What About Alt-Cubicle?

The question posed to MA students towards the end of class on the PhD/alt-ac debate was something like: “How does this make you feel?”

I would say “optimistic, but cautious.” But because my goal is ultimately a PhD, and because the job market is tepid at best, why am I optimistic about it at all? Why is anyone? I know that I want to teach, and I don’t have faith in the job market, yet I still convince myself that it is an option that will be open to me if I work hard enough. I think a lot of people who want to go into teaching are also optimists, and also want to help better the world and contribute knowledge and such. If there are other things we can do that would satisfy the same desires, shouldn’t we know about them?

A thread I found running through our conversation and the articles I’ve read about career identity in general seem to point to a common problem: When we start a career, how do we know what we’re really getting ourselves into?

My mom has worked as an attorney at the same company for the past 30 years. She thought that the current overflow of law school students would be solved if they knew what being a lawyer actually meant. Maybe the same problem could be fixed if a requirement for entrance into PhD programs was to follow professors around and see what it’s actually like to be a faculty member  (considering that you want to be one).

So why are we not given more information about potential careers before we embark on them (outside of “take your daughter to work day”)? Aside from dire warnings about the job market, I think some practical advice is in order before anyone continues down a rocky path.

This article  may be one example of why we don’t get more in-depth information about careers. Any honest transparency could mean that you lose your job or a reference. It’s the same reason people aren’t honest in exit interviews.

Something else about the alt-ac debate that I find disconcerting is this idea that people with PhDs in the humanities can fall right into publishing – a field that is often grossly underpaid and quickly losing momentum.

I think a lot of people from my generation look at their parents successful careers, pension plans and slight unhappiness and ask themselves what they can do differently while still finding success. For some, this is a constant exploration that may lead somewhere like graduate school. And because a lot of us are wholly unsatisfied sitting in a cube working at a boring job all day, maybe we just need to be fully aware of our options and what it takes to get someplace else.

Knowledge Workers Unite!

In May, 2012, ProQuest, the historical newspaper and scholarly journal database, introduced Udini, “an inventive new research service that provides individuals with access to premium content and cutting edge tools.” The “premium content” they advertised was pulled from select ProQuest databases which previously had only been available through research and academic libraries. According to their press release, Udini offers scholarly content to “knowledge workers without access to research libraries.”

Then in September, 2013, JSTOR, the online academic journal and e-book platform, announced JPASS, a subscription service also geared toward the unaffiliated scholar. For a small fee, you can access a set number of articles in the JSTOR archive. As the JPASS press release suggests, “It’s a great option if you are not able to get ready access through an educational institution or public library.”

Udini and JPASS, combined with increasing number of open access scholarly journal and monograph content, plus the full text titles available in Google Books, HathiTrust, and the Internet Archive, has made initial research for the unaffiliated humanities scholar easier than ever before. And if one adds the growing amount of content digitized from specialized libraries, plus access to library subscription databases, a curious mind need only to have an internet connection and a library card to begin her independent studies.

In fact, one could argue that many of the alt-ac career paths that were mentioned and discussed in class on Monday don’t require a PhD at all. Many don’t (or shouldn’t) even require a Masters degree. What many of these alt-ac jobs require are the same skills that many jobs require: clear writing and communication, research skills, organization, interpersonal skills, critical thinking skills, and intellectual curiosity and initiative.

Intellectual curiosity, while perhaps once only satisfied by classroom engagement and course readings, is now easily fulfilled by tools accessible to a large portion of the population. Indeed, syllabi, lectures, and like-minded scholarly communities are all now easy to find outside the academy. In fact, there are many articles and blogs written by non academic scholars and enthusiasts whose writing and research are more aligned with their academic brethren than their publishing platforms may suggest. And much of their work is increasingly intersecting and interacting with traditional academia in interesting and productive ways.

I’m not suggesting that the world of material available to unaffiliated scholars mirrors the deep archival content that can be found in a university or academic library, or that an independent researcher is necessarily the equal to a PhD. But in 2013, there is so much more available to whet one’s curiosity and engage in learning, to participate in communities, and to publish, speak, and collaborate outside of the academy than ever before. And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist, or a social scientist, or even a library scientist to do it.

11/18/13 Katina Rogers: Alt-Academic Careers

While many graduate programs continue to focus on tenure track placement rates, a growing proportion of humanities scholars are embracing a much broader range of intellectually stimulating careers in, around, and beyond the academy. Focusing both on her own career path and on her research at the Modern Language Association, the Scholarly Communication Institute, and the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia, Katina Rogers will discuss strategies to support professionalization, public scholarship, and career development across a wide array of possible outcomes.

Katina Rogers is managing editor of MLA Commons, the Modern Language Association’s new online platform for collaboration and scholarly communication. She previously served as Senior Research Specialist with the Scholarly Communication Institute, a Mellon-funded humanities think tank based in the University of Virginia’s Scholars’ Lab. Her current research focuses on graduate education reform, career paths for humanities scholars, and innovative modes of scholarly production. Katina holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Colorado.

Cookstrips

A few weeks ago Matt Kirschenbaum spoke about Len Deighton, the British spy novelist whose Bomber (1970) is considered the first novel written on a word processor. Len Deighton was also a fairly prolific cookbook author. But Deighton didn’t write his cookbooks on a word processor. In fact,  he did quite the opposite: he illustrated most of his recipes in comic strip form. The recipes appeared in a regular column in the London Observer as “cookstrips” and then in several cookbooks throughout the sixties and seventies.   I’m a huge fan of his cookbooks and thought I’d share some of his strips here. Deighton’s cookbooks also demonstrate that while he might’ve embraced technology in some areas of his work, he was open to many forms of literacy and communication.

quenelles_ou_est

perfiteroles

chicken_action

11/11/14 Ray Siemens: “The Building Blocks of the Social Scholarly Edition”

This talk explores elements of the scholarly edition in the context of new and emerging social media from two pertinent perspectives: the first from the foundational perspective of its theoretical context, particularly as that context intersects with a utility-based consideration of the toolkit that allows us to consider the social edition as an extension of the traditions in which it is situated and which it has the potential to inform productively; the second is from the perspective of an iterative implementation of one such edition, A Social Edition of the Devonshire MS [BL Add MS 17,492] (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/The_Devo…), carried out via a research team operating in conjunction with an advisory group representing key expertise in the methods and content-area embraced by the edition.

Ray Siemens (http://web.uvic.ca/~siemens) is Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing and Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Victoria, in English and Computer Science, and visiting professor at NYU in 2013. He is founding editor of the electronic scholarly journal Early Modern Literary Studies, and his publications include, among others, Blackwell’s Companion to Digital Humanities (with Schreibman and Unsworth), Blackwell’s Companion to Digital Literary Studies (with Schreibman), A Social Edition of the Devonshire MS, and Literary Studies in the Digital Age (MLA, with Price). He directs the Implementing New Knowledge Environments project, the Digital Humanities Summer Institute and the UVic Electronic Textual Cultures Lab, and serves as Vice President of the Canadian Federation of the Humanities and Social Sciences for Research Dissemination and Chair of the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Scholarly Editions, recently serving also as Chair of the international Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations’ Steering Committee.

“Community of Practice”

In response to our readings, the talk and workshop involving Raymond Siemens, the consummation of knowledge one can leave with is as described perfectly by Ann before me; knowledge is messy. It was wise that Ray initiated the worksop with this question to the group: What is knowledge? As also stated prior, the lectures featuring Siemens and Kathleen Fitzpatrick  speak as to how knowledge has historically been made accessible via the authoritative governance. “Knowledge” is – according to the Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia – “information, understanding, or skill that you get from experience or education.” For our purposes we’ll focus solely on experience and education as it pertains to ‘social knowledge creation’.

Despite what Nancy Fjällbrant writes regarding the origins of peer review, “the [scholarly] journal had significant ties with the concurrent birth of learned societies (i.e. the Royal Society of London and the Académie des Sciences in Paris),” the Devonshire Manuscript exhibits, as per Siemens’ work denotes, an earlier example of social knowledge creation. Another way to say this concept is ‘social knowledge production,’ which Ray declared as having “always been really messy.” Part of the reason why such developments are messy is because of this idea, “community of practice.” As described in the Toward Modeling the Social Edition: An Approach to Understanding the Electronic Scholarly Edition in the Context of New and Emerging Social Media article, a community of practice:

Refers to a group that forms around a particular interest, where individual members participate in collaborative activities of various kinds. Active involvement in the group is key; through this involvement, group members ‘develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems – in short a shared practice’

Creation and consensus on knowledge is not simple or perfect. However, the practice and symbolization of the book being the source of knowledge (essentially an extension of an exclusive authority), has influenced an often misconceived notion of physically published infallibility, at least until the next edition! which will repeat that declaration. It is this erroneously defended and long held tradition which castigates the potentiality of collaborative knowledge producing sites like Wikipedia.

Knowledge is messy

The theoretical backbone to the Devonshire Manuscript project demonstrated by Raymond Siemens is the meditation on the process of knowledge creation and conveyance, specifically in relation to the social and power: who is creating the knowledge and legitimizing it? These questions invite us to consider the history of the institution. The separation of the “mad” and the “civilized” under the clinical institution in the eighteenth-century that Foucault pointed to, created the power division of the institution as the sole entity that holds truth and ability to cure, and those who were dependent on the institution.

The lectures by Kathleen Fitzpatrick and Siemens, in addition to the past readings suggest a trend of the digital age that is exposing and balancing the power relation between the institution and the mass. As entities outside of traditional institutions (independent corporations, organizations, etc.) began to forge ways of distributing and effectively creating knowledge that drew from the network of the mass, traditional institutions are now faced with adapting to the new configuration, and in tern self-critically assess its history of knowledge creation, which, as Fitzpatrick and Siemens suggest through the origin of journal review, originates in a non-institutional, person-to-person review of text in the royal society.

As a member of an institution that holds influence in a global scale, I am encouraged to think about these power dynamics and how it relates to the institution’s current branding in the global arena. Creating partnerships that result in economic and/or cultural capital in regions, its strategies range from self proclaiming agenda to assess its presence as a cultural cannon, to direct goal for fundraising and building global membership. I am working on the former strategy, which, if done sensitively, perhaps could manifest in results that are sincere revision of the power dynamic problematized above. I am learning the mechanism of the digital that allows us to put a check in the traditional institutional structure, and bring forth a new type of knowledge making.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Lecture

I also enjoyed Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s lecture on the future of scholarship and the challenges ahead.  Not only is she a very passionate lecturer, she offered varying perceptions and trials ahead.  Traditional peer review is an archaic model, that being said, most of academia remains fundamentally in that realm.  The adage, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, comes to mind, but this system is broken.  There are gatekeepers in editorial staff and I would assume lots of who knows who in different areas of knowledge.  Although, I think there will still be gatekeepers and a leaning towards an elitist group when (if ever) scholarship shifts over to digital world.  If I could image digital scholarship “reviews” I would assume that it would draw on a larger population than that of the closed doors of established journals and other publications.  We all are under the assumption that if if gets past the gatekeepers, the work is solid and sound, supported and valid.  Post Peer review is just if not more important than the initial screening review.  I found this article, regarding letters to the Editor, an important part of the post peer review, discusses misleading information. 

When input emanates from all sides, not just the top, I would assume one would yield more well-rounded results and more transparency.  Overall this shift needs a revolution to occur, if there are going to be comprehensive changes in this type of review that produces tenure or establishes experts in fields.  In this article from 2012, discusses the hopeful future of online scholarship, with the established journal which has the following tenets in the “How it works section.” 

Authors submit manuscript to Peerage of Science, before submitting to any journal. Submitting Author decides the deadlines for the four stages [timed stages of review] of the process, which are thereafter automatically enforced.  Once submitted, any qualified* non-affiliated** Peer can engage to review the manuscript. (Peerage of Science, Online Journal  http://www.peerageofscience.org)

That model seems like a promising start.

I think the first steps of establishing scholarship that will force the change the academia mindset, is digital tools in the curriculums of schools at all levels.  This background will be the scaffolding that the digital scholars and traditional scholars will lean on for support and continue to build upon.  If digital scholarship only establishes itself in higher education as it seems to be doing at the moment, this shift needs to proselytize by the next generation of scholars not yet in higher education, the ones who are in grade school now.

11/4/13 Kathleen Fitzpatrick: “Open Review, the New Peer, and the Future of Scholarly Communication”

A talk with Kathleen Fitzpatrick sponsored by the CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative and the Digital Praxis Seminar at the CUNY Graduate Center November 4, 2013.

Recent experiments in open peer review, as well as a recent study of open review practices jointly conducted by MediaCommons and NYU Press, suggest that online scholarly communication may be changing the nature of the “peer,” as well as the shapes of scholarly communities. This presentation will explore the history and future of peer review as a means of thinking through the issues that open review raises for communities of practice online.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick is Director of Scholarly Communication of the Modern Language Association and Visiting Research Professor of English at NYU. She is author of Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy (NYU Press, 2011) and of The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television (Vanderbilt University Press, 2006). She is co-founder of the digital scholarly network MediaCommons, where she has led a number of experiments in open peer review and other innovations in scholarly publishing.