Marginal Notes, vol. 2

Apologies for the delay - I'm currently working on a funding proposal, and catching up on my Open University "Reading Classical Latin" course, so it's been a busy period for me. Still, without further ado, here's a collection of noteworthy links. I've organised them a little better this time, but expect these updates on a bi-weekly basis in future.

So to begin...

Higher Education
Thomas Benton argues that it's just not worth going to grad school anymore in his article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. He puts this down to "a shrinking percentage of positions in the humanities that offer job security, benefits, and a livable salary", but I can't help but wonder if the same applies to many professions in today's economic climate.

Speaking of the tough economic climate, the New York Times asserts that the Humanities must justify their worth as higher education institutions are faced with painful cuts - implying that the Humanities are somehow less valuable than other disciplines and therefore need to explain why they are still necessary in changing socioeconomic times.

Meanwhile, on this side of the pond the arts and humanities have seen a dramatic decrease in research funding following this week's announcement of how funding will be distributed as a result of the RAE (see the full tables for how much funding was allocated to each discipline here). Although it all seems pretty bleak, Anthony Grafton rightly points out that if we don't start posing the tough but necessary questions now, then "we will see another generation’s relationship [w]ith the university ruined by our refusal to face and discuss facts."

On the brighter side of all this, Geoffrey Rockwell reminds us that these next few years will present opportunities as well as challenges: "Let us build something that celebrates what we do together rather than begging apart", he says, and proposes some credible starting theses. He ends with a rousing call to arms:

"Do research not regrets and hold out your hand to those less fortunate as you would want a hand held out to you. Be liberal in your arts and humanity and the liberal arts will thrive"

Here here!

Digital Humanities
As I think about what sort of employment I'd like to take up when my PhD is all over, I do wonder about the possibility of doing work on digital research tools at some (fantastical) higher education institution someplace. Imagine it - to obtain funding to write code to create a programme to be used in the pursuit of humanistic learning, and then write papers on how these tools might be used for the benefit of teachers and researchers. Well, Caveat Lector has a similar vision, but implies that the odds are stacked against those like myself who see this as a credible employment option: "A very, very few digital humanists will run the entire vicious gauntlet and survive in regular humanities departments". At the same time, the University of Lethbridge is playing with the idea of establishing a course which provides "skills, knowledge, and experience a typical undergraduate ought to have if they were to be certified as being basically competent in contemporary web technologies alongside their core domain", indicating that these are necessary skills for graduates, and such skills are nurtured in certain (praiseworthy) institutions.

Speaking of web technologies, it's worth noting that Zotero 1.5b1 has just been released, and much is already being written about how we can use its new features together with other applications in meaningful ways.

Finally, in a lengthy but engaging piece posted last year, Kathleen Fitzpatrick proposes a new way forward for academic publishing in the digital age. Fitzpatrick's appropriation of scholarly terms within a digital framework ("scholars must consider how peer review might usefully transform into something more like peer-to-peer review”) reinforces the need for institutions to reassess their outdated modes of academic review and publication, just as the electronic publishing units should seek to adopt "a broader view of textual structures, seeking not just the replacement for print-on-paper but an updating of the codex for a networked environment". Well worth a read.

Website Focus
The Guardian has recently put together a list of 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read, usefully broken down into categories including "Science fiction & fantasy", "War & travel", "State of the Nation" etc - thanks to bookn3rd for pointing it out. Also sourced via bookn3rd is a remarkable online exhibition called Making Visible Embryos; compiled by the University of Cambridge's Department of History and Philosophy of Science, the site illuminates key questions and concerns by "contextualizing images [of human embryos] that have become iconic or were especially widely distributed in their own time" - weird and wonderful stuff.


And Finally...

Hark! A Vagrant is a webcomic by Katie Moira featuring an array of famous (and indeed infamous) historical figures. Ever wondered how Mary Shelley felt in that remote Swiss villa with Lord Byron and her husband? Find out by clicking the image above!

Last week I finally received my copy of Eluvium's boxset, Life Through Bombardment. Eluvium, a.k.a Matthew Cooper, is an ambient electronic musician who incorporates a variety of instruments into his ethereal palette, and the boxset (containing all of his releases) was well worth the money and the wait. The artwork was drawn by Jeannie Paske, and I strongly urge you to visit her website to see more samples of it. If Elvium's work sounds like something you could get into, then why not try downloading the following track from his latest release, Copia (right-click and save): Prelude For Time Feelers

Read More...

Summary only...

Stanley Fish, Open Access, and some thoughts on higher education

I'd like to point you in the direction of a fascinating interview with Staney Fish conducted earlier this week on election day in the US, one of many similar conversations conducted with various academics which can be listened to on the Radio Open Source website. Radio Open Source is a podcast and blog (more information can be found on its Wikipedia entry), and is hosted by the American media personality and author Christopher Lydon (who has a Wikipedia page of his own). It's been going for a while now, but I've only just stumbled upon it and I highly recommended you to take a look at what's on offer in the site's archives.

Along related lines to that of 'Open Source' (which, according to Wikipedia, can be defined as "computer software for which the human-readable source code is made available under a copyright license"), I've been reading a little about Open Access (OA) in recent days. OA takes the same approach to digital scientific and scholarly material as Open Source does to software in general - it opens it up for readers to view (although, of course, not to modify as one might in the case of open source software). At the danger of over-citing Wikipedia, I refer you to an entry there on OA, but I would also highly recommend this video presentation by Stevan Hanard, a scholar at Southampton University, on the how's and why's of OA (only the brief introduction is in French - the rest is in English so stick with it).

Here at the University of Exeter, it will become compulsory for PhD students to upload their completed thesis/dissertation into the institutional repository from the academic year 2008/09 onwards. This, in my opinion, is a positive move given the limited visibility currently afforded to PhD dissertations. Furthermore, by encouraging open access to scholarly works written by its own distinguished researchers, Exeter, like an increasing number of other higher education institutions in the UK and abroad who are catching on to the benefits of OA, permits its student body access to the volume of work produced by the academics to whom they are most closely associated with. As the list of universities who subscribe to the idea of open access grows, this provides students and researchers with the opportunity to draw ideas from a larger portion of the 25,000+ scholarly journals currently in circulation around the world - this can only be a good thing. Exeter has organised its collection of free scholarly papers into what it has named the Exeter Research and Institutional Content Archive (ERIC), but at present I find the number of works available extremely limited (just 4 from the English department!), and the dissertations uploaded by PhD students of previous years are not relevant to my own work. I'm confident the repository will see a larger number of works trickle through in the coming years, but for now I'd say it's still early days for open access at Exeter.

In closing, I feel compelled to comment briefly on what happened in the US on Tuesday night. I'm wary of writing too much about politics - this blog is after all a chronicle of my time as a PhD student and not a space for partisan grandstanding, but as a student hoping to break into academia in the next few years it is necessary to talk about the effect President Obama will have on higher education as I finish my PhD and look for work. Where I work is still a great unknown to me, but it has been my dream since my teenage years to work in the US, and since Tuesday that dream has somewhat intensified.

I am inclined to agree with Stanley Fish's view that Obama's presidency will have little short-term impact on higher education in America (even if its predominantly liberal population of scholars will be a lot happier having an intelligent leader in charge of their country). This realisation doesn't discourage me from hoping to teach at an American college, however - I am drawn more by the sense of hope and change which seems to be permeating the American consciousness right now more than an anticipation of college-friendly policy changes. I believe it would be a wonderful thing to work and study in a nation where, after eight years living under the burden of an administration that governed so often with the politics of fear and ignorance, a change is coming in the shape of a man who speaks so eloquently of hope and understanding.

There is also the sense that higher education in the UK, particularly when it comes to the arts and humanities, is floundering - and it can only get worse under what looks increasingly to be a Tory government after the 2010 general election. I have had conversations both with my academic supervisor and my line manager at work this week who have complained of the time-consuming need to deal with increasing amounts of paperwork, and of the need to meet targets which reflect less the quality of research and teaching at the institution than they do its success at securing vast sums of money, and its obsession with ticking off boxes as its climbs up the university league tables. How does it benefit a world-leading scholar to wake up at 5am every morning to work on an application for a research grant sought by at least ten other academics in that scholar's school? Surely the university should acknowledge the merit of their researchers not by forcing them to beg for the opportunity to develop it, but by granting them a semester's leave to write up a paper in their own time. When you combine this approach to research in many so-called "top twenty" universities in the UK with the ever-dwindling financial support for arts and humanities postgraduate students here, is it any surprise than I'm repulsed by the prospect of starting by academic career in such a narrow-minded climate? The whole issue of postgraduate funding in the UK was in fact summarised in a BBC News online article recently, which I encourage you to look at.

This has turned somewhat into a rant and for that I apologise, but what Tuesday's election result made me realise more than anything else is that American truly is the land of opportunity. Under eight years of Bush many of us doubted that cliche, but it's true and I believe it provides more opportunities for an English scholar such as myself than my home country does. My PhD supervisor came to this country 15 years ago because, among other things, she believed that British scholars were the best in the world, that the British Library was and remains "the centre of the universe", and that its universities value research as much as they do teaching. I have no doubt that our scholars are outstanding, and whilst I agree that the British Library is an indispensible resource its importance to scholars isn't as crucial as it was 15 years ago since EEBO was introduced, but on the third point I detect a worrying shift: it seems to me that my supervisor simply doesn't have the time to conduct research in the way she did when she first came to this country anymore. Would it be any different for her in America? Maybe not, but after January 20th 2009 there is a greater chance it will be, whereas I think the opposite could be said about this country.

Read More...

Summary only...