Caveat Lector

Hat tip to the LibrarianInBlack for setting off this set of musings…

A year and a half after I delivered The Social Journal, its tenets keep coming up and up and up again. Blogs are vibrant literature, yep, in libraryland and elsewhere; I happened across something a while back indicating that the number of blog citations in law reviews is heading for the sky. “What is a scholarly journal but a means of communication among people of similar interests and backgrounds?”

Aha. That’s what a journal was, way back in the day. It’s not what a journal is. Real quick now, I’m going to reconstitute my argument from The Social Journal. (You might do better just downloading the presentation, honestly; it’s got my talk notes in it, and it has pretty pictures of Oxford!)

Journals started because the round-robin letter-sending arrangements by which research results were communicated among gentleman scientists got to be too unwieldy to manage. They started out as pure communication vehicles. No peer review (in fact, a chap by the name of Sir Isaac Newton relished the chance to bypass his staid, unimaginative peers in communicating his results, and The Social Journal quotes him on it!). This meant that quite a few of the articles were pure snake oil. No credentialing; gentleman scholars didn’t need credentials. No discipline boundaries, really; that had yet to shake out. Just pure, untrammeled 200-proof communication.

If this sounds like the blogosphere, especially the biblioblogosphere… well, it should. I would argue that librarianship has glommed onto the blogosphere far faster than other nominally or genuinely academic disciplines precisely because a lot of us are a lot closer to “gentleman scholars” than we are to today’s notion of an academic. I know I sure am. I adduce the relative paucity of actual library-school professors in the biblioblogosphere to support my point: Those folks ain’t gentleman-scholars; they’re wrapped up in regular old academia.

So what does that mean? Well, the gentleman-scholar eventually gave way to the professional academician, who suddenly had to defend his value in a marketplace if he wanted to get paid. So he had to mark his territory (thus the emergence of disciplinary boundaries and scholarly societies), prove he could produce (publish-or-perish), and prove that what he produced was any damn good (peer review). All of this is fine and dandy, but it reduces the communications efficiency of the journal medium by quite a lot. It’s hard to yell out “Eureka!” in a modern journal. By design.

Enter the conference, the listserv, the preprint server, and yes, the blog. Just because the academy needs to puff up its CVs doesn’t mean it doesn’t need to communicate efficiently. Other means of communication came in to fill the void. There’s a pretty good paper to be written on disciplinary differences affecting precisely which means were adopted, but I am not the one to write it.

But there is a line, still, between the blog and the journal. Well, several lines. But the important one for the arguments being made about blogs as a substitute good for journals is what the fanfic folks call beta-reading. Journals have beta-readers, people who read your stuff in order to help you improve it before it hits the newsstands. Blogs don’t.

I once read a peer-reviewer stating that the publish/don’t-publish decision was the least of his considerations as he read articles. His chief goal was to make the article better: clean up the logic, clean up the language, ask fruitful side questions, et cetera. Even at non-peer-reviewed publications, a good editor can do yeoman’s work as a beta-reader. Whoever they’ve got over at D-Lib is decidedly skilled at it. First Monday is unfortunately horrendous, which just goes to show that peer review doesn’t always mean good beta-reading, and the lack of peer review (D-Lib isn’t peer-reviewed) doesn’t always mean bad or no beta-reading.

(There’s a side argument here about blind vs. open peer review that I don’t care to get into. My own belief is that reviewers ought to have to sign their reviews, and article provenance should be as blind to the reviewer as possible, noting that it isn’t always possible. But any kind of beta-reading, even bad peer review, is preferable to none. I reread the Roach Motel revisions the other day and found one really astoundingly bad paragraph that I dearly hope the copyeditor will cringe at and fix. On the other hand, I see some epic-fail sentences in my Project Bamboo blogging that I’m just going to live with. Communication versus polish.)

We haven’t figured out how to do beta-reading in the blogosphere yet. Until we do, that’s one genuinely important way in which the blog is inferior to the journal.

It’s probably not the only way. Y’all can find the arguments about long-form versus short-form blogging on your own. I do tend to think that the blog is hostile to the kind of extended argumentation that the journal article is good at. I’m pretty sure I couldn’t have written Roach Motel or Design Speaks on CavLec, and if I had, would anyone have waded all the way through them?

There’s one other problem with blogs as a scholarly medium that I’m frankly appalled that a passel of librarians and library-school professors didn’t come up with: the scholarly record. Remember that? That thing that’s supposed to outlast ephemeral thoughts and ephemeral media? That thing that allows us to check that when X writes “Y said Z,” we can go back and read whether Y actually did say Z? That thing that academic libraries are partly in business to protect?

Yeah. That. A blog can disappear in a heartbeat or a DNS blip, irrespective of its quality. (When I’ve been tempted to pull the plug on CavLec, and I have been so tempted, it’s had nothing whatever to do with my or anyone else’s sense of the quality or importance of my writing here.) If pieces of the record vanishing altogether into the ether isn’t bad enough for you, I know bloggers who regularly redact their stuff, for matters far more important than grammatical miscues or adding corrections. Catching them out can be quite a trick.

We haven’t solved that problem, either. We’ve barely even made a stab at it. Until we do, blogs can’t do something genuinely important that journals (pace the problems of e-journals) do: persist.

We live in a beautiful state. Not to go all Chamber of Commerce on everybody or anything, but we do. I’ve had every opportunity to enjoy that over the last week, and now that I’m home, I find myself picturing places we went in my head at the drop of a feather.

I’ve ridden Interstate 90 to the Great River, and as interstates go, there are worse drives, but we got on the road early enough that we didn’t have to hurry, so we took Highway 14 instead. This kind road meanders through plentiful Wisconsin farm country, about which David remarked, “When they want to put rural America in movies, this is what they want it to look like.”

We then turned north on 35, also known as the Great River Road. Be careful in La Crosse; they’ve torn 35 up and it’s a bit of a white-knuckle drive. We made it nonetheless, and stopped at a little Tex-Mex place in Onalaska for lunch before going on. David the conscientious navigator called off the small towns as we got to them.

We were making fine time, so we decided to stop near Trempeleau at Perrot State Park. We bought our day sticker (if we keep up this day-tripping business, we may have to pick up a yearly one!), parked the car, wandered toward the river to look at the burial mounds—and were greeted by a blue grosbeak, large as life and twice as blue.

Essaying the Perrot Ridge Trail, I learned that I ought to be doing more time on a Stairmaster. The steep climb was manageable, not to mention absolutely gorgeous in a ferny, verdant sort of way, but we had to stop a few times. Once we stopped for quite a different reason: to gawk at a great big pileated woodpecker, a rare and most welcome sight. The top of the trail is the big reward, a brilliant view of the river valley; we saw what I think was a tugboat sans payload churning upriver, but I assure you, the river traffic is not the point. I then proved why David was navigating the car trip, turning us the wrong way at a trail junction, so that we walked half the Reed’s Run trail back to the start of the Perrot Ridge Trail instead of going directly down. Stupid but harmless; to avoid doing it yourself, turn right, not left, at the split. (Wisconsin DNR: I quite understand that it’s difficult to put a sign there without ruining the view, but I can’t be the only person guilty of this particular stupid. Please fix?) Perrot State Park is a stunning place. I’m glad we have such places in our state.

We found the turnoff to our boat provider, but it was too early to board, so we drove on to little bi-level Alma in a none-too-hopeful search for food. (Rural Wisconsin tends toward bar-and-grille food, which is fine for most, but generally unlucky for vegetarians. La Crosse is a culinary wasteland.)

As luck would have it, though, Alma boasts Kate and Gracie’s, which is a fantastic establishment I can’t recommend highly enough. We had a little bit of this and that, to the covert amusement of our kind and efficient server. The capellini with honey-ginger sauce was a standout; I’d gank that recipe in a hot minute. The applesauce cake was just about as good as mine, and I make quite a tasty applesauce cake if I do say so myself. Stop in, if you’re in the area! You won’t regret it.

Happily refreshed, we made our way back to the marina and were shown our houseboat. These things are immense, quite comfortable, and appallingly civilized. It’s a little like having an expensive hotel room, minus the hotel, in the middle of nowhere. No room service, but an ensuite kitchen, and boy are the beds comfy.

There’s just one problem with the things. Ford Prefect said of a particular model of spaceship: “Looks like a fish, moves like a fish, steers like a cow.” That about covers it. It doesn’t help that the steering wheel is a Donald Norman disaster, a metal wheel that turns an arbitrary five revolutions, doesn’t offer immediate feedback about where the propeller actually is, and doesn’t have the tug-toward-straight that a car steering wheel does. A steering-stick travelling in a 180-degree arc would be a much novice-friendlier device. Sure, it’s not traditional, but (are you listening, libraries?) sometimes traditions (like, ahem, left-anchored title searches) were developed under conditions and constraints that no longer obtain, and jettisoning those traditions would greatly assist folks just trying to get some use out of the object in question.

The Mississippi doesn’t have moons of Jaglan Beta to smash into, but it does have barges, wing dams, locks-and-dams with huge do-not-go-here—no-really-don’t areas, and similar hazards. There is a single guaranteed-navigable “channel” marked by buoys (red for the Wisconsin side of the river, green for the Minnesota); stray out of it at your hazard. Then try to cope with all this in a thing that steers like a cow.

We opted out.

We pretty much stayed in the nice little cove they left us in after our largely unsuccessful “shakedown cruise.” We tromped over the island, finding orioles and warblers (yellow, Blackburnian, and palm), red-bellied woodpeckers and flycatchers. (We also picked up and properly disposed of quite a bit of trash, much of it left by fishermen, to judge from the nightcrawler boxes.) We sat up top with our binoculars to watch herons and eagles and vultures fly by, and the incidental clouds make patterns on the bluffs opposite; one morning, an immature bald eagle sailed in and sat in a tree across the cove for half an hour. In the mornings and the evenings, we watched the little spotted sandpipers fly in to do their bob-tailed dance with the shoreline. We built sand castles (and sand ziggurats, and Aztec sand pyramids, and sand Great Walls). We dined on roasted CSA vegetables, mostly. We went to bed shortly after sunset, and woke up to see the moon shining on the water, and felt marvelously decadent about rolling out of bed at seven-thirty because the sun had risen two hours previous. The morning we left, we found that a great blue heron had left spiky heron-tracks not six feet from our boat.

It was grand. Not what either of us was expecting, but grand nonetheless. “Is that your interesting bug?” I asked David, pointing—and a purple martin nabbed it out of the air that very second. Strolling across the dunes, we instinctively ducked as an immense adult bald eagle floated ten feet overhead, never so glad as then not to be preferred eagle-food.

On the way home, we stopped at Trempeleau National Wildlife Preserve, greeted by a friendly rose-breasted grosbeak and a wary great blue heron stalking brunch in a reedy pool. Walking the Prairie View Trail turned up a wealth of flowers and meadowlarks and buzzy phoebes, as well as another eagle young’un. Another trail alongside the Mis

I don’t think I need to do the houseboat thing again…

… but…

… I hear there are interesting ways to canoe the Wisconsin River.

I’m tired. What with travel and all, I’ve been “working” seven days in a row, and while it’s been an amazing, enjoyable, and productive week professionally, I’m sorta mind-blown.

Tomorrow we drive out to the Great River Road and north to our boat. Then four days of boating, birding, and caffeine detoxification. Then whatever we want for a few days!

I will take Buffle along, because it’s my version of an emergency cell phone. But I doubt I’ll be using it much, which is as it should be.

Y’all be good while I’m gone.

(I ought to have blogged the “what are new people doing?” and “if you had a magic wand…” discussion, but I am running outta steam here.)

Karen Brown, Dominican University. “Libraries and the Scholarly Process.”

Building on Judith Nadler’s talk. Things happening in libraries in support of scholarship; also challenges.

Three considerations: resources and materials, the scholar (and the process of scholarship), the institution (of librarianship). “Clouds” as metaphor coming up a lot.

Resources: the library provides systematic cataloguing/classification of materials. The way this is done hasn’t kept pace with current applications (e.g. Web 2.0). You used to have to know LCSH to get anywhere with your search, but that’s changing. We’re also starting to use visual metaphors, clouds of related terms, to help navigation (e.g. AquaBrowser). Learning how to help browsing, amassing resources, navigating the universe.

Personal information clouds: increased expectation to take your tools and resource access with you (mobiles, wireless networks, collaboration/sharing). How do we enable this in libraries? “Seed the clouds” to get info to people who need it.

Clouds of collaboration: large-scale projects, infrastructure investment, huge funding issues. Example: Making of America project. No one institution can do these things alone!

Q: Cloud is pretty from without, “debilitating fog” from within. So who is it that’s making the associations in AquaBrowser? How important is it to expose the identities of the cloudmakers? A: AquaBrowser works with subject terms as well as terms you add as you do your search. You end up with a mix of controlled and uncontrolled subject terms.

Table 8. Foraging: Includes both purposeful foraging (framing a search within the context of a preexisting set of assumptions and prior research) and “dumb luck” experiences that change our perspective on a problem or create a new problem. Those who have foraged before us leave paths that may indicate value (e.g. tagging).

Producing non-traditional materials: e.g. non-Western scripts and odd realia. Scholarly products that are non-traditional, and so hard to evaluate by tenure/promotion committees. Can you put a website in your dossier? How do we peer-review and assess and preserve these things? Hyperlinked texts, machinima, mashups, datasets, targeted queries, blogs. Can we use these approaches to preserve non-traditional inputs (such as insights by local people into archaeology, linguistics, folklore, etc; not trained scholars, but still knowledgeable and illuminating)?

Table 9. Sense-making. Everybody does it! So common that it doesn’t take any single form, no single way to do it; should remain unrestricted. Academic work is recursive sense-making; making sense of other people’s attempts to make sense of… We get academic credit for classification, categorization, etc. which always involves loss, loss of detail, the insistence on pushing things into boxes, the elimination of points of view. You end up with multiple stories, but how do you combine norms and standards and beauty with an appreciation for minority perspectives? Can Bamboo push a culture of reflectivity and mindfulness about what we do as we make sense of things? Taking responsibility for what we find and say.

Mindfulness. We all need time to reflect, focus quietly. Bamboo shouldn’t take away from that! But Bamboo can help us deal with disruptions and interruptions, decide what’s important (but not urgent), handle trivial and redundant tasks, help us customize our environments so that we’re mindful of our audiences (students, the public), provide excuses for not responding immediately so that we don’t offend, run events aimed at promoting mindfulness.

Table 10. Authority and validation. Theme has been running through whole workshop! Have to think about PROCESS and STANDARDS. Process: peer review, community judgment (online forums), performance review. This process is institutionally located and collective, not individual. Excitement and wariness about Bamboo as a social movement: what is the potential of our community? How can we bring this community to a critical mass, so that it stands for something, and has influence within academia to push for tenure/promotion reform?

Why standards at all? Again, for interoperability: so different communities of practice/scholarship can talk to each other. Must be transparency about standards in a given context. There should be a process and a continual process of standards change; also need a sense of context. Bamboo: create a community that challenges and considers current standards of authority and validation, but also develops standards, choosing consciously how to locate itself in a continuum from “anything goes” to very rigid and consistent departments. Bamboo cannot duck this choice!

Support both those working within the standards and those working to subvert them? If standards inevitably exclude some things, how do you create a place for the people you exclude? Will Bamboo be a consortium or a club? In the latter, everyone has to fit a model; the former is a bigger tent.

Tools: discovery tool, because “there’s so much going on that we don’t know about.” Filtered search engine? Don’t work in ignorance of similar work elsewhere.

Political activism. Access (e.g. international, the digital divide), policy questions (fair use, copyright, A&H left out of cyberinfrastructure discussions), intervention/outreach (which audiences?), engaged scholarship (how we frame intersections and engage with our communities).

Tasks and tools: will Bamboo become strong enough to lobby? What about Bamboo governance (mediating among different groups with different agendas)? Technologies that support a broadening of the base. Action among academics and their collaborators. Where will Bamboo resources be invested? How do we reach out to smaller institutions and community colleges? How will flows of information and decisions be transparently managed? How will we address questions of research ethics?

Greg Jackson, University of Chicago IT.

Free-associating reminds us that things we think of as new really aren’t. 25 years and four jobs ago, head of Educational Technology Center, working out how to use computers in schools. Controversial but interesting project. Why did/didn’t it work?

Project Athena: same questions as ETC, but different technology and more resources. Now? Opportunity to reflect on these questions again. Many policy questions revolve around copyright, which are threatening serious effects on scholars’ use of raw materials.

Under what circumstances should we think about things as following stage progressions? (To get to one stage, you go through previous one; you don’t regress.) If you organize process around this, it’s all about moving people forward on a determined path. Thinking about technology in scholarly work tends to presume a stage progression. Presumption is that until you do the simple stuff, you can’t think about the advanced stuff.

Different way to think about it: we are always facing choices. The choice set varies, but you have an everpresent array, and there isn’t just one path through.

An interesting thing about Bamboo is that it’s caught on like wildfire, and it’s really engaging people. Why? Because it’s interesting from a transactional-analysis point of view. Often, we get an “I’m okay—you’re not okay” viewpoint, where the technologists are automatically okay and anyone who’s not paying attention to technology isn’t. These interactions produce pathological results.

But is it just the techies doing this? A professor at UC complained that students weren’t paying attention in class because of open laptops; requested wireless turned off. Response: it won’t work, because there are other connection modalities. Response: this is not a technical problem, it’s a classroom-management problem, so cope! This is another “I’m okay—you’re not okay” transaction! I want what I want, I don’t care what you think, and if you don’t agree, you’re full of it.

Not okay/not okay transactions: Tech exists that works, but isn’t even slightly creative and doesn’t change the educational process. E.g. basic course-management system. Increases efficiency, but it doesn’t change a damn thing; both sides are thinking “I don’t really know how to do this, but I have to do something.”

Bamboo is different; all sides are trying to understand each other. Sometimes it feels like we’re talking with idiots, but no, we’re talking with smart people saying idiotic things; we have to pick through that and get into the other side’s head (why don’t they think it’s idiotic?).

Goal: getting to “I’m okay—you’re okay.” Releasing the potential we all suspect is there, in this interaction of tech and the humanities.

(This has been quite a long day, but it hasn’t felt long. Very involving conversations all ’round! I think a lot of people have had the experience of re-valuing people and practices they hadn’t known about or hadn’t thought much of. That’s a fantastic outcome.)

Table 1. Intellectual networking/self-interest; fieldwork/folklore. Listed out traditional networking processes (conferences, institutes, seminars, humanities centers, individual contacts and mentoring, etc). Eventually mailing lists came about, and they were different: enabled lurking (which is no good at a conference!), non-networking networking. Newer networking practices (undergrads and younger grad students): always in the network, multitasking with one task being networking, networks start at an early age and carry over across educational contexts, bigger networks than young scholars had before. In learning-management systems, networks are brutally cut off at semester end because of FERPA; conversations end abruptly. In networks outside university contexts, this doesn’t have to happen. No strong evidence of these networks among current-gen humanities scholars, but will probably happen.

Fieldwork/folklore. Collect a lot of data, but only a small amount of it ends up published/cited. Where does that primary material go? No incentive to collect/organize it, arrange it for IR, but IR doesn’t know what to do with it without that organization! Sciences notion of “waste data” that’s of use to someone else. E.g. Hubble telescope images captured incidentally, while tracking from one part of the sky to another, not useful to PIs, but useful to someone else! Not a practice of sharing data collection in the humanities (”if I go to Amsterdam to look at my stuff, I don’t ask anybody ‘hey, I’m going to Amsterdam, is there something I can look at for you?’”).

Table 2. IP/creation of new works. Talked about distribution too. Humanities consume IP to produce IP (e.g. media studies). Bamboo should push fair use hard and aggressively. What is the best approach? Model licenses, “bill of rights” (proclamation “we the scholars believe we have these rights to use your materials…”), e.g. use without permissions, non-exclusive digitization rights. Whatever Bamboo does needs to be open (source). Could be like JSTOR or DLF; pay-to-play, or RedHat Linux model (free to use, support costs). Google is aggressively digitizing stuff from the global south, stuff needing digitization for preservation purposes, but it’s the usual exclusive license; deal with the devil? are we being scooped by Google? can Bamboo help, by digitizing stuff in a more open and equitable manner?

Libraries/universities as publishers. Will they stand behind faculty who publish riskier (vis-a-vis IP) materials? How will they respond to cease-and-desist orders? IRs should be easier to use and operate!

Table 3. Delivery/presentation/dissemination. What is the architecture needing development to make things accessible? Indexing, search, scanning, delivery, flexibility. Assume that architecture exists; what does delivery mean? Building interfaces to resources based on target audience. Packaging relevant to content and audience. Information visualization!

Dissemination: assuming we want to reach a wide audience, it should be possible. Multiple delivery vectors. Simplifying access. Cheap access!

Presentation: networking techniques involving technology, e.g. Second Life, sharing slidedecks. Long-distance collaboration. “Interfaces” includes Google Earth tricks (Rumsey Maps). Is Bamboo a self-contained software stack, or a collaboration among developers of many different tools? Either way, you want connections/hooks into other technologies (such as 2.0 tech).

Serendipity: Pure luck in discovering something you weren’t looking for. Open to discovering unlooked-for possibilities throughout the Bamboo process. Tools exist already that facilitate this (clustering search engines, SemWeb stuff). Bamboo = slime mold!

Table 4. Creativity/recreating past methods. What does creativity mean? New discourse contexts, new products, new strategies; new forms of creativity. Related verbs: moving around, adapt, play, react, test, re-mediate, repurpose, experiment. Sometimes you have to be saturated with info to do this; sometimes you have to be expert. Limits and inspiration to creativity: technology, context, having a problem. Creativity killers: technology, form, control, isolation, pressure, no pressure, audience, rules.

What should Bamboo do? Figure out how to make tools that enable productive play without wasting time.

Recreating past methods: to understand what you’re looking at. Recreate an environment (e.g. of a play performance, of another culture or time). Recreate context (intertextuality, relations between art and politics, historiography). Recreating a model. Eventually, we become the past; how do we make transparent our work to those who come after us? Contextualized archiving, documentation via social tagging.

Table 5. Discovery. Of what? texts, images, objects (what we study), people (in communities, to network with), archives, tools to work with. Tasks: google, read, search, follow citations, etc.

Archiving and “data hygiene.” You expect what you work with (primary text editions, etc) to have certain levels of quality; what is good enough? If it’s not good enough, who can fix it? Allow users to help, but are they skilled enough, and who judges their corrections? Distributed Proofreading as model. Add metadata/tagging to add value.

Archiving issues: versioning. what should get archived? what does an archivist do? IRs versus dark archive vs. OA archive. Preservation and format migration.

Table 6. Social connections. Social networking. Building, contributing connections. (Reprise of academic social practices.) Status, trust, and respect in established and sustained connections. Role of leadership.

Enrichment. Adding value. Enriching content, for ourselves and others. Visualization, annotation, pattern recognition, digital surrogates and how they help us enrich content. Discovering, adding new knowledge vs. adding new methodologies.

Table 7. Public/community involvement. Maybe not all that common? What does the community do? Folksonomies, meaning-making, disambiguation, putting things in context, changing the public sphere. Would like to see: two-way processes, removing barriers to public involvement in classroom contexts, libraries, etc. Connecting to community to make our work relevant. E.g. internships, oral history, service learning, surveying, offering work for sale. Is the connection with the public discipline-specific? More incentive in some disciplines than others. Does engaging with the public make work less valuable academically? Facilitating delivery, discovery, participation by academics and public.

“Smashing.” All had it in common! Literal and figurative. Questioning established forms of publication. Promotion and tenure. Boundaries (academia/public, disciplines, teaching/research/service, teaching/learning, faculty/staff, faculty/student relationships), perceptions of library and IT, hegemony of print.

“Confessing stupidity.” When can you do this in the academy? Feedback loops for improvement. Accountability, learning from mistakes, exploring dead ends (where is the “journal of null results”?). Need authentic, meaningful peer review; very challenging to do, to receive, to get people to do. Acknowledging boundaries of knowledge.

What do we want, in the end? Reflective practice, continuing engagement in process. Submitting non-traditional materials in tenure and promotion packages. Taking risks. Re-evaluating how we provide feedback. Celebrating mistakes. Collaborating across boundaries. Being involved in peer review and critique. Exploring new forms of publication and distribution. Giving stuff away!

Four/six, Mark Williams, Dartmouth College, “Building Media Studies Wikis”

Explosion of content suddenly, feeling pain about coping with it all; how do we think about this in context of community, sustainability, public interest? Can we look toward the media industry to have them help us build these wikis? E.g. history of network news, asking the broadcast companies to help.

Maybe tiered access to these wikis, recognizing that scholars are different from the general public, documentary filmmakers, etc? On what scale? Restrict by campus, by Bamboo participants?

Fair use: balancing copyright interests. Bamboo with its profile as scholarly consortium might be able to drive a wedge into entrenched copyright interests, to protect scholarly goals and guarantee the public sphere. Context: Teach Act (expanded to cover distance learning; wikis as part of that), Media Studies (teachers can break encryption to create clips and montages for teaching), library section 108 exemptions.

Scholarly practices: finding areas of inquiry and collaborators, designing the wiki methodologically, etc. Tasks underlying: infrastructure, software selection, finding source materials, handling permissions, making media wiki-friendly, tagging wiki materials.

New contributors to context: orphan works, Fair(y) Use Tale.

Q: Do you envision this as something for students to create/use, or for faculty? Students are enthusiastic, but very few cases of faculty editors. A: Both/and. Permissions become a problem; we need to exercise our fair use rights! We can start locally, and then expand into the world. If we choose the right kinds of topics, we can earn enough public interest to protect ourselves. Both scholarly and class-specific usage possible.

Q: Interested in the scholars-only wiki. Is it bothersome that we exclude independent artists and scholars? A: Sure, it’s a problem, but we have to build a wedge first. Exclusion is not the goal!

Q: Famous orphan work? A: Day-in-the-life family movie, fantastic text, displayed at NYU as an orphan work, brought into LoC’s protection program as a result.

Four/six, John Laudun, University of Louisiana

Folklorist on English faculty: finding intelligence and beauty where no one expects to find it, expanding the historical and archeological record on what it is to be a human being. Current research: duck boats (land/water).

III.4: “For the humanist, the library is his/her laboratory, the place in which is found or hidden the raw materials of research.” His reaction: the library is not raw! The world is raw. 75% of the world isn’t anywhere near a library, never mind the scholarly record—that is rawness. 75% of our lives is bills! So much of the world isn’t in records, not in any library or archive or museum.

Library as place from which he draws data and into which he puts products. No. Instead: putting in notes from fieldwork, in audio/video form as well as text, and he wants infrastructure so these data can appear in libraries finally! The new-media landscape lets him capture this, lowering the cost of production/documentation. Ordinary people can produce broadcast-quality work. Beyond notion of “multimedia” (the more the better) to expanded, more flexible production that fits your topic, without broadcast media’s constraints.

Presentation available online.

Q: How do you see your role now that many of the people you study can produce their own work? Are you becoming more meta? A: Becoming more of a collaborator. Engaging students in projects and conversations instead of passive knowledge inculcation. Really what he likes!

Q: Does this materials put different demands on the library vis-a-vis preservation and access? A: Yes. Some of this material has to be access-restricted, at least for a time. Courtesy to subjects, not just IP questions. Increases the number of stakeholders and the layers of things to think about. Interesting circular process: as they gather/curate stuff and increase access to it, it makes us uncomfortable, but people are also bringing us stuff and then examining and reusing it themselves.

Q: What do you think about what libraries call collection development and collection management? We might not want to restrict access. A: He’s as confused and torn as everybody else by that. Realizes he ought to meet with campus librarians more often; they have their own culture, passions, and limitations. Is going to go home and make that appointment! (Applause.)

Coming together to summarize discussions: Two common and two uncommon themes from the previous discussion.

Table 1. Common themes: making social connections, engaging with primary(/secondary) materials. Uncommon themes: reconceptualization of projects, recreating past methodologies (understanding how scholars used to understand and engage with materials).

Table 2. Common themes: Aggregating and organizing materials, user participation and involvement of the user in the scholarly process (user as agent: scholars, educators, public, etc). Uncommon themes: text hygiene (involving users in process of making sure that texts grow more accurate, more useful, richer over time), “confess stupidity” (be open to discovering dead ends, what’s not working, getting corrective feedback), infrastructure development.

Table 3. Common themes: Discovery, interaction with other scholars. Uncommon themes: archiving, personal enrichment.

Table 4. Common themes: Creativity, presenting scholarship. Uncommon themes: serendipity, “smashing” (of preconceived notions, critique, deconstruction)

Table 5. Common themes: Foraging (gathering materials), sense-making. Uncommon themes: non-Roman scripts, is Bamboo too-text-based? what about artists and multimedia and performance?, “political activism” (politics of access, IP/copyright, outreach to non-academic audiences, why aren’t humanists at the table in policy discussions?)

Table 6. Common themes: Delivering (including via blogs, branding, etc), connecting. Uncommon themes: simplifying vs. enriching; building (tools), integrating research and practice

Table 7. Common themes: Mindfulness, intense intellectual engagement (with colleagues, students). Uncommon themes: Fieldwork (generation of knowledge or data), ethos (making sense of what we do in light of the new digital world, finding common ground). Concern over constitutive, generative force of what humanities scholars do.

Table 8. Common themes: individual self-interest (scholars are both competitive and collaborative, and Bamboo has to accommodate that), creating new knowledge in tangible and validatable form. Uncommon themes: individual stances on IP (all is free vs. somebody’s paying vs. public-domain vs. fair-use advocacy; disagreement on priorities), money (funding priorities; everybody wants more, but disagreement on what they want more of)

Table 9. Common themes: define authorship/scholarship (field-specific and cross-discipline), intellectual networking (informal and formal). Uncommon themes: discovering unimagined resources (serendipity), writing as a research practice in and of itself.

Table 10. Common themes: discovery (of resources), dissemination. Uncommon themes: tools (e.g. Zotero), communities of practice (how they have trouble forming even when they’re wanted).