0.1 Sustainability: the elephant in the room  (Page 7/12)

Fitzpatrick is an energetic voice, and the practical cast of her mind is particularly refreshing. But plans for institutional changes that can actually be implemented need to rest in a comprehensive view of the scholarly scene. “To the degree that scholarship is about participating in an exchange of ideas with one’s peers, new networked publishing structures can facilitate that interaction,” as Fitzpatrick says, and the interaction will work “best . . . if the discussion is ongoing, always in process.”

But implicit in that argument is a presentist view of scholarship that needs expanding. Our peers are both “the noble living and the noble dead.” All of our ongoing discussions are rooted in the past even as they are executed in the present. That’s why the crisis in the humanities is only partly—and I suspect not primarily—about tenure, promotion, and the obstacles to a current “exchange of ideas.” It is about sustaining what Raymond Williams, a great scholar as well as a great critic, might have called “The Long E volution”—if he had thought about the problem of culture as a socio-scholarly instead of a socio-literary problem, and if he had addressed it from an E lectronic vantage point.

A Long View: this is what scholars have traditionally taken and it is still What Scholars Want, or what they ought to want, now. A Long View stretches back to the period before copyright—a territory being overrun by Google and other vendors. But it also stretches back to that middle distance where so much of our scholarship was print-published, and where copyright restrictions are such a hindrance to digital initiatives. Consider that proposals are now being drawn up to generate searchable PDF files of the in-copyright backlists of academic presses. Consider that this is precisely not to take a long view but a short view—one that responds to the financial difficulty of digitizing such works by avoiding the more basic needs of scholarship and education. You can look at and think about PDF files, you can even data-mine them—or at any rate some of them. But you can’t work with or repurpose them to any depth. For that you need structured data: TEI or XML files, databases, and ontological schemas that organize information’s metadata. Traditional scholars can easily imagine that these are the requirements of digital pedants. But it isn’t so. Scholars need these things because structure introduces explicitly historical dimensions into the material. Even Google takes a longer view of its digital migration of books than do vendors, proprietary or open source, who resort to PDF.

Or reflect on the short view that pervades much of the thinking about (and practice with) “Web 2.0” and the enthusiasm for various kinds of “networked collaboration.” Is “Web 2.0” simply “a piece of jargon,” as Tim Berners-Lee has mordantly remarked? See the 2006 developerWorks interview with Berners-Lee: (External Link) I think the answer to that question hangs upon how the scholarly community actually works, as a community, with web resources. So far the signs are only minimally encouraging. Because the roots of social networking are in online practices like Flickr and other folksonomies, the considerable scholarly potential of collaborative technology remains a pursuit.