Media Commons Journals

mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr

mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/tne

My first impulse was to look at In Media Res, an online academic alternative publication that I often assign to my students as a preservation mini-project. In following the links from some of the sites discussed in class last week, I was reminded of its sister project, The New Everyday, because some of the people associated with the maker websites have published ‘clusters’ there. These two publications are both part of the larger Media Commons project, itself part of, or at least an offshoot of, the Institute for the Future of the Book. According to its own text on its website, the Institute for the Future of the Book is a small think tank that aims to both ‘chronicle’ the shift from print to screen as well as to drive it in positive directions, whatever that might mean. One of its founding members is Bob Stein, well known for his inventive projects that predated the e-books we know today.

The audience for the two journals mentioned, In Media Res and The New Everyday, is predominantly academic. TNE publishes journal-like articles in clusters, and functions as a blog/journal hybrid. Academic posts are open to commentary from both other scholars as well as the public, in principle. This is meant to serve as a form of public and transparent peer review. IMR works like a piece of time-based media art. A weekly topic is suggested by a scholar, who acts as curator, and 5 articles are produced around this topic. Each must feature a media clip. The articles are released one a day for a week beginning on a Monday, so the entire series isn’t viewable until Friday. As with TNE, there is space for commentary on each article. Both are available through websites hosted by NYU Libraries via the Media Commons project.

The users and creators end up being the primary audience, although the sites are publicly available online. In this case, the project is partly designed to provide a platform in which scholars can exercise and demonstrate curatorial skills with the hope that these might some day be considered for decisions such as promotion and tenure. The cluster or weekly curator is supposed select and arrange the content, both by preplanning and finding authors to contribute, but also by ostensibly arranging and highlighting the commentary that is posted in a way to further discussion and deepen understanding. In this case, the labour is primarily on the shoulders of the scholars—they write the articles, curate the sites, and often provide the majority of the commentary. Since the commentary is supposed to act as a form of peer review, they contribute their labor in this way as well.

I think the fact that these are still being actively used and maintained constitutes a success in its own right, as I first became aware of these after they were already up and running in 2010. Their original purported goals were to make inroads in changing the kinds of criteria on which scholars were judged, and I think this change has been slow in coming, if it is even coming yet at all. That is precisely where this type of project fits within the larger discourses about maker and other creative spaces that seek to highlight and encourage alternative modes of scholarly production.

In both cases, the cultural technique that is being promoted is this idea of curation—that careful arrangement renders a collection more than the sum of its parts. Both journals seek to market this as skill that should be recognized and rewarded.   I don’t know that I would consider either of these journals to be precisely in my field; I know that I have not come across the level of saturation with these journals that would indicate the critical mass of users necessary for this cultural technique to take hold in any particular field of discipline. People in LIS don’t know them; neither did people in media studies classes.

I attended a conference a couple weeks ago, whose theme was ‘teaching social justice’. One of the recommendations, from a panel on teaching social justice as junior faculty, was this idea that when working in alternative spaces, it is incumbent upon you to present work that is thoroughly and transparently rigorous. This is necessary as a sort of first line defense against mainstream voices who might otherwise dismiss the work you are doing– the old adage that you have to do things 10 times better to be considered just as good. It seems to me that in this alternative space of publication, this is very true and I wonder what such rigor would look like.   In both projects, the articles are by nature brief. The extra substance is designed to come from the interaction and commentary. But in order for this to be substantive enough that someone could make the case that such contributions be considered on the level or order of a traditionally peer-reviewed journal piece, the commentary would have to be fairly meaty with a number of comments and responses and interchanges with other scholars or public figures who could demonstrate their own expertise or credentials such that their additions to the conversations could be seen as real alternatives to traditional peer review. In my head, the way to do this is via critical mass, and saturation within a discipline to accumulate the participation of necessary voices and to encourage them to expend the time and labour on something that isn’t yet seen as valuable in the same way other uses of a scholar’s time might be.  I don’t know how to measure this or engender it.
-Rhiannon

Constructing Hoaxes in the Classroom

The syllabus of T. Mills Kelly’s History 389 course tells his students that he hopes “this course will be unlike any history class that you’ve ever taken.” The class, called “Lying About the Past,” endeavors to show “that by learning about historical fakery, lying, and hoaxes, we’ll all become much better consumers of historical information. In short, we’ll be much less likely to be tricked by what we find in our own personal research about the past.” This project represents an intriguing and collaborative model for engaging students in historical research and digital media production.

First taught in 2008, Kelly’s course exposed students to the contingencies of knowledge production, the politics of historical memory, and the dynamics of digital media ecologies. Kelly’s students learned about historical hoaxes, and wrote about the differences between plagiarism, hoaxing, myths, and conspiracies. But the course culminated in an 8-week collaborative project in which students worked together to perpetrate their own online hoax. The hoax was designed to evoke public reaction, and would be deemed successful if it resulted in “a daily newspaper reporting our hoax as fact.” (The second time the course was taught, the class divided in half to produce two hoaxes, which you can see here and here.)

During the first iteration of the course, students worked collaboratively to create an elaborate hoax about “the last American pirate,” a man named Edward Owens who really lived in late 19th century Virginia, but who was never really a pirate. The students created a blog detailing the research process of Jane Browning, a fictional college student working on her senior thesis about the pirate. The hoax combined real historical research with falsified documents, a fake Wikipedia page (which made it through Wikipedia’s vetting process, but has since been removed), and a hilarious YouTube interview with Jane Browning’s fictional thesis advisor (played by one of the students in the class in costume).

In the end, the story was reported as true by a USA Today blogger and was written about in glowing terms by an academic. A success, according to the standards in Kelly’s syllabus.

The project was not only aimed at the students in the course (whose collaborative labor produced the many textual, visual, and video artifacts that made up the hoax), but also generated a public conversation about the intersections of pedagogy and digital knowledge production. As Jennifer Howard wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Is is [sic] unethical to ask students in a history class to fabricate?”

The class demonstrated something about the politics of (mis)information on the internet, and the ways in which online communities can work to debunk stories, challenging students to be more critical when assessing knowledge and information in online and offline contexts. A similar course could easily be taught in my discipline to teach these kinds of literacies.

-Paul McKean

Course information and syllabus

This course explores “extratextual” forms of scholarship. Such forms include : interactive digital software or hardware; datasets; visualizations; artworks; performances; publishing & distribution platforms; review structures; rubrics; standards; course syllabi; workshops; methodologies; (and more!). Our emphasis will be on medial forms that might form a part of your future portfolio of reviewed products and accomplishments for purposes of dissertation, job application, or tenure.

You will realize, alone or in groups, at least one such object, as a working model, prototype, or pilot with a clear path to expansion or realization with future support. Along the way, you’ll research peer projects and contextual literature for presentation to the class, in the service of educating our group on emerging possibilities and prospects.

We’ll also bring our own critical tools to bear on forming evaluative criteria for the objects we propose or produce.

For a full syllabus, see here.

Learning to Create Systems : Extratextual Reviews

First, read Sharon Mattern’s brief blog post here:

http://www.wordsinspace.net/wordpress/2013/10/16/the-cultural-techniques-political-economy-of-theory-making/

(You may need to do a little outside reading to understand some of the references.)

I would also suggest Deb Chachra’s blog post here:

http://tinyletter.com/metafoundry/letters/metafoundry-15-scribbled-leatherjackets

Choose a specific extratextual scholarly project and review it for us on through a short, 1-2 page blog post or essay (with screenshots or other illustrations). Alternatively, you can record yourself reflecting on it via video or sound (Unpolished “vlog” style analysis is fine.) You may work in groups on this if you wish. Post by next class somewhere we can all access it.

Possible sources for projects:

https://github.com/curateteaching/digitalpedagogy/blob/master/keywords/praxis.md
http://hybridpublishing.org/
http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/
http://dhcommons.org/projects
http://vectors.usc.edu/archive/

Please address, explicitly or implicitly, in your review the following questions (in any old order):

What is it?
Who is the audience, and how was it distributed?
How did it get made? Whose labor?
Was there any sort of editorial or peer review?
How do you think the creator would demonstrate its success?
Does it propose or offer any sort of repeatable “cultural technique?”
Can you imagine something like this making a substantive contribution to your academic field?