Privilege and Polemic

At the Society of Fellows I worked every day surrounded by intense privilege, privileges few other scholars enjoy in the length of their career as scholars: the privilege of dining amidst Nobel laureates; the privilege of not teaching, and that of enjoying research grants free to pursue any turn of inquiry.

It made me restless, and it made me impatient with the academy, even more impatient than I was already, which was plenty.  I stated working on bigger projects, a long history of land reform. I started working on bigger methodologies — not merely toying around with digital maps but asking questions about how topic modeling could be turned to archives at scale.  I started talking to historians about what I was doing; many were resistant, some were supportive.  Armitage liked the ideas and encouraged them.  We talked more. 

Occupy erupted while we were there.  Occupy started a tent village in Boston.  My friends were all occupy-ers, there and in Chicago and New York.  I visited and talked with folks.  We talked about history and its public uses.  A group of graduate students and post-docs was leading walking tours of privately-owned public spaces fit for future occupations; I had been writing about the radical history of the walking tour and I offered to share some history that might help to orient them.

Orientation to time and place, I tell my undergraduates, is what they can seek from history as a profession.  They should know something about the history of the institutions that they engage; they should be able to tell something about the history of practices of democracy and capitalism; and these skills will help them to know when something is changing around them. 

Much of the critique of the book that I subsequently wrote with David Armitage about history has been disorienting — for us as authors and likely for others as readers.  Dueling in the footnotes has been inflated, by a few critics, into the charge of being bad historians, of not having understood what we read, of misapplying big data, and even of breaching professional ethics by hiding our corrections to the text in a series of open-access releases online.  The open-access release and website were originally designed to promote accessibility to all readers regardless of their ability to pay.  

Thus critics who don’t like the book have gone after our professional credentials as historians.  I suppose they think we either should not have written it, or that we should have written it in a different way, treating every footnote and datum with the care of a monograph.  But a manifesto is not a monograph.  A polemic’s job is to compare vastly different points of view — in our case, the economic with social history; and social histories past with political economy in the present, and earlier methods in the archives with new methods of digital history. 

We took on more than an entire discipline; we wrote a short book about the university as a whole and about the role of historians inside it.  We didn’t make up our picture of the university; the portrait of public intellectuals engaged with national and international governance in the 1950s making way for professional historians sometimes motivated by peoples’ struggles in the 1970s is a story that has been told by professional historians of the public intellectual, as well as recited in the memoirs of historians who lived through those periods.  We painted with a broad brush about the discipline of economics and its engagement with climate change, but it is no exaggeration to say that scholars in economics have proposed, over the last twenty years, that the free market will spontaneously take care of climate, while many a historian has worked over the same period to reveal how much our relationship with the environment has been harmed by centuries of growth-oriented economics. 

For a great many readers, who have spoken to us in our travels and contacted us personally, that orientation has been useful beyond measure.  What we hear again and again from our colleagues and graduate students is this: there has not been a healthy debate about why social science academics do what they do, about the appropriate methods of turning the social sciences to critically inspect one’s own political climate or culture.   We heard from a former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who appreciated our call to use history to measure possibilities for reform and utopianism in our own time.

For us, an orientation to the university as a changing institution was more important, and we painted the picture that made sense to us: a world where the humanities have been ill-able to defend themselves against budget cuts, closing, and adjunctification, but a world with much promise where new methods of modeling text with digital tools may have applications far beyond the humanities projects where they were born.  Much of what we said about the succession of the disciplines — the way that economics rose to power in the 1970s, outstripping not only history but also sociology and anthropology — was relatively new to public debate and sparked important questions that will lead other scholars to examine the story of 1968 in more detail.  Much of what we said about the possibilities for using digital tools was also new, if not to debates in the digital humanities, then new to the history graduate classroom.  Those are professional contributions to our understanding of how the university is changing, and they come not out of laziness, but out of a rapt and ongoing curiosity about how the institution is changing in our own time, and what exciting possibilities our friends and colleagues are working on. 

Ultimately these questions — both of how we understand the university past and how we release our texts to the public online — are crucial for making sense of the role of the social sciences in the university to come.  The reasons for which we raise these questions extend well past debates about the meaning of 1968 or bureaucratic decisions about when particular revisions to an electronic text are released and how. 

It seemed important to me when I was sipping moselle at the Society of Fellows while Occupy was formed a few miles away, as it does now, that historians should work for the cause of a broader public.  It seems to me that we had many exemplary stories of historians past who had done exactly that, and for those reasons, it was worth writing a first pass at a history, even if the subject was outside of my specialization, even if others would revise it later.  It is still better to orient ourselves, and to keep in dialogue as we undertake the process of revision, than to simply never open up these questions in the first place. 

Amendment

One paragraph in my 4/14/15 blog post seemed to some readers to suggest that David Armitage was responsible for errors in The History Manifesto. That was not my intention.

The Challenges of Beginning a Scholarly Debate in the 21st Century

C. P. Snow's The Two Cultures (1959) began a critical debate about the role of the humanities in an increasingly scientific world.  It was also the receipt of such enormous criticism that Snow later wrote The Two Cultures: A Second Look (1963).   In the last few months David Armitage and I have experienced a technologically-accelerated version of the same. In the 21st Century, this debate happens not only between colleagues, but also via pseudonymous blogs and retweeted punchlines.

When we published The History Manifesto in October, we set out to rouse a debate in the university, and in history departments in particular, about the methods and ambitions of our profession in a moment of global warming, growing inequality, academic specialization, and short-term thinking.  The debate took off beyond our wildest dreams; usually positive, sometimes controversial, and even occasionally dipping into extreme ire as individual personalities took issue with our text, some of them choosing to duel in the footnotes instead of to engage the substantive, positive vision that we wrote to offer.  A deliberation of this variety and passion on all sides is evidence, we believe, of a healthy engagement by the profession.  Like others creatures, when historians are aroused, they experience emotions, sometimes violently.  

Passion and critique redound on the internet, mirrored and intensified beyond the bounds of normal scholarly discourse, where debates are moderated by editors as well as conventions of reasonable politeness, in ways that can be particularly dangerous for junior faculty.  In the voicing of criticism online, the norms of academic discourse disappear. Online enthusiasms that use heated rhetoric to suggest that an argument has been totally eviscerated can distract from the question of which data and issues are at the core of a professional debate, and which are illustrations that can be overlooked without harm to the major argument.  

The even-handed, respectful tone of civil debate that we saw in published book reviews in history journals -- the majority of which were positive -- disappeared on Twitter and the blogs. A journal editor noted in his published introduction how the tone of the unsolicited critique of our book were out of keeping with normal practice at that journal.  The norms of scholarly civility were tinged with a form of rhetoric colored by strong pronouncements.  It is my intention here to raise the question of the degree to which those strong pronouncements pertained to the culture and rhetoric of the internet, where one strand of academic debate originated as a result of our open-access publishing venture.  

Online debates bring particular challenges when they concern the debating of footnotes that this debate has involved.  In an earlier blog entry, I told the story of an anonymous twitter personality, "Pseudoerasmus," whose critique was cited by senior colleagues in their footnotes as evidence of sloppy scholarship.  The critique appears largely to stem from an individual who is unfamiliar with historians’ conventions of writing and footnoting.  Where critics pointed to individual footnotes that could be tightened or prose made more accurate, we accepted their criticisms. Indeed, many of the most heated critiques that appeared first on on the internet were leveled against details and footnotes rather than the major argument.  

As we examined the criticism, we found most of it to be taking issue with footnotes that could be fit the text better and summaries of economists’ work that could be made more precise.  Very little of the most heated criticism on the internet (or in the printed engagements that quoted the internet) engaged substantively with the larger arguments that we had made about the tradition of a place of political engagement in professional scholarship in the social sciences, or about the questions of time-scale raised by new work by our colleagues, or about how visualization and digital analysis can help to tell stories on a greater scale.  

On the internet, claims that one of these complaints had destabilized our argument circulate like a rumor mill.  A provocatively titled tweet ran, for example, "stunning take-down of the #historymanifesto!" The tweet easily circulated among even our friends and colleagues, and not necessarily because they agreed that the take-down was successful.  "Retweets" very rarely equal endorsement; I myself have been wont to retweet articles whose headlines I disagree with when I am saving them for myself to read later.  Yet even in such cases the headline circulates nonetheless, perhaps because many people thought the text was important enough that a debate should be read.  And for those who idly read the headlines on twitter, it was easy to get the impression that a "take-down" had happened.  I wonder how many colleagues absorbed that rumor, and dismissed the need to read the book themselves.  Even very clever people are sometimes put off by a rumor of that sort.   

It is hard to debate online in spaces where identity is so fluid, as it can increase the vulnerability of a scholar up for tenure, while disguising some of her critics.  It was me, the untenured member of our writing collaboration, who was targeted by an anonymous twitter personality for his original attack, on the grounds that due to her relative inexperience, it was she, not her senior collaborator, who must have been responsible for any errors in the text.  The attack explicitly singled me out as the faulty party, an assumption that revolved around bizarre notions of authorship that certainly did not apply to our collaboration.  In the process, standards of authorship circulating on the internet, not in the world of scholarship, were applied to tarnish my reputation as a scholar.  

When scholars at other institutions and editors of journals in my field retweeted the headline of a "take-down," they may have appeared to some readers to be buying into this faulty understanding of authorship and intention.  Without paying careful attention to how claims circulated and where, it would be easy for someone arriving at this conversation for the first time to misread the retweets as a vindication of the Manifesto's critics.  Effectively, if such misunderstanding as I have construed has happened in the scholarly community, it would mean that the voice of one anonymous twitter personality and a handful of critics were promoted above the dozens of positive reviews published in scholarly journals by accredited peers across the academy.  

This is a dangerous system of ranking, and it represents a novelty in academic practice that we should note and try to understand as a mechanism.  The academy has evolved, over time, its own standards for understanding praise, blame, and dissent, culling consensus through the slow-moving process of publication itself as well as the published reviews. Where much academic favor depends on reputation, besmirching rumors started on the twitterverse can do immense harm to the scholar whose career is just beginning.  

Internet publishing also brings challenges in the form of the sheer workload that a scholar must take on in order to stay engaged.  Praise, critique, suggestions and invitations flooded in over the first few months of the Manifesto's release.  We soon found that we were inundated by more than we could, ourselves, respond to in detail.  Our critics, while small in number, were prolific writers and tweeters.  Their schedule also differed in its intensity from that of traditional academic review, which has some respect for holidays and academic schedules; two senior scholars released their critique the day before Christmas Eve.  The intensity of the same writers kept up over formal and informal blog entries that continued over the following months.  In the five days after American Historical Review published our reply to our critics on its front page together with the editor’s congratulations, one of our senior critics has released to the internet two further "take-downs".  When traditional book reviews may take six months to two years to appear, and then tend to take the form of a single reply, the volume of praise and criticism that can meet a text with a life on the internet dwarfs that of traditional scholarly encounters, and it can be hard to navigate in the midst of the other academic obligations.

As I described in an earlier blog post, paying attention to which feedback to accept and which to reject on the wide berth of the internet is more complicated than it is in the format of a traditional journal or book revision process, where the scholar responds to criticism from 3-5 pre-selected scholars with expertise in their field.  But readers on the internet do not necessarily share the same expectations of expertise as the authors, or even as other scholars in the field.  As any scholar who has passed through the process of revising an article for journal acceptance knows, the process of considering these critiques is time-consuming.  In bulk, without the guiding hand of an editor familiar with the interlocutors who has his own vision of what feedback to prioritize, the process of revision can be even more time-consuming.  Online publishing is not a arena that a junior scholar should enter without caution about the time-consuming nature of the work, should the debate take off.

Together, these burdens -- the inflation of trivial critiques, the spread of rumor generated in communities with different standards for authorship and excellence, the weight of time to keep up with a discourse at volume -- generate particular vulnerabilities for junior scholars of any gender who engage with discipline-wide questions on the internet.   By engaging in open-access publishing, where the text freely circulates to a public -- and not just a public committed to visiting the bookstore, paying money, or accessing a subscription behind a paywall -- they may inadvertently may place their reputation in the way of anonymous critics, academic incivility, and rumors spread by casual retweets.  

The burdens of online criticism also redound differently through the hierarchy of the academy.  For me as a junior scholar, the weight of these debates has particular ramifications for the processes ahead of me.   The stakes are, of course, extremely real: rumors of scholarly malpractice or an ethical breach can result, especially in junior cases, in losing one's job.  Will the relevant committees and meetings be swayed by these voices from the internet?  There is no sanitary cordon that shields senior voting colleagues from debate online.  When they meet it, will they interpret it as the sign of a passionate debate erupting in the context of a new technology that makes way for more heated debate than past generations of scholars have witnessed?  Or will they be alienated by the fervency of the voices of some of our interlocutors and the intensity of their communications?  The committees who will try to understand my case have likely viewed few examples of similar cases before.  

Public opinion matters in those rooms, and it is not the only thing that matters; scholarly consensus matters, and a range of opinion from the extremely positive to the extremely negative may be a sign of successfully engaging a disciplinary-wide controversy.  Engaging with new forms of publishing and critique in the name of helping our institutions (departments, universities, libraries, and publishing-houses) to evolve may be taken as a sign of a commitment to institution-building.  How my own case will be read has not yet been decided, although my hope is that they will be cognizant of the importance of engaging the issues at the heart of our discipline that cause such passionate eruptions, as well as the vitality of working with established academic publishers like Cambridge University Press in frontier spaces of innovative publishing.  

I would necessarily advise caution, or at least a clear-eyed sense of reality, to younger scholars contemplating the same path.  Nevertheless, it is a collective burden that we come to understand the evolving nature of scholarly discourse online, together with the opportunities and challenges it represents.  

My engagement with the discipline of history and new opportunities represented by the digital was commissioned by a series of awards and fellowships, from a Mellon fellowship in Digital History to a later fellowship at the Metalab to my current position as an assistant professor of Britain and its Empire who has been encouraged by senior faculty, my chair, and various administrators around the university to continue research, publishing, and teaching about these new technologies.  My opinions and work did not come as a surprise to any of those bodies of scholars. 

For me, the research, teaching, and publishing experiment of The History Manifesto followed seamlessly from the writing, research, and teaching about the digital humanities that I had been pursuing for six years already.   My own contributions to The History Manifesto should be read in that light: the fruit of an officially-sanctioned project of research, teaching, and publication.  I was the junior partner in a collaboration, offering my experience with digital tools and the possible audiences for history, reporting on an ongoing conversation with a senior partner who happened to be at the time chairing a major department of History.  We hardly set out to offend our fellow-historians; instead, we were excited about new possibilities for research methodology, theories of history, publishing opportunities, and even political engagement on the part of history, and we wanted to report on this excitement to our fellow historians so that those who approved could play along themselves.  We also hardly suspected that the criticism of a few senior faculty would find its way to the front page of the Chronicle of Higher Education, inflated from a few colorful tweets whose content revolved around editorial suggestions about footnotes and illustrations into a headline about shoddy data and ethical breaches in publishing.  

I myself do not believe that these charges would have happened were it not for open-access publishing and our attempt to engage an online community.  Senior scholars might have still expressed their displeasure at our conclusions, but their opinion might have been limited to traditional venues, as its circulation would have as well.  In other words, we are still very much learning about the opportunities and limits of scholarly engagement online, and about the way that scholarly engagements may open up new challenges for the junior faculty who are first to engage them.

The virtue of having a text published online is that it immediately solicits input from readers.  As advocates of rethinking publishing have noted for some time, online publishing has the opportunity to make less formal the traditional roles of anonymous reviewer, pre-publication, and post-publication manuscript.  Immediate feedback gives authors the opportunity to constructively reflect on critique at any point in the publication process.  We have not been shy about singing the praises of this kind of engagement, blogging in November about constructive criticism of a visualization.  In January, we released a revised version of the text, both online and in hard copy, that took into account particular online criticisms of our phrasing and individual footnotes.  We tightened ten lines of prose and changed five footnotes to better reflect the environmental debates in economics, although we did not substantively change our arguments.  It is important for historians, other scholars, and publishers to contemplate what this new model of ongoing feedback offers to scholarship, raising humanism to the level of a field that can fluidly benefit from ongoing collaboration.  

Some of the praise of online publishing has been overstated. Critics of traditional publishing in academia like Kathleen Fitzpatrick have argued that publishing on the internet could potentially free the humanities of abuse by removing the temptations to abuse that were structural in the blind peer review system used by academic journals, a system that shields senior scholars while promoting discrimination against junior scholars, women, and minorities.  Our own experience with online community criticism suggests that blind peer review possesses a monopoly neither on anonymity, nor on senior scholars flexing their power to promote and denounce new ideas, nor on outright hostility.  

There is a vein of feminist criticism where “dangerous places” are viewed as a positive challenge for radical intellectuals.  Indeed, in the news cycle of the past year, the female game designers and their advocates were attacked on twitter with threats of gang rape and murder in the “GamerGate” controversy, demonstrating what an unsafe space the internet can be.  But the women in question rallied, many of them refusing to go offline, several of them publishing incredibly moving memoirs of their experience. Some of them, including Anita Sarkeesian and Randi Harper, fought back with games and code, the tools of the attackers themselves.  In so doing, they have turned a vicious fight into an opportunity for building solidarity between women in technology and rallying consumers of video games in the direction of social awareness.   

Academic attacks are almost certainly easier to endure than rape and death threats.  All the same, engaging our interlocutors has been far from easy.   On the internet, whether we are academics or gamers, we tame unsafe spaces by continuing to show up, and by continuing to insist on high standards for intellectual exchange and civility.  We create safety by advocating for the respect due to vulnerable individuals like women, junior scholars and minorities.  We have to show up in order to claim the spaces that need to be claimed. 

Is the internet itself really to blame for these heated emotions?  Perhaps not; it might be the nature of manifesto-writing or polemic essays on the state of the academy in general that arouses so much emotion.  Writing decades ago, C. P. Snow would’ve recognized that pattern after the flood of articles and letters, “praise, blame…accumulating at an accelerating pace,” that piled in after he published The Two Cultures (1959). “Do certain kinds of animosity lead to an inability to perform the physical act of reading?” he asked. “The evidence suggests so.”   Snow’s own conclusion, published four years later as is rather like our own: the resulting hubbub was about a Zeitgeist in conflict; the particular acts of vitriol or praise, in the end, “hadn’t much connection with me.”  The same might be said for the victims of sexual aggression in many eras, before the internet and including it: they needn't take the aggression personally, for at the end of the day, the emotions come from deep cultural sources around us.   

On the other hand, the internet is most certainly a new sphere of civil discourse.  We might imagine that humans need to learn how to inhabit it, how to behave in public.  Perhaps we are only beginning the process of learning what to say in public, and our culture (as well as our institutions) need to be patient as we do so.  Just as publishing houses and educational institutions need to come to understand anew the rules for engagement in an age of open-access publishing, just so we as scholars will have to convene to make up our minds about when we accept the word of rumor, twitter, or a handful of internet-published critics, and when we defer to the published authority of our traditional journals. 

On a more individual level, we as scholars or as public intellectuals participating on the internet have ethical choices to make about the tone we take when leveling criticism at a peer.  Should we throw out civil discourse because we are limited to 140 characters and are thrilled by the prospect of a retweet of a scandal-mongering headline?  Should we target a scholar's reputation as a whole when a complaint is with an illustration, a footnote, or a political point of view?  Journalists have done an excellent job of documenting, these last few months, how rumor spreads on the internet, and some have made a case that we are seeing the development of a new culture of public shaming, unparalleled, perhaps, since the Puritans.

Public intellectuals of all kinds today must make up their minds how they participate online, given that a technology for constant circulation of opinion and critique arrives in the middle of a culture that cleaves to event and scandal, that circulates headlines without necessarily agreeing with them.  As anyone who has run a seminar knows, keeping sage opinions and even-handed reading is a skill that has to be cultivated alongside an attention to detail.  Even hackers online are forming a new consensus outlawing "gratuitous negativity" from their boards in the name of promoting more critical thinking.

In The History Manifesto, we argued for the importance of taking the long view on the university, the environment, and the economy, topics about which we argued that historians have a great deal to contribute.  If we apply that lesson to our own experience, we might reason that it takes a long time to develop rules for productive debate in a new social context.  The internet may not be there yet, even when one’s interlocutors are also respected scholars capable of civil discourse in many spheres. 

Open Criticism and the Freedom to Imagine New Forms of Research in the Social Sciences

Publishing online and soliciting tweets gave ample room for an airing of any grievance with our manuscript to be heard.  As advocates of open access publishing, we were enthusiastic about providing this opportunity for dialogue.  But some of that dialogue comes in the form of a heated attack, in a few notable cases, questioning our credentials as scholars in the process.  When does open-access critique offer useful food for thought and revision, and when does it overstep the boundaries of scholarly respect?   I will argue here that traditional scholarly standards have become confused in the midst of hasty communications from our critics.  One of the features of the most impassioned critiques we heard was inflated rhetoric about the faultiness of the text as a whole, coupled with fairly minor critiques of the data we used and our interpretation thereof.  This mismatch has dangerous consequences for debate.

Our book was not a research monograph that claimed exhaustive research on a historical era but rather a polemic, whose purpose was to hold up new methods for research in the social sciences, drawing inspiration from methodological revolutions of the past.  Polemics like these have an extreme utility in the social sciences and humanities, as they unify scholars working with new toolsets (for instance the digital humanities) and propose new possible orientations towards their use. 

The crux of our argument about the waning of an age of mid-century public intellectuals who participated in government debate and the rise of economists rests upon secondary, scholarly sources that have been vetted in other contexts.  These timelines exist independently of our own work. We did not pretend to be doing archival research on a monograph that would review in detail the lineaments of the American academy in the 1970s.  

I believe that some of the rhetoric that accompanied our interlocutors’ fastidious suggestions came because our interlocutors misunderstood the genre in which we were writing.  We were writing a persuasive essay, not a monograph in which we claimed exhaustive, expert authority on the eras and actors in question.   We were taking on the case of history departments as an exemplary case of a profession working within the modern university as a whole, offering a critical stance while arguing positively for the promise of some new practices that we have seen younger scholars pursuing – including digital history, working with big data, and engaging the timescale of the Anthropocene.   

My coauthor and myself both work in flagship departments of history where we are routinely exposed to cutting-edge scholarship as well as the ambitions of young scholars.  We wanted to write a polemic that would foreground the difference and novelty that characterized the work that most impressed us, pulling positive examples of similar revolutions in historical methodology from the past as points of comparison for how important a methodological revolution can be. 

To lift up such examples in the form of our own manifesto should be seen not as an act of hubris, but rather as an act of the routine service that scholars perform when they write review essays about recent work in the field, introduce a new set of theory, or write their own historiographical and methodological introduction to a book or journal article.  

As younger scholars, we cannot match in detail the historiographic richness of a Lynn Hunt or Hayden White, who personally experienced the scholarly revolutions of the 1970s and who published their own manifestos this year.  Yet as younger scholars at the beginning (in my case) and height (in David's) of our careers, we are strongly motivated to notice and rank new trends in publishing, big data, and other methods that seem promising, which we and our students and collaborators may borrow as we seek to plow new routes through the field.  

The purpose of a polemic, after all, is to stir debate about the ethical orientation and methods of a field, not to have the final word on any particular episode in history.  To draw these arguments together as a provocation to professional history is an important task for provoking a debate about where we are going as a discipline.  It is also one of the most ordinary traditions in the academy, the eruption of such disagreements.  Some time in the twelfth century, Peter Abelard got into a dispute with his own teacher.  Things weren’t working out well, so he moved down the valley, and set up his own tent, and students followed him there, where he began giving his own lectures.  Polemics are like that: they are an assertion that one body of scholars have begun to see the matter that motivates us differently than another body of scholars.  These moments are creative; they bring together new bodies of scholars, who by moving apart, begin to think about themselves and their work anew.  Such moments are also polarizing; not everyone must agree or come along, and those who don't come may well complain about what the new camp is doing.  

We wrote a polemic that put distance between ourselves and the practices of social and intellectual history of the past in which we ourselves were trained, looking forward to the research that we are most excited about shaping our own work around and proposing as models for our students.  In our polemic, we talked about how new generations of historians are separated from the past by the political impulses of their time and the arrival of new technical methods like the digital humanities.  To disagree with us would mean taking exception to our theory that time-scales in history have been broadening since 2000; that many great scholars are currently taking on climate change, international governance, and inequality as their major foci; that 1968 offers an exemplary moment for understanding how changing politics beyond the academy has long shaped the way that scholars engage archives; and that digital tools promise some help in this new longue duree even while they raise other ethical issues about access to archives. 

In an era of open-access publishing, when critique is extended, open, and invited, it is crucial that we as a scholarly community do not mistake a criticism of editorial work that could be improved (and is then improved, thanks to open access publishing) or an ideological difference in the making with scholarly failure.  Nor should we allow disagreements over critique and genre to cover up a more profound disagreement about the kind of scholarship, methods, and politics that are new and exciting in our discipline.  

One cannot expect all scholars to be enthused about transferring their labored research into the new tools of the digital humanities, nor should one even expect all digital humanists to agree about my own take on the most compelling trends in digital history.  However, offering a portrait of some exciting trends served a goal of unifying some scholars who agree that big data opens the gate to contextualizing archival research with long time-scales.  Those scholars can now identify more clearly their own orientation, and debate the best methods and practices available within that orientation, as a result of being marked out.  That some students and colleagues are inspired by thinking about the tools of big data in terms of periodization and politics has been my personal experience in teaching, writing, and lecturing about this book over the last year.  

Ultimately the questions at the heart of such disagreements as these — both of how we understand the university past and how we release our texts to the public online — are crucial for making sense of the role of the social sciences in the university to come. 

Of Conspiracies and Frontiers: The Scandal of Open Access Publishing

Our October book, The History Manifesto, reached broad audiences.  It was a first for academic history to follow in the trails long ago paved by Radiohead: we put the book online for free; we started a twitter hashtag; we invited the public in, and when they tweeted at us, we read, and sometimes tweeted back.   But open access has new rules, and the rules keep one busy.  Somewhere in the midst of watching the commentary and making revisions, we fell afoul of some of our readers, when we accepted their suggestions and updated our text accordingly. >

I believe that we (and the Press) made a mistake in February by releasing a new edition of The History Manifesto without announcing that a revised manuscript was available.   There was a new edition of The History Manifesto, in two parts.  A revised version of Figure 2 came out on November 20, 2014.  Ten lines of tightened prose and five revised footnotes came out on February 5, 2015.   Some readers took this failure to announce a revised edition as evidence of the intent to deceive. 

It's important to differentiate, however, between an intentional conspiracy to sabotage one's critics and the active, ongoing, evolving task of experimenting with a new format of publishing.   We had no desire to lead our readers astray, nor to cover up the ongoing debate, when we issued a revised edition.    Far from it, we believed that we were living into a commitment to bringing new, online, open-access forms of publishing into the heart of scholarship.  Publishing on the internet opens up the possibility of an ongoing process of revision that is new to publishers, writers, and readers in the academy.  I believe that our experience is an exemplary moment for the institution as a whole to learn from, and to benefit from, the lively public engagement that the new frontier of open-access publishing makes possible. 

The concession that we should have announced the "revised manuscript" has been backed up by action, a collective action undertaken not only by us the authors but also by the whole host of staff at Cambridge University Press.  On Monday March 30, a revised website came out that went go beyond merely remarking a “manuscript of record” in the way suggested to us in private correspondence by Peter Mandler – that Cambridge University Press should announce that there has been a revision posted.  On March 30, we listed all of the revisions in detail – the tightened lines of prose, the footnotes, and the altered illustration will are available on the front page, where a document describes them exactly as they were given to the typesetter.  Those who select “download” on the History Manifesto website now have the opportunity to choose between an “original edition” or a “revised edition.”  The process is meant to be as transparent as we, the Cambridge University Press editors and designers, could possibly make it. 

Charges of an “ethical breach” highlight larger questions of publishing process that we, as scholars, will have to reckon with in an era of new technology -- questions all of us must grapple with.  The dynamics of open-access publishing are new, and there is great utility in establishing a “manuscript of record” to which subsequent criticism can refer in detail.  Some of them have participated in publishing discussions in higher education that have underscored the importance to the scholarly record of having a publication of record, noting when particular parts of the text have been changed.  We, and the leadership of the Press, were persuaded.  Revision should not be an unlimited process; there should be an official “revised manuscript” available to readers alongside an original version.

Dealing with these issues is new not only for us but also for Cambridge University Press, a point that was driven home abundantly in our conversations with senior editors and staff.  In book form, "revised editions" are rarely issued with this level of detailed annotation. Standard practice for a traditional print book, our editors quickly pointed out, would be summed up by one quick line on the copyright page of a standard print book: “revised edition: some text has been altered from the original.”  Even when there have been meetings with positions drafted and recognized, activities such as these are still new to Cambridge University Press.

It is also important that scholars understand that an institutional delay does not signal unethical intention, but is part of a necessary ingredient of rethinking how texts are released when publishing experiments are underway and many individuals are involved.  Delay makes room for a minor public relations crisis in publishing and digital humanities.  From the outside, the two-month delay in clarifying the process of revision smacks of conspiracy.  In reality, there was a two-week-long turn-around between the time that our critics directly contacted us and the issue of a new statement online clarifying what had been changed.  That two weeks was an incredibly efficient process, given the number of editors, lawyers, and in-house web-designers who had to be consulted to make such a change happen.  There was immense good will on behalf of all parties, scrambling to get the changes clarified as quickly as possible. 

Actually effecting the updates to the website required both time and the work of an entire staff – including a series of Cambridge editors with book and journal experience, and the Cambridge New York staff who are responsible for the website.  We, the authors, were happy to post a detailed list of the ten lines of tightened prose and five footnotes revised in February.  The press saw the wisdom of all of this, and recommitted themselves to clarifying what had been done.  But even when everyone is on board – consensus is formed, the will is good, and everyone has signed off – it can take a minute to coordinate a dozen people, including various editors, website curators, coders, and even legal counsels – to make sure that the act happens.  

We are living through a frontier moment of online publishing.  It should be remembered that of the five university presses who we spoke to initially about releasing the manuscript, none had released an open-access book in the humanities before; the sole precedents were works from MIT press like Peter Suber’s Open Access not issued in the field of history. There are scant precedents for appropriate habits of keeping readers updated with what version they are reading.  Critique and revision in an online world come bogglingly fast – indeed they can be consuming for editors and authors who have other obligations.  Remember that these November to February revisions came atop a book that had only been published on October 2, 2014; in the traditional world of academic publishing, we would count ourselves lucky to be receiving the first published book reviews so early.

Other scholars who study digital media have nevertheless been optimistic about the opportunities that this new form of publishing holds for revision as a process. In her 2011 book Planned Obsolescence, media scholar Kathleen Fitzpatrick delivered a positive verdict on her experience circulating a manuscript for “open review” on the internet where all readers could comment, instantaneously, on her text. 

Because we were persuaded by arguments such as these, we published The History Manifesto open access (a first for Cambridge University Press).  David Armitage and I had been part of a world of digital humanities conversations in Cambridge, MA from 2010 to 2014, one where open-access advocates like Margy Avery, Martin Eve, and Caroline Edwards were in meetings with the History Department, Harvard Press, the Metalab, and the Harvard Libraries about how and whether Harvard would move from a digital open repository to more daring attempts at open access, for example releasing its back catalogue of academic books to a public readership.  

Advocating for open access was, for us, a moral issue of how scholars should negotiate when working with publishers.  We believed that we should work with the institutions around us to bridge the gap between the academy and a broader public readership, indeed global readership, at present barred from much scholarship by the obstacle of the pay wall.  It also felt like an important issue for institution-building, for helping our departments and universities to adapt to the opportunities of a digital age, and for modeling a form of scholarship that thinks critically about the organs of publishing and dissemination at a moment of technological change.  When we took the manuscript for our new book around to various university presses, we thought of the book negotiations as an important opportunity for faculty to engage publishers about the ethical and pragmatic questions of how scholars engage the public.  We were pressing for open access because we wanted there to be a path for engaged scholars to reach a broader audience and to learn from them, still paired with the credentials offered by a university press.

Like Fitzpatrick, we too have profited from the particular demands for clarification voiced by Danny Loss and others.  In contrast, how many footnotes in traditional monographs go unread for want of a twitterverse or blogosphere filled with active, commenting readers?  Most academic monographs are reviewed by three readers, a process that sometimes extends from months into years and conflicts with timelines for hiring, tenure, and promotion.  Blind peer review for journals is likewise slow. Our lightening-quick reviews from the public pushed our manuscript towards even greater standards of perfection than those to which most manuscripts are held.  

One of the ways that open access invites new frontiers in publishing is that it opens up a wide window to feedback from the public, whether scholars or members of the public at large.  For the first four months of the book's life, we were closely watching twitter and the blogs, reading the praise and blame alike, and noting for ourselves opportunities to improve the text.  It seemed to us that this process might be one of ongoing receptivity and revision.  Thus, at the time, it made sense to talk about a process of revision rather than to announce a revised edition.  We had already released a general statement about revision as a process in a blog entry of November 20, 2014 (link: http://historymanifesto.cambridge.org/blog/2014/11/updating-visualizations-and-power-open-access-review/) . 

In the process of engaging with our readers, we closely examined the substance of the critiques, some of which were valid inquiries into what we meant in a footnote; others of which simply evidenced that readers on the internet were unfamiliar with the conventions of writing in the historical profession.   For instance, an anonymous twitter personality whose critique was cited by senior colleagues in their footnotes as evidence of sloppy scholarship appeared, upon deeper inspection, to be unfamiliar with historians’ convention of using a footnote to allude to a body of historical writing that may be useful for further reading, rather than exactly matching the content of a sentence or paragraph to the conclusions of the works in the footnote, as is the convention in disciplines like economics.  

This is an important moment in terms of setting a model for engagement by academics with the public.   It is our hope that the model of engagement that we choose, individually and collaboratively, can remain one that is open to critique from without, one that bears out the idealism of sharing and long-term thinking that we talked about in The History Manifesto in terms of a practice of sharing manuscripts designed to circulate for the long term. 

What Cambridge University Press, as publishers, and we, as authors, are modeling is a new form of engagement with open access publishing -- new for the press and new for scholars.  We hope that our commitment to establishing a manuscript of record, and our ongoing commitment to open-access publishing, will be read in the light that we intend it: as a positive example of engagement by scholars with scholars, by scholars with the public, and by institutions with the longue duree and the collective good.