Democratizing Knowledge
In the digital humanities, what does it mean to "democratize knowledge"? In this year's first HASTAC forum discussion, graduate students from the University of Washington and the University of Iowa invite us to consider the intersections of information technologies with fostering community partnerships and opening access to university resources and research.
Democratizing Knowledge in the Digital Humanities: Making Scholarship Public, Producing Public Scholarship
Organizations like HASTAC, Imagining America, the Obermann Graduate Institute for Public Engagement at the University of Iowa, the Center for Teaching at the University of Iowa, and the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington aim to democratize knowledge to reach out to "publics," share academic discoveries, and invite an array of audiences to participate in knowledge production. Of course, emerging technologies and media offer the potential to widen even further the reach of public scholarship and the breadth of community partnerships.
More specifically, in the context of the digital humanities, democratizing knowledge often refers to making scholarship public, to opening access to university resources and research through, for example, the creation and preservation of digital archives and journals.
For scholars, these projects afford rich possibilities for deep collaborative work that is ongoing and historically absent from the humanities' scholarly paradigm.
Yet practitioners of the digital humanities can also democratize knowledge by collaborating with their community partners to produce public scholarship, often through action research, experiential learning, and civically engaged pedagogy, all of which ultimately re-situate and reformulate expertise. According to Teresa Mangum (faculty at University of Iowa and co-director of the Obermann Institute on Public Engagement), as with new information technologies, public scholarship can radically redefine who finds, owns, and gives knowledge. Put this way, the goal is for practitioners to forward research and pedagogy while serving the community in a way that is a truly reciprocal partnership.
With democratizing knowledge and the digital humanities in mind, we are interested in learning more about people's varying experiences in (and theories on) the use of emerging technologies and media to make scholarship public and/or produce public scholarship.
We invite you to join us as we discuss:
+ The requirements, terms, goals, practices and hopes for public scholarship or engaging with public(s) vary depending on the project and groups interacting. What are your best practices for developing and implementing projects with your community?
+ What are the benefits and risks to consider when developing community-driven or joint academic-community projects?
+ How are terms like "democracy," "public," and "scholarship" mobilized in digital humanities projects, for whom, and to what effects? What are the assumptions, definitions, and desires attached to each of these terms?
+ How do community partnerships affect perceptions and deployments of expertise? Does the notion of "the expert" change or collapse?"
+ How do you evaluate different forms of technology for your public knowledge projects? Have some forms of technology been more useful or productive than others?
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Bridget Draxler
University of Iowa, Department of English
Jentery Sayers
University of Washington, PhD Candidate, Department of English
Society of Scholars Fellow, Simpson Center for the Humanities
Edmond Y. Chang
University of Washington, PhD Candidate, Department of English
Peter Likarish
University of Iowa, PhD student, Department of Computer Science
Obermann Senior Graduate Fellow 2010
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February 3, 2012 - 7:00pm - 9:00pm
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February 15, 2012 - 11:00am - 1:00pm
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June 25, 2012 (All day) - June 26, 2012 (All day)
Best Practices for Democratizing Knowledge
Hello, everyone. I'm looking forward to this forum, and for now I'll just pick up on that first question, the one about best practices for public scholarship and democratizing knowledge.
I, for one, would love to hear from those who are currently engaged in community-based research and learning projects that use (or create) a particular authoring or editing envrionment. Having participated in a few myself, I'm at a stage in my work where I'm developing ways to teach and communicate technical competences to audiences who are either new to new media or are looking for more experience.
This is relatively new territory for me. As a person whose academic training is in literary and cultural criticism, I'm accustomed to understanding technology through fiction. Teaching technical competences has forced me to articulate and practice technology as something that is not only a metaphor or trope. It is a concept with material character, and it's often inflexible. For instance, all the more I'm adding modules (on HTML, CSS, WordPress, Flash, and the like) to my classes and curricula. I'm also spending a lot of time helping others compose new media as a form of scholarship (e.g., Kairos and Vectors become models for such projects).
Among other things, this shift has changed the "boundary objects" I share with others when collaborating. Whereas, initally, the only object was a print book or an electronic text on a screen, it now also includes a Flash interface, lines of code in WordPad or Dreamweaver, or the backend of WordPress. That is, collaboration now entails growning about characters in a novel AND a missing ">" or "href."
Perhaps by necessity, the language and literacies I use have grown increasingly "technical" (in the computational sense), yet without abadoning theory. Now, I just prefer letting a theoretical framework emerge alongside the technical aspects of a project (rather than establishing a framework first and then applying it). For instance, if I facilitate a conversation on a text by Shelley Jackson, then I might stress how the text is structured (e.g., looking at its code and design) while also discussing how it conceptualizes embodiment and sexuality. Of course, stressing how a text is made is theoretical. All technical issues are social issues. Nevetheless, I wonder how emphasizing technical competences is also a functionalist move that alters how knowledge and expertise in the digital humanities are produced. As an example, I find that I need to incorporate modules on how to structure navigation (e.g., navigating a website or electronic text) into project development. Such inquiry asks those involved to simultaneously speak to how scholarship is modeled (in order to functionally produce more scholarship) and what are its claims and investments. Put another way, what are the software and platforms we are using to produce scholarship in the first place and to what effects on the digital humanities?
This line of thought might be called "theory in the making," perhaps similar to what Wendy Chun (at HASTAC III) referred to as "running theory." Whatever your preferred term, I am curious about its implications on public scholarship.
What are the boundary objects (or collaborative platforms) that are used to produce public scholarship? What projects are you involved in that are attending to or producing environments for public scholarship and civic engagement? What kinds of practices in the digital humanities can foster the creation of digital tools for such work?
Again, I'm looking forward!
Two versions of public engagement
Thanks, Jentery, for your post! I am also particularly interested in the role of service learning and civic engagement in the future of the academy. We have already begun to democratize knowledge through access to resources and ideas through new ways of archiving, but also more excitingly through new ways of collaborating in both researching and teaching. Civic engagement opens up ownership and connections of knowledge, broadening the conversation not only outside our departments but also outside our university.
My mentor Teresa Mangum, (faculty at University of Iowa, co-director of the Obermann Institute on Public Engagement), has helpfully explained to me that there tend to be two general types of public engagement in the university. The first is a service-model, that can be labeled loosely as "outreach." In this paradigm, university partners do something "for" the community, anticipating need and designing/providing some kind of solution. While useful in some circumstances, this isn't the formula, or the language, used by organizations like Imagining America or the Obermann Institute.
The second and preferred model, as defined by these organizations, is a more radical version of engagement that emphasizes "collaboration"--working with rather than for community partners. The goal here is to forward research/teaching while serving the community in a way that is a truly reciprocal partnership. This kind of work requires coming to the table with the idea that organizations and people outside the university are experts just like we are, but with different kinds of knowledge. As mentioned in the initial prompt above, this kind of civic scholarship radically redefines who finds, owns, and gives knowledge. The goal for us as teachers and scholars becomes to see how information technology and
civic engagement can collaboratively promote the "best" version of democratized learning.
My first question, then, is how new changes and opportunities in the digital humanities foster, invite, or even necessitate community engagement. Will scholarship in the humanities necessarily become more ongoing, engaged, collaborative, and democratic as it becomes increasingly digitized?
And secondly, how can we facilitate this second version of public engagement in our institutions? What kinds of projects are people working on that combine new technologies and new communities in ways that are mutually beneficial and illuminating?
What a great topic, everyone.
What a great topic, everyone. I had never thought about civic engagement and public scholarship in terms of democratizing knowledge, and in the past few days your comments have helped me reframe what is most interesting about digital technology's affordances, and the relationships between campus and community.
I was hoping that Hypercities, one of the HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media & Learning winners, would weigh in -- their project is a wonderfully collaborative, engaged form of public scholarship and community partnership, and I know the choreography of getting each part to work required serious dedication, interest and effort. I contacted them to let them know about the Democratizing Knowledge forum, but they are preparing for a big event tomorrow and all of their resources are focused there. Since they're busy, I'd like to describe the project and point people to their model as a fascinating blend of digital media, public scholarship, and community engagement -- and of democratizing knowledge.
They describe their work much better than I can, so I pasted this from their website: Hypercities is "a collaborative research and educational platform for traveling back in time to explore the historical layers of city spaces in an interactive, hypermedia environment." Hypercities partnered with Public Matters, a multidisciplinary team that works to "engage residents in the creation of media-based neighborhood narratives that illuminate its history, character and conditions and integrate the results with broader civic processes, advocacy efforts and community initiatives." During their grant period with HASTAC/MacArthur, Hypercities and Public Mattesr worked with the Pilipino Workers Center in Historic Filipinotown in Los Angeles, and also partnered with UCLA's Center for Research in Engineering, Media and Performance (REMAP).
It's hard to speak in terms of a final product for this project, because the ripples seem capable of extending indefinitely (perhaps the best possible outcome). But one culminating moment is tomorrow's Mobile Hi(storic) Fi(lipinotown) Tours (Mobile Hi Fi Tours) which is probably best described in the series of questions they raise on their site: " Hi Fi epitomizes L. A.: a diverse population, a significant percentage of low-income and recent immigrants, and a history that has been erased or is hard to find. How then do you experience the history of a place with few visible cultural markers? How do you access the hundreds of stories permeating non-descript buildings, now-empty lots, and commercial strip malls that, taken collectively, result in that Historic Filipinotown sign by the 101 Freeway? How do you dig up the past, peel back the layers of a neighborhood’s evolution over time and make it meaningful to a contemporary audience?"
They took on those questions with youth and digital media, using GPS-enabled Nokia tablets to access images, maps and audio, ultimately creating the Mobile Hi Fi Tour content. I won't be able to attend the festivities tomorrow, but I compare the tours to the audio tours we use in museums and galleries, except that these tours are built by the community, and the experts are the people creating the content.
Hypercities' digital media (which is an open-content platform built on Google maps and Google earth), "allows anyone to create interpretative pathways through time and space." I find that to be a particularly intriguing and alternative way to saying that theymake it possible for people to democratize knowledge. Their partnerships with Public Matters, Pilino Workers Center, and REMAP democratizes knowledge in many ways, by capturing the stories, broadcasting them, and ultimately connecting people with knowledge that might otherwise be overlooked.
All of our Digital Media & Learning projects touch on these themes in some way, but given the discussions in this forum and the myriad ways that Hypercities connects to the topic of democratizing knowledge, I wanted to devote a few paragraphs and links to their work.
course blogging and new media literacy
Inspired by Marissa Parham, who ran a workshop on the topic last spring at Rutgers University, I have been experimenting with course blogging using Wordpress software. The blog format is useful on a number of fronts: it allows students to continue class discussion when we run out of time, it opens their interaction with each other at a more leisurely and substantial pace, it leads to links and topics further afield from the course material, it helps them try out ideas. It is also time-effective for me, since it builds in a process of peer-review and commentary without the need to grade response papers.
The question of democratization has already come up, however, in two respects. The first is the degree of "publicity" to build into such a site: at the moment I have set the privacy options so that the site does not come up in search engine results, but is viewable to anyone who navigates there. I have done so since students may be uncomfortable with the idea that anyone is able to search for them personally - but I like the idea that the blog is accessible to a wider community (you can view it here). I do not allow people outside the course to comment or post, however, since I prefer the "coterie" feel of a learning community unique to those who are enrolled in the course. I may change this depending on the course (or depending on my current ideas about democratization!) To use another early modern analogy, since that's my field, it reminds me of what Harold Love calls "scribal publishing": the medium itself may imply something about the size of the community (a small manuscript coterie or the world-wide web), but in fact many degrees of privacy and distribution are possible in both cases.
I have also been thinking about access and literacy, since I was immediately disabused of the notion that new media is straightforwardly "democratic" in these senses. I have already noticed that some students are unfamiliar or uncomfortable with the format. Some do not own computers or have internet access at home, so they are at a disadvantage. Some had a great deal of trouble setting up an account (don't assume that younger students are always digitally literate!) They all have access to the internet through the university, and I think it is important to help them become more digitally literate - but it reminds us that personal computing remains an economic obstacle even in higher education.
re: course blogging and new media literacy
Thanks for your comment, Scott. I'm particularly struck by your sentence, toward the end: "I have also been thinking about access and literacy, since I was immediately disabused of the notion that new media is straightforwardly 'democratic' in these senses."
I echo your concerns about access and would add to them concerns about who is producing content and how. That is, not only is access still very much an issue and not only is personal computing an economic obstacle even in high education, but also access to personal computing alone doesn't guarantee democracy. Know what I mean?
That said, on the topic of students who are reticent to blog, what is your response (if you don't mind sharing)? I'm also curious how much time you dedicate to teaching students how to blog and navigate the WordPress backend.
Thanks again, Scott! And great blog!
re: course blogging and new media literacy
Hi Jentery - I do know what you mean about access being only one part of the equation: it enters into my thinking about the privacy/publicity settings of a course blog. My fondness for a coterie feel has the implication that the blog does not pretend to be "democratic" for a community outside the class.
And even if the blog were open for comments and posts there would still be a pyramid of "expertise" with the instructor or "administrator" at the top. One thing that has struck me about the format of WordPress is that an administrator appears able to be able to edit other users' comments and posts, and see the drafts of their posts. I certainly prefer not to be in the position of an "adminstrator" in this sense - I wish I could turn that feature off. But some notion of expertise (perhaps as an "intellectual" or "scholar," to pick up on a thread below) seems necessary for a pedagogical environment.
As far as students who are reticent to blog - I tell them to come to my office for help and deal with it to some extent during class, but (speaking of administrative, read autocratic, behavior) I also require them to post or comment weekly and factor the blog as 25% of their grade!
re: course blogging and new media literacy
Thanks, Scott. Having used a multi-authored WordPress platform for nine courses now, I'm facing precisely the issues you raise above. And I don't know about you, but one thing I've particularly enjoyed is how much I learn when students blog. For instance, in a few courses, the students and I have compiled an archive (through the blog) on a particular topic or historical moment (e.g., events in or publications from the year 1919). Essentially, we crowdsource around an idea, stressing differences across discinciplinary and personal investments, and we compile and discuss the material gathered. Aside from producing a resource for later use, the other thing I appreciate about such a project is that, in and outside of the classroom, the students quickly realize that they are speaking to things in the archive that are entirely new to me and about which I'm not (necessarily) an expert (even if, of course, I'm still the instructor, who issues grades, adminsters the blog, constructs the prompts, and the like).
Down the line, I'd like to make this kind of project more about how to foster community partnerships, where something like WordPress becomes a space for collaborative archive building (ostensibly around a local issue). Thing is, this move would require more expertise on my end on how to model (and not just produce) such scholarship. Per my comment above, I'm finding all the more how much navigation and display matter for collaborative projects. How, in short, scholarship functions, not just what it "finds" or means.
One quick technical question, too: When students blog in your course(s), in WordPress are they editors, authors...?
Thanks again! I'm enjoying this conversation, Scott!
re: course blogging and new media literacy
My favorite part of the blogging environment so far is that it can extend that moment you talk about - when a student realizes their expertise exceeds mine on an issue - because they can follow through on it with a longer post.
The students are "authors" on my blog - someday I might try making them "editors," which would give them administrative powers and create a different kind of democratic and collaborative environment in which their control extends to the level of production and display that you describe.
I notice that the blog on your course site is for users only: in other courses have you used a different level of publicity?
re: course blogging and new media literacy
At the University of Washington, I have not used a different level of publicity. All of the class blogs have been passcode-protected. However, at Cornish College of the Arts (in Seattle), I'm currently teaching an Introduction to Digital Humanities course, themed "Designing Literature." That blog is not passcode-protected, but we began the course with a discussion about the implications of blogging in a forum that could be read by people who are not in the class (hence the use, by some, of nicknames). We're currently using the blog for freewrites, lesson plans, workshop prompts, reference, and short blog entries (on the course material). We'll also be using the site to circulate student projects during every stage of their iterative development. By the course's end, the students will be expected to collaboratively compose an e-book, with each of them submitting a chapter and writing a brief introduction to another student's chapter.
Let me know what other questions you have. And I'm curious: In your department/field at Rutgers, do many other English instructors use blogs in the classroom?
Also, down the line, we should chat about our dissertations. I'm also working with sound (but not song, and from 1860 forward)! Hope all's well, Scott.
I'm not sure how populuar
I'm not sure how populuar blogging is in my department, though I know that Henry Turner uses the Wordpress format for both graduate and undergraduate courses: like Marissa Parham, he centers things around his own website, here. This allows for a more fluid combination of research and teaching.
I'll be interested to check out your students' e-book - and also to hear more about your research!
privacy feature for class blogging
I wanted to respond to the merits of keeping a blog open to the public so that those outside of the class can see and/or participate in the development of the blog. I think sometimes when I think about and hear people talk about the value of blogs in public scholarship and the classroom, we envision the value of the blogging to be predominately if not solely in the process of blogging and the unfolding of the dialogue. Speaking as an English student, I definitely find this aspect one of the most fascinating features about blogging. Blogging and partically the ability to trace conversation threads and to search via archive tags is away of making public, a methodology and way of thinking that so often coralled within academia.
However I think you can get a lot out of keeping a blog more or less closed to people outside the class participants when the class is working towards something they ultimately envision to be a public resource. Students are allowed to have an intimate digital community in which they can take something like a collective ownership of the work for a time. This allows them to spend time not only researching but hashing out thoughts and thinking critically about what they are offering a larger community. Once the site is open at the end of the semester, you still have opportunity for users to comment, and revise the blog, but you also offer for discussion, reference, and thought a more fully flushed out resource. Such a resource can be linked from other sites to be simulteneously a place of discussion and an archive.
I'm thinking about a course that Dr. Powell in the Art History department at Duke is leading this semester. The course thinks about visual stereotypes, caricatured images and how their visual rhetoric gets passed down to hosts of images. Instead of a paper, this course is working on creativing via wordpress, a kind of database of turn of the century sheet music images and their stereotyped images of African Americans. Using the digital images from the Duke collection, the students in the course are creating a blog that will discuss the formal elements of the original images, then put them in historical context both textually and alongside other images that challenge and speak to and challenge the formal elements of the origianl caricatured images. The blog is closed to the public during the semester with the exception of a few special guests invited by the professor. After they have posted all the images in the particular collection they are using, they will open the blog to the public. By this point though, they will have already been commenting on each other's posts, assessments, and research.
Benefits of the M-Ubuntu Project for Democracy
Thanks for this forum.
We have discovered that the M-Ubuntu project, in its pursuit "to produce public scholarship" must, on the one hand, act with an awareness of the ruins of a legacy that thrived on keeping your knowledge to yourself because if you share it, you risk becoming obsolete and useless and on the other hand, seize the opportunity to demonstrate the usefulness of acquired knowledge.
Already we are seeing encouraging indicators when we created opportunities for teachers to learn together. The technology, and in our case particularly the use of mobile phones, enables peer coaching to flourish. It seems so natural for teachers to assist and help each other during these workshop sessions. Also, the teachers immediately find a way to employ their acquired knowledge for the benefit of the learners and for themselves.
In one small and significant way, therefore, the M-Ubuntu project lends itself to making a valid contribution to enabling teachers to share their knowledge - it is a small democracy in an ailing democracy.
Theo
re: Benefits of the M-Ubuntu Project for Democracy
Thanks, Theo. I just had a chance to peruse the M-Ubuntu site. It's great! As an instructor invested in technology-focused learing, I especially appreciate the lesson plan that was posted (in November 2008) for the Mobile Learning Workshop. One thing that I notice is how the lesson plan foregrounds activities like writing and listening and incorporates an array of media, as well as poetry, into the exercise. In just two concise pages is a model module that indicates how many literacies and modes of learning are at work in m-learning projects.
In your conversation with Ramsey, you speak to having very little and doing a great deal, and above you stress (among other things) how teachers can learn together. This idea of teachers entering unfamiliar territory (e.g., m-learning) and visibly being learners themselves: would you say this is key to "a small democracy in an ailing democracy"?
Thank you again, Theo. We appreciate your time!
M-Ubuntu Teachers are Keys
I appreciate you taking the time to view the material on our site and get an idea of this "small democracy". The attitude of teachers and their teachability are two core reasons why they are on the verge of being a model for South Africa to follow.
Thanks again Jentery for THIS democracy ... right here, right now!
re: M-Ubuntu Teachers are Keys
& thank you, Theo!
Keeping Knowledge to Yourself
I was moved by this comment, Theo. It is a good reminder that traditions of shared knowledge have special preciousness and special precariousness in certain kinds of social orders and social situations.
At the Franklin Center this week, our HASTAC Distinguished Faculty Fellow Allison Clark gave a talk on digital access and digitial divide and mentioned that there was a plan for high bandwidth access for lower income families. One member of the audience was worried that "a box on the house" supposedly for bandwidth access was also potentially something the police and others could misuse for surveillance, with the implication that it would be safer if African Americans refused this possibility. Someone else noted that, given the kind of policing that routinely happens in poor and especially urban African American neighborhoods, one didn't need a box that could afford digital access in order to have surveillance.
In other words, fear of repression could allow one to over-react to the "box on the house" in a way that would deny one access without solving the problem of surveillance. It was a crucially important reminder and also a good intervention. I imagine that, beyond your astute comment, are many similar kinds of examples of fears of public (or too-public) knowledge. Thanks for writing!
Keeping Knowledge to Yourself
Great conversational thread! I recall an interesting conversation I had with Jessica Pham as we were fretting about the administrative burdens of human subjects protection and IRBs as relates to technology grants. Surely no one was going to be adversely impacted these grants, we griped. So we give cell phones to poor rural women in India and they become empowered. What could be more altruistic and harmless? Or we give new technologies to poor children in classrooms in developing countries. Too great, right? I think it's too easy to idealize a family, a village, a "public," as an inherently supportive organism, one which accepts new knowledge as healthy and vital and desirable. One has only to tune into the current health care "debate" to see people frantically opposed to ideas that are good for them and the populace. Any intervention into a public requires a non-idealized and problematized view of how communities absorb, process, resist and either reject or accept change, no matter its intent. The "box in the house"/surveillance tool is a great cautionary example about potential unintended consequences of high-minded interventions.
Collaboration by Difference implies democratic access
Cathy,
You have written elsewhere about "collaboration by difference" which I think is a powerful idea and one that is greatly facilitated by communication technologies. In our case studys of WSU's ePortfolio contest, one of the concepts that we found in the portfolioes that successfully addressed a problem was "be public." While working in public is not inherently democratizing, the potential to be found by, joined by, or inform others in a democratic way is enhanced over working in a closed group.
Regarding various comments about student blogs and projects, it seems to me that having students engage in authentic projects, in service to, or better, in collaboration with, a community is an important aspect of the assignment design. If students need to be interacting with a public, it will answer some of the questions about why they are working in public, and whether the public should be able to comment back.
Another aspect of this democratization of learning is the role that publics can and should play in assessing the work. By assessing I mean something other than giving letter grades, I mean feedback to the learner about the broad skills like critical thinking, as well as domain specific skills, that their work exhibits (or lacks). We have been exploring how students can work anywhere online where their community or problem is found and the assessment of that work can be harvested back to the University. This is opening up opportunities to talk about designing curriculum that is problem-based and authentic, even for our rural campus.
All that said, learning to work in public, to find communities of practice, to adopt open-source strategies is not natural or comfortable for many of us. It seems to be a skill that must be developed after adopting a faith that collaboration by difference is a very powerful mechanism to address many of the complex problems facing us today.
Democratizing Knowledge
What a great Forum! Thanks for kicking off the new year with such an expansive topic. In fact, the questions you raise here and the responses already being generated make me think that the Forum is as much about "Democratizing Knowledge" in general as it is more specifically about "digital humanities." That is, for any specialized scholarship, in any field, whether arts, humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, or technology studies, finding the best way to have a public interface, a way of making our knowledge useful not only within our professional lives but extended to civic society more generally, is a challenge and, more and more, I think it is an imperative too. Even in my teaching, I more and more find ways to have my students translate their class research into public forums, whether it is adding to Wikipedia entries, writing to the local newspaper, or actually going out into communities to do work (I learned yesterday about a program in Bolivia building bridges . . . that is doing the same here in Durham, on one of our flood-prone rivers).
Thanks so much for this. I can't wait to see what kinds of response this generates in the days ahead.
re: Democratizing Knowledge
Thanks, Cathy!
Of Publics, Experts, and Intellectuals
What a great forum.
I agree with Cathy that it's important to think about digital humanities in relation to the broader question of democratizing knowledge.
I can't wait to look at the blogs and websites mentioned above and investigate further. And to follow the discussion here.
I want to return now, though, to the really important questions that Bridget, Jentery, Edmond, and Peter raise in the opening forum description:
+ How are terms like "democracy," "public," and "scholarship" mobilized in digital humanities projects, for whom, and to what effects? What are the assumptions, definitions, and desires attached to each of these terms?
+ How do community partnerships affect perceptions and deployments of expertise? Does the notion of "the expert" change or collapse?
There has been an enormous amount of high-theory scholarly attention to the concept of the "public" in general (just to start the long, long list: Habermas, Warner, Berlant, Fraser, Robert Asen, the Black Public Sphere Collective, Paul Gilroy, Jodi Dean's work is relevant here to civil society and online digital issues, and there's countless others going back to good old John Dewey and Walter Lippmann). Many different finely-tuned definitions and arguments about the "public": is it a monolithic entity or does it have the capacity for diverse civic participation? Is it "rational-critical" and egalitarian or inflected with emotions, feelings, and unequal power relations? What is its historical lineage? And what happens to the public in different modes of mediation (newspapers and coffeehouses; television and malls; Internet and, er, coffeehouses)?
And yet, when we move from high-flown (and often revelatory, if sometimes jargonistic) theory to civic engagement, we often start to use the term "public" less critically and carefully, and we load a lot of idealistic wishes onto the term (nothing wrong with idealism, but we should be aware of it). Who is this public we're imagining here?
So the questions I'm thinking about now are:
What happens if we bring theories of the public to bear more explicitly on our use of the term in what amount to campus "outreach" efforts (and maybe also "inreach" efforts) of democratizing knowledge? Let's use that scholarly knowledge to think about the concept of the "public" itself.
Would it change our sense of public scholarship if we are using Habermas's rational critical model of the public as compared to Michael Warner and Lauren Berlant's visions of publics as communication among strangers? Or Nancy Fraser's distinctions between distributive justice (the redistribution of material wealth from one part of the public to another) as compared to appeals for recognition (symbolic representation in and before the public)? Or John Dewey's old-fashioned ideas about art as a crucial medium for democratic publics? Or Lippmann's belief that we probably need experts to manipulate "phantom publics"? Or Birmingham School ideas about "subcultures" as counterpublics?
In other words, which public are we talking about when we talk about "the public"? Or should we talk about publics plural rather than one public? These are difficult questions to my mind, but important ones to ponder (we probably can never definitively answer these questions) when it comes to public (publics?) scholarship?
This brings me to the great question about "experts." Here's an idea I've been tinkering with: What if we substituted the word "intellectuals" for experts? Alas, "intellectuals" has an elitist, snooty ring to it in the U.S., and it has the danger of undercutting the expert's authority, but maybe that's just what we aim to do. What if we imagined a public scholarship in which we were all intellectuals rather than a few of us being experts and everyone else "the public"? What if we took the idea of "public intellectuals" and broadened it beyond the few academic stars and celebrities who get the label? Could we be democratic intellectuals? Again, it's an ideal, but one that I am intrigued by.
And what if the Internet might have the capacity to alter the power dynamics of the exchanges between democratic intellectuals? So that they were less top-down and more egalitarian. What would we gain, what would we lose in this scenario? Most of all, what I think about is how would we manage the torrent of ideas and information in a more democratic public of knowledge exchange? How would one navigate among a broadened group of equal citizen-intellectuals?
Okay, that's a few scattered questions that I tend to obsess about and wanted to share. I hope others will find them stimulating to ponder. If not, of course, consider this one voice babbling in the digital mass public.
Michael
"Our Public"
Michael,
I want to thank you for your provocative and difficult questions... these are many of the same issues I grapple with in working with community partners.
Naming is so powerful. The names we give for ourselves and the names we give for the "publics" we work with really tell a lot about the relationship we have with those groups. Adapting scholarship and university-level teaching to, for example, non-profit community organizations is much more complicated than just removing academic jargon to make what we do more "accessible;" this kind of condescending treatment of some vague entity we call the "public" is unproductive and unhelpful. Adapting our work to local communities should hopefully lead us to question, in tough ways but good ways, what the value of our research actually is--and that seems much more productive to me.
The idealism you so rightly note is evident in both terms, the "public" we seek to serve and our status as "intellectuals." Both of those designations can be rosy-colored ideals that can interfere with our ability to make progress. If we can instead think about it as two groups of experts, who are experts in different but equally valuable areas, we can change both the dynamic of the relationship and the potential for a collaborative project. I don't think it can be real collaboration without this reciprocal recognition of expertise on both sides. I wholeheartedly second your call for better names for both groups--but I am equally perplexed about what those names might be.
Thanks again for your questions, Michael!
Individuals in Mutual Cooperation and Association
Bridget,
I was rereading your initial post and appreciating more fully that you were already asking a few of the questions that I posed in my post (rereading is always good, I find, in the rush of digital conversation, since it takes me a few times to absorb things).
I like the questions you pose:
My first question, then, is how new changes and opportunities in the digital humanities foster, invite, or even necessitate community engagement. Will scholarship in the humanities necessarily become more ongoing, engaged, collaborative, and democratic as it becomes increasingly digitized?
And secondly, how can we facilitate this second version of public engagement in our institutions? What kinds of projects are people working on that combine new technologies and new communities in ways that are mutually beneficial and illuminating?
In some sense we are talking here is how what you call "collaboration" might work. We're pretty much agreed that we want to focus on what Teresa calls the second model. The first has its uses, but also real problems.
A few thoughts:
First, terminology: I prefer the terms cooperation or association, because I always think of the Vichy regime when I here the word "collaboration," but that's my own weird association.
Or maybe not just a weird association. One thing I like about cooperation and association is that they emphasize that we still need to respect the need for individual pursuits within a democratic model of knowledge production. Sort of in the way that your phrase "mutually beneficial" does in your second question. Status will always matter to many people, and getting ahead in their own careers, goals, and intellectual journeys needs to form part of the model for working in more connected ways. I'm guessing you and others would agree with this. I think I just want to bring it out into the open: when we work collectively, we should keep an eye on how the individual participants are doing and what their individual needs are, and I think we should honor and reserve a special place for not going with the flow of collective work as well as engaging together in knowledge production.
Second thought: it's interesting to me how we are moving between the term "public" and "community." Are these, to your mind (and others), the same or different? I think of them as different terms, but I need to think more about what that means in terms of digital spaces of cooperative knowledge production.
Just the right word...
Michael,
I think you and I are very much on the same page here--I completely agree with your comment about weird associations. You're retiscent about collaboration, and rightly so, but I hear the words "cooperation" and "association" and find them to sound rather institutional. The problem and the beauty of language, yes? One term can mean something different outside academia, outside your department, etc, and the challenge of using the right word requires us to know what a word means to different people in different contexts.
Some of my most challenging yet most enlightening moments working with community partners have been, believe it or not, concerning vocabulary issues. When a word comes up that means something different to both parties, it can take some time to sort out what is meant and how it is interpreted. I'm hosting a "workshop," for example, at a local library for an adult reading group, and it took some miscommunication glitches to discover that my definition of what a workshop includes didn't align with that of the program director with whom I was working. It was a good reminder of the importance of communication between academic and community partners. Spending lots of time talking about the project together ahead of time, and sorting carefully through both our expectations, prevented a small interpretive difference from turning into a mistake at the actual event that might have flustered everyone involved.
Perhaps it's less important to choose the right word than to have really clear channels of communication between all involved parties to make sure everyone is working with a common definition--perhaps it's less important to have the right answers than to ask the right questions.
So, if you'll humor me, perhaps we can practice! What do you see as the differences between "public" and "community"?
re: Just the right word...
Thank you, Bridget, Michael, and Peter, for this thread.
Here, I want to piggyback on several comments, including Michael's: "One thing I like about cooperation and association is that they emphasize that we still need to respect the need for individual pursuits within a democratic model of knowledge production."
As well as Bridget's: "Some of my most challenging yet most enlightening moments working with community partners have been, believe it or not, concerning vocabulary issues. . . . Perhaps it's less important to choose the right word than to have really clear channels of communication between all involved parties to make sure everyone is working with a common definition--perhaps it's less important to have the right answers than to ask the right questions."
I agree, Bridget: Some of my most challenging yet most enlightening moments working with community partners have also emerged from the vocabularly mobilized. And no doubt, Michael, "collaboration" is one of those tricky words, especially if you distinguish between a kind of collaboration where (to borrow from Chris Kelty) (1) individual autonomy is privileged, and individual work is then filtered through peer review and incorporated, and (2) the shared goals of a group take precedence over autonomy.
While I, too, agree that clear communication channels matter, I also think that language shapes (though does not determine) practice. (I'm in English, after all. Hahaha...) Even more so, some particularly complex issues arise when we represent the community-based work we do. That said, at the end of several projects I've asked myself, "In what ways did I 'collaborate' with this group? Is that word a fair representation of the power that was at play and the labor that was involved? How was 'collaboration' articulated by others involved?"
Thanks, Bridget, for addressing the all-important issue of spending significant time talking about a project before implementing it. That is so true. To this mix, I would also add that the representations of a project, including who is doing the representation and how, really matter as well. How does a project circulate, including to its target audiences and its participants? How is a project historicized? Here are but a few reasons (among a slew) why I think new media---as means of transmitting and storing scholarship---are so imbricated in the future of scholarship.
Now, on the differences between "public" and "community," I'd love to hear and learn more.
Democratic intellectuals
Thanks Michael, your questions definitely struck a chord with me, in particular:
"And what if the Internet might have the capacity to alter the power dynamics of the exchanges between democratic intellectuals? So that they were less top-down and more egalitarian. What would we gain, what would we lose in this scenario? Most of all, what I think about is how would we manage the torrent of ideas and information in a more democratic public of knowledge exchange? How would one navigate among a broadened group of equal citizen-intellectuals?"
I feel ill equipped to address the theoretical notions raised earlier in your post but I am comfortable asserting that the Internet *has* altered the power dynamics between democratic intellectuals and traditional experts. Further, as a computer scientist, I can't help but think that the internet has made almost everything less top-down and more distributed. Where I run into trouble is attempting to determine where exactly that leaves us. Concretely, we now have wikipedia, Google Scholar and the HASTAC forums. We have the ability to remove traditional forms of content control and distribute it freely anywhere in the world. But we're losing traditional sources of knowledge such as newspapers that we used to depend on to provide accurate information. We're trading information for entertainment. And powerful, entrenched interests have a stake in pushing for an abolition of the tenants of the WWW that have helped to make it a democratic force (such as net neutrality). Certainly we can create systems and algorithms to help us distinguish between good information and bad and maybe we can use this to construct a citizen scholar's reputation but the sheer amount of information we're talking about is mindboggling and likely to change this conversation in ways none of us can predict...
Legacy of Public History and Digital Projects
After reading through some of these comments, I'm wondering if there are different discplinary approaches and traditions to treating the democratization of knowledge creation?
I have professional and academic experience in public history and so I'm familiar with different ways that people have engaging in history making in the US.
We can look at some of the New Deal-funded projects that collected oral histories by interviewing former slaves and individuals living in rural areas. These oral histories represent some early efforts to reach out to non-elites and let them share their history with a broader public. There are many oral history projects contain great guided interviews.
Different from traditional oral history, digital collecting projects, like some developed at the Center for History and New Media, allow the individual to come to the site and share what they want on their own terms. The September 11th Digital Archive was one of the early digital collecting projects (http://911digitalarchive.org) launched in 2002 that simply asked people to tell their stories and now has over 150,000 digital objects.
In 2005, I helped to created the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank (http://hurricanearchive.org) to save the stories of those affected by the Gulf hurricanes (Katrina and Rita). It was accessible to anyone with an internet connection, and for those without access to a computer, there were other means for sharing stories. We printed and distributed postcards w/paid postage for some to write down a short reflections that were then scanned. We also set up a local phone number w/voice mail via Skype so that individuals could call and tell us what they wanted to share. Those voicemails are then uploaded into the website's archive.
When you undertake a community knowledge-building or digital collecting project, we have learned that you will spend a lot of time doing hands-on work. Participating in community meetings or events will require a lot of your time. But if you are willing and able to devote yourself to that type of work, the community you are working with will be more likely to partcipate and sustain the project because it belongs to them.
One of the biggest drawbacks to a digital collecting site is the abundance of materials. Roy Rosenzweig wrote about the problems of abundance and scarcity with digital media. There can be an abundance of materials saved that were never saved before, and yet when evidence is born digitally it can very easily disappear as quickly as it was created leaving us without evidence of those creations.
How does one then deal with 25,000 digital objects related to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita? Are individual responses ignored because there are too many of them? How can we think about what has been lost when there is so much already saved? I think good searches and text mining tools help tackle some of those problems, but there always are concerns.
There is a lot of good work out there and it's great to hear from the group on the types of projects they are working on and how we are all working through issues of authority and knowledge construction.
Roy!
Anything Roy wrote about knowledge production and democracy is well worth our time reading, I think. He had such a feel for these issues. In terms of preservation and history (I'm trained as a cultural and intellectual historian), we do face the same problem, only now from the other side. Whereas we used to lose histories because they "weren't important" compared to the works of "great men," with digital preservation we now lose histories because they are buried in the mass of information available to one's fingertips. Is that democracy? In one sense, it's a better problem to have than the old exclusionary assumptions, but multitude might not be the answer for democratic knowledge production. Both people and information has to get organized. And as you being to note, it's the "how" of that organizing that really will matter to a democratic vision of knowledge creation.
Maybe one answer in addition to better search mechanisms are the tools of social networking? These, at their best, could extend the human communication that goes into turning data into knowledge, information into meaning, evidence into interpretation.
wither the intellectual, wither democratization
To quote an old cliche, when you post on the internet no one knows if you are a dog, with some exceptions, of course. If one reads the editorial page of the NYT and the many magazines which post essays on issue of public life or one looks at the myriad of blogs, wiki's and other well crafted pieces often from "think tanks on the left and the right in the US and internationally, one wonders where the academic stands in this sphere. Many in academia also write for the public and play their part in the media. But more and more it seems that those who stand in the Ivory Tower no longer command from that height.
What is the role of the university in an increasingly "democratized" public which can become saturated by thinkers and "scholars" who do not reside within The Academy. I have little trouble understanding John Brockman's proclamation that the sciences are the new humanists as they profer their accomplishments as giving them the right to speak almost ex-cathedra on the issues of the day.
Secondly, "service learning" and the variances which involve students and faculty extending themselves into the community in various ways, in a fragmented manner, seems to need further thought. Few faculty receive promotion and tenure based on such activities except as it is part of a class. Students participate, some out of commitment and others as part of requirements- but their involvement is tenuous and short termed at best. On the other hand, the many community based organizations ranging from Rotarians to local environmental organizations are imbedded in the community. It would seem that if these ideas are to be significant and meaningful it requires a reorientation of the academic instution and a cross cylindered participation amongst the disciplines rather than seeing this as a "humanities" endeavor or any other department for that matter.
There are other issues to consider as education goes from preK->16 and maybe even "20" where secondary blends into post secondary almost seamlessly and the roles of faculty change as well as students being driven by external pressures to obtain levels of post secondary competencies.
Thinking about the future, are the ideas and thoughts being promulgated around this subject based on a university of the past and not what it might be in the future considering the spread of options and institutions evolving? Education, by its roll, is past oriented. One can not "grade" in the current modality for knowledge that doesn't exist. The subject here is transformational in that it calls for risk on the part of all, students, faculty, administration and the public in which the Ivory Tower is imbedded.
Open Source as Democratization of Knowledge & thoughts on Wikipe
I am a computer science student, so Open Source Software immediately comes to mind for me. These days, there is an incredible amount of Free (as in Speech) software available on the internet. Millions of programmers choose to place their source code and make it available to anyone for modification.
Within the open source movement, many large, collaborative projects exist. Projects like Linux, Apache, MySQL are all open source and have completely fueled the entire Internet. Today, even notoriously proprietary Microsoft has released millions of lines of code as open source. Companies like Google have been built from the ground up using open source software and given back to the community appropriately. I believe that this is just another exciting, new form of democratization of knowledge.
I also believe that one may look to the open source movement as a cue for democratization of knowledge. These were the same people that invented blogs and wikis, after all. :)
Some interesting common practices in open source are:
There are some downsides to this kind of development though. Many projects collapse and fail under poor leadership, despite talented workers. Political disputes can sometimes cause projects to fork. Sometimes people simply lose interest entirely.
Larry Sanger, the founder of Wikipedia, has an entire article on the democratization of knowledge and Wikipedia as an example of it: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/sanger07/sanger07_index.html
In it he discusses why the widespread access of information is important for everyone, much in a way that the printing press was. He also discusses a lot of the problems we face when we begin democratizing knowledge. The most obvious is that, if anyone can bring knowledge to anyone else, how do we verify the integrity of it?
You all have probably noted this paradox: Wikipedia has a terrible reputation in the academic community; a Wikipedia citation is almost mark of shame. And yet, it is probably one of the most used resources, especially for obtaining basic information on nearly any topic.
It's as if we want to simultaneously encourage democratization and spread of public knowledge, but we want to discourage its use.
Ethics in the Democratization of Knowledge Production
I think this a great forum to kick off the year! And especially appropriate considering the ongoing legislative debate on net neutrality: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2353128,00.asp
So far, I've enjoyed all the posts and would like to quickly address Stephen's concern, before introducing another dynamic about questions concerning the ethics of knowledge production. The wikipedia paradox is important to bring up, considering its widespread utilitarian function. But considering the epistemological issues of the site, I too deter my students from using it as validated source for academic work. I do not discourage its usage for introductory research though, as the collaborative organization of such information contains citations for the original sources, which are often valid texts. Thus, I look at wikipedia not as an ends in itself but rather an effective nodal point in navigating vast bodies of relative information.
Another element of the democratization of knowledge production within and outside of academia that needs to also be addressed is the ethically complicated social knowledge that is not based upon texts per se, but rather the documented experiences of others. I'm thinking here especially about strong affective and potentially sensitive images and videos of people's experiences, at home and abroad. I think Sheila's post touches on this some, but there are other important testimonies that are meant for specific legislative or interventionist purposes and become potentially endangering if they become publicly accessible, as well as the issues of original raw events themselves, such as the Neda Agha Sultan video.
One of the largest issues then with quick and dispersible forms of such knowledge is the decontextualization of the original event specifics as well as the loss of protective measurements for those in risk, if their identities are exposed. It may be relatively easy to create such a sensitive structure within the classroom but as we facilitate new platforms for experiencing complex historical or quotidian events of others, how do we create ethical infrastructures for making sense of such knowledge and information? Certain organizations that deal with human rights related material, such as WITNESS, increasingly focus on meta-data issues for maintaining contextual information of material that is accessed and/or disseminated.
I think this plays into the media literacy agenda as well, in that the developing skills for navigating and authoring web-based material may need to be coupled with critical semiological skills that take into account ethical and social concerns of the material conditions and origins of produced information and knowledge.
So to sum up, my key question is how do we create data infrastructures, network policies, and media literacy agendas that incorporate the real world social complexities of information sources? And how much of a contextualizing web of information is necessary to anchor knowledge acquisition?
Thanks again everyone and I can definitely see how the interdisciplinary nature of this forum is taking shape. I'm looking forward to future responses!
new media in other areas of study
I'm really enjoying this conversation especially about teaching and learning with new media and how it changes the engagement/learning experience.
As a journalism and communication studies student I have found that within the past year most of my professors have tried to incorporate new media into their teaching process. Blogging with Wordpress, Twitter and groups on Facebook have all been established and considered the main ways to communicate between members of the class.
However I have noticed that most of the students I know in other areas of study (most surprisingly Education department) either have no idea how to use these new technologies or have not used them in an education format. I am interested in how other areas of research are using the technologies or new media to their advantage and how they will differ from how we use them.
Contextualizing technology
I am compelled by your statement about students who may be familiar with these technologies but "have not used them in an education format." Could you say more about how a student could be familiar with blogging, for instance, but still be hesitant to use it in an academic context?
students familiar with new media
I find that most of the time students who are familiar with the technologies that don't use them in an educational format, don't do so because their teachers do not require them to. I also know many who do not think that these kind of technologies are helpful to the learning process or want to mix something they like to do for fun with education. For instance, my soccer team was shocked to learn that my entire Participatory Media class had Twitter accounts and used them to talk about the readings. After I had to explain to many of them what exactly Twitter was, most of them didn't understand the connection. I think that this demonstrates how there are too many departments that aren't utilizing new media effectively.
So you see use of this
So you see use of this technology as more an effort to make learning "fun" than a helpful pedagogical tool? Is there a way that using this technology could be more effective? What would that look like?
E-Learning: Knowledge Production, Accessibility, and Pedagogy
Wow, what a great forum! As a first-year HASTAC scholar, I am really excited to participate in the ongoing discussion that raises so many important questions that I currently grapple with as a M.A. student in Literature. In light of recent developments in open access movements for academic research and journals (as in the Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity and the Federal Research Access Act of 2009), the issues that are discussed here really bring home the importance of collaboration, so that we can build a community of individuals who come together in the sharing of ideas (as HASTAC has enabled us to do so), and whose works will allow a diversity of learners and learning styles. In order to do so, I think it is imperative that we rethink the tools we use in knowledge production, and create an environment which Erna Kotkamp describes as one that is dynamic enough to accommodate different and complex learning processes where doubt and uncertainty can exist. These, in addition to the issues that have been raised here about situating knowledge in physical and social contexts (going back to good ol' John Dewey), will bring us closer to a democratization of knowledge that opens the door to more diverse and complex community of individuals.
Prompted by the discussion that Bridget, bangs23, kenbrown et al have started above, I want to focus this post on the use of new media as an effective pedagogical tool. My direct experience is restricted to the field of literary studies, so I shall speak to that as best I can.
I'd like to take some time to respond to Bridget's question about what an effective use of this current technology may look like (I will say that there is no easy answer, and that perhaps the answer will always change and evolve, depending on how technologies change and how we respond to the change...). I am currently working with a professor (Lawrence Hanley) at San Francisco State University in implementing new media-related projects for his undergraduate American literature class. Engaging the students is important, and using new/social media will more likely get them to interact with the material, but the first question that we ask is how the students will benefit from using new media technology in reading texts. Can new media enhance our reading of texts? Our first project involves the use of a wiki in getting the students to perform a hyper/multimedia reading of Whitman's "Song of Myself." Not only will students be engaged on multiple sensory levels in their reading of the poem, it will also allow them to read and work on the poem collaboratively. When everyone has contributed their multimedia reading of the poem, they are required to blog on why they chose that specific multimedia and how it enhances their reading of the poem. The blog will then be linked to the multimedia and word/phrase that they have analyzed in the poem. The result is a richly-woven, intertextual, hypermediated, collaborative reading of "Song of Myself" (also apt, I think, for the big themes that the poem raises) that allows for visible and active learning. Whether or not this is a truly effective use of new/social media as a pedagogical tool is a question whose answer is continually in progress, and which I hope will be further illuminated by the ongoing discussions here. In upcoming projects, I will continue to get students to work collaboratively as well as individually (I agree with Michael Kramer's astute comment above, that when engaging in knowledge production, it is important to keep an eye on the individuals participating in the activity).
Also in response to kenbrown's question of how new media can be put to good use instead of being a distraction, I think expert produsers of knowledge are needed to guide the public in turning the wealth of information into useful knowledge, so that a community of individuals (in this case, students in higher-ed institutions) can become critical readers, users and consumers of information. Democratization of knowledge in institutions seems to be a tricky subject, one that requires equilibrium of all sorts. What does democratization of knowledge look like in higher education institutions? Does that mean a loss of power for the teacher if the student-teacher relationship becomes more leveled? What do teaching and learning look like in a democratized classroom and institution? If social media are really the "new laboratories of culture and knowledge making" as the Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 suggests, how would that change what goes on in the physical classroom? What, in the current trend toward the democratization of knowledge, are effective ways of teaching and learning?
Wow, Viola! That sounds like
Wow, Viola! That sounds like a fabulous project--I love how the form and function are really complementary with your use of the wiki. Bravo!
re: E-learning
Thanks for your comment, Viola! Per your project description above, I'm curious to hear how the work you are doing with Prof. Hanley and undergraduates at SFSU is affecting your own scholarship. For example, as a graduate student in English, are you using any digital tools in your own research? I ask because I often include online authoring platforms in my classes; however, I'm writing a bulk of my dissertation (excluding one chapter) with a word processor.
And great blog, by the way!
technology and learning
Bridget -- great questions! I've been studying technology-mediated learning for some time, largely in corporate settings. I've drawn a great deal on a theoretical framework in educational technology advanced by Clark, which claims that technology doesn't matter much per se with regard to learning. More specifically, delivering material via lecture or via videostreaming isn't the important distinction. Instead, what matters is what is said in the lecture, and how what is said encourages the listener to think.
So the student who blogs a lot about football may be learning a lot about football (and a little about writing as a blogger) but not much else. So the challenge for students is to be intentional about their use of technologies to help them learn things that matter. And the same is true for faculty. Using technology for the sake of trying to be current may only interfere with desired learning outcomes from the students. Great instructors use technology deliberately to help with their course objectives, such as using wikis to support a course where collaborative writing and editing is a primary goal. In such a course, the wiki can create efficiencies that allow for students to spend more time actually editing and reading comments. While more time doing the work isn't a guarantee of learning, it does generally pay off.
There is a connection here to democratization of learning, I think. One of my concerns as we move forward is that we are heading for a world in which we are inundated with information. I already feel that way. If I kept up with my email, Facebook, LinkedIn, and professional association networking accounts religiously, I'm not sure I'd get much work done let alone much learning. So what can we as academics do to help people make use of what is already freely available via the Internet? I think efforts to make more and more available on-line are laudable, but what about making sure that its being put to good use?
re: new machines and learning things that matter?
I know I'm weighing in late in this conversation, but I read it last week on my cell phone! I just entered the world of interent in my pocket, which I want to speak a little to in a second. First I am really interested in Bridget's question about students not knowing about technologies and/or not knowing how to use them in an educational context.
I have to say I agree with what everyone is saying about technologies have to be tailored to the curricular objective. In so many ways using new medias and technologies has the potential to be for students now what group work was for me and many of my peers. It's theoretically progressive, but almost every peer I encounter can recall feeling like group work was a frustrating artifice put on an assignment whose underlying objectives was not well suited for group work. Group work is fitting here because I think in so many ways (though many teachers/professors have come up with group work that requires and actually fosters a group) group work continues to be poorly put to use in the classroom, and in many ways some of the problems I've noticed in the use of blogs/discussion boars has not been so much, or not only, a problem addressing new problems that arise out of learning to use technologies, but are actually resurfacing of old problems. For example blogs were every student is required to post every week or for every class as opposed to some percentage or number of classes. Though interesting thoughts definitely show up online, what I have found is that there is that the focus is on getting your post up, or reading others post mainly to find a spring board to make your own post. The collaborative aspects of this project seem undercut by the expectations implied in the assignments' guidlines. I know that amending this problem is tricky. What happens if no one feels like posting one week? Or worse what if one student puts a lot of time into a post and no one responds? (Though I would hope that every student is reading, and what's on the blog can tranfer into class discussions.)
This being said, I think it's worth risking failed experiments of technology in the class room. Ken-I'm interested in what you said,
"So the student who blogs a lot about football may be learning a lot about football (and a little about writing as a blogger) but not much else. So the challenge for students is to be intentional about their use of technologies to help them learn things that matter."
I'm interested in the types of knowledge we conceive of as matter. I totally understand and fervently support the idea that we have to help students become intentional about their uses of technologies. Still I think what we know, part of what we seem really enthusiastic about is the way knew technologies make way for new knowledge and new epistomologies. I just attended a graduate symposium at Rice University and one of the papers was about the rise of the small press in britian. She talked about the way this new technology had strong influence on individual merchants who could run their own ads as well as young people who were said to use the press as a learning tool. The presententation also alluded to the way some of how the children interacted with the press was inventive and had potential to be expressive in the print world, but that the technology and the use of it was so regulated by adult, that the use became strictly one of educating young people into established crafts. I see a great deal of parallels between this old new technology and what we are discussing with our new new technologies. There's a way in which we might have to acknowledge that a lot of new technologies are most conducive to the popular. Twitter is an excellent example. Comments quickly become irrelevant. It is a medium of the now, and I mention this because I want to pause before I consider football or other popular topics as just fun and our goal as swooping in to teach students how to redirect themselves elsewhere. The question for me is what can we learn about football via new technologies that require the student to be intentional both about their engagement with the topic and with the writing of their blogs. Maybe this is a matter of having them change who they are blogging to? Perhaps they alterante between blogging to football fanatics and an audience totally ignorant of the game? Maybe they have to find another blog that is not sports related but where they can draw a parallel between what this blog is about and what it is they want to say, or what it is they're noticing about football? I'm not sure, but I think part of what's important in our conversation about democracy and new technologies and about considering the power dynamic between student and teacher means we also have to expand what types of knowledge we privilige in this medium.
Lastly and perhaps this should be it's own post, but alas... Having just gotten interent on my phone, I am blown away by how much more appealling blogs are to read on my phone and in transit than they are at home. I think (and maybe this goes with some of what I'm saying above) the new medias require different types of technology to be effective and what I'm suggesting is that that technology may be even more specific than interent access, which challenges even more who has access to the type of technology most conducive for participating in new medias. That I've pretty much had access to a computer and consistent interent access for the past nine years wasn't really enough. I mean I particpated in blogs, facebook, etc, but I have always felt either chained down waiting for delayed responses or more aloof in the virtual world because my energies and affections are so concentrated on the present physical world. Internet on the phone isn't necessarily a place where I want to blog. (I love T9 word, but it's a bit much for a response as long as this one.) But it's a great way to read, check up to date news. It's still not second nature to consult my phone for what's going on, directions, and whatever else, but I can see that it won't take me too long. Just long enough for a new and more conducive technology to come online. :)
Stephen, I think you have hit
Stephen, I think you have hit upon one interesting implication of the knowledge-democratization debate that has been hinted at thus far but not fully expressed. The basic idea is, what happens to authority when knowledge is democratized? The answer to that question depends, I think, on what is meant by "democratized"; specifically who fills the role of the author. If we are talking primarily about finding new audiences for the fruits of the academy, the traditional expert/lay authority structure is preserved. But knowledge production is a different beast entirely, with Wikipedia standing apart even from open source software development. For in the latter, there is an initial knowledge-hurdle that must be cleared even to be considered a member of the community; namely, one must know how to write code. The only barriers to participation for Wikipedia are an internet connection and basic literacy.
The democratization of the instruments of knowledge production has obvious benefits as you note. But one side effect is knee-jerk skepticism from some of the knowledge-production incumbents who formerly enjoyed a monopoly on the practice--that is, us as academics. Of course, we HASTAC scholars are more progressive than some in this regard, but we all know or have heard of colleagues who have dismissed Wikipedia out of hand without considering how it might properly be used in a scholarly context. They point out, and not without merit, that knowledge production systems that lack mechanisms for accreditation and peer review (Wikipedia has review mechanisms but they're obviously not the same as academe's) should not be considered equal to those that possess them. Some counsel their students to use it solely in a navigational capacity, as Karl does above. But this should get us thinking about whether, and how, knowledge production systems relate to one another hierarchically. Is it the case that, broadly speaking, the more democratized a knowledge production process is, the less credence it ought to be given? Do lower barriers to entry imply lower quality standards? Surely the relationship can't be this straightforward, and yet as Wikipedia illustrates, the perception of universal inputs can convey an impression to some of debased value or quality. It seems to me that this is something the planners of any public knowledge production project would want to take into account.
Hmm, I hope all that sort of made sense; it's getting late here . . .
re: Stephen, I think you have hit...
Thanks, Deen. Plenty of sense made, and I like where you are going with this one. Earlier in the thread, I was stressing the platforms that are used to model and produce knowledge. When you ask, "Is it the case that, broadly speaking, the more democratized a knowledge production process is, the less credence it ought to be given? Do lower barriers to entry imply lower quality standards?", one thing that comes to mind is how a given platform influences the standards of scholarship (including metadata and peer review). In other words, in projects where new(ish) platforms for scholarship are made or used, those involved must also create standards (from the bottom up or by modifying precedent) instead of inheriting them as a given. Of course, creating new standards is simultaneously risky and exciting.
So, to address your questions, I think the challenge is determining what standards should be used and when, depending upon the context and the mode of production. With this determination comes the increased need for education on standards-making and evaluation as critical practices. For example, I find that different projects call for different channels, platforms, literacies, and styles, if nothing else because they have different audiences, each of whom likely has a different perception of "quality." Assessing the context of and competences involved in "quality," then, is crucial---one reason why I like the example you give of needing to know code to be cleared by the open source community.
With all of this on the table, I'm also curious how (if at all) you imagine ReCal intersecting with standards-making and evaluation. I really appreciate how you designed it (especially your comments about why PHP and why web-based). How, then, do you map ReCal and other such open-source tools onto not only democratizing access to what people use to produce knowledge, but also democratizing the very standards of production?
Regarding the former, you mention that your "goal was to make available online a free and accurate reliability calculation program that offered a range of coefficients." Yet what also really impresses me about ReCal is that it seems to be after a new way of evaluating (or assessing) standards. Correct me if I'm mistaken.
& now I'm wondering if I'm making sense... Let me know what I need to clarify here. Or I might be on the wrong track entirely. Regardless, thanks for your comments!
To answer your questions
To answer your questions about ReCal, Jentery, I found that the standards piece of the development was something I had to put together myself. I'm not a software developer by trade—I'm really just a hobbyist and ReCal was a side project that happened to attract a small userbase--so I relied on intuition and data-driven trial and error in making design choices. My guiding principle was simply to lower the system requirements as much as possible to maximize the program's potential userbase. Not all free software projects share this goal--many fail to integrate much in the way of backwards-compatibility as new versions are released, preferring instead to focus on exploiting the latest and greatest hardware- and OS-layer features. I think your point about different audiences is crucial here: if democratization is a key priority, we should take care not to design solely for power users with lots of disposable income. There's probably some essay somewhere out there containing a set of democratic software design principles, and if anyone knows of something like that I'd love to read it.
re: To answer your questions
Thanks, Deen, for responding to my questions. As you can likely tell from my comments throughout this forum, I'm very much interested in design and its role in collaborative editing and authoring environments. That said, I'll also be on the hunt for that essay on democratic software design principles. Let me know if you come across it, and I'll see you soon!
A recent project of mine I
A recent project of mine I think fulfills well the definition of democratizing knowledge laid out in the prompt. A year ago I designed and made publicly available ReCal, a free online utility that calculates several of the most popular intercoder/interrater reliability coefficients for nominal content analysis data. Content analysis is a research technique that is used throughout the social sciences, particularly in my own field of communication, and intercoder reliability is the standard criterion by which its operational constructs are validated. Yet options for calculating it have been limited, as the major statistics packages (SPSS, STATA, SAS) contain few built-in options for doing so. One of the major free software options for reliability calculation, PRAM, is Windows-only, and hasn't been updated since 2004 (and thus could be rendered obsolete by a future Windows release). And while there are other online reliability calculators available, only ReCal computes coefficients other than Cohen's kappa.
Several features of ReCal's design exemplify best practices for maximum democratization of knowledge, which here is interpreted to mean ensuring that as many people can use it as possible. First, being web-based, it can be used by any operating system that can access the internet and store user files. Second, it is written in the open-source programming language PHP, which requires no third-party plugins to function (as do Flash and Java). Third, rather than forcing users to use a proprietary file format such as MS Excel, it accepts CSV (comma-separated values) files, a highly parsimonious and non-proprietary file format which can be exported by nearly all statistics, spreadsheet, and database applications. And fourth, it contains several subroutines aimed at providing compatibility for international users, such as a function that converts semicolon-separated files into comma-separated files (since many computers in Europe and elsewhere export the former under the extension "CSV").
The key design features that have allowed me to tailor ReCal to the needs of its userbase are the collection of users' reliability data and close scrutiny of the progam's error logs. ReCal is not the easiest program to run, and users sometimes encounter difficulty producing results on their first try. The error routines I have designed log every runtime failure and show exactly what happened so that I can modify the program to make such errors less likely. Examining the files users submit to ReCal has helped me fine-tune the instruction page to warn them against making common mistakes. (Of course, I disclose fully that one condition of ReCal's use is that users allow me to view their data for the purpose of improving the program.) One of the reasons I decided to start collecting users' reliability data (initially I did not) was that I was receiving very little feedback on what problems people were having. Their reliability files along with the error logs supplied this information better than they ever could have. The result is that ReCal is an infinitely more robust and compatible application today than it was when I launched it a year ago.
I apologize if this post comes off as something of an advertisement, but I do feel that ReCal is a relevant example of knowledge democratization in action. It is used nearly every day by an international user base, many of whom probably lack feasible alternatives (I'll readily admit that it's rather cumbersome to use compared to SPSS or STATA). My goal was to make available online a free and accurate reliability calculation program that offered a range of coefficients, and I think ReCal has accomplished that.
Re: A recent project of mine I
Deen and Jentery,
I was especially intrigued by your posts, which draw attention to one of the problematic aspects of the democratization of knowledge, i.e. the potential lowering of intellectual and ethical (?) standards that go along with the democratization of knowledge (production). And I was very much impressed by ReCal, the tool Deen has developed to assess the credence and reliability of sources.
It strikes me, however, that what we are discussing here is again not ways to empower „laymen“ through the democratization of knowledge, but rather digital mechanisms for excluding information that does not comply with the intellectual or ethical etc. standards mentioned above. By graduating in an academic subject (humanistic or otherwise) one acquires many forms of embodied knowledge (intellectual and argumentative skills, the ability to contextualize information through personal reading experience etc.), which are just as important in defining the status of an „expert“ as is the formal qualification of a diploma. My question therefore is, how could one facilitate the participation of a larger number of laymen (that is, people who potentially lack these forms of embodied knowledge) in the scholarly discussion, rather than restricting it through sophisticated instruments for scholarly data selection?
Thanks for the interesting discussion!
I can't tell from your
Wolfgang,
I can't tell from your comment whether you are including ReCal when you mention "digital mechanisms for excluding information that does not comply with the intellectual or ethical etc. standards mentioned above." To be clear, the program's purpose is to calculate intercoder reliability coefficients from nominal content analysis data judged by two or more coders; it does not directly analyze text or make any semantic judgments whatsoever. Essentially it is a glorified calculator that offers about a dozen fairly narrow functions. My two original comments above (one about authority hierarchies and the other about ReCal) weren't intended to be related, but their proximity to one another may have given that impression.
To your point about including laymen in scholarly discussion, that is a difficult and worthy task, but one that digital technology is abetting. As might be expected, much of what's available at this point is fairly top-down. You may have heard about the large number of scholarly lectures and podcasts from world-class scholars that are available free of charge through iTunes and Youtube. Popular science programs such as Radiolab do a great job of making difficult topics accessible to the non-expert. And pubilc intellectuals have always been interested in spreading their ideas as widely as possible via public lectures and mass-market books.
The difficult part has always been finding ways to faciliate meaningful bottom-up communication. One key problem here is that many people are reluctant to put their ignorance on display for the sake of satisfying their curiosity--no one wants to look dumb in front of an expert. So I would think that any plan for including laypeople in scholarly discussion would need to find ways to level the putative knowledge gap between scholars and non-scholars. Perhaps there's a way to exploit the fact that no one's an expert in everything--but everyone's an expert in something--to reduce the power differences that can make these kinds of endeavors so awkward.
Public vs. Community
Bridget,
I like your point about communication and terms. There is a lot at stake in terms, but no need to be rigid about them. As you wonderfully point out, sometimes we can productively use different interpretations of keywords among participants to explore the very relations in which democratic knowledge gets made, contested, remade, etc.
Here's my take on public and community. This is just a stab at the difference, and really a kind of rehashing of various theorists whose thinking I've absorbed. But let me just try out a few ideas here, and I welcome your and others comments. Nothing definitive below even though I'm trying to define terms.
Public and community are both very crucial terms to my mind. I think there are two ideas here that overlap with both of these words. They largely have to do with issues of scope.
When we use the word community I tend to think of smaller, face-to-face interactions, of closer ties defined perhaps by kinship or neighborhood. Community is something we all tend to idealize, but it can also have its downsides too. It can grow insular at its worst, homogenous, suspicious -- community can sometimes lack democratic openness. At its best, to me, community does include those things, but I think it is important to keep an eye on what happens at the smaller level.
For me, the public is a far stranger phenomenon (and here I'm drawing on the various public sphere theorists I mentioned above). The public, the people, public opinion — in modern society these signify to me the idea of a far larger mass of participants. When people invoke "the public," it is a kind of representational fantasy, if you think about it, what Lippmann called a "phantom public," since you can never really unify all participants in one entity: too much diversity, too many viewpoints. But even if it's a kind of representational fake, it's really important to me. At their best, democratic publics offer a sense of radical openness, of cosmopolitan exchange among strangers, of connections that are momentary but sometimes deeply moving. There is, I suppose, a kind of community in this — in the sense of a sense of fellowship, a sense of transitory connection — but it seems of a different nature than smaller, more coherent groups of people in communities.
So to sum up my experiment in defining terms:
A community tends to be a smaller group of people, more embodied (though digital realm makes embodiment a more intriguing question!), and better for organizing in that it can have more structure and commitment. But communities also can be limiting: closed, suspicious (often rightfully so), limiting to free range of beliefs and expression. Community at its worst can be stifling, but even in publics, we seem to long for certain aspects of community: that feeling of fellowship and connection.
A public is a larger group of people, more abstract, and not so good for organizing, but really important for that sense of open democratic range in which one comes into contact with lots of different people of all different sorts, perhaps in transitory and temporary ways, but these can still be deeply significant.
One last thought: we might think carefully about the difference between a public and publicity. The recent disturbances at "town hall meetings" are an intriguing example of this. Here, through the lens of representing the public in the mass-mediated news, it began to look like "the public" opposed health care reform. Statisically speaking, only a very small percentage of protesters were speaking in the name of "the public" at these town hall events (themselves simulacra of town hall meetings, by and large), but they appeared in the costume of "the public." To me this starts to get at the strangeness of the public as a concept. And it suggests, to me (and as I said above, the ideas of Habermas, Gramsci, and others are all over my thinking here), that there's always a struggle going on over defining and representing the public.
What does all this have to do with democratizing knowledge? Well, I think if we are going to produce "public scholarship" and be "public experts" and "public intellectuals," we probably need to think carefully about what the public is exactly in these avenues of scholarship and intellectual engagement. What are we imagining as "the public" seems particularly important to me in our use of digital technologies of mediation and representation, such as the Internet. Whose there? What bonds people together? Where are the spaces for disagreement and democratic tension? Is it an open space? Or does this public lack enough structure and organization?
Hmmm, instead of "public" work, is what we're really up to the pursuit of "community scholarship" and the creation of "community experts" and "community intellectuals"?
Final tought: I'm creating what probably amounts to a false binary here between public and community. Maybe it would be good to break it down and reassemble it in new ways collectively (and collaboratively!).
Look forward to your thoughts, comments, objections, critiques, additions, expansions, innovations. I'll be reading the forum and following everything.
Michael
Communities/Publics
First, great to see so much traffic and contributions. Given the scope of the initial prompts, it's no surprise that there's a lot to talk about. Just in the brief moments of trying to digest the wild and wooly threads, I have a few immediate provocations:
1) In direct response to Michael's sussing out of publics versus communities, I think the notion of scale is really important. I wonder, though, as you say that things like digital and communication technologies (though one could think of penpalling or swapmeets or Anderson's imagined communities of newspaper readers) aren't already disheveling these definitions?
2) I also wonder that in our attempts to construct "publics" what does that do to constructions of "privates"? Given the increased attention in everyday media and culture about things like Internet privacy, mobile technology privacy, and intellectual property (which could be considered a kind of privacy), are these very attempts to open up publics shoring up privates? (I'm afraid the double entendre is also telling here.)
3) Several people have mentioned the tag-team duo Berlant & Warner, so what about counterpublics?
What about privates?
Good question, what about privates? What happens to privacy in a digital age? There's a definite generational disparity occurring in which those belonging to older generations view (and value?) privacy in a much different manner than younger generations seem to. I can cite multiple studies of online social networks (for example) that suggest that people just don't seem to care about privacy online.
Thinking about pedagogy: classrooms are (if not a public) at least a community. As we transition to digital humanities, what does this do to students' senses of community? How does it alter their expectations and perceptions of their fellow scholars? I have no idea, but really want to know more about this now. As a student of Human-Computer Interaction, I have learned that some real-world concepts just don't translate well to a digital medium. If we are going to use blogs, twitter and a variety of other tools in the classroom I think it's imperative to know how this will alter student's views of the classroom and their peers...