GLOBAL.CHRONICLE.COM Institute Digital Video Library, and the Internet Archive. Presses at MIT, Duke University, and the University of California are also involved, as are the Modern Language Association and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Organisers see the support of those presses and scholarly societies as key to overcoming a big obstacle in the slow-tochange culture of academe: the difficulty of getting new forms of work recognised. “We have a disconnect between popular forms and what the folks who produce and review and give credit for scholarly work recognise as scholarship,” says Tara McPherson, an associate professor in the School of Cinematic Arts at Southern California, who is the lead scholar on the Mellon grant. “The reason we’re partnering both with presses and scholarly societies is to help credential the work and make it possible for young scholars to produce this sort of work with a reasonable expectation it would count for tenure.” Another new publishing tool, Anthologize, approaches the same obstacle from the opposite direction. A WordPress plugin created with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, it transforms blog posts into books. Brett Bobley, who directs the agency’s digital-humanities office, says the project is slightly “subversive” because it turns new-media objects into old-fashioned texts so that scholars can “print them or distribute them using more traditional publishing channels, something that may still be needed for promotion and tenure or other reasons”. Beyond issues of credit, organisers of the Mellon-backed alliance hope it can broaden the audience for academic scholarship. That would demonstrate the value of this work and perhaps bolster the agencies that finance it, a timely move now that Republican lawmakers, looking for federal budget cuts, are calling for the elimination of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). For example, McPherson says, multimedia work created with materials from the alliance’s partner archives has the potential to attract interest from the general public, just as colleges did by releasing free online lecture videos. And Juhasz says public engagement was one reason she published Learning From YouTube online. McPherson also hopes that embedding primary sources will raise the standard of scholarship. In traditional writing, an academic can “pretty much get away with saying almost anything” in describing an obscure film or oral history, she says. “You can’t just make any interpretation you want if your object is right there and your user can see it”.
‘The Book Is So Temporary’ But will the object remain there? That’s one of the many questions facing this kind of work. Juhasz expects that some of her book will evaporate. After all, she doesn’t own much of its content. For her class, Juhasz prodded students to think about YouTube by forcing them to perform all their coursework on the Googleowned site. Instead of writing papers, they recorded videos and
left comments. The online book that grew out of that work embeds many YouTube videos—television shows, music videos, and the like—that can easily be taken down. “The book is so temporary,” the professor says. But it’s easy to substitute new clips for stuff that gets pulled down, she adds. A potentially greater problem is that technological change will render obsolete old formats like the CD-ROM or floppy disk. Will people be able to consume her web-based book at all in the future? Already an incompatible device has emerged: the iPad. When Juhasz started the project, the iPad didn’t exist. Similar efforts have been doomed by copyright concerns. Doug Sery, the senior editor of MIT Press, who acquired Juhasz’s book, recalls an earlier attempt to put together a digital book on media studies with content drawn from videos and music and social-networking sites. “We had these intellectual-property issues that really prevented us from doing that,” he says.
IN TRADITIONAL WRITING, FILM SCHOLARS LIKE JUHASZ HAVE BEEN TRAINED TO SPEND A PARAGRAPH DESCRIBING A MOVIE AND THEN TO MAKE THEIR ARGUMENT. BUT WHY DESCRIBE A VIDEO WHEN YOU CAN SHOW IT? The fate of Scalar, which has not yet been released to the public, also remains to be seen. Mellon had backed an earlier attempt to build multimedia-authoring software, called Sophie. The first version failed, says Bob Stein, a director of the Institute for the Future of the Book, who left the Sophie project after blowing through more than $2.5-million working on it. A second version is not usable now but may end up being the “holy grail,” he says. “The easier you try to make an authoring environment, the harder it is to build it,” says Stein. “It’s easy to build an authoring environment that requires experts to use. It’s very hard to build an authoring environment that somebody can use after reading two pages of instructions.” Subscribe to a free weekly electronic newsletter from the Chronicle of Higher Education at Chronicle.Com/Globalnewsletter
March-April 2011 EDUTECH
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