Calling Citizen Humanists

Just yesterday, at a HASTAC staff meeting, we saw a tweet fly by where someone noted the prevalence and success of Citizen Scientists and then someone immediately tweeted that there weren't any or enough or good enough (something negative) Citizen Humanists. I disagree. Look at Wikipedia! The wealth of humanistic knowledge that has been contributed there is inestimable. Similarly with genealogical and other kinds of historical, literary, linguistic, philosophical, or artistic projects of general, mass interest. If the point of entry is as easy as GalaxyZoo, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey's public interface that allows any Geek Like Me (I'm an addict!) to spend a few minutes online identifying and classifying celestial objects that professional scientists then use to revise and expand theories of the universe, then you can count on the public to contribute. But you need that kind of public point of entry, ease, and interest level. Fan sites for classic literary texts, for example, are all over the web. Citizen Humanism is alive and well.

What is less vibrant are professional humanist projects with a public interface. I wrote about this in my PMLA essay "Humanities 2.0: Promise, Perils, Predictions" that came out last summer. And (of course) I've blogged about it here. Too many of our so-called digital humanities projects are really highly specialized curatorial archives with limited scope, professional appeal, and no public contributory interface. "Give Up All Hope All Ye Who Enter Here!" our digital archives seem to proclaim. We fence them in a dozen different ways, excluding openness and participation. They do not promote Citizen Humanists.

Perhaps not every project should, mind you, be open nor should every project be aimed at a general audience. That would be horrible. Giving up our chance to be theoretically sophisticated in conversation with one another would be throwing out the professional baby with the digital bathwater. No serious field would consider that, and I certainly would not. The sciences (even those most astute at engaging Citizen Scientists) have it both ways; the astronomy behind Galaxy Zoo is as specialized, professional, closed, theoretical, and complex as anything we humanist theorists could produce. There is need for both.

But that's a different issue. What I want to underscore here is that we humanists need to develop a finer appreciation for what new venues of communication, new avenues for public pedagogy, the digital might offer us and our waning enrollment numbers. Until we reflexively, systematically, and aggressively support openness and participation as professional humanists, we cannot whine about the declining interest in humanism. If we're making archives as closed digitally as they are in their analog versions, we cannot whine that our digital humanism isn't respected. As I've blogged about ad nauseum, if we humanists don't believe we have content worth sharing with the public, and if we don't respect the world with whom we might share it, then we aren't full participants in the Information Age but dilettantes using expensive new digital affordances in predictable and old-fashioned and outmoded ways. If all we are doing is writing grants to make better toys used by fewer and fewer people, then, well, really, who cares? Who should care?

We deserve our marginalization if we use so-called digital humanities simply to replicate in a new (and more expensive) electronic medium the narrowest forms of analog humanities.

One reason why I'm so thrilled about our first year of HASTAC Scholars is they offer us so many rich new models for Citizen Humanism. One tragic loss with the demise of the newspaper as a medium (both from the monopolization of media after the Reagan-era changes to the FCC and now the financial collapse) is the loss of certain forms of intelligent commentary.  On the other hand, not all Op Ed pieces in the local rag were intelligent--let's not romanticize that.   Still, with newspapers in decline, we have a fantastic opportunity to reimagine new forms of intellectual dialogue on line. "Slow blogging" and "slow commenting" afford such an opportunity. Citizen Journalism may well fill in the reporting gap from the end of newspapers and we also need to envision next-generation solutions to the loss of smart, informed, committed people writing about topics we care about, the so-called NPR model of journalism. The HASTAC Scholars have often filled in that role for higher education, especially humanistic higher education in all of its expansive forms. Some of the Forums are clearly professional, intensely specialized in audience, mode of address, insider intertextuality, and so forth. That's great---there is a need for open discourse on that level as well. Other Forums, though, fulfill the function of Citizen Humanism extremely well and welcome in commentary from anyone who is a HASTAC member. (Remember, to become one, all you need to do is register to this site. No dues, no other entry requirements, just sign in, commit to the community standards, and post away.)

HASTAC and the HASTAC Scholars have also developed a real audience. In the first eight months of the HASTAC Scholars program, between September 2009 and May 2010, over 12,650 absolutely unique visitors from across the U.S. and interntionally tuned it, with more than 55,500 views, to the 13 HASTAC Scholars Discussion Forums. HASTAC Scholars added over 300 posts to the site, and have received hundreds and hundreds of comments on topics ranging from "Participatory Learning" to "Collaboration 2.0" to "Fair Use and the Future of the Commons" or "Doing Media History" and "Metaverses and Scholarly Communication."

The success of our Citizen Humanities has been so great that, this week, we will open nominations for HASTAC Scholars to anyone teaching at an institution of higher education. Anyone can nominate a student to be a HASTAC Scholar. HASTAC Scholars Director Erin Gentry will be posting information about this in the coming week with an online application form.

Citizen Humanism lives . . . we humanists just have to refocus our eyes so that we can really see what it is, what it can do, and how we can contribute to a vision of openness and importance that recognizes how foundational humanist thinking is to every intellectual enterprise in the Information Age.