0.20 The idols of scholarly publishing  (Page 5/6)

Social psychologists have also thought deeply about the potent grip of these Idols of the Tribe. They are aware of how cultural norms establish and propagate themselves, and tell us how the imposition of limits creates hierarchies of recognition. Thinking in their way, along with the way the web works, one potential solution on the demand side might come not from the scarcity of production, as it did in a print world, but from the scarcity of attention. That is, value will be perceived in any community-accepted process that narrows the seemingly limitless texts to read or websites to view. Again, curation becomes more important than publication once publication ceases to be limited.

The idols of the marketplace

Price’s frank discussion of sustaining digital projects like the Whitman Archive and Civil War Washington shows two paths to success. The former has had a strong series of funding and is building an endowment; the latter, sweat equity and a good home in an established digital humanities center. Similarly, I have become increasingly convinced that sustainability is most likely at the high and low ends of digital project cost structures, a conclusion also reached by Ithaka in two recent reports on sustaining digital resources. Nancy L. Maron, K. Kirby Smith, and Matthew Loy, “Sustaining Digital Resources: An On-the-Ground View of Projects Today” (Ithaka Case Studies in Sustainability, July 2009), available at (External Link) ; Kevin Guthrie, Rebecca Griffiths, and Nancy Maron, “Sustainability and Revenue Models for Online Academic Resources” (Strategic Content Alliance/Ithaka, May 2008), available at (External Link) .

On the low end, advances in creating, hosting, and maintaining a website have come down sharply over the last decade. Even if Price did not have access to servers and bandwidth at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, he and his colleagues working on the site could run it for a few dollars a month and their labor. The advent of high-quality, open-source content management systems such as Drupal, WordPress, and (if I may) Omeka, all of which include plugins for once-complex elements such as maps as well as themes that make them look professionally designed, make it far easier and less costly than it once was to produce a scholarly website.

Of course, as Price notes, there is no free lunch. Many “low cost” digital projects are hosted at digital humanities centers that spread costs (such as running a server) over many projects. The time given by faculty and technical staff—often at the margins of their “regular” work—add up to significant hidden costs that can become troubling if staff move on or the center loses overall funding. On the other hand, the act of freely giving labor is a time-honored way of supporting scholarship. We already give our free labor for the peer review of books and articles. Ithaka also points to “in-kind support from host institutions,” “outsourcing and partnerships,” and “harnessing volunteer efforts” (evidently under consideration by Price and the Civil War Washington Project) as ways to minimize direct costs and do it on the cheap. Maron et al., “Sustaining Digital Resources,” 17-20.