Doing it in public: Impact, blogging, social media and the academy

The text below is derived from a short talk I gave in February for the Library at the University of Sussex.  At the time (and in the text) I promised to post it as a blog, but never quite found the time. 

Impact is an awkward thing in British Higher Education.  Most of the time it feels like just one more bludgeon used to batter hapless academics into submission.  It is frequently shorthand for an agenda handed down from on high, privileging near-market research and the agendas of government.  And yet no one spends a lifetime researching, teaching and writing about something if they don't believe it is important - if they don't believe that what they do contributes to a better world. We all want to have 'impact'.  The question is how can we do so in a way that reflects our own values, rather than those of whatever government happens to be in power this week?

This question is all the more important because our traditional assumptions about how our work effects a broader social discourse seem increasingly threadbare.  When the print run of most monographs number just a few hundred copies (most of which disappear in to American research libraries, never to be read or used), and when journal articles proliferate beyond number because they serve the needs of big publishing, rather than academic dialogue - we need to think harder about how we do the job of the humanities.  If we simply continue in an older vein - having small (vociferous) conversations amongst ourselves, in professional seminars and at conferences, through book reviews and in the specialist hard copy press - we will lose our place in the broader social dialog. If there is a 'crisis' in the humanities, it lies in how we have our public debates, rather than in their content. 

It seems to me that the solution to this problem is all around us, and that in order to address it, we need to remember that the role of the academic humanist has always been a public one - however mediated through teaching and publication.   By building blogging, and twitter, flickr, and shared libraries in Zotero, in to our research programmes - into the way we work anyway - we both get more research done, and build a community of engaged readers for the work itself.  We can do what we have always done, but do it better; as a public performance, in dialog amongst ourselves, and with a wider public.

The best (and most successful) academics  are the ones who are so caught up in the importance of their work, so caught up with their simple passion for a subject, that they publicise it with every breadth. Twitter and blogs, and embarrassingly enthusiastic drunken conversations at parties, are not add-ons to academic research, but a simple reflection of the passion that underpins it.  

A lot of early career scholars, in particular, worry that exposing their research too early, in too public a manner, will either open them to ridicule, or allow someone else to 'steal' their ideas.  But in my experience, the most successful early career humanists have already started building a form of public dialog in to their academic practise - building an audience for their work, in the process of doing the work itself.  

Perhaps the best example of this is Ben Schmidt, and his hugely influential blog: Sapping Attention.  His blog posts contributed to his doctorate, and will form part of his first book.  In doing this, he has crafted one of the most successful academic careers of his generation - not to mention the television consultation business, and world-wide intellectual network.

Or Helen Rogers, whose maintains two blogs: Conviction: Stories from a Nineteenth-Century Prison - on her own research; and also the collaborative blog, Writing Lives, created as an outlet for the work of her undergraduates. They bring together research and teaching, and in the process are building a substantial community of interest.

Or Adam Crymble and his blog - Thoughts on Public & Digital History - where he melds practical posts addressing straightforward DH problems, with substantial interventions in policy.  Crymble's recent appointment to a lectureship in digital history rested in large measure on his blog.  

The list could go on.  The Many Headed Monster, the collective blog authored by Brodie Waddell, Mark Hailwood,  Laura Sangha and Jonathan Willis, is rapidly emerging as one of the sites where 17th century British history is being re-written.   While Jennifer Evans is writing her next book via her blog, Early Modern Medicine.

The most impressive thing about these blogs (and the academic careers that generate them), is that there is no waste - what starts as a blog, ends as an academic output, and an output with a ready-made audience, eager to cite it.

For myself the point is that these scholars don't waste text, and neither do I.  If I give a talk, I turn it into a blog. Not everything is blogged, but the vast majority of the public presentations I make as part of my job, will be.  And while many of these texts will never contribute to an academic article, about half of them do.   As a result blogging has become part of my own contribution to what I think of as an academic public sphere.  It becomes a way of thinking in public and revising ones work, to make it better, in public.  And knowing that there is an audience (whatever its size), changes how one does it - forcing you to think a little harder about the reader, and to think a little harder about the standards of record keeping and attribution that underpin your research.  

One of my favourite blogging experiences involves embedding blogs in undergraduate assessment.  By forcing students to write 'publicly', their writing rapidly improves.  From being characterized by the worst kind of bad academic prose - all passive voice pomposity - undergraduate writing in blogs is frequently transformed in to something more engaging, simply written, and to the point.  From writing for the eyes of an academic or two,  students are forced to imagine (or actually confront) a real audience.  Blogging has the same effect on more professional academic writers - many of whom assume that if the content is good, the writing somehow doesn't matter.

But as importantly, blogs are part of establishing a public position, and contributing to a debate.  

Twitter is in some ways the same - or at least, like blogging, twitter is good for making communities, and finding collaborators; and letting other people know what you are doing.  But, it also has another purpose.  

Dan Cohen - the director of the Digital Public Library of America - always says about Twitter that the important thing is that at the end of the week, it makes you aware of all the publications  and developments, calls for papers, and conferences, you need to know about in order to keep up with your corner of the academy. It is not about what you had for breakfast.  It is about being on top of your field.

Between them, twitter and blogging just make good academic sense.  And while you need to avoid all the kittens and trolls, click bate and self-promoting gits, these forms of social media are rapidly evolving in to the places where the academic community is embodied.  They are doing the job of the seminar, and the letters page.  They are where our conversation is happening.

And on participating in this 'academic public sphere', there are only a few rules.  First - be yourself.  If you want credit, you have to own your material.  In other words, never be anonymous.  And second, remember that everything from Academia.edu, to Twitter, to Facebook and Flickr, is a form of publication, and should be taken seriously as such.  If you would not say it in an academic review, or in the questions following a public lecture, don't say it on Twitter.

And finally, keep track of it.  Use GoogleAnalytics, or something similar.  Know who you are talking to.  This involves nothing more challenging than cutting and pasting four lines of code, but provides more data, at a more granular level than you can possibly need.  

All of which is simply to say, that social media are building in to what feels like an increasingly coherent environment reflecting communities of interest - allowing us, online, to be just what we claim to be the rest of the time - a community of scholars.  The objections - which usually come down to the fear that someone will steal your ideas, your work, your credit - are best addressed by doing it in public.  And in the process there is every hope that we can rebuild the humanities as a wider public discussion, able to more effectively reach beyond the academy - to have 'impact'.  

Judging a book by its URLs

It will sound odd, but I have recently had a great time editing URLs.  Robert Shoemaker and I have have just finished a book for CUP, derived from the London Lives project, and called - London Lives: Poverty, Crime and the Making of a Modern City, 1690-1800. It is a long book (170,000 words) and each quote and reference in it is linked via a URL to the original document or article, book or web-resource used as evidence or to contextualize the argument.  It will be published as both an ebook and in hard copy, and the links need to be robust, and secure.  My estimate is that there are in the region of 4,000 URLs included in the manuscript (which was written collaboratively in PMWiki).  In the end, I found that I could identify an appropriate link for 98% of all footnote references, but then had to eliminate around 10% of these, as the relevant URL was just not useable.  The book took some nine years, and I am glad it is finished.

One of my final jobs was editing those 4000 URLs.   It took about three months work, spread over the last year, and I have just finished spending a week or so confirming what I hope will be their final form.  When I have told people about this work many have looked incredulous and suggested that this is the sort of technical implementation process that should be left to others.  A couple of otherwise nice people have suggested I dump this job on the shoulders of the nearest PhD student.  But for myself, it is precisely the kind of thing that an author should do for themselves.  And in doing it, two things kept coming to mind.  First was how the role of the scholar in creating a rigorous academic apparatus is a central part of the intellectual journey that academic writing involves - and that we should see the implementation of the online version of this in the light of the precise writing of footnotes and references that mark out good scholarship.  And second, that URLs encode a system of design and intent, online architecture and system of access, that signal the quality and permanence (the academic credibility and perceived audience) of historical materials online.  And that just as we have always sorted and judged scholarship by its form, we should think a bit harder about how the form of a URL can let us interrogate online materials.

On the first point, I do not know of much discussion of the joys of this kind of academic slog.  There is a lot of good writing on research and archives (by Carolyn Steedman and Arlette Farge among many others), on writing and thinking, but no-one talks much about the painstaking labour that goes in to turning a rough draft in to a final finished piece of scholarship.  And here I am really talking about generating accurate and fully comprehensive footnotes that reflect both the material cited, and the research journey that resulted in the main text.   This has become much easier with online catalogs and citation management packages, but nevertheless remains laborious and a reflection of our collective and individual commitment to a particular kind of evidenced discussion.  But for me it also represents my favourite compromise.  The writing of history is a wonderfully imaginative and creative process.  And in some respects we wish to judge the product of history writing as art.  Is it enjoyable to read? Is it convincing?  Does it do the job of good writing in liberating the readers' imagination?  In making these judgements we tend to appeal to a notion of 'value' that is cultural and that privileges dominant forms of authority.  This aspect of judgement is essentially romantic; with all the implications for western and elite hegemony embedded in that idea.  At the same time history writing is the result of simple hard work of a more technical kind - in the archives, in collating and collecting, re-ordering and interrogating data.  And it is valuable because it encompasses that hard work.  The beauty of the academic apparatus is that it evidences this and in the process generates a different measure of value.  In other words it is where quality is tied to a 'labour theory of value'.  I love the academic slog because it is where un-moored judgement is tied down to hard labour; and where value can be universalized in a common human experience (work).  In other words I really enjoyed editing 4000 URLs precisely because in them and their associated footnotes lies a claim to and evidence of the hard labour that underpins the book itself.

 At the same time, the process also taught me to read URLs differently.  Clearly coders and web designers do this as a matter of course.  But I am a historian and want to read URLs as a scholar, rather than as a programmer or designer.  And for me, the important thing is that URLs embed the structure of a site, making it plain to see for anyone willing to look hard; and that they are made up of both the character of a library reference, and a command directed at the new technology of discovery - the Internet .  There are just lots of different types of URL.

There are 'Search URLs' that include all the elements that  take the user past a collection to a specific object, but don't let you go directly there without the query.  And there are URLs that encode a cataloging hierarchy.  There are URLs that sift data, or work in your browser to change the data delivered, highlighting phrases or sifting material.  And there are URLs that encode licensing, passwords, and access information.  It is easy enough to find that the whole search journey that took you from a library catalog to an individual item is encoded directly in the URL, and even personalized to you, the machine you are using, or the forms of access you can deploy.  It is easy to find URLs that run on for hundreds of characters, each element divided by a '&' or a '%', or such.

But in creating robust reproducible links to credible historical materials most of these URLs are at least problematic if not useless.  If they include details for institutional access, or session information, they cannot be re-used by someone else.  These URLs are friable and fragile things and not fit for scholarly purposes.  And as a result, for the London Lives book we have been forced to eliminate all the links we originally hoped to include to forty or fifty different sites.  To take a single example, most archives structure their online collections with search in mind, making it difficult to link to a single item.  I spent a lot of time finding the catalog entry for every manuscript we cited in the London Metropolitan Archives, and Westminster Archives Centre, only to regretfully strip out the links when confronted by a complex URL that just did not look credible as a long term citation of the item itself.

Even in its simplest, and in the form recommended by the site for sharing a link, a London Metropolitan Archives URL looks like this:

http://search.lma.gov.uk/scripts/mwimain.dll/144/LMA_OPAC/web_detail/REFD+P69~2FBRI~2FB~2F001~2FMS06554~2F004?SESSIONSEARCH


Since we had consulted these items in their physical form in any case, it did not seem too problematic to leave out these links, but a shame nevertheless.  And likewise, with paywall material there seemed little point in dangling real access, and the promise of credible evidence, before the eyes of readers who would not be able to go beyond the login screen.  It seemed better to cite a specific item in combination with a general (unlinked) URL and date of consultation as reflecting our own research journey, rather than to promise access when we could not deliver it.

With few exceptions the URLs that have been retained (and there are still 4000 of them) address specific items with a specific ID, and usually run to 20 to 40 characters.  DOIs are not bad once you figure out their structure and reformulate them as they should be, rather than the way they are normally cited on journal web pages.

dx.doi.org/10.1353/sec.2010.0268

And Google Books creates a very nice URL once you strip out all the complex formatting instructions that are normally generated as part of a search and inserted after the main ID.  This is what a Google Books' URL looks like if you were to use the 'search' version:

 http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=1sMJGt7_rTAC&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22Prosecution+and+Punishment:+Petty+Crime+and+the+Law%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=rrzGUq_aDsSy7Aa_9YGQCg&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=%22Prosecution%20and%20Punishment%3A%20Petty%20Crime%20and%20the%20Law%22&f=false

And this URL will take to the same book:

 books.google.co.uk/books?id=1sMJGt7_rTAC

 And the Eighteenth-century Short Title Catalog generates some of the most elegant URLs I have found:

estc.bl.uk/T174945

And to a lesser extent, so does the Ethos collection of doctoral theses at the British Library.

ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.354762

And London Lives and the Old Bailey Online do pretty well on this score:

www.londonlives.org/browse.jsp?div=LMSMPS501980014
http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?ref=t17910413-19


In part, I suspect that these issues would all disappear if I had a better sense of the layer of structure that lies beneath the WWW.  But for the moment I am keen to have a short, human-readable URL that looks like it will last longer than the session I am currently logged on for.   All of which simply takes me back to the joy of academic slogging and the importance of the academic apparatus as something that evidences hard work and opens up scholarship to credible criticism that goes beyond simple romantic appreciation and prejudice.

I know all too well that one of the skills of an academic is the ability to judge a book by its cover and the form of the text it contains.   For the online we need to embed URLs into precisely this process - and the joy of all that editing was that at the end of it, I feel I have learned to do just that.

Drills and holes

I have just spent a couple of days at the annual conference of the NFAIS (National Federation of Advanced Information Services) in Philadelphia.  I was giving a brief paper at the request of the good people at the British Library about developments in text mining in the Humanities, and I was happy to be invited and to participate.

But it was only when I had sat through a day or two of presentations that I realised just how out of place I was, and how irrelevant my comments were.  It turns out the NFAIS is the trade organisation for all the companies (and some libraries) that have been building a commercial operation for a hundred years by placing themselves between information and those who need it.  Thompson-Reuters were heavily represented, as was Cengage/Gale, several medical abstracting services, and a host of companies providing data to particular sectors of the economy such as the building trades and architects.   And they were all presenting their well articulated models of data gathering and manipulation designed to deliver a pablum of stuff to the desktops of America's commercial movers, shakers and capitalists.  Interestingly, the people who weren't there, were Google, Facebook, Twitter, the Creative Commons or representatives of the Open Access movement.  Neither new model capitalists, nor Open Access evangelists were present.  And while there was a strand of discussion focussed on research and academic library services, this was a small corner of an essentially old style commercial ecology.  Nor were the real innovations in data modelling and analysis coming out of CS on display.  A constant sub-theme of the conference seemed to be a tetchy criticism of Google for having done a half-arsed job of inter-mediating between data and users, while the Twitter stream for this event was almost non-existent.  It was clear that these data professionals were having their conversation somewhere else - though I never did find out where. 

There was a lot of talk about Altmetrics as a way of adding value to the data people already had, prior to selling it to the managers of research and education.  And the theme of the event appeared to be a call to extend a hundred year old business model to ensure that these companies were delivering precisely the data that people needed (rather than what they thought they wanted), in a form that allowed them to use that data without thinking.  The controlling metaphor was - people buy a drill, because they really want a hole.

I was bemused by this.  I don't want a hole.  I want a drill, a hammer, a saw and a workshop to make stuff in.  And I certainly don't want anyone else to second guess what it is I am making (perhaps wonky, but original).

And then it occurred to me where my disconnect came from.  The NFAIS and the companies they represent derive from a long and largely American tradition of late Enlightenment data processing.  Their origins lie in Union Catalogues and abstracting services via microfilm; in creating a pre-digested, post-Enlightenment world of understood data, that could be packaged and catalogued and sold as yard after yard of uniform reference volumes. NFAIS used to stand for the National Federation of Abstracting and Information Services. I have always put the American obsession with this kind of thing down to its inability to get over the European Enlightenment long after the rest of us got bored.

My overwhelming impression was that all these companies were anxious to widen the gap between data and its users, to ensure that they continued to have a role and an income - tapping the stream between the two for annual profit.  Some of the work was reasonably sophisticated (though most of it felt more 'relational database' than anything more innovative), and it was clear that many saw the way forward as providing faster access to real-time data in a form that would become normalised in a business context (or well funded, close to market STEM).  

In retrospect, and after having heard the presentations which came after my own, what I really should have said more forcefully, is get out of the way, this is boring, and it misses the point entirely.  We are rapidly approaching the stage when the devil's contract between private companies and the public sector, which has governed data delivery in both the humanities and STEM for the last fifteen years on line (and a hundred years off-line) is going to break down.  Open Access, for example, is just a wedge issue for a wider re-thinking of how research and data, and its users will interact.  And the fact that both the British and American governments were there first, is an indication that this particular community is not paying sufficient attention.

I am not overly exercised by the profiteering of these companies (if people want to sell their souls for a health plan and a cheap suit, that is OK by me).  Nor do I really want to castigate them for their place in an information food chain.  Companies like Cengage/Gale have coralled a useful amount of money for data processing.  I am just struck by the lack of serious engagement with the real changes in the fundamental relationship between the production and consumption of data that the last fifteen years has wrought.  More than anything else, my three days in Phili has brought home to me that I simply don't inhabit the same data universe that I did fifteen years ago.