I’m one of them. The scholarly preoccupation with Google is a quintessential love/hate relationship. Dan Cohen, Director of the Center for History and New Media (CHNM), asks in his latest blog, “Is Google Good for History?”
*aside to Dan Cohen: Thanks to CHNM for Omeka. It’s part of my dissertation project.*
Cohen’s blog and the general question about Google and history overlaps with my talk at the MLA.
The panel I was on last week at the MLA in Philadelphia was called “Making Research: Limits and Barriers in the Age of Digital Reproduction.”
Bad weather prevented the first panelist from attending, William Baker of Northern Illinois University; I was looking forward to his paper “The History and Limitations of Digitalization” but didn’t get to hear it. Also on the panel with me were Kerry Kilner, all the way from the University of Queensland in Australia, who presented the paper “Transforming the Study of Australian Literature through a Collaborative eResearch Environment,” and Jan Pridmore of Boston University whose paper was “A Proposed Model for Peer Review of Online Publications.”
My paper was called “Moving Past the Hype of Hypertext: Limits of Scholarly Digital Ventures.” It did seem to me that the other two papers focused much on limitations, which was the entire focus of my work. I take a few stabs at Google, but I’ll admit I use it a great deal, and it has helped me find a number of obscure items during my dissertation writing.
Below is the text of the conference paper I gave:
While digital environments provide new sites for scholarship, pedagogy, art, and cultural criticism to intersect, the idea of infinite creation, unlimited access, and democracy is an illusion. Pecuniary gain can foreclose access by organizations deemed “unprofitable” because of financial limitations and lack of corporate clout. Marketability and bankability often limit our scholarly digital ventures.
Unlike much of the humanities, digital humanities functions with what Todd Presner and Jeffrey Schnapp abundance-based economy. Digital textuality as marks a material revolution, and we celebrate its creative, scholarly, and social issue, a digital turn that embraces technology as a savior of humanistic study. What is at stake is institutional and political, and involves how we represent history and ourselves.
The editors of A Companion to Digital Humanities argue that the goals of digital humanities include “using information technology to illuminate the human record, and bringing and understanding of the human record to bear on the development and use of information technology” (xxx). This language is romantic, heralding technology’s ability to alter and improve history for the benefit of the human race. In a similar vein, Ken Price explains how editorial work (in the context of digital archive projects) is “one way to engage in historical criticism and to help bring the past into the present so it may live in the future” (“Edition” n. p.). Such celebration opposes the “end-days” approach to English in favor of a digital utopianism, a dream rooted in the capabilities of the database.
The early days of cyberspace prompted celebration, but Alan Liu asserts that the initial “cheerleading” aspect of digital studies is over and that scholars should move beyond the idea that users have unprecendented power in online spaces (“Imagining”). Authors of digital texts still control the options available to users, and the creators are themselves are constrained by what hardware, software, and institutional controls can or will allow. Is it time to move past the “hype” of hypertext and recognize that the new media landscape contains an inevitable paradox, wherein the World Wide Web, once heralded as a possible democratic utopia, is a far more complex landscape with funding or consumerism as its capital, despite the ethical and activist goals of scholars?
Consumer freedom can operate only within a framework determined by an economic architecture. Textual change is inseparable from economics, whereby even the “improvements” of what Bolter and Grusin call “remediation” involve convincing consumers of the superiority of the new. In the academy, the consumers may be old-guard scholars skeptical of digital media, or, perhaps less expectedly, granting agencies that provide funding for humanities computing projects. The potential utopia offered by the digital is threatened by economic realities. Heralding the digital revolution as a shift as significant as the rise of the printing press requires revisiting historical notions of what is appropriate, questions of who owns or has power over production, rights, and the ability to circulate information; who is allowed to speak; what institutions control production; and how is knowledge commodified.
Christopher Keep views readerly freedom as a myth based upon consumerist ideology, with the reader making choices in a hypertext much like a shopper choosing brands in a supermarket (175). Likewise, Julia Flanders describes a reader making choices navigating digital texts as a mimicry of the “act of purchase or consumerist consumption; in effect, the digital edition has the potential to become an emporium of readings, a textual superstore” (diss 42). Furthermore, despite the implied criticism of consumerist effects on scholarship, the fact remains that the features of scholarly digital projects more often than not reflect commercial design, from color combinations to software applications, including the use of social-networking features with academic projects. As with commercial work, we must design sites that people will actually want to use, no matter how important we deem our individual research. Good design, though, comes with a price tag, one not easily afforded in this time of budget constraints. Audiences expect digital projects house at or promoted by universities to have a professional quality, which does come at a price. Cohen & Rosenzweig note how, increasingly, large institutions hire web design firms for their sites, but that sites with “extensive programming or databases can easily top $100,000 because hourly rates for software developers and database administrators are commensurately high. There may very well be a chasm between the high design of museum sites and the more stripped-down productions of dedicated (but cash-poor) individual historians or small historical societies” (n. p.).
Open-source software offers some relief. The Collex at NINES and Omeka, offered by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, can help scholars design projects with small (or no) budgets. The open-source movement is as much the friend of the digital as copyright is its foe. John Unsworth sees the “copyright regime” as a major scholarly hindrance to the humanities, one that keeps scholarship perpetually behind cultural production (“Digital” n. p.). Copyright law determines choice and availability of texts, often restricting much of what is accessible online to historical materials created before 1923. Especially problematic is material that is in the public domain per copyright law, but that once digitized by a university or corporation, can be placed in a subscription database. Although the material is in the public domain, bringing it to the public is an expensive undertaking. Ken Price discusses the problems of paying for permissions and the need for sites to be commercial in order to pay for those permissions, and that a “free” site “means no cost to the end user, not the creators” (“Edition”). Taking something that was once “free” and requiring payment for it limits access and research, yet the funding for digital projects has to come from somewhere. In short, someone has to pay
Jerome McGann writes of how capitalist entrepreneurs view knowledge as a commodity, warning that we should not consider our cultural heritage “safe from commercial exploitation by agents that view our work—what they call ‘the content’ we create—as a marketable commodity” (“The Future” 87). By creating and controlling our work with our own institutional mechanisms, as McGann terms it, we can take steps towards protecting our endeavors. The economic pressures of publishing often drive researchers’ topic choices, as popularity determines market value, and the decline in university publishing drives scholars to seek commercial venues. A number of projects and journals in digital humanities exist because they are inexpensive compared to traditional publishing, even as a great amount of digital material is available only through subscription. The big business of education can act as a gate-keeper to scholarly opportunities, locating power squarely in the budgets of corporations-cum-universities , and while digital spaces might take steps towards a “creative commons,” it remains likely that universities and scholars will continue to control intellectual property and function as arbiters of “what counts” as worthy of scholarship.
Institutions and individual authors will have difficulty achieving control of the digital was possible with print. The same tools we celebrate and use to promote our work can backlash against us. Although we enjoy easy access to information, the accuracy of what we find using search engines is dubious. Geoffrey Nunberg cites Google Books as an example of the corporate influence on scholarship gone wrong, in particular because Google’s metadata for its books if a “train wreck: a mishmash wrapped in a muddle wrapped in a mess,” with numerous misdatings and classification erros, such as a book of Virginia Woolf’s letters dated to eight years before her birth, and the classification of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass under Counterfeits and Counterfeiting (n. p.). Nunberg points out how the problem can even be comical, such as how Google’s automation affects ad placement on a web page, so that when someone brings up Leaves of Grass in a search, she might see advertisements for plant and sod retailers. James Mussell argues that the Google and Microsoft mass-digitization projects provide access to millions of pages, but are “underpinned by a tawdry deal in which the custodians of culture of the Western world hold the material with which they are entrusted to ransom (for the period of a license) so that Microsoft and Google can sell advertising” (95). Consumerism could corrupt scholarship, and digital texts perpetuate themselves through automation, as in the case of advertising placements on Google, or with misleading search engine rankings, we cannot always trust what we find.
The big business of corporate-academic partnerships may be more imperialistic than democratic. Jonathan Freedman argues that Google’s massive digitization project perpetuates U. S. cultural imperialism, even though he describes Walt Whitman’s democratic “vision” as “Google-like”; with a search engine like Google, the “interests others determine what becomes interesting, the way Google’s subjects are ordered by a complex algorithm that records the number of links to (and in) any given Web site, so that what one receives and the order in which one receives it come constructed by the interests and preferences of one’s fellow Net citizens” (1598). Freedman’s comment sums up the tension between what some call “crowd wisdom” and the crowd’s fallibility. Access to books through Google’s massive digitization project saves time, and for some people, money.
Importantly, how information is fed into such projects is less than democratic, as many (maybe most?) databases representing scholarly materials rely on graduate student labor, such that larger universities still control available information more than institutions on smaller budgets, despite the celebration of freedom of access or open-source. Worse, as James Purdy points out, “In order for texts to become part of a digital document repository archive . . . these texts must be secured from publishers; categorized and indexed by repository personnel; and scanned in and treated with optical character recognition, work usually performed by laborers in developing countries” (7). The abundance might come at the cost of workers feeding data into digital storage in a sort of digital sweatshop. Conditions of database creation clash with the utopian ideals of “free” information.
Few, if any, scholars knowingly support potentially abusive labor conditions to support digital projects, and despite corporate influence, digital scholarship lags behind traditional work in terms of respect, funding, and institutional support. Whether encyclopedias, electronic text, or scrapbooks, we encode and digitize to leave a mark of ourselves, hoping to affect a change, hoping to matter. More than any other factor, then, economic realities stop information proliferation, and the digital, like print, is determined by funding and politics than by the imagination. When we see database as the counterpart to recovery—and by extension of the research enterprise itself—we recognize it as the progeny of desire, the stuff of dreams.
Thanks to Liz Losh’s mention of my talk on her blog http://virtualpolitik.blogspot.com/
Anatomy:
