November 2018 – #UWTDigitalScholarship

…digital media technologies are changing the structure of the habits of being a scholar (Daniels & Thistlethwaite, 2016, p. 93).

I have thoroughly enjoyed the ideas that eddied around me during our discussions, yet as I listened to this week’s discussion about the possible effect of digital technologies on publication practices or tenure and promotion, I was acutely aware my viewpoint within the dialogue was different than the rest of those at the table.

I am not faculty considering how to include or increase my use of digital tools or technologies in my classroom—or wondering if my scholarly work will become somehow devalued in an increasingly digital world.

Neither am I a librarian peering into the future of information embedded in digital practices, watching the cost of scholarly journals rise every year and wondering how to best help students gain access to technology, costly textbooks, or other course necessities that might be beyond their current technological expertise or financial means.

From my position as a writing instructor in the TLC, I see some students struggle with learning unfamiliar technologies, and recognize the difficulties others face in completing assignments when they cannot afford course texts. I am daily aware of their unfamiliarity of some with academic practices that increasingly require a digital literacy beyond their understanding. The tools of the academy are changing, even if the work is not.

Yet, in considering how to respond to the three chapters discussed this week, I realize I sit most comfortably in the position of student. I am here in this room to learn, to glean what I can from a discussion with those who understand a side of this topic with which I have little experience. But there is a viewpoint I do understand.

As a current doctoral student, I am the scholar being trained in a digital era. I am the student who was just given a book list priced at nearly $300 for (used) books for one course. Yet, as that scholar-in-training, I also can’t help but wonder in what ways the acceptance and use of digital technologies will come to affect the scholarship of the future—including my own.

Open access is, above all things, a moral and political decision (Jiménez et al., 2015, para. 2; cited in Daniels and Thistlethwaite, 2016, p. 79).

Through both my positions—student and staff—I have become a firm believer in the power of open access and digital technologies to spread the influence of the academy: its scholarship reaching out from behind ivy-covered walls and extending knowledge toward those who have long been kept at a distance, whether because of a paywall or a lack of accessible language. I believe that making the work of scholars available to a larger public sphere is, quite simply, a matter of social justice—a “human right,” if you will. And I agree with authors Jessie Daniels and Polly Thistlethwaite (2016) as they remind us: there is nothing important that cannot [somehow] be made interesting to a more “general reader” (p. 97).

You never know who will benefit from your work. The only way to find out is to make it accessible (“Interview” with Sarah Kendizor in Tadween Editors, 2013; cited in Daniels & Thistlethwaite, 2016, p. 63).

Although the shift to digital scholarship may be slow in coming, it is coming. Faculty across this campus—and many others—are already a part of the change, whether through teaching digital storytelling techniques, using digital tools in teaching, or creating digital portfolios and projects with their students. Many are already including ebooks or open access materials in their course syllabi and have long taught their students the value of moving beyond a simple Google search to recognizing scholarly sources, such as journals or databases housed in the library and available 24/7. They might even be encouraging their students to submit their work to open-access journals like Access: Interdisciplinary Journal of Student Research and Scholarship with its 1500+ downloads of 16 student papers—in just over a year.

Screenshot of map showing downloads from Access — Screenshot of map showing location of papers downloaded from Access*: Interdisciplinary Journal of Student Research and Scholarship

Access, housed in the UW Tacoma Digital Commons and networked throughout other commons sites across the web and around the world, was created to expand the reach of students’ scholarly work. I’m admittedly proud of Access’ reach, but an even better example of the scope of open-access sites like Digital Commons can be seen in a single paper: “Corporate Social Responsibility of Multinational Corporations” (Chan, 2014), UW Tacoma’s most popular paper, downloaded more than 31,000 times around the globe in just over three years.

Digital media technologies provide a tremendous opportunity for the scholarship of engagement (Daniels & Thistlethwaite, 2016, p. 106).

For faculty on an urban-serving campus like ours, there is undoubtedly a certain tension surrounding an individual desire to participate in digital practices that would inform our communities and engage them in our scholarship and an uncertainty

Still, the opportunity is in our hands to discover just where the road into digital scholarship might lead.

Jimenez, A.C., Boyer, D., Hartigan, J., & de la Cadena, M. (2015). Open access: A collective ecology for AAA publishing in the digital age – Cultural Anthropology [website]. Retrieved from www.culanth.org/fieldsights/684-open-acess-a-collective-ecology-for-aaaq-publishing-in-the-digital-age.

Digital Scholarship, like legacy scholarship, refers to a set of practices rather than a single field of study. (Jessie Daniels and Polly Thistlethwaite, Being a Scholar in a Digital Era, 8)

Photo showing book, notes, computer, and coffee cup on table. Taken just prior to meeting. — Photo taken while waiting for everyone to arrive to first meeting. The paper in the center shows my rough notes on the book, taken on a library hold slip.

We held our first discussion of Being a Scholar in a Digital Era by Jessie Daniels and Polly Thistlethwaite on October 8, 2018. This was at the beginning the quarter, and I’m just now catching up on the notes I took during that meeting.

We met in the Chihuly Room, so named for the Chinook Red Chandelier by Dale Chihuly that hangs there, and the space soon filled up with faculty and librarians. All ten seats at the table were taken, and we had to pull in chairs from downstairs. People also took some of the comfortable chairs around the room. I forgot to count how many people were present, but I estimate about eighteen because we had some drop-in participants.

To start the conversation, I closed my computer and opened a notebook I started earlier this year to track conversations I’m having around digital scholarship. It was a wild ride once we started talking about the first three chapters of Being a Scholar in a Digital Era. Two people had signed up for each chapter, and I asked each person to provide a brief response and pose one question to the group. My intention was to do a kind of round robin or survey of people’s responses, but there was such energy around certain topics that people couldn’t keep from responding the questions.

Here are just a few that I heard and jotted down:

How does one transition from being a “sage on the stage to a guide on the side”?
What is the overlap between engaged scholarship and open access? (This was my own.)
How do we effectively teach in a networked environment? How do we effectively shift to open models?
What is the actual labor that goes into teach, learning, and scholarship? How do we account for the disruptions, blurring of boundaries, and expansion of labor that technology of creates?

I felt like I was in eye of an intellectual cyclone circling around that room, drawing its power from everyone’s curiosity and uncertainty, their questions and attempts at solutions, their excitement and anxiety. My brain went into facilitation mode and focused more on keeping the conversation on track and making sure everyone’s perspective was heard. Thus, I was more focused on the present than on remembering. Yet somehow my hand kept moving. Here are the messy notes I took that day:

I show these notes because they are evidence of one approaches I bring to the “craft” of digital scholarship. As a member of Generation X, my life and education has straddled analog and digital worlds, and this background has informed many of the practices I use to navigate and understand digital scholarship. Perhaps this is why I was so drawn to the discussion of the “craft” of digital scholarship mentioned in Being a Scholar in a Digital Era.

In the appendix to his classic The Sociological Imagination, titled ‘On intellectual craftsmanship’, C. Wright Mills exhorts aspiring scholars to keep a journal and create a ‘filing system’ to reflect on personal experiences, notes about the literature in one’s field, along with charts and diagrams. In this appendix, Mills refers to being a scholar as ‘a choice of how to live,’ he says, ‘as well as a choice of career’. It is, he explains, about being a scholar, ‘a structure of habits’ (Mills, 1959). (Daniels and Thislthwaite, 10)

The next five pages (pp. 11-14) of Being a Scholar in the Digital Era then go on to recount the many, many changes that have transformed scholarship, scholarly communication, and the distribution of knowledge. In sum, “The ever-changing pastiche of digital technologies, alongside the analog of occasional in-person meetings, enables a new level of connectedness among scholars across geographic distance and types of institutions. Sharing research interests and exchanging work among scholars has never been easier.” (14)

Rather than digging into the specific changes (which is the purpose of this reading circle), I would like to stay awhile on the idea of craft because it reminds me of observations in another book I read recently: David Levy’s Mindful Tech: How to Bring to Our Digital Lives. In this text, Levy develops a notion that our interactions with digital, online technologies can become a kind of craft:

When I suggest we think of our online activity as a craft, I mean to call attention to the skill involved. But I also mean to highlight three addition dimensions of craftwork, making four in all: intention, care, skill, and learning. (David Levy, Mindful Tech, 7)

Levy’s book then investigates how personal practice shapes our digital identities (whether personal or professional) and offers a series of activities that enable readers to develop their own sense of digital craft. I don’t have space to explore his ideas thoroughly, but I am realizing that one of the core ways that I have cultivated my own sense “digital craft” has been to deliberately blend it with the analog. I often seek out and create spaces for reflection away from the screen and humming hard drive so that I might recognize more awareness along the dimensions Levy develops. One of these is with a notebook.

These observations are all highly personal, but so are habits–or practices. Taking this a step further, I see my role as an educator-librarian is to also encourage and support the digital craft of others. Yet, how do I do this in a meaningful way? This book group is one example. A few days ago, I took what I’ve heard and tried to distill it. On the left are themes (pink), and on the right issues of practice (yellow).

Month: November 2018

Thoughts on “Being a Scholar in the Digital Era”

On Keeping a DS Notebook: Digital Craft and the Structure of Scholarly Habits.