I spent the evening knitting. It’s hard to convey how rarely I get an opportunity to just sit and knit. Between the full time, bursting at the seams job and the child and the household, I don’t just sit down and knit. I don’t just sit down and do anything. But there’s a holiday gifting idea in my bonnet, so here we are.

Along with knitting, I finally watched The Internet’s Own Boy. It’s 1h45m long. Since you’re reading this blog post on the internet, if you haven’t already seen this documentary about Aaron Swartz, you should. I’m allergic to telling people they “should” do anything—but you should. It directly affects the rest of your life, and all the ones that follow.

It’s not even worth trying to recap Aaron Swartz, but here are some highlights. He was intimately involved in the creation of Reddit, Demand Progress, the RDF standard, and Creative Commons, among too many other initiatives to list. He had a history of making information publicly available—including court documents that were public in the first place, but for which PACER charged obscene amounts of money, effectively making the most comprehensive documentation of the U.S. justice system inaccessible to entire socio-economic classes of people.

Swartz also contributed a big-data analysis of the Westlaw database to a study at Stanford that revealed widespread corruption in law publishing. (That article doesn’t credit him, but I’ll give Kahle and Lessig the benefit of the doubt.)

In 2011 Swartz was a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, about which then-director Lawrence Lessig wrote: “The work of the Center? Studying the corruption of academic research (among other institutions) caused by money.” Whether he decided to download massive numbers of academic research articles from JSTOR for research purposes, or political-activist ones, or both, will remain unknown. But download them he did, by the tens of gigabytes, using MIT’s network.

This should be review for you, so I will only highlight what happened next. Swartz got caught; MIT, JSTOR, the state of Massachusetts, and the FBI’s cyber crimes division got involved. The state and JSTOR brought charges against him, which were later dropped. The federal government brought a lawsuit containing four charges against Swartz; the number of charges was later expanded to thirteen. They offered a number of plea deals, all of which would have involved pleading guilty to a felony, and all of which Swartz refused to take. In January of 2013, Aaron killed himself.

The documentary dives far further into the messy complexity of this. The interviewees include Lessig, Tim Berners-Lee, Quinn Norton, the Swartz family, Brewster Kahle, and numerous other collaborators. The film has a decidedly political stance from the beginning, but makes a convincing argument about the powers involved in the struggles around freedom of information on the internet. This argument is unsympathetic towards the U.S. government, specifically the Obama administration, and with good reason. At the same time as this administration has failed to prosecute what the film calls the biggest crime of our time, the Wall Street machinations that led to the economic collapse, they chose to prosecute the hell out of a young activist researcher in order to make an example of him. Plenty of other damning activity, legislative and otherwise, let’s see: SOPA/PIPA, TPP, NSA spying, net neutrality vs tiered internet access — you haven’t been living under a rock, you know this is a problem.

Now imagine the mainstream media’s coverage of the recent police murders of Black men (and women, and children) being the only thing to which the entire country, the entire world had access. Could the current iteration of the civil rights movement (and it is that) have flared up if the internet were openly censored by the U.S. government, instead of merely by commercial interests?

Enabling open access to academic literature is the way that I’ve chosen to contribute to addressing this dangerous interlocking tangle. In conversations with faculty I usually emphasize other true things: there are individual professional advantages for them, of making their work openly accessible. Increased citation, increased serendipitous opportunities for collaboration and presenting, an establishment of their public voice much earlier in their careers than was possible only 20 years ago, increased opportunities for peer review—all of these are true and valid, and come with the nice side effect of encouraging faculty to learn more about copyright, and how to retain and exercise it in a way that most benefits their purpose, which (stop the presses) publishers often de-prioritize in favor of profit. Helping to fix the thoroughly broken academic publishing system, and maximizing benefits of knowledge dissemination for individual researchers, is a great service to us all.

But that exists alongside, and does not nullify, knowledge workers’ civic obligation to disseminate the fruits of our research in a way that benefits the largest number of people. It benefits the workers, yes—but it also benefits humanity in ways we can never predict. The documentary describes one case of a high school kid coming up with an early detection test for pancreatic cancer, but there are others, and their possibility is precluded by toll access to the results of previous research. In cases where marketplace profits have been all but exhausted (most of everything ever created), retaining millions of articles behind $35-per-item paywalls when they’ve already been digitized, and the expenses of that are recouped, is nonsensical. Seriously, what would be possible if all our recorded knowledge were digitally accessible to everyone? What problems would we be able to address?

Open access (OA) issues and a more proactive approach to copyright are still met with overall researcher indifference, and this is frustrating given how closely aligned OA is with things (like careers and social justice issues) they more consciously care about. Likewise with administrators, so many of whom are surprised to find OA topics directly relevant to their work. I think it’s worth the trouble for all knowledge workers to become knowledgeable in open access and copyright issues, both for personal benefit, and for the benefit of everyone else. And for all of us, it is worth periodically reminding ourselves the consequences of not working toward open access.

Here’s that documentary again. For all its white-affluent-male-ness, it’s worth watching. Thanks for reading.

Someone on my library’s internal mailing list pointed to the recent NYTimes article “Plan to Close University of Missouri Press Stirs Anger.” In particular, the following bit:

Scholars argue that university presses are vital for academic discourse. They publish erudite texts that commercial presses do not, giving scholars a forum to share and further research. Professors often rely on them to publish the works they need for tenure and promotion. But they are usually money-losing operations. The presses at the University of Chicago, Oxford and Cambridge are the only ones widely believed to be profitable.

I started writing a response to that, which meandered around a bit and became a blog post. Here it is.

That quote above is a fantastic argument FOR open access. All three of these presses have quite liberal OA policies for articles published in their journals (the following are default policies, which may vary by journal):

– Cambridge UP allows immediate sharing of preprints* and postprints*, AND allows dissemination of publisher’s version after a quite reasonable 12mo embargo;
– Oxford UP allows immediate sharing of preprints, and puts a 12mo embargo on postprints;
– Chicago UP allows immediate sharing of preprints, puts a 12mo embargo on postprints and publisher’s version, and actually encourages institutional repositories to use the publisher’s version.

Most other academic [journal] publishers, including both large-commercial and small university-based, for the most part don’t allow IR deposit of the publisher’s version, not by default anyway. Talking with them about, say, political science or anthropology articles from the 1980s often prompts them to rethink this policy: the revenue they’re likely to get from those articles is miniscule at best.

This is only to say: and the havoc that the digital world has played with scholarly publishing, and the concept of open access, doesn’t actually have much to do with the viability of a given university press. Higher-administrative support does, and innovative thinking does (with regard to both journals and monographs; for the latter, see MIT Press and Penn Press). It’s extremely disappointing that the administration of the University of Missouri seems to be giving up. I wish we were holding on more strongly to venues for dissemination of academic research.

Then again, there’s an awful lot of dry, bad academic publishing going on. Certainly the books/articles with broader public appeal are the more likely to survive. And that may be a good thing. I’m writing this from the annual Digital Humanities conference. Yesterday I found out that the rules have changed for academics in the UK: they now practically have a mandate to engage the public in their research. The mandatory review process that they go through every few years will be specifically looking at their level of public engagement. In addition, I hesitate to add, to the academic integrity of their work.

This is mindblowing. Can you imagine what would happen if this were a dimension of tenure review here in the States?

-Vika

*I keep needing to remind myself: preprint is author’s original version, as submitted; postprint is a misnomer, it’s the author’s final accepted manuscript, after post-peer-review corrections but before final layout and copyediting.

The complex toolkit has great potential. The course has been frustrating, in part (though not wholly) because SEASR’s documentation is not at all geared toward your average digital humanist, or what I know of my diverse kind, anyway. I thought that the best thing I can do with my class time today was to write some documentation. Here it is. It’s in no way complete; just the beginning of an overview of SEASR for digital humanists. Please feel free to repost, augment, comment here with your augmentations and have me edit this post to reflect them, what have you.

At the end of this post, I propose the beginning of a list of categories into which all components and flows might be subdivided, each component/flow probably listed in more than one category. This would help humanities scholars with no prior experience with SEASR, or even some of the functionality it affords, get oriented in using it.

I also propose that we need a lot more detailed information for each component and flow. The SEASR team has already begun this process, but given the project’s maturity and the fact that it’s in its third year of being taught at DHSI, such (again, humanities-scholar-oriented) documentation is sorely lacking.

I should say that, unless ESTHR or another one of my projects decides to pursue use and development of SEASR, I am unlikely to add to its documentation after the end of this week.  I ardently encourage SEASR’s developers and managers to devote significant resources to documenting this great project, such that it may be usable by the wide diversity of researchers who stand to benefit by it.

OK, here we go with the overview.

WHAT IS SEASR?

It’s a modular multi-tool for working with word-based texts. You can find the project site at seasr.org. From there, you can try it out (see the Documentation section). Or you can download the relevant software (which includes Meandre, a web-based interface for creating and working with SEASR data flows) and install it on your computer or a server.

WHAT IS SEASR MADE OF?

Meandre’s web interface—the Workbench—reveals that SEASR is made up of components and flows. Flows are little applications that can help you ask questions of your materials.

Components are the building blocks of flows, snippets of code that you can string together . At the time of this writing, there are 180 components available. Ideally, each component does a single thing: fetch a document from a URL you specify, for example, or convert all text to lowercase. The more discrete its function, the more broadly a component is applicable.

You can use existing flows with your data, or build your own out of existing components. Thanks to the graphical user interface of the Meandre Workbench, building new flows requires only dragging and dropping existing components, connecting outputs to inputs by clicking, and a basic understanding of other information you might need to provide (like a URL from which to fetch text, for example).

You can also write new components. For someone who knows Java, this is generally not difficult (although, of course, it depends on what you want the component to do).

WHAT KINDS OF QUESTIONS CAN I ASK USING SEASR? HOW CAN I DO THIS?

Theoretically, any questions. In practice, however, many of its components were created in order to answer specific questions in the moment. Because of this, the set of functions that can be performed in SEASR is not a cohesive whole. As SEASR’s developers and the user community contribute more components, the tool will become more robust.

In order to ask a question using SEASR, you have to:

• select a flow that you think might bring you closer to the answer you seek;
• use data in a format that the flow needs in order to operate;
• give the flow any other operands it might need (for example, a Google Maps API key for a flow that’s supposed to map data for you)

WHAT KIND OF DATA AND FILE FORMATS CAN SEASR HANDLE?

That depends on what flow(s) you’re using—but right now, for the most part, text-based data. File formats SEASR can handle include [but aren’t limited to—developers, what am I missing?] direct plain text input, PDF (as long as it’s text-based or OCR‘d) and anything text-based that a URL might contain.

WHAT KNOWLEDGE DO I NEED TO USE SEASR EFFECTIVELY?

If you intend to build your own workflows (and it’s likely to be necessary for doing deep research), it would be very useful for you or your collaborators to know Java. SEASR’s components are, for the most part, written in it. It’s certainly possible to use SEASR without knowing Java, but that will only get you so far. This is because, although many of the components are sufficiently well documented, in some cases it helps to look at the code to determine whether the component, in fact, does what you need to do—because if not, you might be in for creating a new component.

HOW DO I GET STARTED?

The easiest way to get started is to use some of the flows available on seasr.org (see the Documentation section). Then, install your own copy of SEASR/Meandre and look at some of the flows. The manual for Meandre is available at . After installing Meandre, you can expect to gain facility with the basic processes of setting up workflows within a few hours. Understanding the intricacies of flows and components will, of course, take longer.

Other useful URLs:

• Meandre Cookbook
• SEASR Wiki

PROPOSED COMPONENT/FLOW CATEGORIES

Only a starting list. What other categories do we need?

• – Working with  XML-encoded texts
• – Working with XML code
• – Working with non-encoded texts
• – Natural language processing
• – Data visualization, graphical
• – Working with time
• – Working with proper nouns
• – Social networks

INFORMATION STILL NEEDED

For each component:

• categories for dh scholars
• dependencies (what other components must this one be used with)
• examples/use cases

For each flow:

• inputs needed (a la GMaps API key)
• external tools/specialized concepts referenced
• categories for dh scholars
• examples/use cases

What was the wisest decision you made this year, and how did it play out?

I’m learning to let go of absolutes. So you’re on notice, #reverb10: I’m going to ignore the acme aspect of many of your prompts. Frankly, the wisest decision I made this year isn’t anyone’s business, and I don’t feel like writing cryptically.

One wise decision I made this year was to apply for a new job. It took me a while to come around to applying, mostly because I haven’t entirely internalized that what appear to be absolutes in academic language are actually quite flexible notions. It took a friendly face and a nudge to apply, and I’m glad I did! First of all because I rocked the interview by making it personal, allowing myself to be openly passionate about the issue at the core of the job: open access to knowledge. The best thing I can do to address my pacifism and liberal socio-political stance is to help people acquire knowledge. I’m ok bringing the Pollyanna if that’s the way to most fully contribute to my world. (There are other worlds than these…)

And second, because it worked. Tomorrow I’ll be starting my new job as BU’s Institutional Repository Librarian. Nifty, eh? Terrifying—and I’m as excited as can be. Here’s hoping I’ll have the wisdom to help move this thing forward. Advice and suggestions — particularly from more experienced repo rats — welcome.

There is no frigate, no bus, no plane, no space ship, no car, no train—none of these is like a book, like a song, like an operatic voice, like a painting, like a sculpture, like a drama. To help us imagine other lands and cultures, to help us cultivate that kind of compassion and empathy required for democracy, for practicing equality as a fundamental value, instead of the more primitive ‘better than’.

And also:

We should remind our administrators that the kind of education that enabled broad access to highest quality instruction and research, and made these United States a world leader—that kind of education can never be a gated community. And it must be worldly, reaching beyond any nation-state. Healthy, too, are reminders that business management is really not the best metaphor for knowledge workers. As was noted in a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, a better metaphor for knowledge workers is that of gardener. We work in fields. We cultivate.

What I’ve been pointing out is that unless you’re at home in the metaphor, unless you have had your proper poetical education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative values. You don’t know the metaphor and its strength, and its weakness. You don’t know how far you may expect to ride it, and when it may break down with you. You are not safe in science, and you are not safe in history, unless you are at home with the metaphor.

Smith rejects the rhetoric of a crisis in the humanities, a phrase often uttered. For more on the state of the humanities, see Stanley Fish’s recent NYTimes opinion pieces: “The Crisis of the Humanities Officially Arrives” and its sequel, “Crisis of the Humanities II.” I find it more than a little odd that not once does Fish mention digital endeavors of any kind, but can’t say I’m surprised. He didn’t mention them two years ago when asking whether the humanities would save us, either. I don’t subscribe to Fish’s opinions, but the articles and comments on them are thought provoking. Martha Nell Smith’s lecture, on the other hand, I heartily endorse. It’s well worth the hour and ten minutes it’ll take to watch the video.

Meanwhile, though, have a quote from Audre Lorde:

For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

Exciting, all of it, but scary. On top of this, my mom is sick. (This is the part I’m compartmentalizing like crazy, because it would easily send me into panic if it were allowed to, and that’s just not helpful to anyone.)

On the plus sides, today was full of social goodness. Went to a brunch-and-Gattaca-showing, which was brilliant. Took a friend (and myself) shopping at a Russian supermarket. We were both sort of unreally happy with the experience, and talked and talked in the car both ways. Housemates were almost as pleased, and partook of the tasties. Then we watched Torchwood.

It’s pouring in every sense but the rainy. The weather is cool enough for sweatshirt and a scarf. All my nerve endings are at attention. Life’s edges are rather ill-defined, and frightening in this. Wouldn’t trade it, even if sometimes I need to be talked down from scraggly fear trees.

Some background first. The school I work at is a theological seminary existing within a Research I university. The students in it are all [post]graduate: Master’s- and doctoral-level. Some degrees are more vocationally oriented; others—more research-oriented. This refers to what the students do after they leave here; all of our graduate programs involve the usual amounts of traditional scholarship. Some also involve field work.

I aim for these to be one-off, two-hour workshops offered to every student near the beginning of their time here. There will be two different workshops, one for most of the Master’s-level students, the other for our advanced Master’s and all doctoral students. The topic list is more or less the same, with different areas of emphasis for each workshop.  For those people writing theses and dissertations, there will be an additional hour-long workshop touching on things like how to properly format things in MS Word (sigh; yes, really—nobody teaches them this stuff!), open access, authorship etc.

These might more rightly be called digital scholarship primers, I don’t know. In any case, “digital research methods” might be a misnomer. I actually don’t think that it is. Implicit in the topic list below is my belief that the use of digital resources that feed you information and the use of digital tools to directly create new knowledge are different skill sets, but both classifiable as digital research.  If you think I’m off the mark here, I’d welcome your reasoning—not to make you justify yourself, but to gain more perspective—and/or suggestions for other workshop titles.

Here’s what I have so far. What would you add? Do you see problems with my thinking that I’m not seeing?

• What digital scholarship is
  • not all scholarship that’s online is digital scholarship
  • not all digital scholarship is online
  • digital scholarship is not equivalent to digital publication
  • major communities in the humanities
  • digital theology, online and off
• Is this real scholarship?
  • you bet
  • but in many places it doesn’t count for promotion/tenure
    • briefly on the herarchy of knowledge production that informs your studies
    • this politics has no bearing on quality, either of digital or paper resources
  • peer review for online resources
  • ultimately YOU have to decide whether it’s worth your time
  • whatever you intend do after STH, you’re a scholar now
• Why do people bother doing it digitally?
  • some things you can’t do analog
  • knowledge dissemination/access
  • the digital cannot replace the analog, and vice versa
• How digital scholarship is done
  • Father Busa and the Corpus Thomisticum
  • semantic encoding
  • 3D imaging of artifacts
  • other [this is a big Other, of course. I’m looking to limit principal examples to ones most relevant to theology, but will also touch on examples from history, sociology, literary studies etc.]
• Why digital scholarship is relevant to you
  • some of it you can’t find anywhere else
  • it’s scholarship in your field. not knowing it is knowing your field incompletely.
• How to find digital scholarly resources
  • searching the internet: more than the Google search box
  • how to evaluate for trustworthiness
  • a special note on Wikipedia: not a scholarly resource BUT uniquely useful.
  • some points of departure (Voice of the Shuttle, Intuit, WorldCat, library databases)
  • there’s a difference between digital scholarly resources and digital tools that let you find analog resources
• How to interact with digital scholarly resources
  • a few resource examples (including History of Missiology)
  • how to know what questions to ask
  • how to evaluate quality
  • peer reviewed resources vs. not-peer-reviewed ones
  • some problems to watch out for
  • data often obscure, particularly semantic encoding
  • how to cite digital resources
• General notes on digital research
  • research is iterative
  • digital research can span vast amounts of information or a single text
  • you can not only utilize what’s already available but make your contribution, too
  • you can use social media for research purposes (here’s how)
• Resources available at BU
  • me
  • new initiatives going on right now
  • look for events around Open Access Week in October

I attended the Digital Humanities Summer Institute in Victoria!  This was made possible by the DHSI and by my dean, and I’m grateful to both.  The Institute’s ninth year was my first time attending, and it was an intense experience.  Something like 35 hours of instruction over five days; evening plenary talks and early-morning graduate student presentations for four of those.  I took the large project planning and management course with Lynne Siemens. It was even more exciting and useful than I’d expected it to be. Who would’ve thought I’d be into project management?  But bring industry-born ideas about cat herding resource wrangling into academe, and I’m there.  We talked about juggling (often too-little) money and time and people, getting folks to be as excited about your ideas as  you are, getting your head around a project in the first place.  We had guest speakers in almost every class and got to plan our own projects.  All of this delightfully low-tech: I’m bringing back large sheets of flip-chart paper with wild scribbles and post-it notes.  Now to get grant funding for this thing.  (Grant application is in, but we don’t find out for a couple more months.  If we don’t get funded, I imagine we’ll apply again.  In any case, the training will be applicable in other contexts, not least of them the everyday juggling of activities at work.)

The best part, of course, were the people.  I saw some old friends and acquaintances, and finally got to spend a bunch of time around Julie Meloni, who is moving to Victoria to work as a postdoc at UVic’s Electronic Textual Cultures Lab. (ETCL folks put on the Institute every summer—and let’s pause for a second to appreciate the work they do, and their success at it.)

Talking to Julie, and to Jentery Sayers, and Jon Bath, and Susan Brown, and the many other folk I met at UVic,  one thing is clear: networked technologies are finally at a stage where they can be reliably and cheaply used for long-distance collaboration in the digital humanities.  There’s no substitute for in-person interaction, but it’s also increasingly easy to work together over arbitrary distances, meeting in the same place every once in a while.  This is changing our work process.  It’s no longer just that we can email Word documents back and forth.  We can use combinations of text/audio/video chat, collaborative editing environments, remote file upload and syncing venues, online project management systems, even bibliography and research sharing systems to work on projects either synchronously or asynchronously, as circumstances permit, at times across many timezones.  All of these tools have been available for some time, but have been clunky or expensive or not easily interoperable.  The recent explosion of networked tools and services (some of them created by and for academics) is a perfect storm for academic collaboration.

At the beginning of the DHSI week I got pretty discouraged about my self-imposed geographic restriction to Boston.  All this activity swirling around me, watching people who have found inspiration in working with one another, felt like being on the outside looking in.  Which is pretty ridiculous, all things considered: nobody can do everything, and I have a job in Boston that’s at least nominally a digital humanities/digital libraries job.  But it does get lonely at BU sometimes.  There isn’t much DH activity either at the university or generally in New England. (Sure, Brown University is just an hour away, and THATCamp New England has just opened for applications.  But given that we’re in CollegeTownUSA land, there’s still woefully little DH work going on around here.  It’s ramping up, but slowly.)

Well, seems like there’s nothing like a little live interaction to get things going.  Seems I’m about to get involved in a couple of projects that will feed me in ways that will supplement the satisfaction I draw from current in-person work.  This is good both for me and for my workplace.  Information will flow through more channels, inspiration can be distributed. Perspective allows serendipity to do its unpredictable future thing.

I love Boston, and have good reasons to live where I live. This has meant passing on multiple opportunities to apply for jobs I’d no doubt enjoy. But I’ve placed a high priority on being near my people. It was a hard decision to make when I made it, but the rewards are constant and significant. And now, the trade-off doesn’t seem as big as it did even only three years ago.

Being a free agent in the age of networked communication is pretty exciting.

It was a great time! I was heartened to see so many people thinking so creatively about classroom technology. Distance ed may not equate to using technology (networked or not) in the classroom, but there’s a lot of crossover, so I was asked to reprise a talk I’d given few months ago through the Center for Excellence and Innovation in Teaching.

I’ve taken recent thinking about slide presentations to heart, so looking at my slides wouldn’t yield anything particularly coherent: there’s little text on them. So I’ve inserted the slides here instead of putting them on SlideShare; click on a slide to see it full-size.  Alas, I haven’t figured out yet how to open the full-size images in the same page, with a gallery-like overlay (is there a WordPress plugin for this?), so—apologies—they’re set to open in a new window.

This gets long; here’s hoping the LiveJournal crosspost can deal with the more tag. If it can’t, sorry, LJLand—I don’t do this often…

WHY NETWORKED TECH?

A definition of social media is probably in order, and I like the one used by the European Commission in the EU Internet Handbook—social media are “tool[s] to communicate with specific target audiences.” Fair enough! But, the EC says, it’s more than that:

Social media cannot be treated as a traditional distribution channel. Social media are in their essence a two-way communication tool, and therefore you must know how to respond and what you want to do with the voiceback that is generated from users’ comments or reactions. Not following-up/responding to voiceback can have adverse and sometimes disasterous effects.

Thinking of education as a conversation, rather than a process of imparting knowledge from high atop a hill, this definition sounds about perfect.

But really, why use social media in teaching and research? Well, for me part of the answer is — because I am in the humanities, and that’s what humans are doing these days. Not only are educators increasingly converging on where their audiences and their colleagues are (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube), but all the ways in which people interact with each other (and with new knowledge) using social media — are themselves part of what we study. The notion that somehow this is what people do in addition to, or in lieu of, their real lives doesn’t make any sense. It is real life. And although less than a quarter of the world’s population is online, we can’t pretend the internet isn’t there. Like with telephony, we are never going back, only forward.

Also, consider this about obscurity. I think it applies to academics, and to education—and this will later lead me to talk about the reputation economy within which we operate:

WHAT I WILL TALK ABOUT

So, today I’ll focus on four categories of tools: blogs, microblogs (specifically Twitter), photo sharing sites (Flickr), and Google’s collaboration tools. These tools provide mostly for asynchronous communication: conversation doesn’t have to happen in real time. This seems to be a great advantage, simply because more people end up participating when it’s on their schedule.

So let’s move right on to…

WEBLOGS

Some people still think of them as journals, but they’re not so much journals as a publishing *and commenting* platform. Posts are normally chronologically arranged, with the most recent first. Different blog publishing platforms handle security differently, but most do allow you to only make posts available to certain people if you wish it. Blogs can have one or more authors. And, of course, most have syndication feeds, so I can “gather” the 55 blog sites I read regularly in one news reader, instead of having to visit the sites themselves.

WHY BLOGS

How do people use blogs in classrooms? Educators post writing prompts. Students write week-in-review posts; respond to readings; post the results of fact-finding missions they’re assigned. Students might also critique a website, be it a news site, a political site or an artist’s gallery. They might critique each other’s writing. In other words, they practice public rhetoric and social annotation of resources.

Like all forms of social media, blogs can act as personal learning networks. Students find topics that interest them, and post questions, which their peers then answer in comments.

On the research side, peer review has been conducted in blog comments, too.  A good example of that is Planned Obsolescence, a book by Kathleen Fitzpatrick.  It’s published using the popular platform WordPress, with the CommentPress plugin installed.    CommentPress allows readers to comment on an entire page, or paragraph by paragraph.  Comments can also be threaded, and become conversations—here’s a good example of that.  (Take a look at the comments on paragraph 2.)

I have some other examples, particularly of classroom use, which I’ll be happy to share later with anyone interested. I will briefly mention Looking for Whitman, “A[n NEH-sponsored] multi-campus experiment in digital pedagogy,” not only because it’s a stellar example of the use of blogs for teaching, but also because it showcases the use of WordPress as something halfway to a content management system. So a blog doesn’t have to be just posts and comments: this one houses multiple self-contained projects, as well.

WHY NOT BLOGS

OK, so why not use blogs? Well, for one thing, they can be intimidating to some students, and to some instructors!

But also, because anyone with an internet connection can see most blogs, unless you password-protect yours, you have to be ready for unforeseen participation, including by people who are just looking to start an argument. (Although it’s worth noting that in order to participate in your discussion, someone has to first find the blog, and let’s face it, not many people will unless you advertise it. Plus, you can restrict commenting to registered users, close posts to new comments automatically after a certain period of time, and moderate comments. So there are tools for dealing with trolls, and more control than we often think of when we think of the wild wild internet.)

MICROBLOGS

So that’s blogs. Moving on to microblogging, and its most famous instance: Twitter. A quick overview:

• Anyone can get a free account and make posts.
• Each post must be 140 or fewer characters in length.
• You can follow people—or entities, like the Chronicle of Higher Ed, or the U.S. Supreme Court, or BU—whose tweets you’d like to read, and all of those tweets are aggregated on your Twitter home page.
• There are certain community conventions: for example, an @ sign and a username signals to that user that you’re talking (publicly but) directly to them.

WHY MICROBLOGGING

OK, so why use microblogging? For me, the initial use was for research, not pedagogy. A hash mark (#) with an agreed-upon abbreviation—called a hash tag—allows people to search for all posts associated with a particular topic.  Or a particular event! At this point I’ve virtually attended and contributed to three or four conferences to which I wasn’t able to travel. I’ve also tweeted conferences myself, giving others the opportunity to virtually attend.  Handy.

Another handy feature: you can have anyone’s posts sent to your phone via SMS. When the NEH Office of Digital Humanities posts something, I want to know right away, in case it’s time sensitive and about grants.

A youth pastor I spoke with likes the stronger sense of community that arises from using Twitter. The 140 character limit encourages concise and effective writing. One educator said, “Twitter offers a medium that helps those who hesitate and lose the opportunity to provide input during a classroom session.” So students can use Twitter to float ideas, post links to relevant materials, raising new topics if they’re reluctant to do so in class.

Note that scholars who have left studentship are also using Twitter to float ideas, post links to interesting new materials, ask questions of their colleagues. I got pointers to some valuable information from my Twitter followers even as I was preparing this presentation.

Here’s an example of someone using Twitter in teaching. Twitter content is more informative and less analytical than blog content, but some rudimentary analysis does go on — a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, or a short note explaining who in particular might benefit from a linked resource. This can translate into rich and concise information sharing. Of course, it can also degenerate into meaningless quips. David Silver, who teaches digital media courses at the University of San Francisco, draws students’ attention to the informative potential of Twitter by distinguishing between thin tweets (which provide a single layer of information: “Just read an interesting study on library funding”) and thick tweets (two or more layers, “XYZ study on library funding says libraries need more money, here’s a link“).

WHY NOT MICROBLOGGING

There are, of course, reasons to not use microblogging in academic settings. Students who don’t participate might end up invisible to their professors. There’s concern that students attending multiple courses that require the use of Twitter will be overwhelmed by the relentless stream of tweets they have to follow and process. There’s concern that, like so many social media sites, Twitter will be short-lived (although so far that doesn’t seem likely). Some people are wary of microblogging replacing face-to-face conversations in the classroom, and of the distraction of Twitter during classtime. Finally, like any networked technology, Twitter is only handy when the participant has a reliable network connection. What about students on field placements in rural settings?

Other concerns seem to be in the process of being addressed by the fact that Twitter recently gifted all its contents to the Library of Congress. These concerns revolve around the search feature, which only goes so far back, and the fact that tweets “expire,” so teaching past conversations suffers. We have yet to see exactly how the Library of Congress will choose to make tweets available, but the possibilities for data mining are pretty exciting.

PHOTO SHARING: FLICKR

And speaking of the Library of Congress, it’s been making great use of the photo sharing site Flickr. For those of you who haven’t played with it, here’s a quick overview:

• Accounts are free, unless you want to display more than 200 of your photos at any one time, in which case they’re about $25 a year.
• Users can post photos and short videos using any number of venues, including the website itself, standalone desktop applications, and smartphone applications.
• Uploads can have prose descriptions and tags associated with them, and parts of images can have notes attached.
• It’s possible to automatically cross-post uploads to a blog.
• People can tag their own creations as well as others’.
• Photos and videos can be organized into sets and collections.
• And there are groups whose members post on particular themes—everything from cats to artistic nudes to New York history—to volcanoes and the UK General Election.
• Finally, Flickr provides for easy copyright declaration: users can post all-rights-reserved, or attach Creative Commons licenses to their work.

WHY FLICKR

OK, so repeating the pattern: what does a photo sharing site offer to us pedagogically? Well, there’s often something to be said for inviting students to express themselves in a medium they don’t typically associate with classes, or with scholarship. Among the better-known photo sharing sites, Flickr is a particularly good venue because of the huge user buy-in, and also because its versatile interface can also be used to teach Web 2.0 concepts: social tagging, critique, conversation that takes place in and through comments, social annotation.

I’d like to show you just a few examples of how academics use Flickr.

• Here’s a good use of the notes feature. Calls attention to specific costuming details; asks guiding questions; provides links to more information.
• Another example of notes.
• Here’s some visual storytelling.  This sequence seemed to particularly grab the audience, each photograph so striking and beautiful.
• Or how about storytelling with the image title?

Distance education course participants might introduce themselves with Flickr: post photos of themselves and their surroundings, comment on each other’s posts, build community.

This website is also a great library. Thanks to Flickr’s integration with Creative Commons, it allows you not only to attach licenses to photos, but also to search for photos that you can use, say, in a slide presentation. Mine is far from a stellar example, but an important point is: Flickr has revolutionized the slide presentation, taking the focus off of bullet points and encouraging folks to synthesize their thoughts in imagery. Both students and seasoned scholars have already benefited from this, and conference presentations are less likely to lose their audiences’ attention now than they were ten years ago.

WHY NOT FLICKR

Everything has its down side. You do need special equipment to use Flickr, though these days not much: many of us have cameras in our phones, and those are more than adequate to convey an idea. And also, the visual is very different from the verbal, as a mode of interacting with the world. This can be a great thing, but like everything else, may or may not be appropriate for a particular course.

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

There are so many social media tools I haven’t mentioned. Virtual worlds, voice over IP telephony, wikis, social bookmarking sites, the list just goes on. And it can seem intimidating, no?

But it is our world.

And our academic world operates in a reputation economy. Or, that’s our hope, right? Eric Raymond, a programmer of open source software who also studies open-source communities, has said that by putting arguments on the network and making them available for hyperlinking, searching and discussion, people “homestead the noosphere.” Raymond’s homesteading paradigm comes from John Locke’s theory of property: if a piece of land is not claimed, you claim it by working the land, investing of yourself in it.

The hacker community Raymond describes is characterized by two main aspects: pragmatism and gift culture. This does not mean that there is no ownership: “[t]he owner of a software project is the person who has the exclusive right, recognized by the community at large, to distribute modified versions.” There are also rewards, the main among them being reputation, which in turn leads to a meritocracy. But the key is making your creations, the fruits of your knowledge, widely available. This is what social media let us do, and let us teach students how to do. This will serve them well in any job that involves making new things, knowledge among them.

Kevin Roberts, who made a ten-minute video called Teaching in the 21st Century, writes: “Teachers are no longer the main source of knowledge. We are the filter. Sure,” he says, “they can use Google. But has anyone shown them how to validate, synthesize, leverage, and communicate information?  How to collaborate and problem solve with information?” Yes, we can do all that without using social media. But that’s a lot like dancing about architecture. The internet’s status as the container of human knowledge will only increase and solidify; we have the means and the opportunity to filter, discuss, analyze and add to this body of knowledge directly, in the midst of it.

And it’s more than just an opportunity; at this point, it’s an obligation if we’re to understand our students. Roberts asks, “how would you answer questions like, what is the most efficient tool for this project?, or what are the newest ideas and innovations I need to keep up with?” Now, “How would your students answer these questions? Have you asked them?” Without knowing their frame of reference—both in theory and in practice—it’s hard to teach them effectively. The understanding most BU students have of even such basic scholarly concepts as authorship, the editing process and reflection is radically different from the understanding that a person who doesn’t use social media would have. Roberts says, “we need to rethink the tools we use and the types of problems we ask students to solve.”

One of the people who have best used social media tools in a university setting is Michael Wesch, a cultural anthropologist at Kansas State. Let me just show you a short segment of a video he and his students made, titled “A vision of students today.” [I only showed the part between 1:01 and 2:15, but the whole 4m44s video is worth watching.]

This video showcases collaborative use of Google Docs, the last tool I promised to tell you about. And it also makes an elegant case for educators making an effort to connect with students using their tools, their language, their mindset. All kinds of knowledge work are being done using social media, so that’s—partly—where we need to be.

Thank you.