35 lines
3.7 KiB
Markdown
35 lines
3.7 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: 'Scholarly Collaboration in the Digital Age'
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date: '2008-01-11T09:53:38-05:00'
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permalink: /scholarly-collaboration-in-the-digital-age/
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tags:
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- conferences
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---
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Today’s the [NITLE conference](http://nitle.org/index.php/nitle/opportunities/programs/upcoming_events/spring_2008/scholarly_collaboration_and_small_colleges_in_the_digital_age) on campus, beginning with a plenary panel on Scholarly Publication. My paper (based on my article, [“CommentPress: New (Social) Structures for New (Networked) Texts”](http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/commentpress)) was first, allowing me to relax and pay attention to the rest of the papers — which is great, because the next two papers were by [Tim Burke](http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/) and [Laura Blankenship](http://geekymom.blogspot.com/). My notes are below the fold; stupidity therein is my fault, not theirs.
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Tim Burke, “Q: Should I Write My Next Book Online? (A: Probably Not)”
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— Institute for the Future of the Book, Gamer Theory, Siva’ Googlization of Everything
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— do I want to be producing a long-form work online? why would I want to? how is it good for me?
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— creates larger, more robust context for the things we already do with one another in our scholarly network — is my take viable? is there something I’ve missed; much faster way of seeking information (blegging); creates working groups in a broader way; public pressure to work; self-promotion
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— more altruistic reasons: moral imperative to open-source scholarship; challenges to monopolies of scholarly knowledge; demystifying the work of scholarship
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— what are scholars afraid of? might get scooped (but might happen anyway); might alert target of critique, closing doors; might reveal how much we don’t know about something; might attract trolls or other unwanted commenters (depleters); might attract no one at all; might attract someone who will try to take over project or consider you a threat; might not be able to publish end project as book afterward; might not want exposure; might be (certainly will be) more work
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— next project: general history of Africa, intended for broader audience; synthesis of existing research, but with new twists — clear idea of what he wants to do
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— best project online: maximum familiarity to digerati (or no one will come); medium polarization around issue (or there will be no discussion); medium specialization (or not much will be gained by networking it)
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— Tim’s project: very low number of digerati in Africa, or knowledgeable about Africa; very highly polarized issues; pretty highly specialized
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— Gamer Theory and The Googlization of Everything define the best points on the graph
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Laura Blankenship: “Putting it all out there: Why I blogged my dissertation”
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— decision to restart dissertation, but working in isolation, far away from advisors and scholarly community
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— fears about working in public as Tim listed
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— topic was about students writing in public; practicing what diss preached
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— blog: Blogical Construction; posted pdfs of chapters, but also blog posts of messy stuff leading to chapters
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— definitely more work rather than less, but work was really necessary for what she was doing
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— results: important networking, validation; better knowledge position from which to advise students
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— lessons learned: would probably be better for a shorter form project; problems with blog form’s reverse chronological order — couldn’t rework blog to look more like wordprocessing document; upkeep was a bit prohibitive — moved some meta stuff to personal blog
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— now what do you do with that space? turning it into a reading journal?
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— difficulty of maintaining public scholarship over long periods of time faced by all academic bloggers
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