Fasting from Information

“Fast from stories,” advise the Taoists. The practice switches off old narratives. It’s advice related to a meditation practice of following the breath, remaining attentive from moment to moment, opening to new information, and staying in a state of awareness without judgment.

In an age of information, reading is pulled between two poles: one, reading intensively in the same areas that always intrigue us, the other, skimming for something new, observing without analyzing. A narrowing of focus is the natural shape of attention in an age of overwhelm. Fandom, loyalty to a political issue, and “following” one’s social network all take this form. How often does someone in my twitter network voice a point of view with which I radically disagree? Not so often. How often do I click through to a story on a topic I’ve never read about before? Not so often. Luddites, lamenting the death of the newspaper or our retreat from the forest, draw the conclusion that we have lost both awareness and variety. However modern it is, this narrowing of focus is almost necessary as a means of siphoning the ocean of information around us into a digestible trickle.

What about stepping into the ocean of sound itself, merely tasting its swirling mists without judging them?

I live beside that sea of information and spend more time alone with it than perhaps anyone else I know. For the last three years I’ve had the extremely unusual position of being paid, to read books and to write books, with very little in the way of outside obligation. Maybe 1% of professional historians are full-time professional researchers. The freedom of that position makes way for a diversity of reading unusual even among full-time writers, journalists, and professors.

When I was first granted this freedom, I wrote publicly all the time. Almost daily, fits of attitude would make their way onto the internet: observations about the modern university, the modern church, the modern family, the phenomenon of chatroulette, infrastructure policy, the recipe I most liked, the book I’d just been reading. Nothing was too big or too small but for me to have an opinion about it.

For the last nine months of that time, I haven’t blogged. I’ve confined myself to 140-character observations on Twitter.

I’ve been wondering about the poisoned wells of water below us, about our parched planet, the death of a radical movement on the left, about alternative capital markets, and about how far things can or cannot change in a generation.

I’ve been shifting from caring about policy to caring about participation. Instead of wondering about declining infrastructure, the collapse of the Rust Belt, eminent domain, and the segregation of the poor in the nation’s cities, I’ve been wondering about the few historical examples of cities and nations where poor people had control over their own territory. I’ve been reading about property law and its varieties. I’ve been dallying among radical law faculty at Cambridge in the 1870s, who felt in their bones that commons and commonly-owned property were the only antidote to the consolidation of power in the hands of an elite minority. I’ve been reading about water wars in South America and landless peasants in China and evictions in the United States. I’ve been scouring the World Bank reports on land reform movements and the literature published by the Via Campesina and other landless peasant movements in the global south.

I read as if asleep, taking notes without analyzing them, reading a dozen articles without synthesizing an argument. Awash in information, I fasted. There’s been too much to read for me to say yet what it meant. Most days, success was finding a spare anecdote for some argument-in-formation, or letting a dozen contrary opinions wash by my eyes. Friends grew cross with me for talking about my work so little.

But synthesis is hard. Like the gardener in the proverb who scatters seeds and forgets where they are till they grow into plants, the reader-without-judgment takes in narratives, washing the brain in new information each day, confident that somewhere in the back of the brain, aside from judgment or narrative, the hippocampus is sorting that information into appropriate registers.

I corresponded now privately, with the one friend who researched the history of allotment gardens, the other colleague who studied the history of property law and the environment, the mentor who writes about the nineteenth-century experience of caves and underground spaces.

The old issues evaporated for me. It was harder to get worked up about the future of the university when so many possible futures danced before my eyes. I was finding a new continent hidden under the mists of information, and I began to explore it, by myself, in secret forays. To write back too soon would be to risk misjudging it.

Occasionally, people would ask me to talk and I would write talks for them. At the University of Virginia, I argued that for thirty years, Foucault has driven political history towards the dead end of lamenting power’s presence without studying the avenues for liberation. At the University of Ohio, I outlined some of the models for liberatory scholarship, pioneered by radicals historians in the 1920s and 30s, who took working-class people on walking tours of their own communities, using buildings and cemeteries, not books, as sources, telling stories and at the same time proving that history was something individuals could do on their own, unmediated by the power of the expert (see chapter on landscape methods and walking radicals here).

Little by little, the anecdotes were stringing themselves into a big story, a tale of seven hundred years of people losing their relationship to territory, of the ways in which we come to know the land and reestablish a community capable of distributing territorial resources.

Time away from publishing is more precious than rubies. The sage needs to fast from stories; the student needs a long walk before writing the paper’s conclusion; faculty need sabbaticals, and saints and radicals, most likely, need to sojourn in the mountains for a month or a year at a time. That’s how we stop clutching at a particular narrative, how we relax and open the skin to the mists of information around us. In an age of information, that retreat is more necessary than ever.

Reinventing the Academic Journal: First, Take Down Your Website

The web is thirsty for efficient, effective ways of retrieving useful information about the state of the field. This pressure creates an enormous market for those instruments that help individuals locate authoritative discourses and situated scholarship, and this, of course, is one of the traditional roles of the academic journal.

Academic Journals are in the course of rethinking their management, methods, and publication standards. This year saw major panels at the AHA (American Historical Association) and MLA (Modern Language association), largely through the leadership of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.

If they face this transition with courage and ingenuity, journals have the opportunity to plant themselves firmly as pillars of professional utility, scholarly collaboration, and authoritative knowledge as a public utility. Much of it may require thinking in terms of shifting communities and the life of information, and shifting sharply away from current journals' dependence on issue-by-issue websites and pdf-servers like jstor. If you're a journal editor, the first step in a shift away may indeed be so radical as taking down your website, sharing information in new ways even more deeply integrated with the flow of information on web 2.0.

I list here four major headings for the consideration of those trying to adapt academic publication to a web 2.0 world.

1) Journals must pursue interoperability with the other online tools that are shaping the techne of scholarly practice.

Web 2.0 requires public visibility and interoperability with other web tools, in order that a searching aid should be found, adopted, and rendered relevant to the new research paradigms being adopted by scholars and members of the public alike. The more journals fit themselves into this paradigm, the better they'll thrive in the new order, finding readers both academic and para-academic as allies. They will function usefully as finding-aids for the most relevant, expert material in their disciplines.

In going web 2.0, journals have the ability to mesh their publications with tools that will allow readers to better integrate journal essays with the rest of their research. A scholar using zotero and jstor can download the article pdf and the citation, ready for use in footnote. Web 2.0 journals will go further into this zone: a scholar using zotero, jstor, google scholar, and delicious can instantaneously find other scholars' opinions of a particular article, the names of the disciplines and sub-disciplines they think it applies to best, and other articles of similar note to that particular scholar.

1.a) With these tools, every published article becomes easily interfaced with the tools new scholars are using to sort their data.

For example:, if you look at http://delicious.com/bibliparis4/revues you will find some sources of reviews recommended by the French librarian who holds that account. When I'm signed into delicious as joguldi, I have the option to save any of these citations from the list into my own account. Each visitor can refashion their own micro-reading-list from their colleagues' reading-lists, cutting and pasting collective knowledge into an individual canon suited to their own project.

1.b) The promise of resilience: continued relevance to changing research patterns.

The web 2.0 journal will encourage this kind of interface, working within technologies for co-tagging, sharing lists, and making-one's-own-list. In so doing, the web 2.0 journal will become intimately interfaced with scholars' processes of research, reading, and writing, remaining an indispensable part of scholarship in the next era of research. They will avoid the possible irrelevance to reading processes, subdisciplinary conversations on mailing lists/delicious/twitter, and other forms of scholarly information-sharing that are coming to predominate in the life of the digital scholar.

1.c) The need for permanence.

Web 2.0 journals must insure that some copy of whatever material they publish is backed up for posterity. They may rely upon a public, collaborative site such as archive.org for those purposes.

1.d) Real interoperability.

It is strongly desirable to use a public, widely-adopted instrument such as delicious or librarything, already equipped with full tagging, user interoperability, and visibility before the public, rather than one of the new, unstable, invite-only micro-communities for information sharing like academiacommons or scribd.





2) Journals have opportunity to reframe their role in the academy as curators of the noise of the web.

Dream Scenario: The Web 2.0 Journal as a web bastion of curatorial authority.

The web suffers from a crisis of authority which is being met on the individual, rather than the collective and disciplinary level. For questions of disciplinary fields, for example, wikipedia is likely to be irrelevant and useless. Far more useful, from my point of view, have been peer-to-peer exchanges on delicious.com, librarything, and twitter, where colleagues in proximate fields have openly shared their course reading material, current research, and private canons.

In these sharing sites, individuals tag interesting citations with a series of terms most relevantly useful to their own practice. Users are less concerned with the interoperability of those selected terms than with the project of generating as many accurate, natural-language keywords as possible (see "folksonomy" entry in Wikipedia). The collected mass of these tags becomes an ultimate subject catalog to all the possible subject headings that might apply to any given website. Particular individual users become peculiar sources of authority for a given subject heading (for example, http://delicious.com/bibliparis4/, an expert archivist at the Université Paris-Sorbonne, is an authority on the best online archives, especially in the Francophone world.

Journals have the opportunity to weave themselves as crucial threads in the fabric of online conversations if they begin tagging, becoming collective repositories of the best, collectively-ratified articles and citations available for download on the web.

In a world where the primary tools for finding new scholarship are tagged, social databases like delicious and librarything, the most efficient form of journal interface with the world might be a for journals to scrap their websites and become collective, tagging entities.

2.a) The advantage of having an official canon of online material ratified by editors.

In the world of the traditional print journal, scholars vied to get a Journal of Modern History citation on their vita because it stands for something. What if there was a http://delicious.com/victorianstudies and http://delicious.com/journalofmodernhistory?

Such a stream of official citations could come to stand in for the private account of a collective recognized for setting a standard in the field, providing much the same function as the old print citation in terms of scholarly participation and professional standing. Being collected in those entries could still stand for the product of collective vetting among recognized scholars, standing out in the same way that my more famous colleague Danah Boyd's collection, http://delicious.com/zephoria, is better-read than my own (http://delicious.com/joguldi).

2.b) The editorial voice.

It might seem that if the Journal of Modern History disbanded its website in favor of a delicious stream, much would be lost: for instance, the editor's voice. Not necessarily. Perhaps invited keynote editorials might deserve a special tag, setting them apart from other tags; perhaps certain articles in the JMH tagging stream would also be tagged "featured article" or "special edition."

Consider: the editor-in-chief of The Journal of British Studies for 2009-2011 has a blog, which she has maintained since 2007 and keeps writing through 2020. For the years 2009-2011, the blog entries which she writes that pertain to the field of British Studies and are ratified by the rest of the Board become tagged "editor-in-chief" on http://delicious.com/journalofbritishstudies. The researcher who searches "2009" and "editor-in-chief" under that stream will find that subset of her articles, or they can search "editor-in-chief" for the full download of editorials for JBS.

2.c) The freedoms of web 2.0 journal operation.

Web 2.0 journals that take their primary responsibility as curatorial have no need for official publication from the university press system. They are not dependent on the income model of the university press, and they have no reason to collect subscriptions: their purpose is disciplinary service and public access. There is no reason for the articles published in this format to be made private, or to require elaborate fee-charging mechanisms.




3) Electronic journals will have the opportunity to expand their curatorial mandate include different forms of publication.


3a) Past the essay model.

The traditional journal collects and publishes only three sorts of essays: the editorial, the peer-reviewed essay of new research in 15-50 pages, and the book review. There is nothing platonic about these forms: they evolved from the culture of eighteenth-century coffee-house journals, reviewing the books in circulation, and the canonization of eighteenth-century essayists like Addison and Steele in the English curriculum of higher education at the end of the nineteenth century. They are considered the template for developing a reasoned, supported argument, and so the metric for measuring the ability to research, argue, and write.

3b) Broader forms of inclusion.

The traditional canon of essays, editorials, and book reviews has excluded much of other forms of scholarship, the circulation of whose best models are of value to the scholarly community, including: syllabi, subject division lists for qualifying exams, lectures, paragraph-sized notes/queries, lists of relevant new electronic tools, reviews of electronic tools, reports on best methods in the archives, lectures, and blog-sized opinions about exciting new directions for the field. An electronic journal has no reason to exclude a twenty-minute audio segment, a selection of maps shared on Slideshare.net, or a video segment of a conference paper shared on Youtube. Properly curated, any of these categories would be of immense disciplinary interest, worthy of collection in a journal stream.

3c) Against exclusive publication.

It is contrary to utility, in the world of web 2.0, to maintain exclusive publication rights on an article. Exclusivity of publication places a text in only one domain. Yet non-exclusive text gets reproduced and recopied, circulated around the internet, and rapidly floats onward to mimetic influence in other cultures, excerpted and referenced. For every web 2.0 author, non-exclusivity and easy republication is ideal. For every would-be-idea-of-influence in the age of web 2.0, easy reduplication is crucial.

Exclusivity has been the format followed by most online journals, which seek to mimic in form the traditional journal: one essay, neatly formatted, looking as professional as possible. Exclusive re-publication suggests the old model of authority, and is superficially reassuring to editors without actually promoting the real functions of the journal: disseminating ideas and establishing the authority of the journal-as-canon and disciplinary metric.

Significantly more desirable would be setting a different precedent: for all disseminated forms of the text to advertise the article's accreditation as having been curated by inclusion in the journal-as-stream. (the text might end with, for instance, "please recirculate with this citation: by-Professor-Bonnie-Wheeler, SMU, 2009; officially tagged in 'Arthuriana,' [link] May 2010") Advertising the link between article and journal in many reproduced/cross-referenced copies would function both to the benefit of the article and the prestige of the journal.

Again, if the dissemination model is followed, the journal homepage need not include reprints of the articles themselves: merely links to the original blogspace or university-housed-pdf or slideshow where the material was originally posted, with all of its links, illustrations, video, and wallpaper as the author originally presented it. The journal's role is reduced to curation, not to presentaiton. Not having a use for a graphic designer, typesetter, or illustrations layout person, the journal's workflow will be considerably reduced.






4) Broadening the criteria for participation.

Another major question opened by the age of the electronic journal is the issue of expertise. Like the essay, the journal peer-review process is the relic of another age: an age of abundant, unbegrudging emeriti with plentiful leisure to foster the development of younger peers who had, on average, three years of training by way of a PhD. The limited number of peer-reviewers and editors responsible for the operation of the journal at any given time, is the relic of the system limited by the expense of the US Post Office, the limited social networks of the people who invented the system, and the era of fewer PhD's on the world scene. In a new era, many of the burdens of editing and curation can be more broadly distributed to both the aid of the editors and the thriving of the discipline itself.

4a) Benefiting from a wider array of input.

In the age of web 2.0, journals have the opportunity to reconsider the distribution of time and responsibility. Is peer review a top-down mentoring process for scaling up the academic ladder, or will it be reconceived as an open playing-field (a sort of open seminar for peer review rather than a two-vetted-readers-read-you)? With the aid of wikis, it becomes possible for a single text to be usefully edited by hundreds of individuals, vetting their understanding of significance, authentic fact, and argument flow. For young scholars, accreted small suggestions of other citations, references, examples, and counterexamples, from a wider array of supporters, could conceivably enhance an article on multiple levels.

4b) The opportunity to expand disciplinary boundaries.

In web 2.0 collaboration, the thinking of interdisciplinary members of the broader academy might be usefully invited. The pressure of other ideas could hypothetically encourage the discipline to take account of the findings of related sub-disciplines (invited participation from scholars in postcolonial studies for Victorian Studies issues on empire), the concerns of related fields (are economists convinced by new findings in economic history?), and the legibility of argument to the public (does this ground-breaking, relevant article on tyranny and empire actually parse to the average reader of the NYT?)

4c) The reconsideration of timelines.

In the age of web 2.0, it is also possible for a writer to continuously revise an argument over an extended period of time, even indefinitely. For the sake of scholars' multiple projects, an indefinitely revised work is probably not ideal, but extended revisions, over the course of a year, become possible and useful for the author and the discipline. An article could be published as "officially under review" in a sub-category of the journal stream, subjected to gradual wiki conversation for a year, and remain available to a reading public for the entirety of that time.

The product that would emerge at the end of a year of wiki-ratification would be very different than that at the beginning. If the author failed, in the course of wiki revision, to produce a stronger article than at the beginning, the article could be removed from the journal stream at the end of the year.

4d) Indefinite projects.

An exception to the rule against indefinite revisions might be the case of a collectively-authored, introductory textbook (editions #33-150 of Arnstein's Introduction to British History could easily be collectively rewritten over the course of 20 years by a team of collaborators). Similarly, the journal might include a wiki article on "the state of the discipline" that was collectively revised by the journal's readership, year after year, to consider the best collective knowledge of subjects of inquiry.



(I've had the honor of being in conversation with Bonnie Wheeler of CELJ, and I want to express my gratitude here for being invited into the conversation. Editors of academic journals have been the heroes of professional support processes like peer review for a long time, and they have a brave future ahead of them, whatever course they take.)

How Delicious is Changing Academic Research

As of a recent post on Google Books and the research of History, our quiet little blog here on academic history, activism, and spirituality has suddenly gotten more notoriety than it's accustomed to. Hi world! Thanks for stopping by. To carry on with the thread of how information travels for academics, and what the 'net is doing, let's talk about another of my favorite sites for research, del.icio.us.

Delicious is the Rome, Jerusalem, and Paris of my existence as an academic these days. It's where I make my friends, how I get the news, and where I go to trade. All this from a little server that does nothing but share bookmarks in public.

Why? Two reasons it's cool. 1) It sorts things. 2) it makes them public.

1) it sorts things.

For two years I've been using Delicious as an information organizer. It's produced an impressive encyclopedia of the most interesting information, images, articles, citations, books, and subjects on the internet to which I might want to refer. Consider my dissertation tag, under which are a wide variety of online images and google books that I'll be using for my research. Not only can I come back to them, but I can also find related subjects -- dissertation material related to walking -- navigating seamlessly from one to another. As an improvement on the index card system, or on my own terrifying piles of articles (even now ornamenting my bookshelf), or even on the folders within folders within folders of word documents, this represents a definite improvement.

I've been building a taxonomy -- the way some people use wikis, the way my boyfriend uses that utterly cool personal software, "the brain;" the way my father uses his vertical file, the way my DC friends use their rolodexes -- so I sort out all the information I take in, annexing technology to memory, sorting factoids and spare threads and notable evidence in neat, interlocking piles where I can find information again, draw connections, and create new connections.

The result is a navigable taxonomy of my thoughts. If I want to find my stuff on the history of "walking," the taxonomy already knows that my material on walking is associated with other categories of knowledge which I've tagged nearby.

After a year of using delicious for my own bookmarks, helping other people find things becomes remarkably easy. Many of the link lists below are simply cut and paste over from delicious. Lists of citations for colleagues are cut and paste from delicious into email. The forty American history students I teach are instructed to go to my delicious page for writing help, research help, maps, and images relating to the class.


Second reason delicious is cool:

2) it makes things public.

Not only can you look at your own bookmarks, but you can also look at others'. When you find something noted to be queer and interesting, you can find out what other topics that same person thinks to be queer and interesting.

What's rapidly happening with these shared tags is academics finding each other in rapid numbers. I have some twenty people in my network, at least half of whom I've never met in real life. They include:

* Javier Arbona, a graduate student in Geography who's also at the University of California, Berkeley
* Travis Brown, a graduate student in literature
* LeahB, an editor at Cabinet Magazine, my favorite periodical
* bibliparis4, a librarian at one of the public universities in Paris

Each of these is another intellectual putting together rarified connections about strange pieces of thought somehow related to my world.

I found them because they were, like me, publicly tagging with some arcane tag that I also use. c19 -- the nineteenth century tag. vernacular -- a tag used by other people who work with ephemera.

Every morning, I log into my delicious network and read the links that my small army of admired, clever, canny, eccentric brains has put together for me.

What's more, I'm developing what I'd consider an actual working relationship with these other scholars. A few of them have added me to their own networks. Day to day, I watch their reactions to Bush, I get a sense of where their research is going, and they get a sense of mine. It's low-level, low-commitment hanging out with high levels of information exchange.

And this is something different than the social activity I know anywhere else on the internet.

Normally, if you want to meet people on the internet, the connections are typically time-limited and action-specific. You want a date, you want sex, you need a friend of a friend for networking in Argentina. You meet up online and then you meet in real life. Or you meet online at Myspace and then, unless you have a crush on the person, forget to ever go back again. But my scholars are folks I'm seeing on a regular basis in the course of my regular research. This is the nearest thing to running into someone else at the card catalog yet.

I don't check in with them. I don't have, nor do I really need, the capacity to send email to them. Some of them I may actually encounter at academic conferences later, and we'll share more of a bond, through our years of doing collaborative research, than many scholars who have labored through the years in adjoining offices.

As Hannah Arendt understood, the modern democratic state happened when people in public spaces began interacting, and thus began taking action together. For this reason, she identified the medival carnivals and fair days of Europe as the seat of literature, culture, debate, and politics. The rule goes like this: make a public, get action. Today, Delicious does for the internet what open-air markets did for medieval society. Low key, high-information, continuous-formation community building.

All hail the bookmark market.