Two Conferences: One Students’/Women’s Media Power

Home after back-to-back events where I wore one hat that just might be construed as two (an interesting slip [of the tongue] or tip [of the hat] that helps point out some of my unease with [my place in] the “Digital Humanities,” more on that to come).

The first was just that: Re:Humanities, a student-run undergraduate conference where a day of really impressive student presentations were book-ended by addresses by professors (myself and Katherine Harris) who spoke on our own pedagogic commitments to undergraduate research.

While there was much to note here, I’ll focus my observations on the related themes and contradictions of expertise, authority, authoring, and professional(ism)(ilization) in the realm of the digital (humanities). We enjoyed polished, first rate and diverse student presentations on topics ranging from the mapping of Soweto, to websites devoted to postcolonial feminism, Paris monuments, and global street-art, to pleas for better digital design or citation practices, to the digitizing and narrativizing of rare books. It was crystal clear that digital humanities opens up a place, multiple methods, and voice for qualified young participants who would otherwise not be so readily enabled to “publish” or circulate their work while also being so creative and impassioned about both the content and forms of their fledgling scholarly endeavors. Many of the students commented that doing work for an audience larger than one professor (and maybe their Mom), promotes a higher degree of commitment, professionalism, and passion then they feel when writing a paper, and this reminded me of something I already knew and already do…

The subject of the second conference: Women, Social Justice and Documentary, held at Smith College. Granted, this group of faculty, artists, and students had not really heard of the “digital humanities,” although they were also interested in thinking about the relationship between making things like documentaries, and their academic (arts and humanities) studies, and (feminist) passions and commitments. In this case, a decades-long struggle to find and circulate a voice by those deauthorized by gender, race, sexuality, and other forms of patriarchal oppression has created a substantive history of media objects, and an infrastructure that holds them (including distribution, festivals, scholarship, and pedagogy).

Why, we might ask, doesn’t Digital Humanities know about the work and struggles and conquests of (see Hammer Retrospective at the Tate above) the speakers at the second conference like Lourdes Portillo, Barbara Hammer, or Rea Tajiri who have been interpreting their impassioned, politicized ideas into forms of media and pedagogy for decades and this to an enthusiastic audience who has responded in kind with criticism and media production of our own?

I’d have to say the answer to this is why I don’t whole-heartedly embrace the digital humanities (while I’m happy to be embraced by them). The “field” does the amazing potentially radicalizing work of asking humanities professors (and students) to take account for their audiences, commitments, forms, and the uses of their work. But this was always there to take account of, merely being obscured by the transparent (and patriarchal) protocols of publishing and pedagogy that have suddenly been miraculously revealed because of the confounding force of the digital. However, this turn is occurring, for the most part, as if plenty of fields, and professors, and artists, and students, and humanists hadn’t been already been doing this for years (and therefore without turning to these necessarily radical traditions of political scholars, theoretical artists, and humanities activists).

I wrote just such a comment recently on Miriam Posner’s blog:

“Just got turned on to your blog. How thrilling! When I think (and write and d0) about doing as making as thinking I have often made videos as well as books, and more currently “ video-books” (which are really just big web-pages), so what I think has been lost in this “all Digital Humanities are communities of practice speak” (and particularly that this is a radicalizing moment for humanists) is not simply that people crafted before in that twee sense, but that academic writing is and always was doing, as it was craft, and that these added digital technologies have merely exposed that scholars were always making things, in ritualized ways, for particular users, with machines and for special(ized) uses (and now actually have to be accountable for this). I spoke with Victoria Szabo about this at length for a panel she co-ran recently, Evaluating Digital Work for Tenure and Promotion: A Workshop for Evaluators and Candidates at the 2012 MLA Convention. I love your four points at the end for the reason that it marks practice as political, and hope you’ll take a peek at some of the similar principles I’m working through at my Feminist Online Spaces site (a work in progress to be sure).”

Teaching and Learning as Making

I will be beginning my talk for the Re:Humanities, an undergraduate conference on Digital Humanities run by students at Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr and Haverford, with these observations. There are certainly reasons that the digital humanities lend themselves to an integrative pedagogic method (including both undergrad media production and research):

• the field is new: so there is still not a lot of original research, and there’s room for undergraduates
• it is digital and therefore young people’s “native status” qualifies them to do work that many more “qualified” experts can not or will not
• web 2.0 is characterized by a diminishing of the power of expertise with a linked growth in access to voice (through both production tools and distribution platforms)
• since digital literacy includes reading and writing beyond the word, the production of sounds and images becomes critical
• working with digital tools allow us to stay within the vernacular of what we critique while modelling the methods, ideas, and norms we wish to see on the Internet

(this video won best in show for the Learning from YouTube 2012 video about YouTube popularity that was also a good video for school).

Voice as Structure

Yesterday afternoon, I had the decided pleasure of partaking in a conversation with Natalie Bookchin, the amazing new media artist who is my friend and even sometimes collaborator. We spoke together with the Critical Digital Humanities group at UC Riverside about space, quotation, and community in relation to our critical media practices.

A highlight in our conversation addressed how we both conscientiously move and link our work between “real” and “cyber” spaces always anticipating how they are co-constitutive (thanks to April Durham for this clarification) while trying to maintain a shared, and admitted commitment to the “real” in the last instance (what I called a complex three-way). But I was most inspired by our interactions about the voice, body and structure: how Natalie explains the ways that her voice is visible in the system, tensions, arguments, and connections she draws from the indexical images of faces and words of others from YouTube, while my online feminist mantrafesto didactically insists that the (feminist, raced) body of the user must be seen. Bookchin’s unseen but anchored presence as artist may be the out I’ve been looking for, as participants at my road show have consistently been critical of these lines:

All voices want a body. A body needs to be visible
Visibility allows for warranting

Contractual Mayhem: On the Absurdities of Moving from Paper to Digital in Academic Publishing

I am currently negotiating my contract with MIT Press to “publish” my “video-book” about YouTube this Fall. The enlightening, confusing, crazy, friendly, and productive conversations I am having with my editor, Doug Sery, and my production team at USC’s Vectors and IML are a telling indication of how far academic publishing (and writing) has to go to match the technological possibilities for writing, research, and public intellectualism afforded by new media. My project will be the first publication supported (in part) by a Mellon Initiative “The Alliance for Networking Visual Culture,” which set out to re-think academic publishing (in conversation with UC, MIT and Duke University Presses) in light of media archives (including the USC Shoah Foundation and Institute, The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, Critical Commons and the Internet Archive) and digital humanities. With Doug’s kind permission, I will be presenting some of our conversation here as a way to network these sorts of negotiations, and the questions they raise for digital humanists, new media scholars, and academic presses:

Doug:

Thanks for making a first pass on the contract. I am thrilled to be working with MIT, and realize “The Work” (what I am currently calling a “video-book” until a better name is found) is the first of its kind, and we’re making this happen as we go. Towards this end, here are the notes I promised about the concepts in the first draft of the contract that don’t align well with my understanding of this born-digital publication. I think the conceptual issues for us to tackle are:

1) Delivery of the Work: what form is acceptable given that the Work lives only on-line (or in a data-base) and not in “word-processing files”

2) Author’s Warranty:
a) I am wondering about urls and YouTube videos that constitute a large portion of the Work. Of course, the writing is all mine.
b) Also, regarding credit: It is not clear to me, contractually, how to credit the design team who built the Work which holds my words and points to other’s videos.
c) As for Previous Publication: a significant amount of the Work has been “published” already on my blog, although reformatted and designed for the Work.

3) Size of the Work: Do you actually want a word count for the Work? This will not account for the videos, which take up a significant portion of its content. Should there be a video count, or a time count, too?

4) Royalties: There is currently language about royalties that gives me 0% of all books sales, which makes sense, as there is no book. The language in the separate portions called Electronic Rights and Royalties from Other Sources (i.e. “if the Work is sold electronically”) both seem to be written for a paper book (i.e. “we might make the Work as a whole available via the World Wide Web)” and seem to be in some contradiction or in uneccessary parallel with each other.  Given that on-line, electronic distribution would be its primary (only?) possible revenue stream, if there is to be a revenue stream at all, since it is my current understanding that the Work will be free on the MIT site (although this is not stipulated in the contract), I’d like this all to be clarified and probably re-written.

5) Materials Created by Other Persons: To be clear, I do not have permissions for most of the YouTube videos the work points to, which sit on YouTube and not on the Work.

6) Upkeep, repairs, hosting of the infrastructure, database and Work: Who is responsible for this? Where does it sit? Where does it go after three years? How is it preserved?

7) Editing, Proofing: Unclear how this will be done given the unique quality of the material in the Work: i.e. design, words, videos. I certainly want it to be edited and proofed but how and by whom?

8. Author’s Alterations: We need to decide whether the Work will be adapted, in that it is live, and easily updatable, added to, commented upon etc. or if it stays still once delivered (more like a paper book).

9) Promotion: given the unique nature of the Work, its economic model, and its final shape and home, I am interested in thinking through where and how the Press will promote it and otherwise let its audience know about its presence and availability.

10)  Index: The Work has a search function and thus I will not need to make an index.

I look forward to working all this through. I understand that most of these concepts are new for the Press (and me) and am open to hashing them out in ways that make the best sense for all concerned. Meanwhile,  I am busy revising the Work as we speak. All the best, Alex

PS: I would like to ask your permission to “publish” some version of this (and other emails) concerning our ongoing discussions about publishing the Work, first on my blog, and then perhaps in the Work itself. As you know, the self-referential quality of the Work, discussing its own status as an object of writing, pedagogy, social-networked scholarship, activist intellectualism, and digital humanities publishing would be well-served by including this final stage of its production, process, and conceptualization within itself.

“Blind” Review: You Can Ask to be Seen!

My friend and colleague, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, has written much and more on the state of academic publishing (and I recently edited a section on this in Cinema Journal) so I won’t go there again here. Kathleen’s recent book, Planned Obsolescence, is being openly peer-reviewed, on-line, at MediaCommonsPress: “open scholarship in open formats.” In this spirit of openness and full disclosure, I share my recent escapades in the dodgy realm of the “blind” review. For, “blind” reviews certainly achieve many things, including the cloaking of shoddy practices of those in control, the hiding of labor and promises behind shields of anonymity, and the use of outdated methods that have lost touch with current technologies as well as practices of publishing.

About two years ago I applied to write for an edited anthology (by two of Cinema Studies’ most esteemed statespeople), to be published by a pre-eminent discipline-specific press, about Teaching Media Studies. How proud was I to be accepted! I wrote and re-wrote my little manifesto about teaching media production within media studies classrooms, with the close help of my editors. A lot of time was spent, and the piece was perfected for this particular place. Quite recently, I was rather summarily dismissed from the enterprise, after being told in a professional but not particularly supportive way, that there were too many words in the anthology, and mine had been, not surprisingly, given its edgy and marginal goals, selected to go to reduce word-count. In the meantime, the uncountable hours of revision were wiped away, “blind” to all but me.

Now much too short for just about any place (the requirements of the anthology) and entirely re-directed to address the editors’ and anthology’s concerns, I naively set out to try to re-place my effort elsewhere. I chose to send it to one of the pre-eminent journals in the field because the book version had itself been written for a lofty forum and a field-specific audience. The journal has a nifty little on-line submission template, so imagine my surprise, after the cumbersome effort of filling in all their required fields, and taking my name off the front of the article, to be asked to re-submit. I include my correspondence about this for one reason: to prove that these creaky old rules, that make less and less sense in our on-line world (where a quick google search could identify anyone anyhow, if anyone actually cared), can be re-thought to be more responsive to our needs as writers and thinkers, critics and learners.

Dear Dr. Juhasz,

I write you in regards to manuscript #x which you submitted to Y. Y is an academic journal which peer reviews all its essays. As per the instructions to authors on our website, all the files you upload, apart from the cover letter, must be blinded, ie not give any information as to your identity. The manuscript you have now submitted twice is not blinded for review. Please can you log in again and resubmit it, with the cover information in a separate file. When you resubmit, please can you answer all the questions fully (ie  not “already answered” in place of essay title etc). Your previous versions will not be visible to our reviewers, so the latest version needs to have all relevant information fully completed.

Sincerely,
Z

—–Original Message—–
From: Alex Juhasz
Sent: 02 March 2010 18:19
To: Z
Subject: Re: Decision on Manuscript ID X

There must be some misunderstanding here. The version I am uploading has no cover information on it. Is there something I am missing? Thanks,

Alex Juhasz

——-

On Mar 4, 2010, at 8:06 AM, Z wrote:

Dear Alex – your name is listed several times in the contents of your essay. Any info identifying you must be uploaded separately, as a cover letter.

Z

—–Original Message—–
From: Alex Juhasz
Sent: 04 March 2010 17:26
To: Z at Y
Subject: Re: Decision on Manuscript ID X

I am a feminist scholar who writes about my own media work in conjunction with production and scholarly traditions that inform it.  Taking out references to myself in the piece seriously changes the fundamental theoretical, political, ideological and stylistic program of the piece. Not really sure what the best response is…Happy for your advise.

Alex

—–

On Mar 8, 2010, at 2:32 AM, Z wrote:

Dear Alex

Blinding essays so the author cannot be identified is a long-established process in peer-reviewed journals. If you feel you cannot remove references that identify you without compromising the piece, I’m afraid Y cannot accept your essay for peer-review.

Best wishes
Z

——-

From: Alex Juhasz
Sent: 08 March 2010 16:45
To: Z
Subject: Re: Decision on Manuscript ID X

Z:

I will re-send this truly blind, as you request. In the meantime, I an requesting that you bring this matter to your Editorial Team. As a feminist scholar who has looked to (and published in) Y for my entire (nearly twenty-year) career, and has applauded its role in allowing feminist practices and concerns to have a central role in the (re)shaping of the field of Cinema Studies, I am somewhat stymied, or perhaps disappointed, that the “long-established process of peer-review” trumps careful decisions about particular pieces that fall inside and outside these cherished rubrics. The challenging of such common-sense institutional practices was once a focus of your journal. I have a long and steady career of writing about my own work in the first person voice and theorizing from this position. I am not alone in such a writing style and method: one theorized by feminists in these very pages over the course of twenty-plus years. In fact, in the 1980s, I published a piece in Y about making AIDS activist videos, where my presence, work, and personal relationships were central to the theoretical meaning(s)of the piece. I do not remember striking references to my videos, or myself when this writing was reviewed. I will continue to insist that by taking the web-site that I discuss (and made) out of this piece in the name of “blind review” you do a greater disservice to the meanings of the piece, which are that real people make the culture they need by looking to past practices, sharing their own experiences, and building communities of conviction. I hope you understand that it is your institutional practices that are of real concern to me. The matter of my piece is pretty incidental.

Alex Juhasz

—–

Dear Alex

I’ll check this out with the editorial board. It does sound as if this piece needs to be seen as is, so please hold off resubmitting another version for now – I’ll just need to run it past them and I’ll get back to you.

Best wishes
Z

——–

09-Mar-2010
Dear Alex

I’ve checked with the editors as requested and in this case they’ll accept your original version of “TEACHING MEDIA PRAXIS”. So, I’m sorry for the inconvenience but please can you upload original version again.

Best wishes,
Z
Administrative Asst, Y

Animating Archives (W)rap Sheet

This was one of the best conferences I ever attended. The take home message for future conference organizers is hard to replicate: 1) carefully chosen speakers 2)  given ample time (2 speakers in 1 and 1/2 hour sessions) and 3) beautifully choreographed two-day flow, where distinct areas of approach, method, discipline and theory, hit against each other to build to a crescendo. Not one dud. Here’s the rap sheet of one-liners:

Diana Taylor: Archives, repertoires, and the digital are each made from practices, things, and places (riven with power) in distinct configurations.

James Chandler: Animating archives through re-presenting holdings in translated forms itself has a history as long as modernism’s.

Sharon Daniel: Poetics and aesthetics can be written into the ethics of the archive.

Matthew Fuller: The relational archive links through a messy rhetoric of power that includes findable “flubs” like deletions and leaks.

Kelly Gates: Corporations hope to catch the face, an unmappable archive of feeling, to better find us out.

Amelie Hastie: The body’s archive of memory, desire, longing and loss fuels a search for objects that might objectify their trace.

Josh Kun: Digital music generates mobile archives of local/transnational style and taste.

Lawrence Liang: Ownership is not only a matter of capital but also of proximity and love. To own can be to owe, a matter of ethics.

Janine Marchessault: A life on-line might map the lost as it pools into a shared computer dream of all seeing.

Trevor Paglen: The military-industrial complex litters our skies with evil digital eyes, the better to see you with. So,

Lisa Parks: we must look up, not across, in a shot-reverse of accountability.

Abby Smith Rumsey: The evidence of things remains for our loving re-use. Digital things will be lost without stewardship.

Ramesh Srinivasan: Embrace the incommensurability when the local(e) gets to gather, save and organize the complex, adaptive, fluid stuff they love.

James Tobias: We engage in a history-free media-logic to the peril of the complex lineages of local practices.

Travels & Travails in Digital Media: From Blog 2 Page to Screen 2 Santa Cruz

I begin with a video (where I say among other things that I’ve been working for two years on a project about teaching, writing about, and publishing/presenting in the digital humanities and this raises contradictions about vernacular, audience, duration, translation and more) all to be demonstrated in this post where I perform and re-present and preserve what will be at talk on November 23:

But YouTube cut me off, darn it! (as it so often does when you record from your monitor), so I will finish my intro verbally, in the room, face-to-face, there our flesh connected:

“…Broadening the Digital Humanities: The Vectors-IML NEH Summer Institute on Multimodal Scholarship and supported by ‘a planning grant from the Mellon Foundation to develop a proposal for a multi-university digital hub in support of work in visual culture. She will be working with scholars from Brown, NYU, Rochester and UC-San Diego.’

And in part 3 of this talk, I will conclude with a discussion of the implications of my project for teaching, research and publishing in the ‘digital humanities.’”

THE TALK: Part 1: Teaching and Writing about Learning from YouTube

Example of my blog writing which, of course, includes video writing.

READ: “I am teaching an experimental class on/about YouTube this semester,” (continue while video plays). Show press coverage.

And then 3 attempts to structure and control our class.

Then provide examples of how to control/with video.

End with examples of my attempts to write it out.

PART 2: The “book” (under wraps, under construction, coming soon…)

Here I discuss the September 24, 2009 blog, On publishing my YouTube “book” on-line.

III. Conclusion re “Digital Humanities”

A video (where YouTube messed up my synch, but I don’t mind, I support bad video):

I conclude by discussing my July 17, 2009 blog, Digital Humanities.

On Publishing my YouTube “book” on-line

Tomorrow I will be visiting Tara McPherson’s graduate course on something like “theories and practices of new media,” and she has asked me to present, quickly, some of the difficult considerations that define my current efforts (with the assistance of the Vector’s team) to “publish” my various YouTube findings, practices, musings, papers, videos, blogs, tours, and internet publications into a digital “book.” (author’s note [May 24, 2010]: since this was written last year, the on-line “video-book” has been accepted for a radical publication with MIT Press [part of a Mellon grant on re-thinking humanities publishing via the digital], and will be hosted on their web-site, for free, I think, once all these difficult decisions are finalized.)

By way of introduction, and as a method to display the many contradictions and conundrums in the very format that is the problem, I will briefly list here ten themes that define my (attempts to) move entirely on-line:

1. Audience. When you go on-line your readers (can) include non-academics.

2. Commitment. Harder to command amidst the distractions.

3. Design. Matters more; means.

4. Finitude. The page(s) need never close.

5. Interactivity. Should your readers, who may or may not be experts, author too?

6. Linearity. Goes out the window, unless you force it.

7. Multi-modal. Much can be expressed outside the confines of the word.

8. Network. How things link is within or outside the author’s control.

9. Single author. Why hold out the rest of the internet?

10. Temporality. People read faster on-line. Watching video can be slow. A book is long.

Here’s the shape of my current project, in development: this publication will speak to an audience of scholars, committed intellectuals, and media activists through a simple, legible, but perky interface that refers, visually, to that which it critiques, while on a deep-level (via programming), performing that which it says YouTube precludes. It will stay open, as I continue to learn but there will be only limited avenues for interaction. I will produce several arguments that the reader can choose to follow or depart from at their whim and a second structure that gives the user more opportunities to l(th)ink for themselves. A good deal of the ideas of this text will be expressed through video which will sit in a highly designed and interactive relation to written words with which it has been been previously associated. I will try to “time” these arguments, a kinds of montage really, to command my readers’ interest and commitment.

Digital Humanities

I am spending a month at USC’s NEH Vector‘s Institute, Broadening the Digital Humanities. 11 scholars are given the incredible opportunity to develop digital projects through the generous technical and intellectual support of the Institute for Multi-Media Literacy.

At the first session, Tara McPherson asked of us our relation to the term “digital humanities,” and I said that I had always thought of myself as a media scholar, artist, and activist but would be pleased to also take on this newer title. However, after spending a few days amongst digital humanists of various home disciplinary stripes, I believe that this inter-disciplinary field holds much in common with earlier practices enabled through the work of scholars who have pressed at the intersections of academia and art and/or activism.

In an unpublished draft essay by Institute fellow Katherine Hayles, “How We Think:  The Transforming Power of Digital Technologies,” Hayles engages in dialogue with 18 Digital Humanists to better understand the current shape of the field, currently, in her opinion, its 2nd phase (having gone from text to multi-modality). She proposes how Digital Humanities move Traditional Humanities from “text-based study … to time-based art forms such as film, music, and animation, visual traditions such as graphics and design, spatial practices such as architecture and geography, and curatorial practices associated with museums, galleries, and the like.”

I would want to say the same thing, just differently. Listening to my ten colleagues describe their exciting digital projects, I see  a turn in traditional scholarship towards accounting for and embracing the demands of art and activism. Namely, digital humanists need to collaborate (a well-developed set of practices refined by those in film or theater, for instance, and theorized by feminists and other activist-scholars who work within communities while being committed to re-thinking power relations). Similarly: digital humanists engage affect and aesthetics, must make sense of their relation to machines, take account of audiences, as they no longer necessarily speak only to a small and rarified audience of their peers, and think seriously about time and space, which to my mind, demands an ethics about how one’s “intellectual” practices effect the lived world and its inhabitants.

Thus, I’d suggest that the “digital” part, while being primarily the new technology of the day, is perhaps what was needed to push more scholars to engage with the personal and political implications of their practices.

See also, Sharon Daniel’s Vector’s project on women and prison.