DH Publishing To Me

Rebecca Foote recently invited me to a part of an ACH panel on publishing in digital humanities along with Jojo Karlin and Nat McGartland. Rebecca circulated some questions in advance of the panel that we might use to orient our thinking. What follows are some slightly edited responses to those prompts. More to come soon based on the conversation!

What has publishing and DH meant for you? What are some of the various platforms, venues, and structures you’ve used to publish your work?

The platform, venues, and structures are easier to start with. I have published in more traditional venues: journal articles, collected editions, and edited journal issues. And I’ve done a fair amount of work in spaces that are a bit edgier for the humanities but are pretty typical for DH: open access textbooks, open educational resources, blogging, and lots of cowriting. I’m currently working on a more traditional monograph that blends the two worlds by blogging as I go. And I also consider social media a form of publishing that I engage in regularly.

These spaces have had a wide range of tech stacks: WordPress, GitHub, Manifold, a Zoom discussion series that has outcomes hosted on Knowledge Commons, my own self-hosted Jekyll blog, and more. Perhaps the one anecdote that springs to mind most forcefully when considering the question: for my first article, I actually had to put a physical CD in an envelope and mail it to an older scholar. The thing got lost in the mail, and it wound up getting published three and a half years later. I think my frustration with that process actually affected a lot of how I approach publishing my work.

For me, DH publishing has primarily been a full court press, a focus on everything. I try not to throw anything away, because any piece of what we do in the Scholars’ Lab might be useful for someone. Publishing openly and frequently is, to some degree, about passing on the generosity, mentoring, and privilege that I’ve been lucky enough to receive so that others can benefit from it. I think of DH publishing less as about showing off my successes. It’s always felt more about trying to speak to people who might not have the resources that I’ve been lucky to enjoy, such that they can learn from what I’ve learned.

I often, frankly, think of it as answering the question “what have I learned today that I wish I knew yesterday? And how can I share it in a way that’s useful for someone else tomorrow?” Professionally legible components of the publication process have generally followed. A tweet might become a blog post might become a peer-reviewed article. But that has all happened as a byproduct of following my own North Star, which is sharing process-oriented work in public.

What do you consider when taking a project or your research from something that you develop for yourself into something designed for a larger audience? How do different publishing media and platforms affect your understanding of audience?

I think I take a pretty extreme view on this question: the bar is extremely low for me take something that was for me and put it in front of a broader audience. I think the reason for that is that I learn an awful lot from trying to put together a blog post. It helps me to refine my ideas. It helps me to feel like I have made a statement, and it’s often integral for me when I’m putting together larger pieces of work. Even if no one reads my work, even if the audience is just me, I still find it worthwhile to share a thing in public. I often start with that eventual aim in mind.

But that response is a bit of a dodge. To actually answer the question: what does it take for me to think about moving something from myself or a broader audience? It often starts in conversation with the people around me. If I have doubts, I’ll say to a student or coworker, “Hey, this is the thing I’m thinking about. Does that seem interesting?” The answer is usually yes. I don’t mean this to imply anything about the quality of my own work. I mean this more as a commentary on the deep sense in which we are all engaged in a collective attempt to work in a really difficult field, to understand challenging methods and how to pass them on to others. We are all trying to understand the place that these ideas and methods have in the larger academic economy. We’re all trying to sort that out, and we’re all looking for guideposts. And we all have something to share that is helpful to someone else, far more than traditional publishing structures allow us. I’m always happy to see others share work in process outside of traditional scholarly norms, and I try hard to promote the work others, particularly students and early-career scholars. I think it’s an important part of the mission of Digital Humanities to do so, a kind of wall-to-wall, collective solidarity of intellectual practice.

To your other question about how different platforms affect my understanding of audience—I think it’s especially important here to note social media, which sometimes gets left out of conversations about publishing. If there is a collective hesitation towards publishing openly for fear that it might have an adverse effect on your ability to publish traditionally, I think such fears are only amplified for sharing work on social media. For me, all these forms of publishing are interconnected. I have had tweets turn into blog posts turn into articles. I don’t think that time spent on social media platforms is a waste. Intentional time in those spaces trying out ideas, building an audience, and engaging with that network is time well spent. To sum up, all of these different venues do all have distinct characteristics and distinct audiences, but I try to think about them all as continuous. Each one has different affordances and limitations for doing so, but at the end of the day, it’s about the writing and the sharing. The technology I’m working with is writing.

How have you navigated conventional institutional pressures and expectations in the publishing process?

It’s important to contextualize my answers so far in response to this question. I occupy what is sometimes referred to as an alternative academic career. It is digital humanities position within a university library. I am Head of Student Programs in the Scholars’ Lab, and, within that role, my promotional structure actually doesn’t care all that much if I do any publishing. I think the library is happy to have me publish in an abstract sense, but I’m not getting any kind of direct promotional legibility for it. I’m never going to submit a report of my citation metrics to my place of work. I am extraordinarily lucky to be in a position that writing is supported by my direct supervisor anyway, even with the inherent challenges of fitting this work into my other job responsibilities.

I think it’s incumbent on those who enjoy institutional privilege to think about how this work can benefit those most feeling those institutional pressures you mention. I often think that the real beneficiaries of my publishing activities are my students, because I always think of any networks and opportunities I get from this work as in the service of what I can pass along to them so they can shine as the expert collaborators they are. I am working with lots of people who have much more direct intersections with the kinds of institutional pressures that one might expect from a publish or perish model. It’s my students who are considering whether or not to go on the job market. For them, the CV line can often be much more important. I often try to think in these terms when considering how to work with them. I absolutely love collaborative writing. So I frequently find myself asking: am I the best person to write a particular thing, or would it be better with other people? And if better with others, what venues could we find for it? So, to take one example, I asked my students to cowrite with me when I felt it was time to write about the pedagogical interventions in the Praxis Program. Writing together was useful to them, but it also made the piece better for including their voices.

How do you approach publishing when a project is collaborative?

As I mentioned before, collaborative authorship is pretty important to me, and it tends to be the bulk of what I do. It’s also frankly untrue to suggest that publishing is ever done fully in isolation (hat tip to textual criticism and Jerome McGann here). Whether it is your peers or your students, your editors or the people who host your finished product…writing is always a collaboration.

I’m especially interested in proactively cultivating this shared writing culture. In the Scholars’ Lab, we started a weekly opt-in writing time, where people can join and work on whatever they need to do. And then we also have monthly time to share back material for feedback. These tools are all throwbacks to my own dissertation writing process, when I had a writing group that was absolutely essential to me finishing. But I’m also interested in pushing us to think about the craft of writing in different ways. I’m obsessive about process. I have all sorts of different approaches to writing I’m trying any given week. One week I’ll try pulling a card from a deck for blogging inspiration. Right now I’m building out a writing program based on the couch to 5k model, where I’ll write one sentence every day for a week, two sentences a day for a week, and so on. By the time the month is done I’ll be used to writing a paragraph every day, and hopefully it will be easier to activate my writing muscles on command. I bring this up, because I’m constantly trying to enroll other people in kinds of experiments. “I’m doing this weird thing this week. Do you want to join?” I have found people are often up for it. This feeds into my answer for the last question, which is…

What advice do you have for someone looking to publish in the age but who is unsure of where and how to start?

My most important piece of advice is to look at what you’re already doing. I mean, really look at what you’re doing and break it down into all of its component parts. The academy tends to train us to think about publishing as one particular kind of thing that looks one particular way. But, in fact, what you are doing has so much more to it than you can fit into a single journal article or book. The process can all be meaningful, both personally and professionally. So my primary piece of advice is to start writing now. And don’t stop. Start making a practice of writing constantly, in as many different formats as you can, about as many different things as you can. Because you will find platforms for it, and it can all be useful to you. The more you write, the easier it will get to do so. My first piece of advice is just to start writing, and don’t wait for the publishing industry to tell you that you can do something. Your work is more meaningful than that, and it’s worth getting out there sooner than later. One could, quite reasonably, respond that there is only so much time in the day. And I hear you—I really do. We’re all trying to find ways to squeeze as much out of each day as we can, and everyone has their own pressures. Figure out what works for you and what you can sustain without burning out. You might have to get creative. I actually wrote this post by dictating it into my phone on the drive into work. It still counts! And I think my other writing has benefited from trying out all sorts of approaches to making it happen. In terms of finding your own platforms, I would find the people out there that you admire, find the work that they’re doing and the places they’re working, and try to find ways to join the conversation. Maybe that means starting a blog. Maybe that means starting email correspondence. Maybe that means using social media.

I’ve been conveying messages like these to students for years, and I typically offer a huge caveat. It’s truer, now more than ever, that it is not safe for every kind of person to be online. In particular, your work may increase the degree of risk you feel existing in such spaces. It is not for me to tell you what makes sense for you in this context. Your safety is more important. But I would encourage readers to think about the approach to open I have been describing not as a binary. Your work does not need to be only either fully open or completely closed until peer reviewed. Think of it as a continuum. What parts of your process are you able to put online sooner for others? What opportunities or risks might that entail? At the very least, make a practice of writing every day, whether you ultimately share that material or not. Because I think you’ll find it far easier to publish when the time comes. As John Coltrane perhaps apocryphally said, “We practice so when the doors of perception open, we’re prepared to step through.”

Creativity is a discipline. It takes practice.