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Articles Conference Reviews |
D.24 Scholarship, Remix, and the DatabaseD.24 Scholarship, Remix, and the Database Members of this panel explored the implications of networked databases for composition studies as a discipline, taking as their point of exigency the constantly evolving composition studies archive and concern over what will be the legacy of the data we, as a discipline, choose to archive today. Rather than presenting separately, panelists re-mixed their talks to create a differently integrated whole; they didn't interweave as much as they stood in a shared space and looked outward. There were provocative suggestions in all three presentations, addressing the question of the disciplinary database at different levels of theory and practice. Alex Reid's point of departure was the increasing divergence of composition studies as a discipline. He claimed that there is now a wider range of scholarship, a wider range of media of publication, and a wider range of audiences reading work in our field. For Reid, the database plays an important role in this diverging/refiguring. Drawing on social assemblage theory and Derrida's treatment of archives, he argued that all archives are remixes: they remix the history and structure of a discipline. For Reid, the concept of time was most productive--that is, how the database is structured to preserve disciplinary history and identity but also to project it forward. According to Reid, the database/archive remixes the past rather than secures a single version of it. Reid argued that it is only through the homogenizing remix of the archive that a disciplinary identity can be established. Looking forward and planned with an eye toward what our discipline might become, the database anticipates the historiographic remixes of future searches. Like Reid, Bradley Dilger framed his discussion of the database around expanding our notion of what constitutes scholarship in the discipline. He called for reconceptualizing the web link as a foundational unit of discourse, arguing that links need to be a primary component of how we understand the database and make database contents accessible. Dilger elaborated that there are three types of accessibility about which we must be concerned: (1) ensuring everyone can read, hear, or touch, or work; (2) ensuring people can get to our journals; and (3) ensuring those outside our field can understand our work. As a result, Dilger advocated giving everything online a URL, striving for link stability, concatenating links into feeds, creating common standards, putting pre-print versions of our scholarship online outside of proprietary databases, and writing publication abstracts that are accessible to those outside our field. Dilger proposed—and the other two presenters seemed to take as a given—that we use the moment of database formation to expand what we consider scholarly activity, so that we archive not just published articles but also "crosstalk and conversation." Online syllabi, reading notes, blogs, conference presentations would be part of the database. An important impulse here is to have our research reach people outside of our discipline. If it's on the web, then it's archived by Google, but we can do a better job of concatenating our research and showing what it means via database construction. Through a review of scholarship on the relationship between database and narrative, Derek Mueller began his part of the talk by asserting that the curation of databases is intellectual work. He contended that there are currently two prevailing approaches to archival work: outsourced and in-sourced. The first defers the responsibility for archiving to an external third party (e.g., Elsevier) whose interest may not match our own, yet it is this external third party who makes the decisions about what and how to archive. This approach is currently followed by College Composition and Communication, College English, and Computers and Composition. The second approach to archival work makes archiving part of the journal work of the discipline--i.e., is taken on by the publishing members of our field. In-sourcing or field-sourcing relies on sometimes Herculean efforts of individuals or collectives within the field, and here we may run into problems with persistence and standards. This approach is currently followed by Kairos, Enculturation, C&C Online, Composition Forum, and JAC. Mueller proposed a third model of network-sourced database curation: "impulsive, contingent, spontaneous, small-scale," this kind of database is not about grand narratives but rather a constant repositioning and reinvention of narratives from the field. This proposal drew the most questions during the lively Q&A session following the presentation. Though network-sourced database curation is still in its conceptual stages, Mueller ultimately used this third approach to underscore his call for an expanded curatorial ethic that asks us to think of the relationship between database and narrative as based on their designs—where each continuously shapes the other (rather than being natural enemies). This panel reinforced that there is a lot of scholarly activity that happens in the field that is not recognized, captured, and archived in existing database systems. In turn, it raised a series of crucial questions for the discipline (on both practical and theoretical levels). How do we balance having marks of authority with open access? What does it mean to make our processes--i.e., unfinished, partial, fragmentary database work—accessible to a wider audience? What happens when we strive to make our work accessible in existing public database systems like Google Scholar? What does it mean that (very arguably) the most "successful" (i.e., respected, consistent, and stable) journals in the discipline are those that are outsourced? In what ways does/can/should attention to databases shift scholarly focus to activity? |