of generalized pseudo-workshop debrief:

It’s not as easy as you’d think. There seems to be something unarguably good about sharing created knowledge, perhaps especially when it stops circulating and becomes stagnant or invisible. Common obstacles to even getting going with this sort of work, though, include obtaining authors’ permissions (some are dead, some are hard to reach, some distrust or philosophically object to OA publishing) and securing appropriate copyright clearance (even with fair-use policies, each image, big or small, photograph or artwork, illustration or map, will have its own side path to journey down). For this reason, text-heavy titles that are only recently out of print are exponentially easier to publish than are architecture, art history, or design titles on the outside fringe of “public domain” territory; a year of work on each might result in 600 publications of the former, while only 18 of the latter. Commission some new forwards/introduction essays or fresh cover designs and your timeline can extend well past what you had originally projected.

If it’s not accessible, it’s not actually OA. Digitizing out-of-print titles as EPUBs might make them “open,” but it’s often not enough on it’s own to confirm true “access.” Extra work needs to go into remediating these titles and making them ADA-compliant, work which might require annotating and converting texts and, as importantly, images into machine-readable formats. Factor in the fact that some titles might be written in non-English languages featuring diacritics that aren’t easily picked up by OCR-like technologies, and you really have to go beyond the simple scanned PDF or EPUB to demonstrate a true commitment to OA.

Even when you’ve done it, it’s hard to know how you did. In one project director’s words, HOB allows titles to be “reborn,” with books disseminating into the hands of readers in up to 150 different countries, in one case. Routing these titles through a range of aggregators and distributors like JSTOR, Project Muse, HathiTrust, Google Books, (etc.)  might aid this kind of increased visibility and exposure, but may also result in duplication or redundancy of content across platforms. Does this ultimately help or hinder discovery? Moreover, without the ability to consolidate OA usage metrics across these platforms, there seems to be no efficient or consistent (or standard, in Fitzpatrick’s terminology) way of reporting on if or how these recovered texts are being used. (For what it’s worth: there’s a recent Mellon grant out to the University of Michigan to support cracking this nut.) Since getting organizational buy-in beyond the “soft money” of grant-funded support might very well rely on such analytics, this seems to be a critical area of focus in the larger conversation about preservation and use.

What are we doing this for? Is the goal of projects like HOB to churn out the largest number of out-of-print texts as possible? If so, perhaps presses and libraries start to lean to simpler, text-exclusive projects in literary criticism, history, and philosophy. Or is the goal to figure out how to overcome the obstacles of more difficult projects involving significant out-of-print titles that might otherwise be lost to time? If so, perhaps organizations begin to prioritize image- or design-heavy titles, or ones that invite new contextualizations in our political climate (e.g., in Indigenous or Black studies), with a focus on establishing model, replicable, and sustainable workflows. Related to this: one project director noted how the lack of an online source for buying and selling ebooks (i.e., no Amazon) in Latin America had resulted in an increased market demand/ potential for preservation/publishing projects like HOB, while another project director showed off his organization’s use of a Python script tracking WorldCat holdings across the globe to see whether popular titles in one area of the world are noticeably absent from others. Could a geographically-focused strategy for selecting out-of-print texts parallel or even complement the mission-driven approach of the area-focused strategies above?

 

Do the Humanities have Impostor Syndrome?

Kathleen Fitzpatrick opens her book ‘Planned Obsolescence’ exposing anxiety over the supposed decline of reading as anxiety over a perceived threat to the form of the book, which is a status-laden cultural token. From our previous readings, I gather the humanities community had a similar defensive threat response to the waxing digital humanities. The digital humanities have not obviated the existence of traditional humanities so much as cut into their degree of cultural power. Yet casting the threat to the humanities as critical created a protective reflex to maintain the status quo through the implied threat of extinction.

What do the traditional humanities have to be so anxious about? From the first section of this book, it sounds like plenty.

The humanities are anxious at the increasingly common requirements from administrations and funding sources to show empirical processes and/or quantified results (p47).

Humanities scholars have also failed to apply the very critical thinking they claim as their vital contribution to society to their own academic practices and norms, as evidenced by the long-time lack of challenge to traditional peer review (p10).

Why might humanities scholars have avoided interrogating the peer review process that had such heavy influence on their professional lives? Fitzpatrick proposes five reasons.

  1. philosophical slipperiness around what “truth” is
  2. insufficient empirical skills to prove the disutility of traditional peer review
  3. resistance to self-analysis due to anxiety about self-exposure
  4. resistance to changing traditions
  5. fear of loss of power and prestige

Fitzpatrick also tells us that traditional humanities work, more than other fields, happens in isolation. Collaboration is relatively uncommon. Humanities scholars are in general therefore unused to navigating the sharing of credit or open sourcing of work, and may have anxieties around the implications of doing so to their academic identities.

Taken together, this reads to me like the traditional humanities may have a case of impostor syndrome. Impostor syndrome, per Wikipedia (deliberately chosen as a source, as it was in the reading), is “a psychological pattern in which an individual doubts their accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a “fraud”.”

Let the record show I do not think the humanities are fraudulent. Only that they seem to be behaving in an overly fearful and slightly neurotic way. How to alleviate this counterproductive mindset?

Fitzpatrick exhorts the reader to embrace an elevation of the community product and good over that of any individual. The traditional humanities may be happy to realize that working collaboratively balances the risks to any one individual. With the input and support of a community, loner scholars no longer need to fear being caught out. New methods can be seen as new opportunities for collaboration. The digital humanities cease to be a threat and become a new playing field.

Peer review + power dynamics in Planned Obsolescence

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?