collaboration – Alyssa Arbuckle

On Living Books by Janneke Adema

October 26, 2021 Alyssa Comments 0 Comment

Janneke Adema considers the contemporary scholarly book and how it could transition from a fixed, bound object to a more fluid and evolving entity. She argues that humanities scholars should reconsider their role as authors and strive to engage with knowledge production in more open, critical, and experimental ways. Adema challenges new media scholars (such as Lev Manovich and John Bryant) and print historians (such as Elizabeth Eisenstein and Adrian Johns) for their perpetuation of the book as an unchangeable,…

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On “The Engaged Humanities: Principles and Practices for Public Scholarship and Teaching,” by Gregory Jay

September 14, 2018 Alyssa Comments 0 Comment

Gregory Jay reviews the concept of engaged or community scholarship in relation to the humanities. He argues that if the humanities took up such practices, as well as integrated new media tools and techniques more fully, the discipline might gain relevance and public value in an era of funding cuts. Jay explains why engaged scholarship has not been as prominent in the humanities as it has in other disciplines: namely, for Jay, the humanities is based on extrapolative, written critique,…

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On “A ‘Civic Mission’ for the University: Engaged Scholarship and Community-Based Participatory Research,” by Michael Cuthill

September 12, 2018 Alyssa Comments 0 Comment

Cuthill, Michael. 2012. “A ‘Civic Mission’ for the University: Engaged Scholarship and Community-Based Participatory Research.” In Higher Education and Civic Engagement, edited by Lorraine McIlrath, Ann Lyons, and Ronaldo Munck, 81–99. Cuthill explores the construct of “engaged scholarship” as emblematic of the civic mission of the university. For Cuthill, universities have an ethical obligation to contribute to the common good, and he sees this as being particularly feasible through community-based participatory research. Significantly, part of Cuthill’s argument for engaged scholarship…

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On “Imagining a University Press System to Support Scholarship in the Digital Age,” by Clifford Lynch

March 23, 2018 Alyssa Comments 0 Comment

In this brief article, Clifford Lynch proposes a vision for the future of scholarly communication. He envisions a world where all universities have a university press of their own, not least at all for reasons of publishing their faculty’s more esoteric work. Lynch is adamant that a coordinated system across university presses would be beneficial, as it would streamline processes and be more economically viable than a collection of boutique institutions with idiosyncratic needs. Lynch also makes some proposals for…

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On “Back to the Future,” by Bob Stein

November 10, 2017 Alyssa Comments 0 Comment

In “Back to the Future,” Bob Stein discusses SocialBook, an Institute for the Future of the Book project that uses networked technologies to publish and read cultural materials. He argues that prior to the invention of the printing press, reading used to be a collaborative activity in social knowledge creation. People would gather around texts, discuss them, and insert comments into manuscripts via marginalia. Once book production became mechanized, and more people developed literacy skills, reading became a much more…

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On Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy, by Kathleen Fitzpatrick

November 10, 2017 Alyssa Comments 0 Comment

In the oft-cited touchstone book Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy, Kathleen Fitzpatrick examines the current academic publishing system, and outlines its drawbacks and possibilities. She suggests that the current fixation on the printed book monograph, at least in the humanities, needs to change. For Fitzpatrick, the monograph is part of an undead, zombie logic of the academy, as it represents a mandatory but often dysfunctional system of scholarly communication. Beyond the monograph, Fitzpatrick argues, we…

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On “Crowdsourcing the Humanities: Social Research and Collaboration,” by Geoffrey Rockwell

October 19, 2017 Alyssa Comments 0 Comment

In “Crowdsourcing the Humanities: Social Research and Collaboration,” Geoffrey Rockwell asserts that the point of his chapter “is not to praise collaboration, but to ask how it can be structured through social media for research” (136). He goes on to explore crowdsourcing as an outcome of social media-enabled collaboration in the humanities. Rockwell surveys the arguments for and against digital humanities collaboration, and tends to come down in the middle: he doesn’t believe that collaboration is a “transcendent value” (138),…

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On “‘By the People, For the People’: Assessing the Value of Crowdsourced, User-Generated Metadata,” by Christina Manzo et al.

October 19, 2017 Alyssa Comments 0 Comment

In “‘By the People, For the People’: Assessing the Value of Crowdsourced, User-Generated Metadata,” Christina Manzo, Geoff Kaufman, Sukdith Punjashitkul, and Mary Flanagan focus on the classification of digital objects in libraries. They immerse themselves in the debate over which model of classification is superior: a folksonomic model, where users generate metadata as they encounter cultural material, or an institution-imposed classification system. Manzo et al. argue that, in fact, a blended system is best. By bringing together user-generated content with…

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