I've been looking over the new edition of Kairos and noted Jeff's comment on Yellow Dog. Kairos' 10th anniversary includes both looking back and some looking forward, as you might imagine. Jim Kalmbach's article provides an interesting analysis of the types of media represented in Kairos articles.
It strikes me that we will see an increase in the inclusion of audio and video in our field as bandwidth pressures reduce and the learning curve for production becomes less steep. At the same time, I imagine articles will continue to be organized into sections (and subsections) that will be primarily menu-driven with a secondary organization of tags or keywords. Clearly there will be experimental offerings as well, but this is what I would predict.
Kairos editors, Cheryl and Beth, have also developed a new section called Inventio, which promises to track the development of a new media project, making public the design phase and exchanges between author and editors. As they explain, the purpose, in part, is to make visible the process of producing new media scholarship. I think the impluse there reflects my thoughts on reading Jim's article and Jeff's comment about it. The impulse I'm speaking of is the attempt to represent the dynamic quality of the medium. Addressing this dynamism will be the primary challenge in developing a future for multimedia scholarship.
One of the ways we most staunchly remediate print in online scholarship is through the concept of the article, the finished product, sometimes with multiple authors but almost always, in our field, by a single author. The single-authored, peer-reviewed journal article remains the coin of the realm, so it is understandable, given that web journals are still sometimes unfairly seen as lesser, that Kairos sticks to that genre, even if the media within the article changes.
This concern echoes the conversations about a MediaCommons at if:Book. There, a lot of the conversation surrounded the issue of the review process. Part of that exchange includes balancing the desire to reach a wider, non-expert audience with the concern of what happens when you let the non-experts in. However, to me, the fundamental issue is how does a new medium gain credibility while still having the opportunity to be new. Clearly credibility seems to be at risk in a community trying to be scholarly while being flooded by non-scholars comments.
It's an old question. Though unanswered nonetheless.
In abstract terms, I think the answer is fairly simple. A new medium will gain purchase and credibility when it offers something valuable that the old medium cannot offer. Obviously we can all come up with a laundry list of things you can do online that you can't do in print. But are any of them valuable?
To answer that question, you'd first have to know what the value of humanistic scholarship is to its stakeholders. So why do we produce scholarship?
- To get tenure, promoted, a raise, a better job, and other monetary rewards
- To improve our reputation/standing in the academic community
- To lay claim to an idea
- To promote an ideological/disciplinary position and/or to critique another
I'd say those are roughly in descending order and might be followed by more alturistic notions like "advancing knowledge" or some such. If that seems cynical then perhaps you are unaware of the pressures involved in tenure or the pathetic role reputation plays in academia (something Jeff's post addresses).
I think the problem any future for scholarship has lies right here. If we were truly to say that we published scholarship to share knowledge with one another AND to share knowledge with the general public (maybe not both at the same time), then we wouldn't care if it helped us get tenure or improved our reputations or even if we got credit for the work.
Imagine a discipline's scholarship as a single wiki. Demonstrate some baseline credentials, and you're let in as an editor. Wikipedia-style. I'm not suggesting that, nor do I imagine it as some utopia. My point is that obviously it wouldn't work because it wouldn't serve the primary purpose of producing scholarship: to get mine. And as long as that's the purpose who cares how the work is published. In fact, print creates an economics of scarcity that makes publication all the more valuable.
It's the Internet's economics of abundance, its flow of information--cheap, easy, and reproducible--, that makes it, ironically, poorly suited for the purposes of humanistic scholarship (I'll refrain from applying this beyond that scope). That said, humanistic scholarship doesn't exist in a vacuum, though it has largely thrived as a hothouse flower that has made it quite alien to the world beyond. However, a new mode of scholarship that was able to demonstrate value to an audience beyond the discipline might be able to gain some purchase under different terms. This audience wouldn't necessarily have to be a commerical or corporate one, but it would have to be one that would be valued by the broader academic community.
A new multimedia scholarship that essentially does what we've always done, only with video and links, isn't worth the trouble it takes to create. A new medium means a new epistemology and not a predefined one held out manifesto-style like an ideological holy grail (though those can be fun to write sometimes). At the same time, though experimentation for its own sake is a necessary part of this, ultimately a new multimedia scholarship must respond to some exigency. (In my view, this exigency is that traditional scholarship is insufficient for understanding the emerging info/mediascape.) Though I don't believe that the Wikipedia-style image I created above is the way to go, I do think some shift is needed in our notion of authorship and our reverence for the "finished work." In Internet terms the finished work is like the static web page, a ghost haunting the web unaware that its irrelevance grows by the second.
In any case, I've meandered on long enought. The future of multimedia scholarship has little to do with the particular media involved. I mean, of course that's important but that will keep changing with the evolution of technology. We can't have a scholarly revolution with every new app that hits the Web. Our future will depend on how we are able to address the dynamic unfolding nature of information when we can no longer stab it to death with a pen, fix it to a piece of paper, and mail it in with our name attached.
technorati tags:karios, mediacommons, multimedia, scholarship
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