'Why' and 'What for?' Publishing Sociocultural (Digital) History - Emma G

Q: What are the philosophical and practical reasons why people publish? How do “we” benefit from doing history — cultural history or social history — through the digital realm? 

To begin to answer this question, I'll start with a blanket statement from the authors: 

Nawrotzki and Dougherty  state that: “Writing is an individual and highly personal process, as well as one that is materially and culturally situated” (p. 5). 

A)   Philosophical Reasons: They first include a quote from Ken Hyland, whom states that “Academic writing is not just about conveying ideational content, it is also about the representation of self” (p. 6). They then outline a few more specific reasons:

a.     Short pieces read by broad readership are typically writing reserved for journalists, not for scholars

b.    IOW (they state) “we are what we write, and what we read” (p. 6).

c.     They state that the digital emphasizes curation rather than detective work

                                              i.     I’m not entirely sure I agree with this. 

Q 1: How might the digital emphasize detective work, and how might traditional publishing methods emphasize curation?

B)   Practical Publishing Practices: For these, they have subheadings within the document - a good method of curation ;)

a.     Publishing to Share Ideas

                                              i.     Stepping out of isolation and into a public forum, where ideas can be shared, built upon, and offered as a counter to the ideas of others

                                             ii.     Creating intellectual communities

                                           iii.     To become something larger than ourselves

b.    Financial Gain – probably the least likely reason to publish

                                              i.     “the financial payoff for a best-selling trade book or popular textbook published by trade press is far greater” (p. 7)

                                             ii.     They also explain how academic publishing is organized by a terrible business model, one that overcharges institutions and underpays scholars

c.     Publishing for Professional Status

                                              i.     “Publish or Perish” – essentially can be looped into financial gain, since in order to earn job security or get a promotion, scholars need to publish. Publishing means viability on the job market.

                                             ii.     Of course, “…quality, status, and marketability are neither identical nor interchangeable” (p. 7), but this matters little when publishers want their book to garner broad viewership so that it actually gets read.

C)   I have include some practical reasons to resist digital publishing:

a.     Material, technological, and temporal constraints

                                              i.     Digital has its own vocabulary and requires different skill sets

b.    “Many of us lack the basic literacy in digital genres, technologies, and information architecture to be able to articulate our ideas” (p. 6).

c.     Likewise, they don’t want to invest in new technologies in case the tech becomes obsolete before the work is finished

d.    General lack of awareness of what they do have access to

e.     General lack of awareness that some forms of digital history can be done without access to said tools

D)  Benefits of doing socio-cultural history digitally:

a.     Avoiding monographs priced waaayyyyy too high by publishers

b.    Books are built to provide only one-way scholarly communication of ideas: from author to audience – even e-books don’t effectively allow readers to enter into dialogue with authors, but…using a ‘web-book’ with open source tools allows readers to respond to the text online.

c.     The ability to integrate narrative and text with multi-media source materials is way easier to do, since publishing pictures and whatnot within a text typically means higher pub costs, and of course – poorer image quality. Further, you cant have audio (unless you include a CD), and definitely not audiovisual.

d.    Can simultaneously provide instant access to new ideas while at the same time offering a PDF (that can be printed by the reader) and a print version (to be distributed later).

e.     “socially networked texts allow substantive communication between writers and readers. In the case of this volume, online commenting, combined with view data for the web pages, tells us exactly which passages readers praised, panned, or never even bothered to read” (p. 13).

E)   I have also included a perceived shortfall: 

 * Doing digital history is counter to a historian’s general orientation to their work, which is much less about being innovative, quick, open, etc. (they also mention DIY, but that seems counter to what they say before about historians doing everything on their own).  The drawback is that: “Historians largely seek to be comprehensive rather than (necessarily) innovative—and comprehensiveness takes time” (p. 6). 

Q2: Nawrotzki and Dougherty state that, “…digital media both extend and fundamentally change the way we read and understand information, by rendering it manipulable and interactive and allowing us to access it in nonlinear form,” and I think I’d push back on that. I at least question the adjectives they’re using to describe the affordances of digital technology. Don’t books do all of these things, too?  Isn’t that what an index and a table of contents are for? I recall Jockers drawing our attention to this toward the beginning of the semester. Citing one drawback of digital technology as the “return to the scroll” – I’m not sure those are their exact words, to be fair – Jockers argues that in a way, reading on a computer is a return to the period before bound books, when reading something required unrolling a scroll and starting from the beginning. How might digital reading be a hindrance? Further, how might ability figure into how people deem something an extension or a hindrance?