The Social Parameters of Scholarship

Willard mccarty says—well, said, a long time ago, actually—that what used to be called humanities computing had the salutary effect of asking scholars to be more explicit about what the humanities full-stop held as its core values and practices. And so it is with this latest generation of more deliberately social digital media. Which core values of the humanities are revealed in this new blue light social media cast over our texts and our practices? Earlier digital media—giving rise to hypertext collections and to multimedia scholarship, for example—pushed us to question what an edition or an archive might mean in the age of (virtual) abundance, or whether or not our text-based methodologies could engage with hypertextual cultural artifacts. Newer digital media drag the para-or meta-academic values into the interrogation room: how do we interact with one another and with the broader public, and to what end? In the “age of Facebook,” have the social parameters of scholarship shifted?

I think we don’t take the social very seriously at all in the humanities, except perhaps as a research topic. Fundamentally, most of us understand academic work as essentially solitary: it is, if anything, anti-social. Social aspects of scholarship are valued in either a very pragmatic, meta-work way (as “networking”), or practised in purely personal, blowing-off-steam ways. But social networking as a serious scholarly practice? I don’t think so. We should reconsider this dismissal. Perhaps sociability need no longer be, as this forum’s abstract placed it, a “counterpoint to … scholarly endeavour,” no matter how “important” a counterpoint it is.

Along with Heather Zwicker and Erin Wunker, I have a blog. It’s called Hook & Eye, with the tagline “fast feminism, slow academe.” It might well have been subtitled “fast thinking, slow profession,” or “fast writing, slow publication,” or “fast living, slow society.” It is pretty much everything that the rest of my research is not, in ways that might be useful to think about here.

For starters, it mingles the personal and the professional in ways that are very common to the format and practices of blogging, and social media generally, but that are very unusual in academic or even more informal professorial public discourse. The blog forcefully conjoins, in my case, what it means to raise a child, overcome academic imposter syndrome, build a marriage, go up for tenure and promotion, get the flu, wonder why students hate textbooks, and critique on-campus events through a feminist lens. Or rather, the blog allows me to sidestep the forced separation of those topics into matters dealt with in strictly personal, small-scale ways at the bar with my friends or in very public, peer-reviewed ways through the medium of print publication with colleagues who assess my work purely intellectually and anonymously. That separation has its problems, a fact that even institutions recognize as they grapple with ways, as at my institution, to fairly and equitably assess merit for faculty who have lives outside the library, the lab, and the classroom.

Along with my co-authors, I am a fully fleshed out human being online and I aim at demystifying the profession and modeling academic womanhood online in ways that can be more effective to produce real change than any number of equity reports from blue-ribbon task forces. We bring—in real time—our ideas and issues to an audience that can speak up and join the conversation or remain silent and not feel exposed, as they wish. People keep spontaneously telling us how meaningful they find the writing and community building we do on the site. In this case, I feel that instead of researching or writing about public feminism and equity issues, I am doing them.

How We Interact with One Another

Maybe, also, we’re too focused on how we interact with other academics: we’ve always been focused on interacting with each other, through peer review and coursework and doctoral supervision and conference papers and scholarly books and academic library catalogues.

We still need to do...