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My title makes an appeal to humanities scholars who are uncertain about the survival of time-honored, print-based scholarly practices in the digital age of information abundance and attention deficits.

The argument laid out before you concerns not only the eponymous subject matter of the work of scholarship in the age of digital reproduction, but also the potential for undergraduates to make original contributions to humanities research. My focus on undergraduate participation is likely to appeal to a smaller subset of humanities scholars who are eager to involve students in research in their fields. Yet this more narrow focus is, in fact, a gesture toward a wider audience. Because undergraduates qualify as “non experts,” my emphasis on their participation is tied to a crucial component of my agenda: re-imagining humanities scholarship in the digital age to involve a broad public of experts and non-experts—and in the process, to dislodge hierarchies that currently divide these constituencies.

Hence my publishing here, on Atavist, a digital storytelling platform geared toward “a new genre of nonfiction, a digital form that lies in the space between long narrative magazine articles and traditional books and e-books” (qtd by Butler). Can a work of scholarship in the age of digital reproduction inhabit such a free, open space?

So much for the subject matter and platform, and on to methodologies. Like a three-legged stool, my argument rests on three methodological principles for humanities scholarship in the digital age:

1. bibliography,2. design, &3. collaboration.

The ideas I am about to unfold are not original to me. Rather, I will gather and arrange arguments made by scholars whose writings inspired me as I began my own path from a solid grounding in print-based scholarship and pedagogy into the uncharted terrain of digital humanities. In curating other scholars’ ideas here, I am effectively doing the work of bibliography, gathering sources on a subject and arranging them in an accessible, intelligible form.

Design is crucial to this effort. If I am going to capture and hold your attention, so that you ignore the new message alert that just popped up on the smartphone, tablet, or laptop on which you are reading, then I must deliver these ideas in a stylish, easily navigable, minimalist, and immersive format that reduces distractions and rewards concentration. (Thanks, Atavist.)

Collaboration will ensue when you use the comment function to critique my argument and make suggestions about how it might be refined and improved. Based on your suggestions, I will make corrections and improvements, so that this argument will remain a living, changing, unfolding statement of principles and practices concerning the work of scholarship in the age of digital reproduction.

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WORKS CITED

Butler, Kirsten. “7 Platforms Changing the Future of Publishing and Storytelling.” Brain Pickings. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Oct. 2015.

The tectonic shift from print culture to the digital age is transforming practices of reading and writing, turning a once solitary endeavor into an interactive, multimedia activity. The shift is also affecting scholarly practices, albeit more gradually. Humanities professors, rooted as we are in print-based traditions and methodologies, tend to approach the digital revolution with attitudes ranging from healthy skepticism to horror. The popular “blog,” for example, seems the antithesis of the thoroughly researched, well-reasoned, expertly vetted analysis that we expect in academia.

As Scott Pound explains in “The Future of the Scholarly Journal,” these expectations arise from a system for producing and disseminating scholarly knowledge that dates back to the seventeenth century and is rooted in print cultural practices and values such as individuality, permanence, hierarchy, linear thinking, scarcity, and depth. According to this model, a lone scholar painstakingly researches and writes an academic book that takes years to prepare and requires the approval of two experts in the field before being published by a prestigious university press, issued in hard copy for $100+, purchased primarily by academic libraries, and reviewed in subscription based, peer-reviewed academic journals read only by professionals in the field.

The digital age has ushered in a new system for producing and disseminating knowledge, and with it, alternative practices and values such as collective intelligence; networks; divergent, lateral, systemic thinking; abundance; and breadth (Pound). In this model, anyone with access to a computer can publish online about any topic—climate change, You-Tube, Twitter, or twerking; research questions can be crowd-sourced on sites like Ask.com; community members can submit content to online bulletin board systems such as Reddit; and the general public can contribute to the expansion and regulation of free, open-access informational resources like Wikipedia, where you can learn about any subject in minutes, click on links, and surf across the World Wide Web to related (and unrelated) sites. 

The typical scholarly response has been to resist the tide of information abundance, as Pound explains: “For the most part, the scholarly community has managed to artificially maintain its traditional grounding in information scarcity through hefty subscription rates, low acceptance rates, and slow mechanisms for vetting research.” Innovation in scholarly vetting procedures can a slow, arduous, and painful process, as Nick D. Kim’s cartoon shows.

But not all scholars resist the change. Pioneers in digital studies have begun to utilize digital tools and platforms for academic writing and research, with promising results. These innovators recognize that in the scholarly enterprise, as in book publishing, we must avoid simply relocating print-based practices to the digital realm. In this regard, we can take lessons from non-academics like independent writer, designer, and publisher Craig Mod:

Everyone asks, “How do we change books to read them digitally?” But the more interesting question is, “How does digital change books?” (2)

Academics may be similarly inclined to wonder, “How do we change our scholarship to publish it digitally?” But the more interesting question is: “How does digital change scholarship?” Rather than simply uploading our articles as PDFs, we must put our minds and imaginations to the task of using digital platforms to invent new methods and forms of scholarship—forms capable of presenting long and deep inquiry, fostering intellectual exchange, and maintaining rigorous standards of peer review.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick, co-founder of the digital scholarly network MediaCommons, is a leader in the effort to adapt digital tools and platforms to serve the highest standards of scholarly inquiry and communication. “The blog is not a form but a platform,” she argues, explaining that the blog is not a genre that precludes sustained analysis or concentrated attention, but a “stage on which material of many different varieties—different lengths, different time signatures, different modes of mediation—might be performed” (48).

“The blog is not a form but a platform.”

The next two chapters discuss two different applications of blog platforms for academic research involving undergraduates. The first emphasizes the importance of bibliography and the second, the importance of design. But despite the difference in emphasis, both case studies reflect the three methodological principles of bibliography, design, and collaboration. And both offer models that you can adapt to involve your students in original research in your field using digital tools and platforms.

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WORKS CITED

Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. “Reading (and Writing) Online, Rather Than on the Decline.” Profession (2012): 41-52. Web. 15 Sep. 2013.

Kim, Nick D. Peer Review Cartoon. Strange-Matter Archive. Web. 13 Oct. 2015.

Mod, Craig. “Post-Artifact Books and Publishing.” @craigmod (June, 2011). Web. 15 Sep. 2013.

Pound, Scott. “The Future of the Scholarly Journal.” Amodern. N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Mar. 2015.

Sapiens de Mitri, Nichola. “Studying at Starbucks.” (2013). Creative Commons licensed. Web. 13 Oct. 2015.

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What did Surrealism offer women like Loy?

This is the first chapter of my magnum opus on Mina Loy’s migration from Italian Futurism to New York Dada. First let me tell you who she was:

Artist. Writer. Entrepeneur.

Born in London to an English mother and German Jewish father, she was raised in an aspiring middleclass Victorian household. She did not fit in. Artistic, dreamy, and headstrong, she was the problem daughter. Her parents sent her to a series of art schools, first in London, then in Berlin, and then in Paris. In Paris, she was elected into the prestigious Paris Salon, and seduced by Stephen Haweis, whom she married. Disastrous. Then she moved to Italy where the Futurists woke her out of her lethargy and depression. Affairs. Also disastrous. Then she moved to New York, where she found more amorous, amicable relations in the Arensberg cirlce, a proto-Dada cadre.

December 12, 1913. Five thousand spectators crowd into the Teatro Verdi in Florence, Italy, to witness an unprecedented event: a Futurist serata or “evening,” orchestrated by F. T. Marinetti and Giovanni Papini. The mood is electric. The theatre-goers are restless with anticipation, whetted by the flood of publicity spread around the city via posters, fliers, and newspapers.

Marinetti ascends the stage and launches a barrage of insults at the audience. The crowd erupts, hurling oaths, cheers, and rotten vegetables. Standing impervious to the chaos, Marinetti suavely catches an egg vaunting toward him and shouts back: “Your frenzied behavior gives me pleasure. The only argument the passatisti have is a horde of dirty vegetables” (qtd by Burke 156).

Papini takes the stage and attacks the entire city of Firenze for being “marked by the past as by a disease” and requiring “the fresh air of futurism” to rid it of the “disgusting passé-ists who make their home here” (qtd by Burke 156).

The crowd roars with applause. Somewhere in its midst, a tall, striking woman “with grey-blue eyes,” “waved black hair,” and “strange, long earrings” sits smiling, lips closed and eyes wide open (qtd by Burke 173).

Three days later, the Futurist newspaper Lacerba declared the event a triumph, proclaiming victory over the crowd, whose “overwhelming vulgarity… drunken frenzy… [and] raging stupidity” they had transformed into “a magnificent spectacle” (qtd by Burke 156). Mina Loy—the tall woman with strange earrings—shared their sense of accomplishment, feeling as cleansed and exhilarated by the event “as if she had benefited by a fortnight at the seashore” (qtd by Burke 156).

But she was not convinced that the Futurists controlled the crowd. She teased her lover Marinetti, telling him he had no identity apart from his audience: “Even there you are a spurious entity, drawing ‘something’ out of an audience to give back to them in your superb pretentiousness as yourself” (qtd by Burke 156). Far from having mastered the audience, she suggested, Marinetti was utterly dependent upon it for his identity and power. Her taunt must have struck a nerve, because he countered by forbidding her from attending any more seratas. He could not risk having the keen-eyed gaze of a woman puncture his ballooning sense of ascendency over the audience.

This anecdote, recounted by Carolyn Burke in Becoming Modern: the life of Mina Loy, complicates the oft-told story of Loy’s artistic and erotic entanglements with the Italian Futurists. Loy was powerfully attracted to the Futurists—so the story goes—she was electrified by their energy, but repelled by their misogyny (Burke 178-9, Arnold 84, Augustine 92, Schmid 1). Loy was entangled in a triangulated affair with Marinetti and Papini between 1913 and 1916, while she was living in Italy. When these affairs soured, she packed up and moved to New York for two years, shifting affiliation to a proto-Dada set that included Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Beatrice Wood, and the love of her life, fighter-poet Arthur Cravan. Scholars attribute Loy’s disaffection to the Futurists’ misogyny, but she was also critical of their chauvinistic attitude to their audiences—their assumption that they could orchestrate mass audiences without being subsumed by their unruly energy and power.