A Presentation by Jesse Stommel and Sean Michael Morris for the Digital Currents initiative at University of Michigan. Where DH grew out of positions of deep and necessary inquiry — especially in that its early advocates had to form communities of practice beyond the pale of traditional academic communities — today that inquiry has eroded into gratuitous and massively-funded career-building projects.

1. Photo by flickr user Son of Groucho
Digital Humanities and the Future of Scholarship:
Exclusivity, Disruption, and Leading from the Margins
Sean Michael Morris (@slamteacher) Jesse Stommel (@Jessifer)
“I am hopeful, not out of mere stubbornness, but out of an existential, concrete imperative.”
~ Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Hope

2. Sean Michael Morris (@slamteacher)
PART 1: Leading from the Margins

3. Photo by flickr user Fio
There is no better solution to the problems scholarship faces than its
professors, adjuncts, and students. Each of us has agency we can apply —
not only to create our own success, but to ensure the success of those
who come after us.

4. “Like many others, I’m tired of academia. I’m disappointed and
disillusioned by a lot of the promises academia has made and failed to
deliver on.”
~ Adeline Koh,“Academia,You Don’t Own Me Any Longer: Or,Why I
Started a Small Business While On Sabbatical”
Photo by flickr user Graeme Law

6. Photo by flickr user Fio
From kindergarten through the writing of a dissertation, we wait upon the
satisfaction of others, a nod, permission to speak. Indeed, the final step in
our long life of study is not to present a dissertation, but to defend one.
A dissertation should be met with applause, not with a defense.

7. “My iron determination to offer authors publication is dogged. I prowl
the gates of this journal, I do — but to keep them open, not closed; to
invite in rather than keep out.”
~ Sean Michael Morris,“Call for Editors”
Photo by flickr user alexandre alacchi

8. “Editors can serve as gatekeepers, yes, but they also solicit writing,
contextualize it, help refine it and, ideally, put it into conversation with
other voices.”
~ Annemarie Pérez,“Textual Communities:Writing, Editing, and
Generation in Chicana Feminism”
Photo by flickr user Jessica

9. Photo by flickr user Fio
“My name does not belong on the Board, I’m told, because lecturers are
itinerant, and because to purchase more small white letters would cost
the department too much money.”
~ Katie Rose Guest Pryal,“The Lecturer’s Almanac”

10. Photo by flickr user Fio
What happens when we put the “I” back into our work is really nothing
short of the return of the human to that work.We forget to oppress
ourselves.

11. Photo by flickr user Fio
“Revolutionary leaders cannot be falsely generous, nor can they
manipulate.Whereas the oppressor elites flourish by trampling the people
underfoot, the revolutionary leaders can flourish only in communion with
the people.”
~ Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

12. Photo by flickr user Fio
“There is something organically extra-institutional, even anti-institutional,
about the quizzical approach of Digital Humanities. It is as much a practice
of inspection as it is of invention … It is its own pain in the ass. And when
it’s not, it fails to be noteworthy.”
~ Sean Michael Morris,“Ecstatic Necessariness:Turmoil as Process in Digital Humanities”

13. Photo by flickr user Fio
“academia with this digital humanities push is rushing to catch up with centuries old
practices of marginalized wmn / & really, academia made itself via the exclusion/
delegitimizing of these kinda open grassroots scholarship practices. / now its ready
to acknowledge them, but only via the approved bodies & positionalities.”
~ @so_treu

14. Photo by flickr user Fio
Where DH grew out of positions of deep and necessary inquiry — especially
in that its early advocates had to form communities of practice beyond the
pale of traditional academic communities — today that inquiry has eroded
into gratuitous and massively-funded career-building projects.

15. Photo by flickr user Fio
“I am hopeful not out of mere stubbornness, but out of an existential,
concrete imperative.”
~ Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Hope

16. Photo by flickr user Raïssa
"Increasingly, I think the work of education is activism not teaching.”
~ Jesse Stommel,“Leaving Wisconsin”

17. Jesse Stommel (@Jessifer)
PART 2:The Future of Scholarship

18. Photo by flickr user Fio
A year ago, when the UW system started to feel pressure, I was told to “be
careful.” I was advised by many people at all levels to compromise my
scholarly work for tenure (or to just do different work altogether).

19. Photo by flickr user Dmitry Krendelev
The following bolded words were sent to me in a letter for my official file:
“The Committee wants to send a clear message that what matters is
tenure, what matters for tenure is peer review, and work posted on
the web is not considered peer-reviewed.”

20. Photo by flickr user Fio
Our scholarship should not be static. It must resist the deadening impulse
of much so-called “academic rigor.”

21. Photo by flickr user petalouda62
Increasingly, the web is a space of politics, a social space, a professional
space, a space of learning, a space of community.And, for better or worse,
more and more of our work is happening there.

22. Photo by flickr user Tambako The Jaguar
This is the voice I speak in, the voice I write in, a voice that chooses at
strategic moments to generalize. It is often (to my mind) a more rigorous
voice, because it is a hybrid voice, attempting to balance the nuanced
analysis of a scholarly approach with a desire to make the work accessible.

23. Scholarship
“I am not suggesting that the future survival of the academy requires us
to put academic publishing safely in its grave, [but] I do want to indicate
that certain aspects of the academic publishing process are neither quite
as alive as we’d like them to be, nor quite as dead as might be most
convenient … It’s thus important for us to consider the work that the
book is and isn’t doing for us.”
~ Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence

24. Public Scholarship
“The work of public engagement comes not after the scholarship, but as
part of the scholarship.”
~ Steven Lubar,“Seven Rules for Public Humanists”

25. Public Digital Scholarship
“Post-print publishing keeps its focus on moving objects: digital artifacts and
networked conversations that can be plumbed at the level of the code
behind them, tracked in their progress through the web, or catalogued next
to works beside which they would not normally sit.”
~ Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Stommel,“Hybrid Pedagogy, Digital Humanities,
and the Future of Academic Publishing”

26. Photo by flickr user Fio
The impetus for my scholarly work and publishing is to do my pedagogy in
much larger and more open spaces.This is my digital humanities, and it is
one focused less on reading humanities texts with digital tools, and more on
using humanities tools — humane tools — to read and make digital texts.

27. Photo by flickr user twinkabauter
Writing is, for me, a pedagogical act. It isn’t that my scholarship and
teaching are connected, but rather that they are coterminous. For me,
Twitter is the space where this is most fully realized.

28. Twitter as Scholarly Platform

29. Photo by Hamed Saber
“The rot we’re seeing in Twitter is the rot of participatory media devolved
into competitive spheres where the collective “we” treats conversational
contributions as fixed print-like identity claims.”
~ Bonnie Stewart,“Something is rotten in the state of…Twitter”

30. Photo by Jan Plogmann
Twitter offers space for dialogue.The 140-character limit leaves no room
for monologues. Even a series of tweets strung together in succession
creates opportunities at every turn for discussion. Each individual tweet
becomes an addressable object, always a beginning and never a conclusion.

31. Photo by Bob Jagendorf
“As a medium,Twitter is decentered—that’s why gatekeeper journalists and
conservative luddites continue to warn us about the dangers of the messy,
uncontrollable, fragmented nature of Twitter conversations.”
~ Dorothy Kim and Eunsong Kim,“The #TwitterEthics Manifesto”

32. The Public Digital Humanities
The PUBLIC DIGITAL HUMANITIES is built around networked learning
communities, not repositories for content, and its scholarly product is a
conversation, one that engages a broad public while blurring the
distinction between research, teaching, service, and outreach.

33. all learning is necessarily hybrid
Hybrid Pedagogy is an open-access journal that
: is not ideologically neutral;
: connects discussions of critical pedagogy, digital pedagogy, and online pedagogy;
: brings higher education and K-12 teachers into conversation with the e-learning and
open education communities;
: considers our personal and professional hybridity;
: disrupts distinctions between students, teachers, and learners;
: explores the relationship between pedagogy and scholarship;
: invites its audience to participate in (and be an integral part of) the peer review process;
: and thus interrogates (and makes transparent) academic publishing practices.

34. Hybrid Pedagogy uses a Collaborative Peer Review process, in which editors engage
directly with authors to revise and develop articles. Editorial work is done both
asynchronously and synchronously in a Google Doc that evolves through an open
dialogue between author and editors.

35. Photo by MythicSeabass
In our efforts at scholarly publishing, I would argue for the exact opposite
of objectivity -- for an intense subjectivity.

36. Photo by flickr user Fio
We have built an almost ironclad academic system — and I acknowledge
myself as one of its privileged builders — a system which excludes the
voices of students, which calls students “customers” while monetizing their
intellectual property, which denigrates the work of learning through
assessment mechanisms and credentialing pyramid schemes.

37. Photo by flickr user Fio
What counts as digital humanities, ultimately, is work that doesn’t try to
police the boundaries of what counts as digital humanities.

38. Photo by flickr user J J
It’s not that we need to do this work in bigger tents but that we need to
move outside tents altogether.This is what I call the “humongous tent digital
humanities.”

39. Photo by flickr user Dmitry Krendelev
bit.ly/futuredh