The Long Roll

It’s hard to overstate the value of social media for building relationships in the profession. Today’s graduate students can arrive with a network of Twitter contacts and relationships built through dialogues on blogs. There’s also a new platform for conversation, called MLA Commons, that was launched just before the convention. So the MLA is increasingly a chance to build professional relationships that were initiated online.

One thing I love about Neatline is that it asserts the enduring value of close reading and hand-craftedness in a world of data-mining and automated, algorithmic visualization,” Nowviskie said.

Still today, we humanists shudder at incompleteness, protecting our ideas from the public, polishing them toward perfection in the private confines of the library or the book lined study. We prefer the silence of these spaces, nurturing our ideas until everything is said just right. Only then are we prepared, reluctantly, to reveal them to the world.

The promise of the digital is not in the way it allows us to ask new questions because of digital tools or because of new methodologies made possible by those tools. The promise is in the way the digital reshapes the representation, sharing, and discussion of knowledge. We are no longer bound by the physical demands of printed books and paper journals, no longer constrained by production costs and distribution friction, no longer hampered by a top-down and unsustainable business model. And we should no longer be content to make our work public achingly slowly along ingrained routes, authors and readers alike delayed by innumerable gateways limiting knowledge production and sharing.