What follows is the text of a presentation I gave at the MLA 2019 Convention in Chicago, Illinois, on January 5, 2019 in Session 613: Getting Credit in Digital Publishing and Digital Humanities Projects

Thank you to Anne Donlon for organizing this session and to Harriett Green for chairing it. I’m excited to be with you today to talk about issues of credit, care, and labor in peer-to-peer review processes. My original title focused only on credit and labor, but I realized as I was writing it up that a full accounting of labor and credit necessitated attention to the subject of care, as well.

In this talk, I’m going to:

• Begin by discussing a few models of peer review and peer-to-peer review
• I will then discuss issues of labor as they play out in such review processes
• I will then show how peer-to-peer reviews can be structured with care to ensure that participant labor is valued and respected
• And I will end by talking about issues of credit and the overall goals of p2p review

Peer Review and Peer-to-Peer Review

I’m choosing to focus on peer review, and network-enabled peer-to-peer for a few reasons:

• it is a space of scholarly communication in the academy where we see technology used to alter existing conventions of academic work;
• second, peer-to-peer review is not often discussed in terms of credit and labor, so it seemed a useful topic to explore in a session that deals more broadly with the way we value the work that we and our colleagues do;
• third, evolving forms of peer-to-peer review have been used in a variety of prominent digital humanities publishing projects in recent years, making it a subject of engaging interest;
• and fourth, I’ve experimented with multiple forms of peer-to-peer review myself and have some thoughts to share about them

Before progressing further, I want to take a moment to contextualize my discussion of peer review within the context of contemporary DH work on scholarly communication. Here, Kathleen Fitzpatrick is my guiding light; her work in Planned Obsolescence: Publishing Technology and the Future of the Academy (2011) historicizes peer review and charts the way it is changing in the era of networked scholarship.

Fitzpatrick builds on the work of Mario Biagioli to exhume the history of peer review and its entrenchment in systems of censorship and disciplinary control. Fitzpatrick notes the many weaknesses of double-blind peer review, in which journal articles and book manuscripts are circulated to reviewers in such a way that neither the identity of the author nor the identity of the reviewer is disclosed. Although double-blind peer review has often been implemented as a way of eliminating bias in the reviewing process, Fitzpatrick argues that the anonymous space of the double-blind peer review is ripe for abuse, manipulation, and uncharitable communications by reviewers and editors.

Fitzpatrick poses what she calls “peer-to-peer” review as an alternative to double-blind pre-publication review. In peer-to-peer review, projects are reviewed openly by a community of respondents, whose replies to the text are visible to the author and to each other.

Examples of recent publications that have used this kind of process include:

Fitzpatrick’s own ­Planned Obsolescence:

Jason Mittell’s Complex Television

Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities, edited by Rebecca Frost Davis, Kathy Harris, Jentery Sayers, and me

Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein’s Data Feminism

And Jeff Maskovsky’s edited collection Beyond Populism: Angry Politics and the Twilight of Neoliberalism

And in the sciences, there are a variety of other models of pre-publication peer review, including ArXiv, F1000 Research, and PLOS One

[Here I spoke extemporaneously about an article published the night before in The New York Times, “The Sounds That Haunted U.S. Diplomats in Cuba? Lovelorn Crickets, Scientists Say,” which was based on a paper published in Biorxiv. The NYT article noted that the paper had not yet been submitted to a scientific journal, but it was already receiving attention in the mainstream press:

You’ll notice a bunch of platforms are commonly used across these examples:

• CommentPress, a theme and plugin for WordPress
• Github, a site for sharing code that has also been used for peer review
• PubPub, a new platform from MIT Press
• And Manifold, a new publishing platform from the University of Minnesota Press and my team at the CUNY Graduate Center

Beyond these peer-to-peer models and platforms lie a set of hybrid options, some of which I’ve explored myself in my collaborative publications. In the Debates in the Digital Humanities book series from the University of Minnesota Press, for instance, all volumes undergo a private community review in which authors review each other’s work, followed by an intensive editorial review process. Special volumes in the series then receive a more traditional blind review administered by the Press.

The community review of the DDH volumes is semi-public. The review site itself is private and viewable only by contributors to the volume.

Reviewers can see author names and authors can see the names of reviewers. All authors can review any piece in book, though they are specifically assigned to one or two pieces themselves.

In early volumes, we simply opened pieces up for general review; for more recent volumes, we have been asking reviewers to leave comments throughout but to reply to a specific set of evaluative questions at the end of the piece.

This process is followed by a revision request in which the editors take account of the feedback, ask authors to revise

Labor

This is all a lot of work. How are we to value the labor of peer-to-peer review?

To begin, we have to acknowledge the situation within which we are working – the way that the internet, and technology more generally, can exacerbate the processes of deskilling and the devaluing of labor.

As Trebor Scholz says in Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory:

“Shifts of labor markets to the Internet are described [in this book] as an intensification of traditional economies of unpaid work”

and

“each rollout of online tools has offered ever more ingenious ways of extracting cheaper, discount work from users and participants”

Scholz and others in that book are obviously talking about the commercial internet, especially as it intersects with social media – the way, for instance, that newspaper sales fell when social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook became a primary space for news consumption.

Of course, there is a clear difference between the business model of a pre-internet content business such as newspaper publishing and the process of academic peer review, which generally does not involve financial compensation (depending on how much one values a few hundred dollars worth of university press books – typical compensation in the academy for reviewing a full book manuscript).

But there are clear connections to the knowledge economy more generally and to issues of crowdsourced labor.

As we ask our colleagues to participate in open community reviews, we need to avoid a situation in which the work of public peer-to-peer review essentially becomes a site of alienated labor. Probably the most dangerous potential for that to happen occurs when work that has gone through open peer review winds up being published by for-profit entities such as Elsevier. In such cases, the labor of peer-to-peer review would certainly resemble the vampiric capital discussed by Marx.

In order to prevent such futures, we might turn to the practices and rhetorics of care as articulated in recent years by a range of scholars such as Bethany Nowviskie, Stephen Jackson, and Lauren Klein, among others.

As Nowviskie puts it in her forthcoming piece “Capacity Through Care,” care can become part of the “design desideratum” for the DH systems we build; we can use it to ensure that the demands of public or semi-public peer review protect the affective and intellectual labor of the participants in the review.

So, how, then, do we structure p2p review processes with care?

Here are some initial thoughts, and I look forward to hearing yours during the Q&A.

Provide review structures

• Contrast with completely open peer review
• Offer specific evaluative questions

Create guidance documents or codes of conduct

• Need to voice expectations of community norms for the review
• For examples, you can look at the Code of Conduct on D’Ignazio and Klein’s Data Feminism book, which links to other resources
• We’ve used the following guidance in DDH

Make conscientious review assignments

• When setting up assignments, consider power and rank differentials, areas of specialization, and other factors to help structure fair and responsible reviews

Offer reporting mechanisms

• Things can and will go wrong. Provide space for backchannel conversations with editors. Develop flagging features for comments

Credit

Part of structuring a review with care involves providing credit to those who lend their labor to it. A number of publication venues have experimented recently with this, such as The Journal of Cultural Analytics

And digital humanities practitioners have been discussing issues of credit at both the professional level and in the classroom. Here we can turn to the Collaborator’s bill of rights, which resulted from a 2011 NEH workshop titled Off the Tracks led by Tanya Clement and Doug Reside, and the student collaborator’s bill of rights , which was developed at UCLA by Haley Di Pressi, Stephanie Gorman, Miriam Posner, Raphael Sasayama, and Tori Schmitt, with additional contributors. Each of these documents show how credit on a project can and should be structured to provide adequate and fair credit to everyone involved in a project.

Community

As we think about models of peer-to-peer review, we need to think about how issues of credit and labor can make it sustainable.

But we also need to think about what it is that we are laboring on – and here I will build a bit on what Kathleen Fitzpatrick said earlier today in the “Transacting DH” panel – that as important as credit is for individual participants, we need to go behind it.

Peer-to-peer review is grounded in community investment and participation

People participate in community reviews when their friends/colleagues are invested in it or when they are intellectually compelled to take part

We have to stop imagining that simply making projects open will make peer-to-peer review viable

We have to go beyond the idea that simply giving people credit, or gamifying community peer review in some way, will make the work sustainable.

Ultimately, what makes peer-to-peer review work is when people have a real link to the people or content involved.

the labor of peer-to-peer review, then, isn’t towards an individual text but to a community. What we need to start taking stock of is community value .

This involves investment in open-source, open access publishing spaces where people have autonomy over their work (Humanities Commons/MLA Commons/Commons in a Box/Manifold/DH Debates, etc)

Ultimately, the labor involved in peer-to-peer review is labor that helps us work towards a better academy, one grounded in Generous Thinking, as Kathleen Fitzpatrick has been arguing for] – in the development of what she calls “community-owned infrastructure.”

We should do this not just because it is the right thing to do, but also because it will produce stronger, more effective peer reviews.

But this is hard work, and the work of community development isn’t particularly glamorous.

It is and can be gratifying, though, and it is labor that matters. It is, quite literally, a credit to the profession; but we have to ensure that the work itself is valued accordingly.

Matthew K. Gold

Out of Sync: Digital Humanities and the Cloud

This is the text of a keynote lecture I gave at DH Congress at the University of Sheffield on September 10, 2016. I’m grateful to Michael Pidd, the University of Sheffield Humanities Research Institute, and the conference organizing committee for inviting me to speak.

* * *

In February 1884, John Ruskin delivered an address to the London Institution titled “The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century.” Ruskin began with a reference to his somewhat ominous title:

Let me first assure my audience that I have no arrière pensée in the title chosen for this lecture. I might, indeed, have meant, and it would have been only too like me to mean, any number of things by such a title;—but, tonight, I mean simply what I have said, and propose to bring to your notice a series of cloud phenomena, which, so far as I can weigh existing evidence, are peculiar to our own times; yet which have not hitherto received any special notice or description from meteorologists.

Ruskin went on, in his lecture, to do just that — to convey his thoughts on clouds based on his sketches and observations of the sky, though at least some audience members and later critics have seen embedded in his remarks a critique of encroaching industrialization. And so, in a talk focused on clouds — which Ruskin elsewhere described with much beauty and care — we see the seeds of a larger political critique.

Were I to “propose to bring to your notice a series of cloud phenomena” that are, in Ruskin’s words, “peculiar to our own times,” we would begin, most likely, not by looking up to the sky, but rather down at our cell phones. We wouldn’t discuss “storm clouds,” or even “clouds,” but rather “THE cloud,” by which we would refer to the distributed set of services, platforms, and networked infrastructures that string trellised connections between our phones, laptops, desktops, and tablets. We would point to the media systems that have caused us to consign our CDs to closets and to sign up for subscription-based music services such as Spotify and Tidal. We would point to Google drives and docs, Twitter hashtags and Facebook feeds, wifi signals, Bluetooth connections, Github repositories, files synced across DropBox, Box, and SpiderOak. Indeed — the sync — the action of connecting to and syncing with the network, of comparing our local files to those on a remote server and updating them to match — might be the signal action of the cloud-based life. We become dependent on, and interdependent with, the network — always incomplete, awaiting sync, ready to be updated. The cloud produces both security and instability, offering back-up services but keeping us always in need of updates. We look to the cloud not to see an alien sky but rather to recover parts of ourselves and to connect or reconnect to our own work.

My aim in this talk is to spend some time thinking with you about the cloud and about what it portends for the digital humanities. But it’s difficult to talk about the cloud without also talking about infrastructure, in part because of the clear ways in which cloud-based services and models are dependent upon physical conduits, things in the world, that belie the cloud’s supposedly abstract, virtual, and ineffable nature. I’d like to draw the DH community’s attention to a set of conversations that are occurring both in DH and also outside of it–in the realm of media studies, and in particular, the growing area of critical infrastructure studies. In connecting these conversations, I want to encourage us to think about how DH work relates to or should relate to issues of infrastructure — particularly as these issues involve larger concerns that have been raised in the humanities about DH work around issues of instrumentalism and neoliberalism. My premise is that thinking about DH work within an infrastructural context may allow us to both focus on the work that DHers do so well — reflexive and theoretically informed building, making, and critique — and to build or rebuild that human, social, and scholarly communications infrastructure upon sturdier grounds of social justice.

—

It’s easy to see that an “infrastructural turn” has been growing over the past year in DH and allied fields. We can see it in evidence in the July 2016 King’s College symposium “Interrogating Infrastructure“; in the recent DH2016 panel on “Creating Feminist Infrastructure in the Digital Humanities”; in DH2016 presentations such as James Smithies “Full Stack DH,” which described his project to build a Virtual Research Environment on a Raspberry Pi; and in experiments such as my own team’s DH Box project. In media studies, we see this infrastructural turn in recent publications such as Tung-Hui Hu’s A Prehistory of the Cloud and Nicole Starosielski’s The Undersea Network; in a renewed focus, generally, on the material nature of computers; in the growth of the field of media archaeology; in calls across the academy to pay more attention to the social and political contexts of digital work; and in efforts to recover the diverse histories of early computing. This work encourages us to take account of computational work as enmeshed in the different levels of the “stack,” Benjamin H. Bratton’s term for the set of infrastructures – media infrastructures, data infrastructures, political infrastructures, physical infrastructures and legal infrastructures — that have accreted over time into an accidental whole through what Bratton calls “planetary scale computing.” As more and more DH work moves to the cloud and becomes dependent on networked infrastructure, thinking about the protocols, dependencies, and inter-dependencies of the Stack can help us fruitfully shape our work as it relates to both allied scholarly disciplines and to larger publics.

What role should the digital humanities play in conversations about infrastructure? What particular insights does work in the field have to contribute to them? And to what extent are DHers already doing the work of infrastructure in the academy broadly, and the humanities more specifically? I will argue in this talk that DHers should engage the Cloud and its associated infrastructures critically, thinking about how the emergence of the Cloud, even as it makes possible new forms of networked connection, also foregrounds multiple risks. It’s my belief, as I’ll detail later on in the talk, that DH should step back and re-consider its use of proprietary social networks, and that it should focus on building alternate forms of scholarly publishing and communication infrastructure that help move us away from proprietary networks where every interaction is always already commodified and where the network effect all too often puts marginalized populations at risk.

In his opening remarks at the “Interrogating Infrastructure” event — an event I did not attend, but which I have at least some sense of thanks to his online notes — ­­Alan Liu positioned the topic of infrastructure as a key future direction for the digital humanities. He argued not just that the topic was well-suited to the field, but that it was one which DH was well-positioned to address. Infrastructure, as the set of social and technological systems undergirding many aspects of networked modern life, for Liu, has the “potential to give us the same general purchase on social complexity that Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, and others sought when they reached for their all-purpose interpretive and critical word, ‘culture.’”

I think Liu is right that DHers can and should pay increased attention to issues of infrastructure and the effects of that infrastructure on the larger communicative and meaning-making networks of contemporary society. And clearly, much work on infrastructure is already blending scholarship in new media studies, science and technology studies, and the digital humanities. I think here of Matthew Kirschenbaum’s work on forensic materiality and software platforms, Lori Emerson’s work on interfaces, Jentery Sayer’s work on prototyping the past, Jussi Parrikka’s work on media archaeology, Simone Browne’s work on surveillance networks and race, and Kari Kraus’s work on speculative design. All of these scholars are already exploring the intersections of infrastructure, platform/material studies, design and new media.

The past year has been notable within the emerging field of infrastructure studies, as scholars in the fields of new media studies and science and technology studies have published a range of books that put the infrastructure of the Cloud into theoretical and infrastructural contexts. Across four of those books — Nicole Starosielski’s The Undersea Network; Tung-Hui Hu’s A Prehistory of the Cloud; John Durham Peters’s The Marvelous Clouds; and Benjamin H. Bratton’s The Stack — we see a range of approaches:

• An examination of the physical infrastructure underlying virtual networks. Starosielski examines the undersea cables that continue to carry much internet traffic; while Hu looks at how fiber-optic network infrastructure has been “grafted” onto America’s aging railroad track system. In both cases, we see attention paid to the physical infrastructures of the internet that are often overlooked, if not purposefully hidden.

• An exploration of how power plays across networked interfaces, infrastructures, and protocols — and particularly how the traditional laws of the nation-state become confused and overwritten across the liminal space of the web. Starosielski looks at cable stations across the Pacific, exploring past and present effects of colonized states; Hu examines what he calls the “sovereignty of data,” exploring how we “invest the cloud’s technology with cultural fantasies about security and participation.” And Bratton delineates, as I’ve noted earlier, the various layers of what he calls “the Stack.” In Bratton’s view, computation itself has become a “global infrastructure [that] contributes to an ungluing and delamination of land, governance, and territory, one from the other” (14).

• A connection, drawn by Peters through what he calls “infrastructuralism,” of computing technologies and the environment. This involves partly a consideration of the effect of computing technology on the environment — what Bratton calls “the ponderous heaviness of Cloud computing” — and partly, through Peters’s book, a consideration of media as environment, as space and place through which we move.

Across all of these works, we see concerns over issues of power, capital and surveillance; the physical and commercial structures through which the phenomenon we refer to as “the network” is built; and the growing sense in which media and networked infrastructures have become constitutive of much of our experience in the world.

The cloud is blurring lines and connecting us in ways that have reshaped conventional boundaries. For instance, As Bratton considers issues of sovereignty, citizenship, the polis, and the network, he ponders the dividing lines between “citizen” and “user,” between subject and state, wondering whether the network itself provides for new understandings of citizenship. He asks:

What if effective citizenship in a polity were granted not according to categoriocal juridical identity but as a shifting status derived from any user’s generic relationship to the machine systems that bind that polity to itself?” In other words, if the interfaces of the city address everyone as a “user,” then perhaps one’s status as a user is what really counts. The right to address and be addressed by the polity would be understood as some shared and portable relationship to common infrastructure. Properly scaled and codified, this by itself would be a significant (if also accidental) accomplishment of ubiquitous computing. From this perhaps we see less the articulation of citizenship for any one city, enclosed behind its walls, but of a “citizen” (Is that even still the right word?) of the global aggregate urban condition, a “citizen-user” of the vast, discontiguous city that striates Earth, built not only of buildings and roads but also perplexing grids and dense, fast data archipelagos. Could this aggregate “city” wrapping the planet serve as the condition, the grounded legitimate referent, from which another, more plasmic, universal suffrage can be derived and designed? Could this composite city-machine, based on the terms of mobility and immobility, a public ethics of energy and electrons, and unforeseeable manifestations of data sovereignty . . . provide for some kind of ambient homeland? If so, for whom and for what? (10, emphasis added)

The questions seething through Bratton’s book — especially those around citizenship, subjectivity, and participation in the techno-sphere – embody the kinds of questions DHers might ask of infrastructure. As enormous forces of capital and computation engender new networked publics around us, to what extent are those publics built on the grounds of equity and social justice? As DHers participate in these new cloud polities, to what extent are we asking Bratton’s question, “for whom and for what,” as we do our work?

DH has always been wildly various and multivalent, and its practices and methods range widely (some see this as a feature; others, as a bug. Count me on the side of those who appreciate DH’s capacious frame). The increasing prevalence of the cloud in our lives and works offers us a chance to intervene in the systems of media and communication developing around us. We can and should ask where and how DH insight might best contribute to scholarly conversations around infrastructure.

One possibility is the work on large-scale text, sound, and image corpora that many DHers — Franco Moretti, Ted Underwood, Tim Hitchcock, Andrew Piper, Richard Jean-So, Mark Algee-Hewitt, Matthew Jockers, Tanya Clement, Lev Manovich, and many others — have been working on, often through larger infrastructural platforms such as the Hathi Trust. Surely, this work involves issues of the cloud, infrastructure, and culture, and surely it builds on methods central to, and perhaps in some ways unique to, DH work. DHers excel at contributing to and taking advantage of this kind of networked infrastructure for scholarly work – look at how a set of national and international scholarly infrastructure projects — such as DARIAH-EU, Compute Canada, Hathi Trust, and Europeana Research — are helping DH researchers do their work at scale and also to participate in larger public conversations.

These platforms, and this type of infrastructural work is important. And they may be the answer for DH as it thinks about cloud-based infrastructure. But – aside from the fact that, as I have argued elsewhere, large-scale text mining too often stands in the public mind as a synecdoche of what DH is and should be — this kind of infrastructural work is sometimes hampered by the complex rights issues that attend cultural heritage materials, and these platforms often have a somewhat problematic relationship to access, offering member institutions one set or quality of resources, and offering the public another. Such platforms often embrace a stance of political neutrality that may be inadequate to the increasing complexity of the cloud. And so — perhaps for those reasons, and perhaps because of the direction of my own work – I’d like to consider other possibilities for DH in the cloud, as well.

Earlier, I noted that the action of the “sync” – the point where the user connects to a cloud-based service such as DropBox, Gmail, iTunes, or Google Docs to upload and download files – as the quintessential act of the cloud. As DHers, we know and recognize that these systems do much more than update files – they check us in with that vast global network of users, update terms of agreement, provide companies with a chance to flag illegal downloads. The sync is as much an act of corporate surveillance as it is an act of routine file maintenance.

As DHers, we know this and to some degree accept this in the same way that we know and accept our participation in proprietary networks like Twitter. It seems at times a cost of living in a cloud-based world.

But when we think about what DH is and what it can be, and of how it might relate to the cloud, we might consider that DHers are, among academics, perhaps best suited to reshape the nature of academic research itself. This work — often described as scholarly communication — has focused on the creation of new publishing interfaces and platforms; on the extension of humanities work to include alternatives to text-based argument; on the use of social media and blogging platforms to share in-process scholarship in public ways; on the consideration of collaborative work in the humanities; and on a reconsideration of what scholarship itself is and should be.

Perhaps the great work of DH is to envision alternate infrastructures for technical and scholarly work that help divorce us from systems of entrenched capital, that help move us away from our shared dependence on the set of proprietary service platforms — Twitter, Facebook, Github, Slack, Academia.edu — that have dominated scholarly communication in the humanities (and digital humanities) to date, and to recognize this shared dependence as such. Perhaps a central mission of DH is to build alternate infrastructures that are premised upon social and political understandings of the cloud, as articulated at least in part through scholarship in new media and science and technology studies.

This kind of work could help us address one of the most ironic gestures we see in current critiques of DH: harsh, outraged attacks on the supposed “neoliberalism” of DH, delivered by scholars through commercial proprietary platforms like Facebook and Twitter, or through online publication venues that use clickbait-y headlines to capture page views in the attention economy. It’s hard to see how the platform of delivery of those critiques does not detract at least a bit from their bite.

And yet if we think we are immune from this problem ourselves, we are wrong — this is an issue that affects not just new-media scholars or conservative humanists; it is undeniably present in the digital humanities community, as well. Yes, we have Humanist-L, DH Q&A, personal academic blogs, and multiple scholarly journals that we use to share work in the field. Yes, we are building new venues for open-access publishing such as The Open Library of the Humanities. Yes, we are building out institutional and inter-institutional methods of conversation and connection such as MLA Commons and MLA CORE, not to mention institution-specific repositories.

But DHers also participate actively and enthusiastically in Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Slack, among others. Twitter has, for many, become the de facto meeting ground of the field. And there is an undeniable good here: a strong DH presence on these platforms has enabled DHers to share their work with larger publics. But they also suggest a missed opportunity for scholarly communication and a regrettable participation in the larger systems of capital accumulation that DH could potentially resist.

In “The Scandal of Digital Humanities,” Brian Greenspan’s response to “Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities,” published by Daniel Allington, Sarah Brouillette, and David Golumbia in the L.A. Review of Books, Greenspan argues that digital humanities work is fundamentally aligned against the “strictly economic logic’ of neoliberalism; he notes that much DH work resists the “pressure to commercialize” and in fact involves “either detourning commercial tools and products for scholarly purposes, or building Open Access archives, databases and platforms.” Greenspan remarks sardonically that that is why so many DH projects are “so often broken, unworking or unfinished, and far from anything ‘immediately usable by industry.'”

DH work, as Alan Liu and others have argued, presents to the academy a mode of engagement between the humanities and computational methods and tools that is self-reflexive and empowering. Building on that notion, Greenspan argues that:

DH involves close scrutiny of the affordances and constraints that govern most scholarly work today, whether they’re technical (relating to media, networks, platforms, interfaces, codes and databases), social (involving collaboration, authorial capital, copyright and IP, censorship and firewalls, viral memes, the idea of “the book,” audiences, literacies and competencies), or labour-related (emphasizing the often hidden work of students, librarians and archivists, programmers, techies, RAs, TAs and alt-ac workers).

“If anything,” Greenspan notes, “DH is guilty of making all too visible the dirty gears that drive the scholarly machine, along with the mechanic’s maintenance bill. . . .And that’s precisely its unique and urgent potential: by providing the possibility of apprehending these mechanisms fully, DH takes the first steps toward a genuinely materialist and radical critique of scholarship in the 21st century.”

To the extent that this critique can be baked into the building that digital humanists do — and I do think that that is one of the key aims of DH as a field and practice, particularly in the age of the cloud — Greenspan helps us see DH’s potential contribution to questions of infrastructure. Digital humanities work can indeed help us reposition the infrastructure of scholarship away from the formations we now have in place and towards a more purposeful, and more resistant digital humanism that is grounded not just in non-commercial practices, but in anti-commercial practices. In this way, the strength of DH, its ability to peek into the black box of technological platforms, can be strengthened and can help the academy as it faces the onslaught of techno-capital from all sides. The need for this kind of work is urgent, as the drumbeat of constant reductions in state funding, certainly felt here in England but also in the U.S., force institutions to adopt austerity measures of various kinds.

To some degree, DH is already doing this kind of work—and I don’t want to erase the important contributions of these projects by failing to mention them. For example, we can look at a range of representative projects — Zotero, which has provided an effective alternative to costly bibliographic software; Omeka, which has created an easy way to present cultural heritage objects; Mukurtu, which is designed specifically to take account of diverse cultural attitudes towards the sharing of heritage materials; Scalar, which encourages multi-modal and non-linear argument; Domain of One’s Own, which helps students familiarize themselves with hosting infrastructure and take some measure of control over their online persona; and a few of the projects I have been involved in — Manifold Scholarship, which is creating a new open-source platform for interactive scholarly monographs; Commons In A Box, which provides a free platform for academic social networks; DH Box, which opens DH computing software to communities without technical DH infrastructure; and Social Paper, which is planting seeds that may one day help us move away from Google docs. Across all of these projects are the beginnings of an infrastructure for shared scholarly work that offer alternatives to commercial environments and platforms.

And yet, as Miriam Posner has noted, “the digital humanities [still] actually borrows a lot of its infrastructure . . . from models developed for business applications.” For many, the mere fact that DH involves the kind of technical training that may be very much in line with marketplace demands is evidence of its complicity with the forces of neoliberalism in the academy. How can we ensure that the infrastructure DH builds is self-reflexive infrastructure for scholarly practice and communication; that its builders ask themselves Bratton’s question — for whom and for what — at every turn; that it foreground humanistic research questions and resist the persistent encroachment of capital into higher education?

I don’t have answers, but I can suggest starting points:

• We need a re-articulation of DH technical practice as essentially reflexive endeavor. DHers tend to approach technological systems by seeking to understand them, to historicize them, to unpack the computational and ethical logics that structure them. This gives DHers a good starting place for building out more ethical tools for scholarly communication. But we need to make this case more powerfully to the public.

• We need open and robust conversations about inclusive practices. As recent years have shown, DHers need to pay careful attention to the make-up of their own projects and conferences, seeking to counter the forces of structural racism and gender bias. We might move this conversation forward by consciously seeking to expand our project teams and ensure that our projects engage issues diversity and difference.

• We should expand our notions of what we mean by infrastructure, Jacqueline Wernimont’s argument at DH2016 in her talk “Feminist Infrastructure as Metamorphic Infrastructure.” There, Jacque described a concept of feminist infrastructure that commits to people, that is built upon relational accountability, that embeds ideals of collaboration, collectivity, and care, and that, as Jacque notes about FemTechNet’s charter, foregrounds pedagogies that are anti-racist, queer, decolonizing, trans-feminist, and focused on civil rights.

• We should continue to build infrastructures and infrastructural conversations that encourage the growth of global DH; Alex Gil’s minimal computing is a wonderful example of this, in that it is an infrastructural philosophy and set of technological platforms — such as Ed, his Jekyll theme designed to produce minimal textual editions. The Gacaca Community Justice archive that we heard about from Marilyn Deegan on Thursday is another wonderful example of this.

• That we speak more about, and continue to think through, the kind of education and training that many of us provide for our colleagues and students at our universities, and to situate that work within the context of critical pedagogy, ensuring that when we teach our students, we do so by emphasizing humanities values. Our students need to use DH methods to explore and explicate ambiguity rather than to flatten it. I think we do this already, but our academic colleagues sometimes miss this point.

• That we take seriously the proposition put forward by Geoffrey Rockwell and Stephen Ramsay that for digital projects to be taken seriously, they have to make arguments. And to the extent that they can make arguments in their conception and function, they will help explain what DH is and can be.

And that, I think, is the challenge for DH infrastructure: it needs to make an argument, and it needs to make an argument through its projects, as Tara McPherson argued in 2010. Many of the projects I mentioned above do just that — think of Alex Gil’s minimal computing, of that way it embeds an argument about access and infrastructure into its codebase. Think about James Smithies attempts to build a virtual research environment on a cheap and affordable Raspberry Pi. Consider the DH Box’s team to make DH tools available to institutions that don’t have reliable networked infrastructure. Consider how Commons In A Box offers academics an alternative to Facebook, and how it has been used by scholarly associations such as Modern Language Association to build out alternates to corporate sites like academia.edu.

There are limits, of course. DH Box, though it is available free software, currently runs through Amazon Web Hosting. Domains of One’s Own similarly is a project that is ultimately based on commercial web hosting space. As Tung-Hui Hu reminds us, network infrastructure is often literally laid on top of older commercial infrastructure. It’s hard to live completely off the commercial grid, to live on the bare wires of the network – especially if we want to be involved in larger public conversations. The cloud calls to us to sync with it, and that call is hard to resist.

And there are other challenges. Free software communities, at least those in the US with which I am most familiar, are dominated by white males and are not always welcoming to women and minorities (something that I think and hope is changing through organizations such as PyLadies, Black Girls Code, and similar organizations).

And the work is painful. We are using Twitter, and not Diaspora or App.net, for a reason. The slick, seductive surfaces, the smooth user interfaces of commercial social media platforms are not just hard to resist — they are where other conversations are happening. Removing ourselves from those platforms would cost DHers exposure — and, were more academics to follow — would risk moving academic discourse even farther from the public sphere than it already is.

But as Eben Moglen pointed out in his talk “Freedom in the Cloud” — the talk that inspired a group of NYU undergrads to create the twitter alternative Diaspora — when we use Gmail, it comes with the “free” service of semantic email analysis by Google for Google; that when we get free email and document storage we get a “free” service which is “spying all the time.” That location-based tweets may be used to squash protest. We know this – everyone knows this – but we could do more to combat the force of the commercial cloud.

DH can and will be useful to the humanities and to the academy. But it has the opportunity to consider what the next generation of scholarly communication platforms is and can be. It has the opportunity, and perhaps the responsibility, to approach questions of infrastructure with political and social contexts in mind — to consider, for instance, how its infrastructure can be modeled, to use language from Elizabeth Losh, Jacqueline Wernimont, Laura Wexler, Hong-An Wu upon feminist values, embracing “genuinely messy, heterogeneous, and contentious pluralism” in its design. Or, to return to the cloud, to offer us new visions of what it means to sync with the cloud and with the world. DH can and perhaps should be a primary force for resisting the entrance of capital into the ecosystem of educational institutions, by insisting upon critical engagements with commercial technologies. We can and must interrupt the sync.

Resisting the smooth services of the corporate web — building tools, platforms, and communities that embrace core humanities values of discourse, dialogue, inclusivity, and intellectual exchange — perhaps represent another side of what Miriam Posner has called the “radical, unrealized potential of the digital humanities.”

Were we to engage in that work — and I think we are already doing it, just not as purposefully and mindfully as we might — we would in fact have made a significant contribution to the world and would perhaps help dissipate the storm clouds of our times.

* * *

I’m grateful to Lauren F. Klein, Kari Kraus, and Brian Croxall for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

What follows is the text of a short talk I gave at the 2012 MLA as part of the session Composing New Partnerships in the Digital Humanities. Many thanks to session organizer Catherine Prendergast, my fellow panelists, and everyone who took part in the discussion in person or through twitter.

Like my fellow panelists, I joined this session because I’d like to see an increased level of communication and collaboration between digital humanists and writing-studies scholars. There is much to be gained from the kinds of partnerships that such collaborations might foster, and much for members of both fields to learn from one another. I suspect that most people in this room today agree upon that much.

So, why haven’t such partnerships flourished? What issues, misconceptions, lapses, and tensions are preventing us from working together more closely?

A shared history of marginalization

Both comp/rhet and the digital humanities scholars have existed at the margins of traditional disciplinary formations in ways that have shaped their perspectives. Writing Studies has a history of being perceived as the service wing of English departments. Beyond heavy course loads, the field is sometimes seen as being more applied than theoretical – this despite the fact that writing studies has expanded into areas as diverse as complexity theory, ecocriticism, and object-oriented rhetoric.

The digital humanities, meanwhile, arose out of comparably humble origins. After years of inhabiting the corners of literature departments, doing the kinds of work, such as scholarly editing, that existed on the margins of English departments, humanities computing scholars emerged, blinking and bit disoriented, into the spotlight as digital humanists. Now the subject of breathless articles in the popular academic press and the recipients of high-profile research grants, DHers have found their status suddenly elevated. One need only look at the soul-searching blog posts that followed Bill Pannapacker’s suggestion at the last MLA that DH had created a cliquish star-system to see a community still coming to terms with its new position.

I bring up these points not to reopen old wounds, but rather to point out that they have a common source: a shared focus on the sometimes unglamorous, hands-on activities such as writing, coding, teaching, and building. This commonality is important, and it’s something, well, to build on, not least of all because we face a common problem as we attempt to help our colleagues understand the work we do.

Given what we share, it’s surprising to me that so many writing-studies scholars seem to misunderstand what DH is about. Recent discussions of the digital humanities on the tech-rhet listserv, one of the primary nodes of communication among tech-minded writing-studies scholars, show that many members of the comp/rhet community see DH as a field largely focused on digitization projects, scholarly editions, and literary archives. Not only is this a limited and somewhat distorted view of DH, it’s also one that is especially likely to alienate writing-studies scholars, emphasizing as it does the DH work done within the very traditional literary boundaries that were used to marginalize comp/rhet in previous decades.

This understanding of DH misses some key elements of this emerging field:

1. Its collaborative nature, which is also central to comp/rhet teaching and research;
2. The significant number of digital humanists who, like me, focus their work not on scholarly editions and textual mark-up, but rather on networked platforms for scholarly communication and networked open-source pedagogy;
3. The fact that the digital humanities are open in a fundamental way, both through open-access scholarship and through open-source tool building;
4. The fact that DH, too, has what Bethany Nowviskie has called an “eternal September” – a constantly refreshed group of newbies who seem to emerge and ask the same sorts of basic questions that have been asked and answered before. We need to respond to such questions not by becoming frustrated that newcomers have missed citations to older work – work that may indeed be outside of their home disciplines – but rather by demonstrating how and why that past work remains relevant in the present moment.
5. The fact that there is enormous interest right now in the digital humanities on networked pedagogy. This is a key area of shared interest in which we should be collaborating.
6. The fact that DH is interdisciplinary and multi-faceted. To understand it primarily as the province of digital literary scholars is to miss the full range of the digital humanities, which involves stakeholders from disciplines such as history, archaeology, classical studies, and, yes, English, and as well as librarians, archivists, museum professionals, developers, designers, and project managers.

   In this sense, I’d like to recall a recent blog post by University of Illinois scholar Ted Underwood, who argued that DH is “a rubric under which a bunch of different projects have gathered — from new media studies to text mining to the open-access movement — linked mainly by the fact that they are responding to related kinds of fluidity: rapid changes in representation, communication, and analysis that open up detours around some familiar institutions.”

To respond to DH work by reasserting the disciplinary boundaries of those “familiar institutions,” as I believe some writing-studies scholars are doing, is to miss an opportunity for the kinds of shared endeavors that are demanded by our moment.

So, let’s begin by looking towards scholars who have begun to bridge these two fields and think about the ways in which they are moving us forward. I’m thinking here of hybrid comp-rhet/DH scholars like Alex Reid, Jentery Sayers, Jamie “Skye” Bianco, Kathie Gossett, Liz Losh, William Hart-Davidson, and Jim Ridolfo, all of whom are finding ways to blend work in these fields.

I’d like to close with some words from Matt Kirschenbaum, who reminds us, in his seminal piece, “What is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing In English Departments,” that “digital humanities is also a social undertaking.” That is, I think Matt is saying, that DH is not just a series of quantitative methodologies for crunching texts or bunch of TEI markup tags, but rather a community that is in a continual act of becoming. We all need to do a better job of ensuring that our communities are open and of communicating more clearly with one another. This session, I hope, is a start.