Author Archives: Jessie Daniels

Activist East Harlem Walking Tour

New York City has long been a hub of activism. An exhibition on Activist New York at the Museum of the City of New York uses artifacts, photographs, multimedia presentations to tell a broad story about activism in the five boroughs across a wide range of issues such as civil rights and racial justice, fair wages, civil rights for LGBT people, and religious freedom. New York is an intellectual and academic hub as well, so many of these activists movements have also included scholars, professors, and public intellectuals without institutional affiliation.

Register here.

On Tuesday, 9/10 at 3pm, The Museum of the City of New York is offering an Activist East Harlem Walking Tour, co-sponsored by the Gotham Center of the Graduate Center, CUNY.

Some of us from JustPublics@365 will be on the tour, as well. One of our goals is to help build digital elements of the walking tour that will be informed by scholarship by and about the neighborhood of East Harlem and openly available to everyone.

What it Means to be an Academic is Changing

What it means to be an academic is changing. Academic researchers are finding it harder to either become or stay ensconced in an ivory tower removed from the rest of society.

(Image source)

In a recent LSE Review of Books podcast, Matthew Flinders, Professor of Politics at Sheffield University, talks about his new book Defending Politics: Why Democracy Matters in the 21st Century (Oxford University Press, 2012), and discusses some of these changes. At about the 8 minute mark in the podcast, Flinders says:

“What does it mean to be a university professor? For me, it doesn’t mean professing to other professors or to students. That’s part of the job, but it’s only one small element. The role of an academic is changing. We’re going through a culture shift – a culture shift that’s driven by external drivers. And these external drivers are basically saying that at a time when public monies are very scarce, and competition for those resources is intense, if you want to take money from the public purse, you need to show that there’s some social benefit for using that money.

Therefore now, academics are under more pressure to show that their research has some form of impact. Some academics see this as a threat – to intellectual freedoms, to thinking. Within political science, there’s a much broader debate that began in American political science, about the way the discipline has evolved it has become disconnected from the world it professes to study.

In my experience, at least 99% of the profession, at least the younger members of the profession, are signed up to this particular challenge, because they feel that you can’t study politics from your office. You can’t study politics from crunching data. Politics is about emotions and passions and fears and pain. Somehow, the study of politics has become de-politicized. I ask anybody to pick up an academic journal and first, wonder if they’d be able to read it, and secondly, wonder if they’d really understood why that mattered to the real world, or got any of that sense that politics is about human relationships.

If academics cannot construct a narrative that says ‘my research has some relevance to the world in which we live,’ if they can’t do that, then I can understand why politicians and ministers and the public say, ‘well why the dickens are we funding you?’ “

Flinders is speaking about his discipline of political science and about the UK, where there is still public funding for research. Flinders’ comments are nearly identical to those of Michael Burawoy’s remarks about sociology in the US, who has said:

“Academics are living a fool’s paradise if they think they can hold on to their ivory tower. The public is no longer prepared to subsidize our academic pursuits. We have to demonstrate our public worth.”

One example of academics who are successfully reaching beyond the academy is the work of the Center for Urban Research (CUR) here at the Graduate Center, which uses statistical data and mapping software to provide better understanding of a host of urban issues. In partnership with the League of Women Voters, the CUR developed a website for citizens in New York City to quickly and easily find their elected representatives. The site, Who Represents Me NYC, just launched last month.

In Brooklyn, faculty and students at Pratt are using the tools of Urban Design and Architecture to design ways of rebuilding a sustainable NYC waterfront in the face of the realities of climate change post-Hurricane Sandy.

(Image from After#Sandy)

In the Bronx, the Public Science Project has been working with residents there to create The Morris Justice Project, using participatory research to resist the damaging policies of the NYPD.

(Image created by The Illuminator)

The Morris Justice Project partnered with The Illuminator – a roving van created during the Occupy Wall Street movement – to project their community-collected data onto a local apartment building. The projected image took the form of an open letter to the NYPD. The data called out like a “bat signal” gathering neighbors to discuss what it means to live, work, raise kids, shop, go to school, play, and pray in a community that experienced nearly 4,000 police stops in 2011. Half of these stops involved physical force.

These are just a few, New York City-based examples of academic researchers connecting with people beyond the usual, small circle of fellow experts. There are many others, of course. I wrote here just recently about the excellent partnership between the LSE and The Guardian to produce “Reading the Riots,” intended to reach a broad audience with a critical analysis of the riots that swept London.

What all these examples point to are the ways in which being an academic is changing. Partly this change is due to the rise in digital technologies that make publishing a much easier proposition than in the pre-digital era. This change is also partly due to the rise of alternative academic careers, such as data analysts, mapping experts, and data visualization experts, that are opening up at the same time as the adjunctification of academia means fewer, traditional tenure track jobs are available. Of course, the rise of these alternative careers is in no way keeping pace with the decline in tenure track openings, but their emergence, alongside the rise in digital technologies, does point to new ways of thinking about being an academic and a public intellectual.

There’s something else at play that’s changing what it means to be an academic. We live in a moment in in the US which income inequality is approaching historic new levels that, as President Obama recently observed, “is fraying the social fabric of our society.” A recent study finds that 80%, or 4 out of 5, US adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives. Academics, both those lucky few in tenure-bearing jobs and those looking to find them, are part of this social reality as well. Within such a context in which so many people, including many struggling academics, are hurting it seems improvident, maybe even unethical, to be checked into the Ivory Tower motel using the free Internet, HBO and talking to ourselves.

Transitions: Jack Gieseking Moves to Bowdoin

With happiness for her and sadness for us, it’s our duty to report that JustPublics@365 Project Manager Jack Gieseking is leaving JP@365 to take on a new a position at Bowdoin College as a postdoctoral fellow in Bowdoin’s new Digital and Computational Studies Initiative.

Jack Gieseking

Jack defended her doctoral dissertation on October 22, 2012 and then almost immediately began work as Project Manager a few weeks later. We snapped her up for the same reasons that Bowdoin sought her out: her enormous enthusiasm for her work, her facility with digital tools, her boundless curiosity, her care and concern for everyone around her, and, of course, her uncanny ability to set up immensely complex, multi-tabbed spreadsheets with ease. Over the eight months she worked on the project, Jack helped get JP@365 up and running and kept it moving over the course of an extremely busy launch.

We are enormously grateful to Jack for her great work and we know she’ll go on to do wonderful things at Bowdoin and beyond. We will miss her and we’ll be staying tuned to her twitter account, @JGieseking, to hear about the work she’ll be embarking upon next year. Good luck, Jack, and thanks for everything!

~ Jessie Daniels & Matthew K. Gold

“Reading the Riots” : Academic-Journalism Partnership

Partnerships between academic social science researchers and journalists hold great promise for addressing inequality. At a meeting earlier this month at the London School of Economics (LSE), Professor Tim Newburn of the LSE discussed the Reading the Riots project. This project was run jointly with The Guardian with the aim to produce evidence-based research that would help explain why the rioting spread across England in the summer of 2011. The slides are below and the full podcast of the event is available. It’s definitely worth a listen to hear Newburn describe the opportunities and challenges of this unique academic-journalism partnership.

Social Science in the Public Sphere: Riots, Class and Impact from LSEImpactblog

As Newburn describes, one of the key opportunities the partnership with The Guardian provided traditional academic researchers is reach. The readership of The Guardian far exceeds that of any academic publication by several orders of magnitude and that’s really a game-changer for social science research. At the most basic level, it means that academics need to think about who they want to speak to (and with) when moving beyond the narrow scope of other specialists.

Among the challenges that Newburn enumerates are the radically different pace of work for academics and journalists. Journalists are trained to write quickly to meet deadlines. Academics, well, we like the sound of deadlines as they “whoosh” passed and are accustomed to a much, much slower pace of producing writing (aside: I think this is part of why blogging proves so challenging for many academics).

Newburn also points to some of the interesting methodological issues that arose during this collaboration. He observes that academics and journalists are often engaged in the same practices (e.g., interviewing people, analyzing data), but that academics are often mired in contemplating “how” we engage in these research practices. (Following Newburn’s remarks, the podcast of the event continues with an interesting discussion about “impacts,” something that we’re very interested in here at JustPublics@365.)

In our own academic-journalism partnership between The Graduate Center and the CUNY J-School, I’ve been delighted and amazed at the success of this collaboration around creating the MediaCamp workshops. These workshops offer skill–building in media and digital media combine research and digital media for the public good. We haven’t yet attempted collaborating around a specific research topic, such as the Reading the Riots project, but perhaps that will be next.

What Newburn’s Reading the Riots project and our own MediaCamp workshops mean to me is that there is a new kind of space opening that combines the best of both research and journalism. In this hybrid space, academics and journalists will increasingly collaborate, borrow and remix methods from both fields, and at least potentially, reach wider audiences beyond the narrow range of specialists. Perhaps most exciting to me, is the idea that academic-journalism collaborations could be an innovative way to address issues of social inequality.

Digital Media Storytelling Can Influence Policy

Policymakers are influenced by compelling stories and academic researchers who want to influence policy should consider the power of digital media storytelling to influence policy, as this experience in East Harlem reveals.

East Harlem is among the first of New York City’s “Aging Improvement Districts.” In a global society that’s rapidly aging, Aging Improvement Districts are intended to address the concerns about mobility and accessibility for older adults living in large cities. The Age-Friendly New York City Project, which is behind the Aging Improvement Districts, conducted a public health community-assessment survey to find out about the needs of aging New Yorkers living in East Harlem. The researchers were eager to influence policy makers with some of their findings about the needs of seniors in this community, and they wanted to reach back to those in East Harlem had participated in the survey. They soon realized that an ordinary research paper or presentation wouldn’t accomplish either of these goals.

Instead, the researchers decided that telling the stories, in digital video format, was the best way to reach both policy makers and members of the community. This video (15:53) illustrates the research findings of NYAM’s community-assessment survey through the stories of several seniors living in East Harlem:

The video features the stories of several seniors living in East Harlem and was screened at a large event (August, 2011) hosted by NYAM, and attended by policy makers, service providers and members of the community, many of whom cheered when they recognized friends and neighbors on screen.

One of the issues raised by elders in the video was the reluctance to use public pools and a desire for seniors-only hours for swimming. While the video was being screened, one policy maker representing the NYC Parks Department placed a phone call and implemented a “seniors-only swim” on the spot – and then announced it later in the meeting. Today, Senior Swim in NYC is a city-wide program that opens up access to an important recreational resource to older adults.

While it’s possible this change would have happened following a standard research report and slide presentation, but it seems unlikely. What got the policy maker to pick up the phone was seeing and hearing a compelling story, told by people affected by the policy.

Of course, not all policy issues are as easily addressed. Another issue facing seniors raised in the video is the struggle to do laundry. The video features the story of two seniors taking their clothes from a laundromat and then hauling it up four-flights of stairs to their apartment, a struggle for the even the youngest and fittest among us, and a herculean task for two grandparents. Added to this is the fact that many elders in East Harlem live in public housing, and the local housing authority, NYCHA, recently announced a plan to close all laundry facilities in public housing buildings. A deputy commissioner from NYCHA attended the video screening and, moved by the stories of the seniors and their laundry struggle, promised to keep laundry facilities open. Still, the battle to keep laundry facilities open – and operating – at NYCHA buildings is one that continues.

The point is, policymakers are influenced by compelling stories. Research still plays a role here because it informed the development of the stories in the video. Research can also provide information about the scope and scale of a policy issue. The community screening of the video added an accountability and exerted additional pressure on those with some power to make changes. After the screening, the video was posted to the web and circulated among those in the community, to journalists, and a much wider audience than attended the event.

The strategic use of digital media storytelling – both to engage community members and influence policy makers – is a new and innovative development.

Digital media storytelling can influence policy and researchers should consider it as an important tool if their goal is to shape policy.

Impact Factor Shifting from Journal to Article

The traditional measure of scholarly impact, “impact factor” of journals is shifting to individual articles, separate from their journals they are published in. This has big implications for how we think about the impact of academic research both within the academy and beyond it.

Prestigious, R1 institutions, often evaluate faculty for tenure and promotion based on how often they publish in “high impact” journals, as measured by something known as Impact Factor (IF). The IF was developed as part of the U.S. National Research Council project 35 years ago to evaluate the improvements that resulted from a billion dollar University Science Development program funded by the National Science Foundation. To find out what a particular journal’s IF is, you can consult this guide. It’s currently administered by Thomas Reuters, and journals often tout their impact factor (citing Thomas Reuters) to attract submissions from academics eager to share that putative prestige.

(Image source)

The Impact Factor have come under scrutiny for a number of reasons, including that the IF rankings of journals have a remarkably high correlation to departments’ ranking, suggesting that the it’s not the journals that are prestigious but the academic departments that house them.

Journals can also boost their IF through various easy-to-manipulate means and dozens of journals have come under attack for such practices. A number of academics have launched a critique of impact factors (pdf) and make a persuasive case about their lack of validity.

There’s another problem with impact factors. A recent analysis by George Lazano, Vincent Larivière and Yves Gingras identifies another, and perhaps larger, problem: since about 1990, the IF has been losing its very meaning.

Lozano points out that impact factors were developed in the early 20^th century to help American university libraries with their journal purchasing decisions. Of course, throughout the last century, printed, bound journals were the main way in which scholarly research was distributed. All that’s changing.

With digital means of publication and dissemination, academic research is released from those bound volumes to a many-to-many distribution system. Here is what Lozano and colleagues found in their research on the impact factor in this new environment:

Using a huge dataset of over 29 million papers and 800 million citations, we showed that from 1902 to 1990 the relationship between IF and paper citations had been getting stronger, but as predicted, since 1991 the opposite is true: the variance of papers’ citation rates around their respective journals’ IF has been steadily increasing. Currently, the strength of the relationship between IF and paper citation rate is down to the levels last seen around 1970.

Furthermore, we found that until 1990, of all papers, the proportion of top (i.e., most cited) papers published in the top (i.e., highest IF) journals had been increasing. So, the top journals were becoming the exclusive depositories of the most cited research. However, since 1991 the pattern has been the exact opposite. Among top papers, the proportion NOT published in top journals was decreasing, but now it is increasing. Hence, the best (i.e., most cited) work now comes from increasingly diverse sources, irrespective of the journals’ IFs.

If the pattern continues, the usefulness of the IF will continue to decline, which will have profound implications for science and science publishing. For instance, in their effort to attract high-quality papers, journals might have to shift their attention away from their IFs and instead focus on other issues, such as increasing online availability, decreasing publication costs while improving post-acceptance production assistance, and ensuring a fast, fair and professional review process.

Lozano and colleagues raise interesting issues for us to consider in the new landscape of scholarly communication. If the impact of our research is no longer tied to particular journals, often with very insular, disciplinary-specific concerns, and geared to a narrow audience of specialists, then there are a number of possibilities that open up. As Lozano suggests, we may begin to see journals that increase online availability, lower publication costs, and improve production and peer-review processes.

Whatever happens, the shift of “impact” from a small set of journals to individual articles is an epic shift in scholarly communication.

Legacy vs. Digital Models of Academic Scholarship

There are far-reaching changes happening in higher education today, and I think we need some new – or a least, borrowed – terms for talking about these changes.

Journalists and scholars of journalism talk of “legacy” news organizations — such as The Philadelphia Inquirer (now defunct). The Philadelphia Inquirer, like other legacy news organizations, was based on print publication and relied on newsstand purchase or home delivery option for economic viability. Ultimately, it wasn’t able to make that succeed as a business model (see C.W. Anderson’s excellent Rebuilding the News. Anderson, @chanders on Twitter, is a CUNY colleague).

In contrast, there are many news organizations that are increasingly “digital” in the way they both gather and report the news, and the way they make money. Most notably, The New York Times now includes remarkable digital content, such as Op-Docs and Snowfall; and, it relies on a digital subscription model in addition to print sales. To be sure, there are lots of differences between academia and the news business, and I want to be clear that I’m not suggesting an easy parallelism between the two. I do, however, think that this language may be useful for framing how we think about some of the changes in higher ed.

(Flickr Creative Commons)

LEGACY ACADEMIC SCHOLARSHIP. What I’m calling a “legacy” model of academic scholarship has distinct characteristics. In broad terms, “legacy” academic scholarship is pre-21st century, analog, closed, removed from the public sphere, and monastic. I think that this is mostly going away, but only partially and in piecemeal fashion. What did the legacy model of academia look like?

(Wikimedia Commons)

Within a legacy model of academia, the only option for publishing was in bound volumes or journals. We typed words and paragraphs on paper. We had to use white out to make corrections on things we typed. In order to “cut and paste,” we would literally cut sections of paper, a paragraph at a time, and then paste them with glue or tape in different order. We would go to libraries to find and read information. We would use card catalogs (like the ones pictured above) to look things up.

In order to measure or demonstrate the impact of our research (at least in sociology), we used something called the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), which tracks the number of times a particular work by an individual author has been cited by others in the peer-reviewed literature. So, for example, if I published an article then the SSCI would list my name and then underneath my name track all the citations referencing that article. In effect, the SSCI is a method for counting citations as a measure of academic success. The more citations in the SSCI one has, the bigger success as an academic. In many sociology departments, it was common practice to rely heavily, if not exclusively, on the SSCI to assess a scholar’s prominence in the field. Tenure and review committees would actually use rulers to measure the number of inches beneath a scholar’s name within the SSCI as a way to assess impact. This crude metric of counting the number, and number of inches, of citations is characteristic of 20th century legacy academic scholarship.

(Flickr CreativeCommons)

DIGITAL ACADEMIC SCHOLARSHIP

To be sure, academic scholarship is being transformed in the digital era. In contrast to the 20th c. legacy model, the emerging, 21st c. model of academic scholarship is digital, open, connected to the public sphere, worldly.

To state the obvious, there has been an expansion of digital technologies. For some, this has been transformative because it is so different than the analog way of doing things. For others who were born after the digital turn, these ways of doing are simply the way things are. Whichever group you fall into, these digital technologies have already begun transforming scholarly communication.

Simply put, the shift from analog to digital is about code, coding information into binary code of 1’s and 0’s. When this happens, it fundamentally changes how we can manipulate data. That is, information (or ‘data’) is easier to move around, edit, analyze in digital form then it is in analog. Think for a moment about the difference between “cut and paste” when it involves paper scissors clue and tape versus the simple keystrokes of control-x and control–v. This illustrates a key difference between analog and digital.

The shift from analog to digital and the explosion of different sorts of technologies are already affecting how we do our jobs as academics. Rather than comb through a card catalog, we look things up on Google Scholar. The whole notion of a “library” is now one that’s digital, distributed, like the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), which is a real game-changer when it comes to libraries in the digital era. While physical libraries remain crucial, the expectation among academics for how we use libraries has changed.

As scholars we increasingly expect, and even demand, that there are digital tools within those libraries that we can use from any location, at any time. In fact, most graduate students and faculty I know would be outraged if they could not access their library at any time from any place. In many ways, libraries have led the digital turn in higher education and it is where academics have most embraced the digital.

Digital technologies have changed how we keep track of things we have read, citations, and bibliographies. With tools like Zotero, we can create bibliographies, keep track of citations, and share them with others who have similar interests.

Digital technologies have changed how we write. Technologies such as Commentpress (a WordPress plugin) make it possible to write collaboratively and make peer-review an open, transparent process. Several people in the digital humanities have used this technology to compile entire books for well-regarded academic presses. One of these is my colleague, Matt Gold, who issued a call for papers for his Debates in the Digital Humanities, and in 14 days he had collected 30 essays, which garnered 568 comments, with an average of 20 comments per essay.

The volume went from call for papers to a bound volume in one calendar year, a remarkable achievement for an academic book. Kathleen Fitzpatrick, another digital humanities scholar used Commentpress for her book Planned Obsolescence. Reflecting on this experience, Fitzpatrick writes that these new platforms are changing the way we think about publication, reading and peer review.

PEDAGOGY IS CHANGING, BECOMING MORE OPEN

Digital technologies are changing how we teach and making them more open. We think nothing of emailing students. Some faculty hold office hours through IM, Skype or Google HangOut. At many institutions, Learning Management Systems (LMS) like Blackboard & Moodle are commonplace. And, some professors are teaching in ways that are augmented by blogs and wikis. To the extent that these new technologies allow sociologists to reach a wider audience, these are also forms of public sociology.

In 2012, The New York Times declared it the “year of the ‘MOOC’.” MOOC is an acronym for Massive Open Online Course coined in 2008 by Dave Cormier, to describe an innovative approach to teaching that fostered connection and collaboration, and was intended to promote life-long learning and authentic networks that would extend beyond the end of the course.

MOOCs have garnered a lot of media attention in the mainstream press, and in the higher ed press, and there is even talk of revolution. This hyperbole surrounding MOOCs is both misguided and misplaced. What is perhaps most puzzling about all this is that there is nothing new, much less revolutionary, about the technology here. Some speculate that the attention is due to corporate players entering the field of online education, such as Coursera, which is backed by Venture Capitalists, and is partnering with elite academic institutions, like Stanford

Our own JustPublics@365 version of a MOOC, the POOC, is one that is participatory rather than massive and is closer to Dave Cormier’s original conceptualization. Our goal was to create something in keeping with the roots of CUNY as a public institutions, truly serving the public through education that’s open and available to everyone. We made sure that all the videos, the real-time livestream as well as the edited, archived videos were open to anyone that wanted to view them (without registration).

Likewise, we wanted to make all of the readings available to anyone that wanted to read them, even if they didn’t have a CUNY login and even if they weren’t registered for the course on our site. This sort of commitment to openness is one of the major distinctions between our efforts and the large, corporate MOOCs, which among other shortcomings, are not very “open.” As it turned out, making all these readings truly open turned out to be an enormous amount of work which fell on the shoulders of our heroic librarians.

We are still at the beginning of understanding how digital technologies will transform pedagogy in higher education, but it seems certain it has and it will continue to do so.

SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING IS CHANGING, NOT YET OPEN

Part of what’s changing about scholarly publishing has to do with changing views of copyright. It’s beyond my scope here to fully explore copyright, but Larry Lessig explains a great deal about copyright and how current laws don’t make sense in a digital environment in this TED talk. If you want to understand more about copyright, there’s no better place to start than with Lessig.

There is a lot wrong with academic publishing, much of it having to do with who holds the copyright to the work we produce, and more people are seeing that now. What’s wrong with scholarly publishing? This infographic explains it all.

(Image credit: Les Larue, Content credit: Jill Cirasella)

The way the system of academic publishing is set up is this:

Faculty are paid to do research & report results, then we
Give away this writing and copyright to publishers.
Publishers make HUGE profits, they do this by
Selling our work back to libraries at enormous and rapidly increasing costs.
Finally, the very often people who might benefit from reading our work can’t get to it because it’s locked behind a paywall.

As academics, we tend stash our research in places like JSTOR, where most people outside the Ivory Tower can’t get into. Some people have even begun to argue that it’s immoral to hide publications behind a paywall. A few scholars are marking a reasoned case for open access, such as Peter Suber’s book Open Access. Still others, like Jack Stilgoe, are simply dumbfounded at how stupid the system of academic publishing is.

HOW WE MEASURE SUCCESS IS CHANGING

All these changes in scholarship, pedagogy and publishing mean the ways we measure academic success are changing, too. We are shifting from 20th century ‘metrics’ to 21st century ‘altmetrics.’ So, for example, Jeff Jarvis (another CUNY colleague) has 123,667 Twitter followers. That’s a kind of “altmetric” – a measure of his reach and influence. Increasingly, book publishers, even some employers, look for evidence of your reach on particular platforms before awarding book contracts, even some jobs. This is less prevalent in academia, but it is on its way.

Not only are there new methods and ways of thinking about measuring impact, but it seems that old methods – like “citation counting” I described earlier with the SSCI – are broken. As the altmetrics site describes the situation:

“As the volume of academic literature explodes, scholars rely on filters to select the most relevant and significant sources from the rest. Unfortunately, scholarship’s main filters for importance are failing…”

So what are altmetrics? These are a “new, online scholarly tools allows us to make new filters; these altmetrics reflect the broad, rapid impact of scholarship …”

It might be useful to think about the way scholarship is changing in the digital era – as a shift from 20th c. models of creating “knowledge products” – to 21st century model of creating “knowledge streams.” With products – you count their impact once – with “knowledge streams” – you can also count various aspects of distribution – such as number of downloads, unique visitors to your blog, number of Twitter followers – which can have a much wider impact.

These new, digital knowledge streams (and measurement) don’t replace the “knowledge products” of traditional, legacy models of academia, rather they augment the traditional ones. For example, when you write submit a paper to traditional, peer-reviewed journal you want to think about optimizing the title of that paper for search engines. As another example, a peer-reviewed article that gets mentioned on Twitter will get more citations in the traditional peer-reviewed literature

LEGACY TO DIGITAL CHANGE IS PARTIAL

There is not a complete transition from a “legacy” past that is behind us, and a “digital” present or future. The legacy and the digital are imbricated, that is, they overlap in the here and now. This can play out in painful ways. For example, on tenure and review committees – where reviewers are tied to legacy models of academic scholarship and those up for promotion are engaging with digital models of scholarship.

A DIFFERENT SORT OF CHANGE: AUSTERITY

The politics of austerity mean that the funding landscape of higher education is changing. We are also living in a global (certainly US, UK + Western Europe) context of ‘austerity.’

(Image Source)

Of course, ‘austerity’ is a convenient lie that says we’re out of money but reflects the reality of economic inequality and that the rich and super-rich will not invest in public goods and services.

Political attacks on higher education in the US are changing the landscape of funding. There is a Republican war on social science. Sen. Coburn managed to prohibit any monies for NSF-funded political science unless it was somehow “promoting national security or the economic interests of the United States.” He also tried to put the ax to NSF’s political science funds once before, but that failed in the short run, but in the longer run, the tighter definition allowed him to argue that the funds could exist, “as long as they weren’t squandered.”

There is a different political landscape in the UK, where there is an overall commitment to funding higher education. The Research Excellence Framework, or REF shapes these discussions in the UK. The REF means that the funding is tied to demonstrated “research excellence,” part of which relies on evidence of “impact” on wider publics.

Back in the US there is no longer any broad commitment to funding state-funded public institutions of higher ed, at least when you look at data from state budgets, like this one from Georgia and this one that explores the overall trend in the US:

(Image from The Atlantic)

You really don’t need much more there than the dramatically, downward-pointing arrow to know that this means faculty have to be more entrepreneurial in securing their own funding for research (much like journalists are now considering ways to be entrepreneurial as a response to changing business model in news.)

And, of course, there’s very bad news in academia regarding the way we hire (or don’t hire) faculty. An estimated 73% to 76% of all instructional workforce in higher education are adjunct faculty.

Given the grim prospects for legacy tenure-track jobs in the academy, it is inevitable that many people with PhDs are going to do other things with those skills.

Increasingly, given the grim political economy of “austerity” and the many, many under-employed PhDs, I think that the affordances of digital technologies will create more and more entities like the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.

COMMERCE vs. DEMOCRACY

In academia, as elsewhere, we’re faced with competing forces of commercialization versus democratization as Robert Darnton, of DPLA noted in a recent talk at the Graduate Center.

The political economy of austerity, up to and including slashes in funding to public institutions of higher ed, the adjunctification of the academic workforce, and the attacks on funding such as the Coburn amendment, point to this broad conflict between forces of commercialization and forces of democratization.

Sometimes academics conflate the “commerce v. democracy “ struggle with the transformation from “legacy” to “digital” forms of scholarly communication, and I think this is unfortunate.

Given this context, what are academics to do to resist the forces of commercialization? I argue that owning the content of your own professional identity is key to this… For most faculty, their “web presence” is a page on a departmental website that they have no control over and cannot change or update even if they wanted to. “Reclaiming the web” means owning your own domain name and managing it yourself, a move Jim Groom has put forward for students and I argue should be the default strategy for faculty.

Too often academics, who are a contrarian lot, want to resist commercialization by refusing the digital. This refusal is misplaced and reflects a misunderstanding of the forces at play here.

Owning our own words, “reclaiming the web,” and our own professional identity online as well as offline is just one step.

Another step for academics, especially that handful with tenure, is to say “no” to publishing in places that don’t allow you to own your own work by retaining copyright.

A further step for academics, and especially for those in my discipline of sociology, is to use blogging to open up a space between research and journalism in ways that are creative, interesting, and contribute to an engaged citizenry.

In sum, the current state of affairs in higher ed looks something like this. On the one hand, we have the grim political economy of “austerity,” declining support for state-funded public education and attacks on other funding mechanisms like NSF. On the other hand, we have these amazing new opportunities to do our work in new ways, and make that work open to wider publics.

We are caught in the middle of the colliding forces of commercialization and democratization at the same time institutions of higher ed are making the transition from “legacy” to “digital” modes of operation.

Resisting digital scholarship in order to forestall the forces of commercialization is a mistake that too many academics make. Instead, we as academics need to embrace digital scholarship in ways that help foster democratization.

Public Sociology in the Digital Era

While traditionally trained sociologists and other academics may have once had the luxury of speaking to small audiences of specialized experts, the digital era, changing economic models and pressing social problems are creating a new set of expectations, challenges and opportunities. Last week, I gave a talk about this in the Sociology Department at Rutgers University. I was there at the invitation of Professor Arlene Stein, who is both a public sociologist as editor of Contexts magazine, a quarterly magazine of the ASA that aims to be the “public face of sociology.” Stein also teaches a graduate seminar on the practice of public sociology. Here are is my slide deck from that talk (check the ‘notes’ view for links, image credits and additional resources):

Public Sociology in the Digital Era from Jessie Daniels

The key takeaway is that sociology, as a discipline, must begin to reimagine scholarly communitcation for the public good in the digital era.

If public sociology can find a way to be digitally engaged and more fluent in the digital lexicon of the 21st century in which we find ourselves, then I believe there is hope for sociology to be a force for social good, and by that I mean, an engaged citzenry, and a more democratic and egalitarian society.

If, instead, sociology chooses to cling to a dying, legacy system of higher education, invested in status wars and internecine theoretical debates,
it will fade into irrelevancy.

The future of public sociology is up to all of us.

Visualizing Big Data, Resisting Criminalization

Visualizing big data sets with easy-to-read illustrations can help tell a story and make complex data easier to understand by more people.

Earlier today at the Graduate Center a panel of experts discussed a range of visualizations that may help in efforts to resist and transform criminalization. The panel was moderated by Evan Misshula, Data Visualization Fellow with JustPublics@365.

In her presentation,“Data Visualizations in the Newsroom,” Amanda Hickman, CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, shared some of the ways that she teaches aspiring journalists to dive into data. Given that journalists are doing the hard work of translating academic jargon into plain English, Hickman also made a plea for the academics in the audience to avoid “academese.” She closed by offering this list of resources, including a link to the course she teaches at the J-School:

Amanda Hickman’s Course http://datadrivenjournalism.2013.journalism.cuny.edu/
CUNY J-Camp http://cunyjcamp.com/ and JustPublics@365 MediaCamp (FREE) Workshops
Hacks/Hackers http://meetupnyc.hackshackers.com/
Investigative Reporters and Editors http://www.ire.org/
NICAR-L http://www.ire.org/resource-center/listservs/subscribe-nicar-l/
The Data Journalism Handbook http://datajournalismhandbook.org

Following next on the panel were María Elena Torre and Scott Lizama,“Visualizing Stop and Frisk Data” Morris Justice Project and the Public Science Project. María and Scott presented work on their community-engaged project in the Morris Avenue section of the Bronx. They have been meeting every Saturday for several years to collect, compile and visualize data with the Morris Justice Project, which is a collection of community members, academic researchers, and activists. Most of the data they are compiling has to do with the stop-and-frisk policing of the NYPD. Working with members of the community, they have created a range of visualizations of this data from fairly high-tech mapping illustrations to what they described as “very low-tech, pen-and-paper illustrations.”

The final member of the panel was Sabrina Jones, a graphic artist, Brooklyn, NY who talked about her work illustrating “Race to Incarcerate: A Graphic Re-Telling” based on Marc Mauer’s academic, no-picture text Race to Incarcerate.

Race to Incarcerate Graphic Re-Telling Cover Illustration

Participants in the Summit’s Invited Round Tables earlier this morning were given complimentary copies of Jones’ book. Jones discussed her influences from art history, to classical Greek mythology, to contemporary artists. When asked about how she imagined her work contributing to social change, she responded, “I’ve already seen it create change when people who’ve been incarcerated read it and realize, ‘it’s not me, I’m part of a larger system, and there’s a movement to resist.’ ”

All the panelists talked about the need to work collaboratively with others to create work that connects to broader audiences and transforms social inequality. As María Elena Torre put it, “we’re able to work for change because we work in solidarity. We come together with people who are good at what they do, like displaying things on the sides of buildings…” referring to The Illuminator who displayed some of their data on the side of a public housing project in the Bronx. Torre continued,”And, we work in solidarity with people in communities who are experts at the lived experience of what it means to be stopped-and-frisked thousands of times.”

The archived livestreamed video of the event is here. To follow soon, we’ll post a more polished video recording of the panel discussion.

JustPublics@365 Hosted Conference in NY Observer

National Day of Unplugging lasted from sunset on Friday, March 1 to sunset on Saturday, March 2. But judging from the smartphones, Macbooks, and tablets at the third annual Theorizing the Web conference, no attendees took them up on the challenge.

This past weekend was the first time the conference has been held in New York City, at the CUNY Graduate Center near Herald Square.

Gatherings of this sort are typically insular, academic affairs, but organizers Nathan Jurgenson and PJ Rey, both sociology grad students at the University of Maryland-College Park, have attempted to broaden the tent to include bloggers, writers, and journalists of all stripes. “We wanted to create the sort of conference we would want to attend,” said Mr. Rey.

In the opening remarks on Saturday, Mr. Jurgenson elaborated, “We would go to theory conferences, and nobody wanted to talk about the Internet.” What ties the two worlds together, he added, is a concern with social justice—public intellectualism rather than institutional prestige.

Friday’s panel, “Free Speech For Whom?” was a good example of that hybrid approach.

Panelists included social media scholar Danah Boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research better known as @zephoria; Gawker staff writer Adrian Chen, an editor at The New Inquiry; and University of North Carolina professor Zeynep Tufekci, a fellow at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy. CUNY Professor Jessie Daniels, author of Cyber Racism, moderated.

You can read more of Brendan O’Connor’s article in the NY Observer here.

Academic Conferences in the Digital Era

Academic conferences are being transformed by digital media, and that’s a very good thing.

As a co-organizer of Theorizing the Web 2013 (#TtW13), I was pleased to see this conference happen at the Graduate Center over the weekend. However, being a co-organizer also meant that I didn’t actually get to *see* or hear most of the exciting panels as they were happening because I was preoccupied with hosting duties. The good news is that because of the way academic conferences are changing in the digital era, I could do two things I wouldn’t ordinarily be able to do: have a better sense of what happened in the sessions I missed and have the opportunity to go back and listen to those sessions online when I have time. There are other advantages to academic conferences that are fluidly imbued with digital technologies.

I’ve written elsewhere about changes in the academy being wrought by social media. Specifically, I noted that “Backchannel communications between those attending in-person conferences help academics make connections in real time. Text messaging and Twitter and blog updates allow networks of academics to coordinate in-person connections. Backchannel communications also expand knowledge distribution.” The #TtW13 conference provides an opportunity to illustrate each of these points.

The #TtW13 Twitter Stream: Helping Academics Make Connections in Real Time

The backchannel of conferences in the digital era can be as lively as any of the discussions in session rooms. So, for the panel I moderated on Friday night, I took questions from the audience via Twitter. Here it didn’t really matter whether you were actually in the room or if you were sitting you in your apartment in Paris, you could still ask a question. As it happened, one of the questions I put to the panelists was from a Graduate Center student, Amanda Licastro (@amandalicastro), who was actually in the auditorium:

But it wasn’t necessary to be in the room to follow along at the conference, as Wessel Van Rensburg (@wildebees) notes in this Tweet:

Van Rensburg listened to and live tweeted the David Lyon talk from his home in London:

@Replies + Hugs: Enabling Academics to Have In-Person Connections

It may only be true of the academic conferences I usually attend, but they can be dreadful, unwelcoming places. My impression of academics is that we’re a socially awkward lot that prefers reading books and analyzing numbers over talking to people. One especially status-conscious conference I attend is notorious for the “name-badge-face-scan,” in which attendees routinely scan a person’s name badge, sort for ‘high-status, low-status,’ then smile and say ‘hello’ depending on the status level of the name on the badge. It can be particularly humiliating to walk through the hallways of such a conference having your name badge scanned, and your face ignored because you’re not important enough to warrant a friendly hello.

Digital media, and especially Twitter, have completely transformed my experience of academic conferences because of @replies and in-person hugs. While I’m aware of the kerfuffle happening elsewhere about the “real world” and the “digital dualism” critiques of it, that debate doesn’t diminish the fact that there’s something remarkable about meeting someone in person that you’ve only exchanged messages with via Twitter, as Whitney (@phenatypical) notes here:

The @reply (“at reply”) on Twitter is the primary way that people engage there. It’s public, so it’s possible for other people to see when someone uses the @reply (if they’re following both people in the conversation). The @reply is also a way to have a meaningful conversation with another human being and feel as if you know them. And, you do, in some ways.

The in-person hug is a new feature of academic conferences for me, and it’s tied to those @reply exchanges. That happened when I was sitting next to @sava in one of the sessions. I’ve followed her on Twitter for quite awhile now, and even though we both live in NYC, we’d never met. She’s one of my favorite people on Twitter and I always look forward to her observations about the world. As we were sitting in a session, she peaked over my shoulder as I was updating my Twitter stream, and in a moment of recognition, said “are you Jessie? I’m Sava!” We hugged and there were smiles all around. So much nicer than the cold name-face-badge-scan.

When David Parry (@academicdave) and I met in person for the first time at #TtW11 after following each other on Twitter for years, we agreed there should be some word for that experience. As far as I know, no one’s come up with that word yet.

Livestreams, Recorded Videos, and Sharing Slides: Expanding Knowledge Distribution

The affordances of digital technologies that allow me to catch up on sessions I missed, also enable other people from around the globe who didn’t attend in person to participate in the conference and “feel” as if they were there in person. Here’s what people said about that:

Annamari Martinviita (@amartinviita) from Oulu, Finland joined the discussion. Following her fabulous presentation on MOOCs in higher ed, Bonnie Stewart (@bonstewart) made her slides available for everyone, and posted a note about that on Twitter:

When Jeremy Antley (@jsantley) thanked everyone for coming to his session on “Data Serfdom” – which I saw a lot of conversation about on Twitter – I moaned about not being able to attend, then mentioned the watching the video of it later.

Then, “at replying” to both of us, Shannon Sindorf (@shannonsindorf) astutely predicted a new round of comments on presentations as people got home from the conference and had a chance to watch the videos of talks we missed live.

This, really, is the point of reimagining scholarly communication, so that we can extend the interesting conversations that we (sometimes) have at conferences beyond the constraints of time and geography.

The big theme of our inaugural JustPublics@365 Summit is ‘reimagining scholarly communication in the 21st century.’ Conferences that use a variety of digital technologies the way #TtW13 did at the Graduate Center this weekend are part of a reimagined academic conference in the digital era. This transformation is, in many ways, a very good thing because it opens up previously closed spaces of academia.

Making Research More Public

I was delighted to serve as moderator of last night’s panel on “Free Speech for Whom?” with danah boyd (@zephoria), Adrian Chen (@AdrianChen), and Zeynep Tufekci (@techsoc) (more about which in another post). At the end of the panel, I asked the panelists what one thing they might change if they were going to address the issue of hate speech and other forms of offensive trolling and abusive behavior online. The closing comments came from danah boyd who urged the audience of mostly academics, activists, and web-theorizers to “be more public with your work.” As Dorothy (@deedottiedot) tweeted:

I mention this here because danah’s call to action for the audience last night speaks directly to the core idea behind JustPublics@365. As people who are committed to social justice, we see a lot that’s wrong with the world from hate speech, to growing economic inequality, to criminalization of large segments of the population. We also know that there is a good deal of academic research that could speak to those persistent inequalities and entrenched inequalities that open up new ways of thinking about old problems. JustPublics@365 is all about connecting academic research to social justice efforts already happening, and using digital media to do just that. “Be public with your work,” well said, danah boyd.

MOOC to POOC: Moving from Massive to Participatory

JustPublics@365 wants to reimagine higher education. One of the ways we’re doing that is by re-thinking the graduate seminar and rethinking online education.

Recently, Thomas Friedman in an op-ed for The New York Times proclaimed “nothing has more potential to enable us to reimagine higher education than the massive open online course, or MOOC”. The New York Times dubbed 2012 “the year of the MOOC.” In the context of New York City (and outside of academia), the term is pronounced “mook” (a derogatory term). Aside from the racism this term perpetuates, from our point of view the “MOOC”-model has lots of other problems.

Chiefly, the MOOC-model misunderstands how learning works. Often times, the “massive” forms of online “learning” rely heavily on lecture-delivery as the key pedagogy. In this model, technology is used to amplify the reach of one lecture. This turns the many-to-many communication of the Internet back into the one-to-many broadcast model of television. Perhaps fittingly, when television first emerged as a technology, there was lots of talk about the way “educational television” was going to revolutionize the way people learned. It didn’t change much, as it turned out.

The way Friedman, among others, talks about MOOCs is that they are a way to educate lots of people from a distance for “relatively little money.” As the education system is rapidly defunded, what is to be left for educators and their pupils besides the satellite dishes, computers, and “facilitator” Friedman describes.

Many are similarly jumping to support MOOCs as a money making venture, ignoring the actual purpose of education to envision new business models. Perhaps not surprisingly, lots of administrators in higher ed are jumping on the MOOC bandwagon, which many others are resisting.

We have a different idea. We wanted to create something participatory, rather than massive. Something that engaged with people outside the academy, as well as with those inside. That’s part of why we created the participatory, open, online course “POOC” – that we’re launching today.

(CC Image from Flickr)

To us, the most exciting thing about the Internet is not that we can amplify old lectures in broadcast fashion, but that it enables all of us to create knowledge in new ways, connect with those beyond the academy, and try to transform entrenched forms of inequality.

The course grew out of a discussion about interdisciplinarity at the Graduate Center among colleagues in the Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC). Several faculty there, under the able leadership of Don Robotham (Anthropology), began talking about all the great research being conducted at the Graduate Center that had some connection to the topic of “inequality.” From there, a small group of people began to put together a syllabus for a multi-disciplinary, graduate-level seminar that pulled together diverse conversations about inequality.

In the seminar, the overall questions we want to explore are: What does inequality look like in 2013? How might we imagine our future differently if we did so collectively? And, given that we are situated at this particular historical moment in which technology is changing many aspects of the social world, we wanted to also pose the question: How do the affordances of digital technologies augment the way we both research inequality and resist its corrosive effects?

Then, as Co-PIs Chase Robinson, Matt Gold and Jessie Daniels, developed the proposal for the JustPublics@365 grant, we began to talk about incorporating something like a MOOC, although we had a lot of concerns with the MOOC-model. Mostly, we wanted something that embodied the spirit of the Graduate Center and CUNY, a public institution with a very clear sense of serving the public as part of its core mission. We also sit at 365 Fifth Avenue, in the heart of New York City, so we thought that the course should incorporate some of the vibrancy of our urban setting.

Over the summer months, a series of conversations got us thinking about situating the course in a particular neighborhood within New York City. The organizers wanted to focus on a specific neighborhood in NYC in order to keep the discussion of “inequality” from getting too abstract and too far removed from people’s everyday lives and very real experiences of inequality. In preliminary talks about the course, we realized that a few members of the #InQ13 collective had ties to East Harlem, where we either live or work. And, finally, there was a shared sense that East Harlem has a rich, multi-ethnic tradition of citizen activism that everyone could learn from, but that is not widely known. So those original seminar questions were joined by another one: What can working with East Harlem teach everyone about the most urgent political economic issues of our time?

Part of the challenge in developing and launching the seminar is that we didn’t see many models of MOOC-s (or other open, online courses) that were geared toward a graduate-level. There is an inherent tension, then, in having an “open” course that also aims to foster a discussion and create assignments at a fairly high-level of difficulty, at the same time it is attempting to involve community members. We think it can be done, but we don’t think it’s probably very well suited for audiences on anything like a “massive” level.

And, one last note at this initial juncture about the “POOC” vs. “MOOC.” While there’s a lot of talk about these as a “new business model” or threatening the business of higher ed, based on our experience this seems highly unlikely. If you take a look at the #InQ13 collective – our “credits” page, if you will – there are some 19 individuals listed there. It took at least that many people to create and launch this POOC (no doubt, we left some people out). While this is an interesting, even fun, way to “do” education, I don’t see this as threatening the livelihood of current professoriate. If anything, this kind of teaching could be the next jobs program.

Graduate Center Launches JustPublics@365

Press Release, 11/14/2012.

Graduate Center’s (CUNY) Newly-Formed JustPublics@365 Receives Research Grant from the Ford Foundation to Address Social Inequality through Digital Media

Ambitious Program Will Link Work of Academics, Activists and Journalists to inform the public

New York, NY (November 14, 2012) – The Graduate Center of the City University of New York (GC) announced today that the Ford Foundation has provided a research grant to launch JustPublics@365, which will bring together journalists, academics, activists and policy advocates who are working to address social inequality through digital media.

“We’re delighted that the Ford Foundation shares our long-term vision for bringing academic research to bear on pressing problems of social justice,” said Graduate Center Provost Chase F. Robinson. “JustPublics@365 is an ambitious effort to maximize the influence of faculty research through the innovative use of a wide range of social media, by creating partnerships among academics, activists and policy-makers, and by seeking new ways to measure impact.”

“The Graduate Center, with its distinguished history of research on inequality, is uniquely qualified to work with the Ford Foundation to create a more informed public sphere,” added Robinson.

At the Graduate Center and beyond it, JustPublics@365 engages a dialogue among researchers on inequality, activists and media. It uses the networked landscape of the internet and the physical environs of the GC – JustPublics@365 is named for the institution’s address at 365 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan – to bring attention to those inequalities across several domains: economic, housing, race and ethnicity, immigration, health, and education. The program’s first Summit will be held at the GC on Thursday, March 6, 2013.

“The pathway for scholars working on social justice research to engage the public via traditional and new forms of media will require collaborative models like JustPublics@365 now and into the future,” said Darren Walker, vice president of the Education, Creativity and Free Expression program at the Ford Foundation. “An informed citizenry is a prerequisite for democracy and embarking on creative experiments to connect the public to research on critical issues is a necessary priority.”

JustPublics@365 will be overseen by Chase Robinson, Provost of the GC, Jessie Daniels, a professor of Public Health and Sociology at the Graduate Center, and Matthew K. Gold, who serves at the GC as Advisor to the Provost for Master’s Programs and Digital Initiatives and Acting Executive Officer of the M.A. Program in Liberal Studies.

Through the $550,000 research grant, Robinson, Daniels and Gold will develop an innovative “alt metrics” measurement program with GC to assess the impact of academic research on the public sphere and social justice initiatives.

JustPublics@365

reimagining scholarly communication for the public good