The Scholar Electric

by Ryan Trauman

Nutshell: Gottschall reflects on a few  of Peter Guber’s claims (in PG’s book, Tell to Win,  about the power of storytelling in the business world. I know. Snooze-fest. But his prose is surprisingly fair and corporate-speak-free. In fact, he seems to have a great, if not understated prose style and a respect for the texts he engages. Here’s an excerpt from the blog post:

The new gospel of business storytelling offers a challenge to common views of human nature. When we call ourselves Homo sapiens, we are arguing that it is human sapience–wisdom, intelligence–that really sets our species apart. And when we think we can best persuade with dispassionate presentation of costs and benefits, we are implicitly endorsing this view. But we are beasts of emotion more than logic. We are creatures of story, and the process of changing one mind or the whole world must begin with “Once upon a time.”

The post is impressive. I’m really excited to read Gottschall’s book because of my own long-time interest/investment in digital storytelling. However, I’m hoping that The Storytelling Animal offers insights equally applicable to scholarship, especially digital scholarship. Mostly, I’m thinking about relatively subtle narrative devices that can play-well with the dominant logocentric modes, tones, and languages of traditional humanities scholarship. For instance, I’m interested in strategies for introducing dramatic tension scholarly tension early into a text in order to cultivate reader attention. Or techniques of multiple plot lines in order to foster robust connections within a particular discipline. Maybe even techniques like character development, establishing setting, or cliff-hanger ending might be relevant, somehow, to digital scholarship.

For now, I’m not sure, and I can’t point to any examples. But I am a huge proponent of the power of narrative. When told well, stories can compel us to pay closer attention, please us aesthetically, improve memory, and make relevance more clear. And yet, we know very little about why narrative affects us in these ways. Which is where I always return when I remind myself that scholarship is a creative pursuit. With enormous untapped potential for relevance it hasn’t already established.

(note: image cc-licensed by r_rahul) (this entry is cross-posted here at NewMediaScholar.net)

by Ryan Trauman

 
Personally, I’m not much of a fiction guy, unless you’re talking about movies. I much rather read scholarship, design books, or modern poetry. However, I am excited about this site because of how it uses “big data” (a phrase more common within the Digital Humanities than Literature) in a way that’s accessible and useful to scholars and non-scholars alike. What I’m really hoping for is that scholars in Rhet/Comp, Computers and Writing, Digital Humanities, etc. begin to see how a similar initiative within a discipline could serve as a sort of “force-multiplier” for humanities scholarship. The potential for efficiency gains are exciting. We could become so much more effective at identifying trends within data which is much more rich (and potentially responsive to our needs) than the sales and production data to which most discussions of books and scholarship are currently limited.

The scholarly potential for the humanities demonstrated by a Small Demons sort of site also might serve as one of the more effective “bridge” examples of more of the benefits of moving books and scholarship over to more consistently digital set of platforms. It should also serve the scholarly universe as a heads-up for why exactly it’s not only worth it, but essential to incorporate fine-grained, atomized metadata into future scholarly texts.

by Ryan Trauman

we have a kind of case of collective false consciousness that people imagine that there is a technological spectrum with the analog on one end and the digital on the other as if they are opposed and are enemies. In fact, I think now what’s happening is that there are a lot of ways in which the electronic book compliments the printed book and vice-versa, and that they’re working together so that this period of transition from a strictly world of prints to one of electronic communication is a world in which the whole landscape is becoming richer and more complicated.

I don’t think the quotation needs much explication, even if you tend to lean harder one way (nostalgia) or the other (feat/hope). The quote comes from an interview of Darnton by Dr. Albert Mohler of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary titled, “The Fate of the Book in the Digital Age.”

Other highlights of the interview include: contentious newspaper editorial meetings; book-smell scratch-n-sniff stickers as ebook accessories, e-textbooks, personal libraries, public libraries, and more. It’s a good read. Take a look.

by Ryan Trauman

In her article for The Guardian, Alison Flood reports that Robert Darnton (of the Harvard Library) has promised a free, publicly accessible American Digital Public Library that “will be up and running by April 2013, and its initial holdings will include at least two million books in the public domain accompanied by a dazzling array of special collections far richer than anything available through Google.” If this is true (and Darnton certainly has done nothing that I know of to sully his own reputation), it’s a wonderful development for the literacy practices of millions of people.

Here are a few of the headlines I was considering for this short post:

“Darnton promises functioning “American Digital Public Library” for 2013. Google throws up a little in its throat.” or ”Darnton promises functioning “American Digital Public Library” for 2013. Google to take its ball and go home.”

If nothing else, even the threat of this project should get Google back to work on its book scanning project. Not that they’ve stopped. Scanning books, I mean. But the litigation surrounding the case has certainly stalled, with Google’s hands effectively tied (or at least in risky legal limbo) until they push forward with a newly-structured agreement with authors and publishers. Either way, they’ve significantly scaled back the resources and marketing associated with the project for which I had so much hope. But as Darnton points out in several of his brilliant texts, Google is has a monopoly on the vast scope of its scanning project aaaaaaand its a for-profit corporation. That’s a dangerous mix. And I think the last 18 months of stagnant development (before which it was firmly established that there was little opportunity for another private entity to compete with Google’s project) have shown Darnton’s fears to be at least significantly warranted (although I wouldn’t argue they’ve yet come to fruition. yet).

The only thing trouble about this announcement is that the ADPL just had the first round of its three-part technological development workshop this week. I don’t want to suggest that they’ve really not made much progress with the project. From what I can tell the project is incredibly well-funded from institutions/organizations that will allow them every opportunity to succeed. And they’ve certainly built a solid foundation of theoretical scaffolding on which to build the project. I just don’t know how well-conceived it is to talk about such a HUGE benchmark twelve months from now.

From what I’ve seen, it takes three components to make digital initiatives work: clearly demonstrable need, accessible theoretical foundation for immediate and future action/funding, and momentum. I don’t think it takes a genius to understand the first two components. However, the need for momentum cannot be underestimated. There is an enormous volume of projects whose initiatives are (at least partly) to transition analog media or institutions to digitally operative structures. Unfortunately, even at the most subtle hint of failure or stalling, there are just too many alternative projects to jump to. It may be a chicken-or-the-egg sort of problem, but that’s the point where it’s very difficult for an initiative to regain its momentum.

This is all to say that… Darnton better not be wrong. I want him to be right. Oh how I want him to be right. But if he’s wrong, and the project is really 24 months, rather than 12 months away from functioning, Google will be able to relax again, fat and complacent with its cash and huge digital book database, confident that a digital public library is a technological challenge (which only it can solve), rather than a social challenge (which we as a public, can solve it we put our minds to it).

by Ryan Trauman

Tony works at an institution with a faculty significantly more conservative than I work with at the U of Louisville. Although Tony and I certainly share many similar attitudes towards digital scholarship, I thought he might be able to offer some insight into a more resistant attitude. He characterized a more conservative position with a question: “So what, exactly, is ‘scholarly’ about learning Dreamweaver?” What a powerful distillation of one aspect of the conversation…

 (…preview: In my next posts, I’ll reflect on some responses to that question, some possible analogues to print scholarship, and why I think it’s an essential question for bringing issues of labor, disciplinary maturity, and material concerns into the discussion.)

(Note: image is a mashup by Ryan Trauman of two commonplace Web icons.)

contributed by: Trauman