Scholarly Identity

[Initially posted as a response to this.]

A good point Monica, but a point to which I ask: “Is that enough”?

From our survey of academic use of Web 2.0, I saw again and again that Web 2.0 has a great deal of value to academics for collection, connection, and collaboration—to one open response question on my section of the survey, a whopping 78% of people made some mention of the words (or a closely related concept) connection or collaboration in their response. The only significant followers had to do with doing research (in terms of managing information) and keeping up with the field (also mostly in terms of managing information). A few (maybe four out of this sample) reported that the Internet or online discourse was in some way the subject of their work. But there was no significant claim about using this site for the dissemination—or even creation—of knowledge. It just didn’t factor, because the old print model for creating scholarly texts and academic knowledge (“serious intellectual work” as one blogger puts it)—the monograph; the journal article; the lengthy, sustained, traditionally logically-structured prose essay—is still the dominant paradigm. Even in digital publishing, which is in many cases simply a remediation (and often not a very interesting one at that) of print publication. As Alex Reid argues on his blog, digital digs: “[most digital scholarly works] are pretty much just print texts online, or they are very experimental pieces that operate more like art than scholarship.”

Reid, in another blog entry, asks what I think is a very good question—one related not only to digital scholarship and university education in the 21st century, but to the kind of rupture that the vast changes in individual agency has wrought (changes brought about by social networking’s symbiotic relationship to web publishing). That question: “Is the point of humanities scholarship to participate in the production and communication of humanistic knowledge, or is it to demonstrate a certain level of mastery or academic reputation?”

If the point is the former, then embracing Web 2.0 and the more collaborative and individual agency-laden knowledge construction (at another point, Reid writes about a “collaborative nexus”) it entails is necessary, is indeed inevitable. If that point, however, is the latter, then it’s simply a question of remediating print into digital for the sake of tenure, publication, and economic necessity, and not thinking about this in terms of grand narrative construction or identity negotiation or even facilitation of discourse.

There’s a great deal of talk out there (I’ve also been doing a limited survey of digital scholarship blogs) about “adapting” digital media and being open to new forms of scholarship (see MLA and HASTAC, see just about any digital scholarship blog that you can find). But that may not be advancing the conversation far enough. A new identity of “scholar”—a negotiated one—therein lies part of the answer. “Academia,” as we’ve been referring to it, is in the midst of what may fundamentally be an identity crisis. I think what Dr Kemp wrote about most recently (below), the “continually stated or implied validation of what other people feel and believe, and are saying” lies at about as far a polar extreme to expertise-driven discourse as one can get. It’s a brand new identity, and one which the medieval/modern university isn’t sure how to take on. Humanities scholars have for a long time been trained to be quite happy with the state of aloneness that Elizabeth and many others of us have referred to. Perhaps, however, that is changing…