Becoming a Public Intellectual
Let's start with a basic number or two: the typical scholarly book these days might be bought by 400 people, 800 for a strong award-winning title if you're lucky. Articles might not even get that much attention. And the audience is typically others in the field who share your view enough to comment on it.
Now, let's turn the lens on what has happened over the last three years with the HASTAC Scholars. And I'll throw out a number here too: 350,000. That is how many unique visitors have stopped by the ten HASTAC Scholars Forums since September of 2009. A typical Forum receives 100-150 quite substantive comments, in some cases enough to make a persuasive and provocative book on the subject, and over 1040 comments total (deeply intellectual, engaged, generous, tough, funny comments). Topics so far have included Critical Code Studies, Democratizing Knowledge, Grading 2.0: Evaluation in a Digital Age, and Race, Ethnicity, and Diaspora in a Digital Age and the single busiest of all the Forums so far, "Queer and Feminist New Media Spaces."
The significance of such numbers: if you make the right platform, leave the bar of entry low, create the right atmosphere of community standards--not showboating but thinking together--and let students run the show, you get not academic inbreeding but the humanities in their glory, out there and available, and important and urgent. If I had believed in the "crisis in the humanities," I would never have had a career. There were 1200 applicants for my first job and I was unemployed as a full-time academic for three years (three great years, in retrospect, working at a prison, a mental hospital, a Franciscan monastery, Fermi National Accelerator lab, a community college, and on and on). I believed then, as I believe now, that the humanities are vital to all the ways we think, including to STEM thinking. I believed then, as I believe now, that the crisis is not in the humanities it is in (a) a society that too narrowly defines what it means by "education" and does not support an expansive view of what is required to think well in the contemporary world and (b) professional academic humanists who would rather fight to keep things "as they are" than understand you cannot flourish without responding to the urgencies of the moment in which you live and for which you are preparing your students. That isn't "presentism"; it is (and the social and natural sciences tend to do this extremely well) understanding your fundamentals in context of the urgencies of the present. In Forum after Forum, the HASTAC Scholars do exactly this----and people, world wide, know this and come visit these intense student-run conversations on topics of magnitude and note. 350,000 unique visitors.
350,000. Anyone who believes the humanities do not matter needs to remember that number!
Lots of famous scholars have dropped by over the last two years to comment in the Forums--I won't name them here but invite you to go to the "Scholars" page and read. But the larger point is the intellectual energy, direction, definition, and conversation is entirely student driven. HASTAC Scholars are public intellectuals across many fields. The doctoral student who directs the HASTAC Scholars, the amazing Fiona Barnett, encourages Forums from those at different universities, often among graduate students (and some undergraduates) who have never met one another. The opportunities here for future networking and support are endless.
And soon, on March 5, the HASTAC Scholars will be engaged in something else. The theme of this year's Digital Media and Learning Conference is "Designing Learning Futures" and one panel will be devoted to the HASTAC Scholars and the community they have made together on line and then face to face as public intellectuals contributing together. This public is OPEN TO PARTICIPATION BY TWITTER . . . Stay tuned here for messages from Sheryl and Fiona and Jade about how to participate. It will be the first-ever crowdsourced HASTAC Panel.
We hope we do a great job representing the HASTAC Scholars. It is a fantastically interesting, vibrant community. They remind us that, as beleagured as higher education may feel right now, we give something important, vital, and forward-looking to the world that the world pays attention to. Being a public intellectual is a way of cementing that public's investment in the intellectal life. Thank you, HASTAC Scholars, for doing exactly, precisely, and brilliantly the work of the future.
(edited, Feb 24, 2011)
- Cathy Davidson's blog
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and they say it's an echo chamber out there...
And here's another number to add into the mix: 1040 comments since September 2009! Completely amazing and so inspiring. It's one thing to say, "our forums are busy" but another thing altogether to see some rough numbers like this. We have at least two more forums to go this year, and possibly more. It's also wonderful to hear how the forums are being actively used: in classes, on syllabi, in conversations about developing fields, in conference panels, on campus events. Being a part of this project has been such an honor and so exciting. Here's to the next hundred thousand!
Congratulations and Thank you!
Just wanted to add my congratulations to you for this wonderful space. I was overwhelmed by volume and excellent quality of the discussion in the Critical Code Studies forum whose threads are already being knitted into papers and presentations.
The quality of these forums is also a testament to the riches of the HASTAC Mentors and Scholars programs, which I cannot speak of highly enough -- except to encourage even more faculty and students to join. While much of the field battles about what is or is not withing the big tent, these forums offer spaces for such productive discussions and the kind of collaborative scholarship that is and will be the driving force of digitial studies in the humanities.
Thanks, Mark
It's amazing. All we have done is provide an infrastructure where engaged humanities can flourish in the world we live in now. HASTAC network members (over 5600 active registrants) and HASTAC Scholars (over 350,000 unique visitors) have done the rest. I'm bored to death with "crisis in the humanities." I have had a long and successful career because I refused to believe in that crisis. There were 1200 applicants for my first job, I was on the market three years, crisis crisis crisis: this is a crisis in society and in limited thinking about what thinking is. The humanities are alive and well----everywhere except in academe and in our notions of what is fundable, what counts, and what is job preparation. That has to change. We created HASTAC because we believed we could contribute to a world where humanities were the solution, not the problem. Uh-oh, I feel a blog coming on. . . .
Thanks not only for writing but for your excellent leadership in the Critical Code forum. My code is rusty but I spent my whole childhood and teenage years as a math geek, carried it through to working in some semantics in my dissertation, and as undergrad double majored in philosophy (at other colleges it would have been in the math department, not yet in computer science except at MIT, I believe), focusing on AI and natural language (what a gazillion years ago was called "quantificational logic" and now would probably be "computational linquistics"--natural language, then and now--and everything about that field embeds cultural assumptions that your Critical Code forum went a huge way to unpack. I know people will refer to your Forum for a very long time because I've never seen anywhere else many of the insights that actually evolved in the conversation. That happens in every Forum. The structure (even on this abominable website that we will say goodbye to soon, with no regrets) of the Forums allows ideas to evolve, and the implicit standards of our community (we almost never have to regulate them) are about joining, contributing, not showing off but thinking things through together. It's fanastic. I could not be more happy, more proud, and more impressed by the profession I see represented, every day, on HASTAC. And by "profession" I mean ---the profession of thinking. Some of us have degrees and positions at universities. Some do not. All of us believe in the importance of thinking deeply together and contributing, participating.
I just checked: at this moment, we're just shy of 11,000 unique visitors to your Critical Code Studies Forum. Isn't that unbelievable? For a Forum of such sophistication, knowledge, intensity, specialization, diversity, and depth. If it were a journal, maybe 1000 if you were really lucky.
350,000 and counting. Thanks for contributing so much to that.