Hacking the Academy: New Approaches to Scholarship and Teaching from Digital Humanities

by Daniel J. Cohen, Joseph Thomas Scheinfeldt

On May 21, 2010, Daniel J. Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt posted the following provocative questions online:

“Can an algorithm edit a journal? Can a library exist without books? Can students build and manage their own learning management platforms? Can a conference be held without a program? Can Twitter replace a scholarly society?”

As recently as the mid-2000s, questions like these would have been unthinkable. But today serious scholars are asking whether the institutions of the academy as they have existed for decades, even centuries, aren’t becoming obsolete. Every aspect of scholarly infrastructure is being questioned, and even more importantly, being hacked. Sympathetic scholars of traditionally disparate disciplines are canceling their association memberships and building their own networks on Facebook and Twitter. Journals are being compiled automatically from self-published blog posts. Newly minted PhDs are forgoing the tenure track for alternative academic careers that blur the lines between research, teaching, and service. Graduate students are looking beyond the categories of the traditional CV and building expansive professional identities and popular followings through social media. Educational technologists are “punking” established technology vendors by rolling out their own open source infrastructure.

Here, in Hacking the Academy, Daniel J. Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt have gathered a sampling of the answers to their initial questions from scores of engaged academics who care deeply about higher education. These are the responses from a wide array of scholars, presenting their thoughts and approaches with a vibrant intensity, as they explore and contribute to ongoing efforts to rebuild scholarly infrastructure for a new millennium.

Genres: Library Science, Professional Development

176 pages, Paperback

First published September 9, 2011

About the author

Daniel J. Cohen is the founding Executive Director of the Digital Public Library of America, which is bringing together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and making them freely available to the world.

Until 2013 he was a Professor of History in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University and the Director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. My personal research has been in digital humanities, broadly construed: the impact of new media and technology on all aspects of knowledge, from the nature of digitized resources to twenty-first century research techniques and software tools to the changing landscape of communication and publication.

Reviews

[Pete Lawson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hacking the Academy is in an exercise in contradictions, a text aimed squarely at the entrenched humanities scholarly tradition. An open call was given for submissions along the theme (hacking the academy) but only a week, a speck considering the glacial timelines of academic publishing. The books subversive content culled from decidedly unacademic sources Twitter, emails, blogs, even a Ted talk, serve as exemplars to the goal of Hacking the Academy: academia as we have understood it is dead, we must evolve. The submissions were curated heavily and the final work stands as a testament to that process, a somewhat odd editorial approach considering a crowdsourced up-voting schema is more consistent with what the book proposes. The book may seem ready to undermine academia as we know it, but it is encapsulated in the very medium it purports to replace (academic print publishing). In this way Hacking the Academy acts as a bridge between world's, that of the academia as it is, and academia as we can conceive of it to be.

Hacking the Academy is loosely organized on certain themes: conferences (or unconferences in this case), teaching, scholarly communication, and academic employment. Considering the book's inclusive and unconventional sourcing, it can be repetitive at times, a fugue on its core themes. The varied perspectives serve more to echo and corroborate their fellows then refute them. Nevertheless, the themes are relevant, and it in no way negates the importance of modernizing academia.

[Rachel]

Note that I quit reading it because I had to give it back to the library, not because it was bad. I do intend to finish it at some point.