I agree that ‘humanities scholarship’ is very hard to characterize. It’s easy to figure out what more science-oriented professors would study and why it’s important, but I’m often at a loss to figure out what my English professors do and why anybody cares. Is studying some author from decades ago to publish papers about him or her really useful to anyone? What do English professors research that is actually practical and useful (besides digital media I suppose)?

I found the discussion on interactive research interesting—especially the part about ‘Rome Reborn.’ This sounds to me kind of like Second Life, a virtual world I’m working with for my internship. Second Life is used by at least a couple of ISU professors—Bill Shields and Katherine Ellison—and they both talked about how it lets their students actually experience things in a more active and physical way than simply sitting in a classroom.

I also found the concept of an ‘electronic library’ interesting because I’ve seen this grow more popular with the public libraries. More and more they’re putting ebooks and eaudiobooks and such online, where you can check them out and download them for a certain amount of time. This is definitely useful, and people seem to like it, but I really doubt any library would ever go completely electronic. Maybe it would be more useful to scholars, who wouldn’t care so much about aesthetics like having a physical book because they’re using the resources for research, rather than for fun.

Finally, I just wanted to note that I love this quote: “Predicting the future is easy. It’s trying to figure out what’s going on now that’s hard.” Although I would change that second part to “what should be going on now.” It’s like the copyright wars—we can all imagine different futures with different copyright systems, but we can’t figure out what the laws should be like right now.

There just aren’t enough specifics on cost in this book—I’m completely unconvinced this open access model would be sustainable. Actually, I don’t quite understand how scholarly publishing makes enough money to support itself now. And how do academics ever make any money? Wilinsky keeps saying more of your articles read and cited leads to more money somehow, but I’m don’t see how unless it means a job at a higher-paying university. And how on earth do science academics survive, paying author fees to publish? Do they get it all from grants? And where is all that grant money ultimately coming from, anyway? The government? The whole process seems very in-the-dark.

Digital publishing would probably be more sustainable—at least for publishers. But it still doesn’t explain how the academics can afford to publish. And what I really don’t understand here is why a publisher would agree to publish something that had been offered in any form on the Internet. Commercial publishers would never do that. I mean, who would buy something you could get in a nearly identical format online?

I like the description Wilinsky gives of early nineteenth century cheep scientific journals—it would be nice if people cared that much about science now. There are people like amateur astronomers who contribute, and of course there’s the way the OED was developed. Honestly, though, does Wilinsky really think the public will read journal articles if they have access? Probably less than .1 percent actually would.

I do agree that putting journal articles on open access might force academics to actually write clearly, though. Maybe it would encourage them to do away with all the jargon and roundabout speech and write plainly, as well as do more research into things that are practical and less into obscure things like centuries-old books. I really like this quote Wilinsky gives from Derrida: “that every philosophical teaching [should] be capable of being made popular (that is, of being made sufficiently clear to the sense to be communicated to everyone), if the teacher is not to be suspected of being muddled in his own concepts.” If it’s in academic-speak, I start to wonder if the author really knows what they’re talking about or if they’re faking it.

I did this last time too. Sorry!

The concept in the Borgman that I found the most interesting and compelling was the idea that information systems will always expand as the knowledge needed to be contained by them will expand. I have worked on various grant projects at Milner Library building databases. The project I am on now, I use existing databases to help compile this new one, so when I read that section I felt like I see this in action every week.

Kristen, I think new media is more than digital. But, by “digital,” do you mean the Internet? I think of “new media” as anything creative or scholarly that utilizes technology we didn’t have 50 years ago. Most of these things would be accessible through the Internet, or aided by it, but I think it can also be creative and scholarly video or audio projects. Up until the last few decades, anything worth learning from was almost always printed on paper. Now, we are starting to see valid, legitimate creative and scholarly texts in places we didn’t look before. I think that’s what “new media” means. What do other people think of when they think of “new media”?

Another concept Borgman discussed with which I felt familiar was Open Access/Open Science. I am only familiar in that I use open software for word processing (was NOT going to pay another $150 for MS Word after buying my lap top). The concept seems in direct opposition to our capitalist economy, yet makes so much sense. Why does “free” information online, or on a computer, make so much sense, when we’ve been paying for books for decades?