Public Philosophy

Nor does he see the gatekeepers—even in our new age of blogs and little magazines—that prevent supply from meeting demand.

The problem here isn’t that typically American conceit of “culture” v. nonconformist rebel. It’s the very material pressures and constraints young academics face, long before tenure. It’s the job market.  It’s the rise of adjuncts. It’s neoliberalism.

I had to smile at Kristof’s nod to publish or perish. Most working academics would give anything to be confronted with that dilemma. The vast majority can’t even think of publishing; they’re too busy teaching four, five, courses a semester

I want to suggest that the theory and practice of data curation can augment our notion of “publishing” in a way that will serve the needs of the digital humanities community

Data-curation-as-publishing is publishing work that draws directly on the unique skills of librarians and aligns directly with library missions and values in ways that other kinds of publishing endeavors may not.

Treating data curation and publishing as kindred services may offer the prospect of expanding a library’s stable of “innovative” offerings while not straining resources because there are management efficiencies in having both the “front end” and “back end” people in the library. However, in this model, neither libraries nor publishing seems truly transformed and this is a problematic mismatch when so many other aspects of scholarly work are being transformed.

In referring to “data curation,” I am speaking specifically of information work that integrates closely with the disciplinary practices and needs of researchers in order to “maintain digital information that is produced in the course of research in a manner that preserves its meaning and usefulness as a potential input for further research.”

Kathleen Fitzpatrick has argued that humanists “might … find our values shifting away from a sole focus on the production of unique, original new arguments and texts to consider instead curation as a valid form of scholarly activity” (Fitzpatrick 79)

It is also increasingly common to see the release of open data sets as enticement to attract digital humanists to work on particular sets of questions,

Publishers add value to end products through peer review and high quality production and presentation. Libraries standardize and preserve these outputs and continue to make them available to a community over time. Organizations which comprise both library and publisher can imagine this as a unified suite of services that cover the entire data lifecycle.