{"id":146,"date":"2021-04-26T19:19:34","date_gmt":"2021-04-26T19:19:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ahropenreview.com\/HistoryCanBeOpenSource\/?page_id=146"},"modified":"2021-04-26T19:20:27","modified_gmt":"2021-04-26T19:20:27","slug":"second-revised-draft","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/ahropenreview.com\/HistoryCanBeOpenSource\/second-revised-draft\/","title":{"rendered":"Second Revised Manuscript"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

History Can <\/em>Be Open Source: Democratic Dreams and the Rise of Digital History[1]<\/a><\/h1>\n\n\n\n

In 2006, pioneering digital historian Roy Rosenzweig published an article in the Journal of American History<\/em> entitled \u201cCan History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past.\u201d By then Wikipedia had already become, he said, \u201cperhaps the largest work of online historical writing, the most widely read work of digital history, and the most important free historical resource on the World Wide Web.\u201d[2]<\/sup><\/a> Rosenzweig declared that historians \u201chave a responsibility to make better information sources available online\u201d and called the profession to \u201cemulate the great democratic triumph of Wikipedia\u2014its demonstration that people are eager for free and accessible information resources.\u201d[3]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fifteen years after Rosenzweig\u2019s plea, technological innovation, institutional resources, professional norms, and shifting scholarly attitudes have converged to prove Rosenzweig right: history can <\/em>be open source. Scores of digital projects now provide free, high-quality, peer-reviewed digital historical material, and, with many historians embracing open licensing, Rosenzweig\u2019s dream seems nearer to reality than ever before. But is open access enough? Digital history\u2019s early practitioners promised more than that. They promised a broader democratization of history. It is therefore the goal of this piece to historicize digital history and the wider digital humanities by confronting their past and present claims to \u201cdemocracy.\u201d Placing digital history\u2019s rise in a historical and institutional context, surveying the past and present landscape of digital projects, and evaluating their inconsistent, often problematic, and yet foundational democratic aspirations, this article moves beyond questions of technological innovation and digital access to engage more fundamental and intractable questions about inequality, community, and participatory historical inquiry.[4]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The dream of \u201cdemocratization\u201d fueled much of the rise of digital history and the larger digital humanities.[5]<\/a> Early discussions of digital history, nearly all written by white men, lauded the democratic potential of new technology.[6]<\/a> \u201cIn the 1990s, the animating spirit behind much of our work in the digital humanities was democratization,\u201d said William G. Thomas III, a digital historian and co-founder of digital humanities centers at the University of Virginia and the University of Nebraska. \u201cOur ambitions then were only secondarily to experiment with new forms of scholarship. They were primarily to democratize history: to transform the way history was understood by changing the way it was produced and accessed.\u201d[7]<\/a> Founded in 1994, the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University\u2014later renamed for Rosenzweig\u2014declared that it \u201cused digital media and computer technology to democratize history\u2014to incorporate multiple voices, reach diverse audiences, and encourage popular participation in presenting and preserving the past.\u201d[8]<\/a> Such claims borrowed from the wider digital humanities. As Bridget Draxler and the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance (HASTAC) explained, it was the fundamental mission of the digital humanities \u201cto democratize knowledge to reach out to \u2018publics,\u2019 share academic discoveries, and invite an array of audiences to participate in knowledge production.\u201d[9]<\/sup><\/a>Optimistic calls for democratic digital work echoed throughout universities, museums, archives, and beyond.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As early digital humanists touted the democratic potential of digital technology, Silicon Valley\u2019s prophets preached the \u201ctheory of disruptive innovation\u201d to eager university administrators with the promise of inevitable democratic revolutions. But disruption is not a synonym for democracy. As Rosenzweig put it, \u201cneither the democratization or the commodification of higher education is inherent in technology.\u201d[10]<\/a> In fact, digital humanists such as Safiya Umoja Noble, Kim Gallon, Jessica Marie Johnson, and others, building upon the work of intersectional feminists, demonstrate how persistent systematic injustices prevent participatory equality and  expose patterns of marginalization lurking in supposedly value-neutral digital worlds.[11]<\/a> What, then, does \u201cdemocracy\u201d mean in a world caught between evolving technology and intransigent structural barriers? And how have digital humanists confronted the insatiable conquest of market logics in American life\u2014a rapacious neoliberalism that political theorist Wendy Brown argues has \u201cinaugurate[d] democracy\u2019s conceptual unmooring and substantive disembowelment.\u201d[12]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Grappling with the practice of digital history and analyzing its maturation, particularly in light of its contemporary critics, demands a critical engagement with the long quest for \u201cdemocracy.\u201d \u201cDemocracy,\u201d of course, is a slippery term: vague, often unreflective ideas of \u201cdemocracy\u201d drove much of the development of the field of digital history. It is not the goal of this essay to arrive at a positive, substantive definition of \u201cdemocracy\u201d\u2014centuries of writers, theorists, and activists have already tried and failed to mobilize popular consensus around the term.[13]<\/a> Nevertheless, we identify and evaluate the three major strains of \u201cdemocratization\u201d deployed by digital historians over the past several decades: the first emphasized expanded access by championing digitization and open online distribution of historical material to new users; the second hoped for democratization at the level of production, inviting greater participation and collaboration in the conception and construction of digital projects; and the third, inspired especially by the scholarship of intersectional feminists and critical race theorists, sought to identify longstanding inequalities and level perceived structural injustices within the digital humanities and academia more broadly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To evaluate these democratic dreams, this essay first roots digital history and the digital humanities in a postwar university landscape torn between New Left idealism and neoliberal transformation. It then tracks the digital history boom of the 1990s and early 2000s, evaluating a generation of digital humanists, lured by the promises of the early internet, who extended access to information and fostered collaboration to widen participation in producing knowledge. Believing that digitization could tear down barriers to the world\u2019s knowledge, they increasingly introduced the open access movement to academics. But \u201cdemocratization\u201d is not so simple, and this essay grapples with the contradictions and complexities of an historical moment when not only digital historians but public historians, archivists, and publishers all struggled to balance self-professed democratic commitments against powerful neoliberal impulses inside and outside of academia. Then, this essay explores a more recent generation of digital humanists, who, frustrated especially with the political economy of academia, are especially cognizant of stubborn structural barriers\u2014the neoliberal university and deep-seated divides along the lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, and colonialism. Like Alexis Lothian and Amanda Phillips, they \u201cwonder how digital practices and projects might participate in more radical processes of transformation\u2013\u2013might rattle the poles of the big tent rather than slip seamlessly into it.\u201d[14]<\/a> Finally, surveying recent digital history projects, especially in light of contemporary criticism, this essay considers the myopia of much \u201cdemocratic\u201d rhetoric in digital history, arguing that while much of history can indeed be open source, democracy itself remains elusive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the sake of clarity, definitional precision demands outlining terms such as digital history, digital humanities, open access, and open educational resources. We consider, for the purposes of this essay, digital history as the component of the digital humanities rooted in the methods and discipline of history. While digital history has a genealogy distinct from the broader digital humanities, and even as many practitioners are invested in drawing its disciplinary boundaries\u2014some, notably, by emphasizing history\u2019s particular capacity for public engagement\u2014digital history nevertheless overlaps deeply with the institutions, technology, and debates occurring within the broader digital humanities.[15]<\/sup><\/a> While digital history is the focus of this essay, we also consider the larger landscape of digital humanities as essential context for our evaluation of democratization. Of course, definitions of digital humanities abound: \u201cWhat is DH?\u201d has long been a punchline.[16]<\/a> Nevertheless, we draw on Kathleen Fitzpatrick\u2019s capacious definition of the digital humanities as \u201ca nexus of fields\u201d both employing digital tools to conduct humanities scholarship and using humanities methods to make sense of the digital world.[17]<\/a> Likewise, when we discuss open access (OA) and open education resources (OER), we borrow from established definitions, such as that resulting from the 2001 Budapest Open Access Initiative. We therefore use open access to refer to materials not only freely accessible online but also licensed in such a way as to permit users to freely retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute them. OER are simply OA materials used primarily for educational purposes.[18]<\/a> And yet, before these terms could mean anything at all, democracy-seeking academics were busy building their foundations on college campuses across the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Democratic dreams inspired many of the earliest digital humanities initiatives. While historically-minded computing in the 1960s and 1970s was often confined to a core of \u201ccliometric\u201d historians, the participatory democracy of the New Left would shape an emerging digital history. \u201cWe seek the establishment of a democracy of individual participation, governed by two central aims,\u201d Tom Hayden and members of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) wrote in their iconic 1962 Port Huron Statement, \u201cthat the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life [and] that society be organized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for their common participation.\u201d[19]<\/a> Roy Rosenzweig\u2019s pioneering work would grow directly out of such ideals. As a former student and colleague, Elena Razlogova, explained, \u201cRoy applied his unreconstructed \u2018new left\u2019 radicalism to new digital realities.\u201d[20]<\/a> As protests rocked campuses across the West, computer programmers, software engineers, and \u201chackers\u201d embraced\u2014often in parallel to the competitive corporatization surrounding new hardware developments\u2014<\/a>the notion of shared knowledge and pioneered the principles that would later undergird digital history\u2019s push for \u201cdemocratization.\u201d[21]<\/a> Richard Stallman, for instance, a freshman at Harvard University in 1970, became active in the nearby hacker community at MIT and, believing \u201cfree software\u201d to be a social and ethical imperative, later founded the GNU project and launched the GNU General Public License (GPL) to allow for the free use, modification, and distribution of software.[22]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The tech utopians of the New Left, however, worked in universities increasingly captive to the political economy of Cold War America.[23]<\/a> What is often cited as the first digital humanities project, Roberto Busa\u2019s Index Thomisticus, <\/em>depended upon the financial support of IBM, for instance.[24]<\/a> Corporate funds tentacled themselves into every corner of academia. Neoliberal logics, as historian Johann Neem and others have demonstrated,[25]<\/a> further eroded higher education\u2019s capacity to foster democracy through education by slashing public funding, replicating corporate administration, and incentivizing profit-seeking research.[26]<\/a> The neoliberal university was born.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the following decades, the scramble to adopt new technologies only further blurred the academic pursuit of \u201cdemocratization.\u201d At the same time that academics championed digital tools as a means to bring education to the masses, notions of world-flattening technology offered moral cover for the decidedly anti-democratic ends of business inside and outside of academia. Techno-libertarians in Silicon Valley, for instance, drew upon the celebratory individualism of the hacker culture and counter-cultural institutions such as Stewart Brand\u2019s Whole Earth Catalog <\/em>to nurture their own digital utopianism. [27]<\/a> The Digital Humanities, meanwhile, emerged alongside relentless cost-cutting, the adjunctification of instruction, and diminished public support for humanities education. Digital history would rely more heavily upon librarians and support staff, not tenured professors; would be housed in centers, not departments; and would depend upon outside grants, not institutional funding.[28]<\/a> The field\u2019s democratic potential was constricted before it had even begun, limiting its capacity to fulfill the promises of the New Left. A survey of early digital projects therefore reveals both the accomplishments and limits of early work in digital history and the broader digital humanities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the 1990s, the digital revolution\u2014particularly the advent of widespread personal computing and the \u201cworld wide web\u201d\u2014inspired numerous historians and other humanists, eager to make knowledge more accessible, to embrace digital technology. In 1995, the American Studies Crossroads Project<\/em>, one of the earliest websites of any humanities organization, led English scholar Randy Bass to partner with historian Brett Eynon to lead the Visible Knowledge Project<\/em>. Bass and his collaborators privileged pedagogical innovation and student participation.[29]<\/a> Other would-be democratizers equated democratization with expanded accessibility. While discussing the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)\u2014an effort to establish digital standards of textual presentation\u2014at the 1994 meeting of the Modern Language Association, C. M. Sperberg-McQueen identified three fundamental requirements for scholarly editions of electronic text: \u201caccessibility without needless technical barriers to use; longevity; and intellectual integrity.\u201d[30]<\/a> Early digital humanities projects followed suit. In 1995, two scholars launched The Walt Whitman Hypertext Archive<\/em>, <\/em>a collection of digital manuscript facsimiles and hypertext editions of Whitman\u2019s poems that aimed to make all of Whitman\u2019s public and private work  available to all.[31]<\/a> The William Blake Archive<\/em> similarly launched free and online in 1996 to \u201cprovide unified access to major works of visual and literary art.\u201d[32]<\/a> The Women\u2019s Writers Project<\/em>, launched in 1999, used TEI standards \u201cto overcome the problems of inaccessibility and scarcity which had rendered women’s writing invisible for so long.\u201d[33]<\/a> The \u201cdigital humanities\u201d\u2014a phrase not yet widely used\u2014was busy being born.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

American historians likewise strove to expand access to scholarly work through digital technology. In 1993, Edward Ayers and a large, rotating team at the University of Virginia launched The Valley of the Shadow<\/em> as \u201can applied experiment in digital scholarship.\u201d The project was a digital archive: it allowed users to freely compare letters, newspapers, maps, official records, and a wealth of other digitized sources from two counties, Franklin County, Pennsylvania, and Augusta County, Virginia (one Union and one Confederate) before, during, and after the Civil War. It was also, wrote Michael O\u2019Malley and Roy Rosenzweig, \u201cprobably the most sophisticated historical site on the Web.\u201d[34]<\/sup><\/a> Gary Kornblith wrote in The Journal of American Histor<\/em>y <\/em>that the project \u201crepresents the logical outcome of major trends in late-twentieth-century American academic life: computerization, interdisciplinary collaboration, the postmodern complication of traditional narrative, and the democratic search for ways to recognize, even celebrate, the role of ordinary people in making history and culture.\u201d[35]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1994, Roy Rosenzweig, then a pioneering social historian at George Mason University, founded the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) to \u201cincorporate multiple voices, reach diverse audiences and encourage popular presentation in presenting and preserving the past\u201d[36]<\/sup><\/a> Rosenzweig worked with the American Social History Project to produce pedagogical CD-ROMs.[37]<\/sup><\/a> In 1998, Edward Ayers and William Thomas formed the Virginia Center for Digital History at the University of Virginia.[38]<\/sup><\/a> At the University of Houston, Steven Mintz and Sara McNeil pioneered a free (though not yet \u201copen\u201d) digital history text, Digital History: Using New Technologies to Enhance Teaching and Research<\/em>,<\/a>providing an enduring example of a practical, student-centered project that also explored\u2014in its case, through \u201chyperlink history\u201d\u2014the new possibilities afforded by its digital platform.[39]<\/a> In 1998, the CHNM launched History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web<\/em>, a vast collection of primary sources, pedagogical essays, syllabi, reference material, and other teaching tools that that brought academic historians and high school teachers and students into collaboration .[40]<\/a> Such projects demonstrated that expanding access and participation both motivated emerging digital scholarship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lisa Spiro, in her essay \u201cDefining the Values of the Digital Humanities,\u201d argued that a set of core values, rather than traditional disciplinary boundaries, demarcated \u201cdigital humanities.\u201d Surveying Digital Humanities manifestoes and combing the rhetoric of the young field,[41]<\/sup><\/a> she proposed \u201copenness\u201d as the first of five values governing the field. \u201cMany scholars hope and anticipate that open practices,\u201d two digital humanists, George Veletsianos and Royce Kimmons, wrote, \u201cwill broaden access to education and knowledge, reduce costs, enhance the impact and reach of scholarship and education, and foster the development of more equitable, effective, efficient, and transparent scholarly and educational processes.\u201d[42]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Proponents of digital technology also embraced a participatory ethos. In addition to openness, Spiro, for instance, also touted \u201ccollaboration,\u201d \u201ccollegiality and connectedness,\u201d and \u201cdiversity\u201d as foundational values.[43]<\/a> Democratization interpreted as both the expansion of access and participation, was integral to the digital humanities from the very beginning. Andrea Hunter, writing in the Canadian Journal of Communication<\/em>in 2015, argued that such a democratization was the best answer to the chronic definitional question: \u201cWhat is the digital humanities?\u201d Hunter reframed the question away from technology by emphasizing gains in \u201caccess and participation.\u201d Only through such a democratization, she argued, could the digital humanities realize its disciplinary promise.[44]<\/a> To illustrate her argument, Hunter specifically cited two projects: The Orlando Project<\/em>, a self-described \u201cnew kind of electronic textbase for research and discovery\u201d produced by the University of Alberta and the University of Guelph that revolves around \u201cWomen\u2019s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present\u201d; and CHNM\u2019s Omeka, a digital platform designed to allow users to curate and share their own historical archives.[45]<\/a> The first project was designed to bring obscure sources online and out of the archive; the second to allow users to become historians themselves. Both aimed to make the humanities accessible to a wider audience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Such projects illustrate the common desires of digital historians and digital humanists to disseminate knowledge beyond the walls of particular colleges and universities. \u201cThe notion of the university as ivory tower no longer makes sense, if it ever did,\u201d argued the five authors of the 2012 book Digital Humanities<\/em>. \u201cSince the Digital Humanities studies and explicates what it means to be human in the networked information age, it expands the reach and relevance of the humanities far beyond small groups of specialists locked in hermetically sealed conversation.\u201d By connecting specialists across fields, they argued, the digital humanities will \u201copen up the prospect of a conversation extending far beyond the walls of the ivory tower that connects universities to cultural institutions, libraries, museums, and community organizations\u201d[46]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The open access movement grew alongside the digital humanities. As Martin Paul Eve put it in his recent survey of open access in the humanities, \u201cthe overwhelming assumption from the literature on open scholarship is that it has co-evolved with broader technological developments.[47]<\/sup><\/a> The digital revolution brought open licensing into the mainstream with the establishment of Creative Commons in 2001.[48]<\/a> The following year, a UNESCO forum championed what they called \u201ca universal educational resource available for the whole of humanity, to be referred to henceforth as Open Educational Resources [OER].\u201d[49]<\/a> OER\u2014resources that are not simply freely available online but released into the pubic domain or with an open license that allows users to copy, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute them\u2014had been born. When the Public Library of Science (PLOS) began publishing open access journals in science and medicine, open access established a foothold in the academy.[50]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOpen access,\u201d however, remains a relatively new idea for many historians outside of the digital humanities.[51]<\/sup><\/a> In a notice appended to their 2014 open monograph, The History Manifesto<\/em>, historians Jo Guldi and David Armitage wrote, \u201cEven two or three years ago, most academics in the humanities, and certainly most members of the non-academic public, had not heard much if anything about the Open Access movement.\u201d[52]<\/sup><\/a> But already, as advocate Martin Weller put it, \u201copenness is now such a part of everyday life that it seems unworthy of comment.\u201d[53]<\/sup><\/a> Creative Commons\u2019 open licenses are now ubiquitous parts not only of academics\u2019 general internet browsing but increasingly of their scholarship as well: a number of pioneering publications in the humanities are now following the sciences into open access publishing and grant money is appearing for such projects. In fact, according to Eve, \u201cIt is now more often the practicalities of achieving such a goal that are the focus of disagreement.\u201d[54]<\/sup><\/a> And this is where many projects have stalled\u2014until recently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In just a few short years, barriers to participation in digital humanities have fallen and institutional supports have risen. New publishing venues for open-source scholarship and pedagogy; streamlined digital platforms and lowered technological barriers; injections of public and private grant money; the institutionalization of digital humanities in research universities, the development of scholarly guidelines and best practices; and the growing acceptance of open-source scholarship and pedagogy among the academic community have all created the conditions for a digitized history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Funding seeded the digital humanities across American universities. The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation planted many institutional bedrocks and continue to fund initiatives reshaping the DH landscape, digital public history projects in particular.[55]<\/a> The NEH, for instance, whose charter declares that \u201cthe humanities belong to the people of the United States,\u201d spun off a new Office of Digital Humanities in 2008. In 2015, citing an \u201curgent and compelling\u201d need to pioneer digital publishing, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded several million-dollar grants to university presses for the exploration of digital publishing models.[56]<\/sup><\/a> Other wealthy foundations have focused on digital publication. Yale University Library, for instance, received a $3 million grant in 2014 from The Goizueta Foundation to launch a Digital Humanities Laboratory.[57]<\/sup><\/a> It is just one of many new ventures that have smashed barriers to online \u201cpublication\u201d with appeals for expanded access.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Historian Daniel Cohen, in the same year that Rosenzweig penned his plea for open source history, said \u201cResources that are free to use in any way, even if they are imperfect, are more valuable than those that are gated or use-restricted, even if those resources are qualitatively better.\u201d[58]<\/sup><\/a> Recent polls have shown that academics are not fundamentally opposed to open projects, provided they can be reassured that they are using a rigorous product.[59]<\/sup><\/a> But without the guarantee of peer review, how can digital humanities projects win over hesitant academics? As Martin Paul Eve writes, \u201cany transition to open access must necessarily interact with the value systems of the academy and its publishing mechanisms.\u201d[60]<\/sup><\/a> Those very publishing mechanisms have begun to embrace open access, harkening a shift in academia\u2019s prestige economy: scholars can now remain within existing academic structures even as they push the boundaries of access and audience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

University presses, libraries, and academics have spent more than a decade experimenting with and innovating new publishing platforms for open scholarship. University presses have been particularly vigorous in their experiments with open-access and open-source publications. The University of Michigan Library and the University of Michigan Press launched the digitalculturebooks imprint in 2006 with the goal of \u201cdeveloping open platforms that make openness part of the scholarly peer review process\u201d and publishes work under an Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Creative Commons (CC) License.[61]<\/sup><\/a> Under Mark Saunders, the University of Virginia Press received substantial institutional and Mellon grant funding in 2006 and 2007 to seed the publication of online texts under its Rotunda Imprint, bringing The Papers of Thomas Jefferson<\/em> and The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution <\/em>online.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But if open licensing and digital publishing platforms are relatively straightforward, a financial model to sustain the infrastructure of academic publishing is not.[62]<\/a> \u201cIf there ever was a time for a university press to go into open access,\u201d Neil B. Christensen, the director of digital business development for the University of California Press, said in 2015, \u201cthis is the time.\u201d That year, the Press launched dual platforms for publishing open-access journals and monographs, Collabra <\/em>and Luminos.[63]<\/sup><\/a> Striving for long-term sustainability, the press\u2019s open-access business model revolved around authors\u2019 fees and paid reviewers. Collabra, <\/em>for instance,charges authors a $825 publication fee. Such a model borrows from the sciences, where fee-based publication undergirds open-access standbys such as PLOS ONE<\/em> (which charges $1,700 to publish a research article) and Elsevier\u2019s suite of science journals (which typically change between $1,500 to $4000 to publish a research article.) A pay-to-publish open access model, foreign to academic historians, would democratize access at the expense of participation: by opening up research, it would close off routes to publication\u2014the currency of academia\u2014for all but a few. Under such a model, open access risks becoming, in the words of information scientist Ulrich Herb, \u201can instrument that creates exclusivity, exclusion, distinction and prestige.”[64]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Much of the financial dilemma confronting the institutionalization of open access owes to larger changes in the financing of higher education. While the postwar university maintained an awkward relationship with the corporate world, the mania for deregulation in the 1980s accelerated the neoliberalization of higher education.[65]<\/a> As public funding stalled and then slowly collapsed, universities began to see research and grant-funding as profit centers.[66]<\/a> The ongoing adjunctification of teaching labor further accelerated as increasingly bloated administrative regimes imposed new managerial methods designed to recover costs and improve efficiency.[67]<\/a> Lacking public funding but unwilling to pass costs onto practicing historians and other academic humanists, humanities publishers have largely relied upon public and private grants. In 2012, for instance, the University of Minnesota, through the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, launched The Open Textbook Initiative, a catalog of online, open-license textbooks. In 2018, The Graduate Center\u2019s Digital Scholarship Lab at the City University of New York received a nearly one-million-dollar grant from the Mellon Foundation to develop Manifold, an open-source web-based publishing platform.[68]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Advocates of OER have continued to experiment with alternative models of sustainable, open-access publishing. \u201cAccess to the work we produce must be opened up as a site of conversation not just among scholars but also between scholars and the broader culture,\u201d wrote  Kathleen Fitzpatrick in Planned Obsolescence<\/em>, her exploration into the future of technology and academic publishing.[69]<\/sup><\/a> In 2015, Caroline Edwards and Martin Paul Eve launched the Open Library of Humanities (OLH), with grant money from the Mellon Foundation and partnerships with university libraries, to provide a new, sustainable, open-access publishing platform for the humanities.[70]<\/sup><\/a> University libraries, meanwhile, continue to experiment with publishing models. \u201cIf making scholarly research publicly accessible on the Web could go some way toward enlightening the general public about the importance and the skill of scholarly work,\u201d Brown University\u2019s faculty dean, Kevin McLaughlin, said, \u201cthat would be fantastic.\u201d[71]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The gold standard of academic scholarship remains the university press, and, over the past years many have incorporated open publishing into their regular imprints. In 2006, The Orlando Project<\/em> turned to a traditional press, Cambridge, to \u201cpublish\u201d the project. Cambridge\u2019s agreement marked a turning point in academic legitimation of open source publishing. \u201cThey are the name,\u201d a producer of the project said, \u201cthey have standards.\u201d[72]<\/sup><\/a> Cambridge in particular has continued to experiment with open access. Their 2014 publication of The History Manifesto<\/em>, a book-length essay by historians Jo Guldi and David Armitage, marked a new highpoint of academic respectability for open access publication in the history profession.[73]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cambridge is not alone. The University of Virginia Press has long published projects online, if not necessarily with formal open access. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press has published multiple influential books online through both an open review and open licensing. The University of Michigan, from 2011 to 2013, oversaw the open peer review and eventual dual publishing of Writing History in the Digital Age<\/em> at the same time the University of Minnesota similarly published Debates in the Digital Humanities<\/em>. Beginning in 2019, the Public Library of Science began to allow authors to participate in their version of an open review, where readers\u2019 reports, editorial decisions, and author responses are all made publicly available.[74]<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

These developments offered prototypes for how open access platforms can extend traditional notions of \u201cpublication.\u201d And such efforts continue to multiply. The boundaries of \u201cpublication\u201d are expanding. Stanford University Press, for instance, recently received a large Mellon Grant to bring peer review to digital-native projects. With such efforts proliferating across the university press landscape, academic credibility can hardly be considered any longer an obstacle to democratized access. And yet academic credibility is not the only remaining obstacle to the flourishing of a democratized digital humanities. In fact, the very mechanisms that triggered its expansion\u2014grant-funding, institutional backing, easy traffic in earnest rhetoric rooted in \u201cdemocratization\u201d\u2014have raised legitimate alarms. \u201cAccess,\u201d it seems, is not the only barrier to a more democratic humanities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Digitization by itself did not guarantee the broad-based notion of \u201cdemocracy\u201d so ardently touted by early champions of the digital humanities.  Robert Darnton, historian and librarian at Harvard University, examined Google\u2019s massive book digitization project in a 2006 issue of The New York Review of Books<\/em>and argued that,\u201cYes we must digitize. But more important, we must democratize. We must open access to our cultural heritage. How? By rewriting the rules of the game, by subordinating private interests to the public good, and by taking inspiration from the early republic in order to create a Digital Republic of Learning.\u201d[75]<\/a> Such language has done important work, and great strides have been made in expanding access under the banner of democratization. At its worst, the digital humanities can seem an esoteric world, one more concerned with the code that goes into projects than the utility of the projects themselves. New endeavors can seem designed to win grants, but not users.[76]<\/sup><\/a> The digital humanities have expanded rapidly over the intervening decades, and yet, William Thomas lamented in 2012, \u201cWe are in danger of losing that animating spirit, and we need to recover the democratization at the heart of the Digital Humanities movement.\u201d[77]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The collision of technology and the humanities incites hyperbole: utopians dream of technological revolutions in research and a democratized world of free learning; skeptics warn of a predatory neoliberalism and privatized, profit-driven scholarship and pedagogy that privilege shallow instruction from de-skilled educators. As early as 1999, Rosenzweig himself, writing in a review essay for the American Quarterly<\/em>, lamented the \u201cbifurcated tendency toward visions of utopia and dystopia\u201d in discussions surrounding digital humanities.<\/a>[78]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For decades, the disruption-minded, messianic rhetoric of Silicon Valley overlaid digital history with the moral appeal of democratized scholarship and pedagogy. In 2006, Siva Vaidhyanathan encouraged digital humanists to challenge techno-fundamentalism, \u201cthe misguided faith in technology and progress.\u201d[79]<\/a> Critics note that the self-important utopian rhetoric surrounding the digital humanities often mirrors the language and reflects the libertarian social values of Silicon Valley.[80]<\/a> The rhetorical similarities between digital humanities and Silicon Valley are stark. A typical claim made by a commentator in 2010 is indicative: \u201cThe digital humanities should not be about the digital at all. It\u2019s all about innovation and disruption. The digital humanities is really an insurgent humanities.\u201d[81]<\/sup><\/a> It is a necessary criticism that much of the rhetoric justifying academic and educational \u201cdisruptions\u201d can conceal ulterior motives.[82]<\/sup><\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Market logics\u2014corporate restructuring, adjunctification, and relentless financialization\u2014have infected American higher education. While student radicals dreamed of democratizing the production and dissemination of knowledge, policy makers and administrators increasingly embraced corporate models of governance, reimagining the mission of the postwar university and what scholars of higher education have called an \u201cacademic capitalism.\u201d<\/a>[83]<\/a> Since at least the 1970s, policy makers have slashed funding to universities and administrators have not only decimated the ranks of tenure-track faculty, they have incentivized profit-seeking research, consistently raised tuition, and embraced corporate bloat. Surrendering to the imperatives of the market, universities emphasize the production of marketable skills over the inculcation of democratic values or informed citizenship. STEM programs reign, humanities programs decline. This is the academic context in which the digital humanities came of age.[84]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The potential de-skilling of education\u2014manifested most obviously in the shrinking of the ranks of full-time academic faculty\u2014and the relentless chasing of patronage from billionaire-philanthropists and endowment-bureaucracies\u2014while touting \u201cinnovation,\u201d \u201cdisruption,\u201d and \u201cdemocratization\u201d \u2014haunts the Digital Humanities. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Richard Grusin, Patrick Jagoda, and Rita Raley warned in 2016 of the \u201cThe Dark Side of the Digital Humanities,\u201d arguing that the \u201csame neoliberal logic that informs the ongoing destruction of the mainstream humanities has encouraged\u201d the growth of digital humanities as an institution in higher education.[85]<\/sup><\/a> That same summer, three academics writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books <\/em> <\/em>blamed digital humanities for abetting the neoliberalization of the American university. \u201cDespite the aggressive promotion of Digital Humanities as a radical insurgency,\u201d they wrote, \u201cits institutional success has for the most part involved the displacement of politically progressive humanities scholarship and activism in favor of the manufacture of digital tools and archives.\u201d[86]<\/sup><\/a> Singling out the digital humanities turn in English\u2014they did not engage the field of digital history\u2014they characterized digital humanists\u2019 utopian rhetoric as a self-serving veil concealing the move toward computation over interpretation, external funding over institutional support, and general administration-supported corporatism over traditional academic labor. The authors placed much of the impetus for the Digital Humanities on the labor of what they saw as a conservative core of literary scholars who operated at University of Virginia between 1999 and 2002.[87]<\/a> The Trojan Horse of \u201cdisruption\u201d can certainly overshadow the promise of a democratized history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The specter of exploited labor, for instance, can and should haunt open-access projects. In the neoliberal academy, scholars are expected to offer more of their labor without due compensation or recognition. few beyond a small circle of prominently situated scholars receive significant compensation for writing traditional articles, books, or textbooks. Despite a lack of remuneration, as Stevan Harnard pointed out in his groundbreaking 1994 \u201csubversive proposal,\u201d open access is possible because academics\u2014whose salaries are already paid by universities\u2014produce what he calls \u201cesoteric\u201d work: work grounded in an internal economy driven by readership and impact, not profits.[88]<\/sup><\/a> A copyright designed to protect an author\u2019s personal profits hardly makes sense for the bulk of academics who receive no profits to protect. As Martin Paul Eve put it, \u201cwhy should academics retain the economic protections of copyright if they are not dependent upon the system of remuneration that this is supposed to uphold?\u201d[89]<\/sup><\/a> In a digital world in which the marginal cost of reproduction is nil, open access advocates such as John Willinsky and Creative Commons\u2019 Cable Green argue that academics have an ethical obligation as humanists to share our work and our knowledge with the public and with our students.[90]<\/sup><\/a> And, given the gravity of the current cost crisis in higher education, such work seems increasingly imperative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Academic writing is, of course, only one component in a larger publishing ecosystem. While digital platforms may eliminate the cost of physical publication, what about the work of peer review, editing, copy editing, and the other intellectual labor that goes into publishing academic work? Who, for instance, will pay for the labor it took to publish this piece in The American Historical Review<\/em>? This article received a traditional solicited peer review as well as a separate open review in which seventeen separate academics offered feedback in eighty-eight individual comments that ranged from full readers\u2019 reports to discreet points of fact. \u201cSince my job is to summarize the reports and incorporate them into a letter offering some direction for revisions,\u201d the Review\u2019s <\/em>editor, Alex Lichtenstein, wrote in his open response letter to the authors, \u201cI find this far too labor intensive to be a regular editorial practice. I simply would not have the time to manage this with every single article. I suppose that if the AHA could hire multiple editors to do this kind of work on open peer review, it might be possible. In an open access world, I must say, that would take very hefty author processing fees!\u201d[91]<\/a> Journals, of course, require more than authors and editors. Like many other commentators, Lichtenstein recognizes that \u201cfact-checking, copy-editing, and proofreading\u201d are also time-intensive labor practices that require compensation.[92]<\/a> Without wider public investment in the production of knowledge, even a reconfiguration of what qualifies as academic labor under tenure and promotion guidelines\u2014an already tenuous proposition for the masses of contingent faculty\u2014suggests open access may only be able to meet the needs of consumers by exploiting producers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite the proliferation of digital history and positive shifts in professional norms, was William Thomas right to argue in 2012 that \u201cwe are in danger of losing that animating spirit\u201d of democratization?[93]<\/sup><\/a> Certainly grants and conspicuous institutional backing should be for naught if the digital humanities drifted further from its democratic promise. Digital history betrays its core principles if it fails to engage users by privileging professional advancement, grant-winning, and innovation-for-innovation\u2019s-sake over the pursuit of readership, ease of use, public participation, pedagogical utility, and the pursuit of a multi-faceted \u201cdemocratization.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Digitization does not mean \u201cdemocracy.\u201d But in the pursuit of new projects and new grants, for instance, scholars have long been content to dump information online and call it \u201cdemocracy.\u201d[94]<\/a> Instead, as historian Patricia Limerick noted in 1997, \u201cwe are in much greater need of methods and strategies for filtering, sorting, managing, synthesizing\u201d than simply finding new ways to access information that will never really be consumed.[95]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Archivists have recognized this challenge. \u201cThe digital world challenges our notion of preservation,\u201d the Society of American Archivists (SAA) declared in 1997. It claimed that \u201cIn the digital world access is the central distinguishing quality of preservation.\u201d Archivists have digitized untold amounts of archival materials over the past two decades. The work of regular archivists, interns, outsourced labor, and crowd-sourced labor\u2014over 20,000 volunteers participated in The Smithsonian Digital Volunteer program, for instance\u2014have opened up archives to the world. Copyright has limited more recent materials\u2014\u201cThe management of intellectual property is potentially the greatest challenge to the development of digital collections,\u201d according to archival scientist Lorna Hughes\u2014but even innovations such as the \u201cdigital reading room\u201d at the Special Collections and Archives at the University of California, Irvine, offer workarounds.[96]<\/a> Archivists have, meanwhile, emphasized the importance of metadata schemes for achieving interoperability, although a proliferation of competing schemes–Dublin Core, MARC, MODS, METS, EAD, and more\u2014have rendered \u201cthe dream of integrated access to diverse information resources,\u201d as Murtha Baca put it, \u201cstill just that \u2013 a dream.\u201d[97]<\/a> Still, as Limerick argued, \u201caccess\u201d cannot be achieved simply through digitization. It is therefore the work of digital humanists to curate such raw materials and render them into usable forms. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Textbooks stand at the intersection of curation, access, and pedagogy. The lack of sophisticated, professionally curated textbooks, in fact, partly inspired Rosenzweig’s call for open source history. Traditional rather than disruptive, pedagogical rather than research-based, eye-glazing rather than grant-winning, textbooks are nevertheless the most widely used tool in humanities classrooms. Mintz and McNeil recognized this as early as the 1990s with their Digital History <\/em>survey text, but few academics followed them.[98]<\/a> Textbooks should have been ripe targets for the open access movement.[99]<\/sup><\/a> Nowhere else are current costs and potential savings quite so clear and many outside of academia have long recognized the democratic and cost-annihilating potential of open texts. A closer look at textbooks in history and literature is revealing. For decades, scholars have allowed responsibility for textbook creation to fall upon for-profit education companies, unwieldy non-profit bureaucracies, under-resourced lone wolves, and unregulated open wikis. Perhaps Wikipedia, despite Rosenzweig’s plea, poisoned historians\u2019 attitudes toward open texts. A 2014 \u201cTextbooks and Teaching\u201d roundtable in the Journal of American History<\/em> cited only the unreliability of open texts, rather than their promise.[100]<\/a> For years, the construction of an open-licensed, collaborative textbook fell to the educational industrial complex and its network of funder-disrupters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2014, we proposed a new model for history textbooks. After a year-long collaboration, over 350 historians produced the first edition of The American Yawp<\/em>, an open American history textbook project. We launched the project as a radical experiment in mass collaboration and institution-free pedagogy\u2014an experiment that hundreds of thousands of users now benefit from each year.[101]<\/a> But The American <\/em>Yawp<\/em> was only a logical extension of the democratic promise inherent not just in the rise of digital history, but in a moment when technological innovation, institutional resources, professional norms, and shifting scholarly attitudes have converged to prove Rosenzweig right: history can <\/em>be open source. But can it be democratic?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ours is not the only project to explore the possibilities of massive collaboration. According to Roy Rosenzweig\u2019s 2006 plea for open source history in the Journal of American History,<\/em> Wikipedia is democratic in two senses: it is a free, widely accessible resource, and it is a massively participatory project.[102]<\/sup><\/a> Applying the principles of democracy to classrooms increasingly means involving students in the production of knowledge. With the support of a five-year, $50 million digital media and learning initiative, Henry Jenkins explored the impacts of participatory culture, specifically the opportunity for digital technology to enable the popular production rather than simply the consumption of culture. Jenkins and his fellow travelers work to transform education around technological opportunities to develop cultural competencies and encourage student involvement in not just consuming, but also producing and disseminating knowledge. The democratizing tactics of these educators have included student blogging, video-making, podcasting, and even gaming or social networking. According to Jenkins, academics, educators, and policy makers need to \u201cshift the focus of the conversation about the digital divide from questions of technological access to those of opportunities to participate and to develop the cultural competencies and social skills.\u201d[103]<\/a> For some, the expansions in participatory culture promise to shatter nearly all hierarchies and replace them with egalitarian, collaborative relationships.[104]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, even a broad emphasis on participation can elide structural inequalities. Issues of gender, racial, and sexual representation, for instance, dominate humanistic inquiry but continue to plague the practice and production of the digital humanities. Miriam Posner argued in 2016 that we must confront these questions, but \u201cto truly engage in this kind of critical work .\u2026 would require dismantling and rebuilding much of the organizing logic that underlies our work.\u201d[105]<\/a> Similar essays by Tara McPherson\u2014\u201cWhy Are the Digital Humanities So White?\u201d\u2014Bethany Nowviskie\u2014\u201cWhat Do Girls Dig?\u201d\u2014and host of other critics hint at problems that are foundational and cannot be solved through modest organizational statements or more equitable faculty appointments and grant disbursements.[106]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to Sharon Leon, the very act of historicizing digital history has often reinforced inequality. Leon, for instance, argues that women, particularly women of color, have been especially eager to connect digital work to community needs but that the emphasis on published research in digital history has obscured their contributions.[107]<\/a> Critics therefore argue that digital humanists, far from ushering in democratic triumphs, have often only further marginalized already marginalized voices.[108]<\/a> As digital humanists institutionalize themselves further into the landscape of higher education, they must recognize that they are often no longer insurgent underdogs, but, increasingly, the very gatekeepers they have so successfully positioned themselves against.[109]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The digital humanities, of course, do not have a monopoly on democratic yearnings. In fact, some of the most active engagement in democratic discourse comes from outside of the digital humanities. The Democratizing Knowledge Project<\/em>at Syracuse University, for example, draws from an impressively interdisciplinary core faculty and eschews digital practice in favor of analog forms of scholarship and activism. Through an annual summer institute, campus forums, creative pedagogy, and connections beyond the walls of the academy, the project pursues its goal of \u201cconfronting white privilege, hegemonic masculinity, heteronormativity, and colonial heritages.\u201d[110]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Digital history is not the only subdiscipline of history that has struggled to realize democratic commitments in an increasingly digital world.<\/a> Public history, for instance, has long emphasized public engagement and civic participation as core tenets.[111]<\/a> Suzanne Fischer defines the field\u2019s mission as \u201ccracking open history as a democratic project, and doing it transparently, in public.\u201d[112]<\/a> Andrew Hurley likewise argues that \u201cThe attempt to leverage historical knowledge on behalf of social change has absorbed a significant segment of the field since the 1970s,\u201d Over the past decades, public historians have therefore also championed, as Hurley puts it, the \u201cuncensored, open-access realm of cyberspace\u2026 as an exemplary venue for democratic civic engagement.\u201d[113]<\/sup><\/a> But what does a democratic, digital public history look like? Sheila Brennan rightly warns that \u201cprojects and research may be available online, but that status does not inherently make the work digital public humanities or public digital humanities.\u201d[114]<\/a> Digital tools can, in fact, prove decidedly undemocratic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Technological sophistication and community needs to do not always align. Hurley, who created the Virtual City Project, an initiative to create 3d-models of historic landscapes, worried that the innovative technology that would win him funding would lose him his audience: \u201cTechnology that was supposed to democratize knowledge and bring people together was having the opposite effect.\u201d[115]<\/a> Lara Kelland\u2019s Parkland History digital project, built to capture the neighborhood\u2019s importance to Black life in Louisville, similarly struggled to win community engagement. While laboring to incorporate local voices, \u201cour hopes for engaged and sustained dialogue about the neighborhood\u2019s past, present, and future have yet to materialize,\u201d she wrote. Suspecting that \u201cthe digital divide in its many forms has contributed to this silence,\u201d Kelland redoubled her face-to-face work in the community and created new, local, in-person programming.[116]<\/a>  Like Laurenellen McCann, she argues that digital projects must work with <\/em>communities, not for<\/em> them.[117]<\/a> Sharon Leon, for instance, in her presentation of \u201cdigital public history\u201d work, has emphasized the idea of a digital \u201cuser-centered history.\u201d[118]<\/a> These are lessons that digital humanists have had to learn. Only by annihilating the distance between the production and consumption of knowledge, the authors of Digital_Humanities <\/em>argue, are digital humanists \u201cable to revitalize the cultural record in ways that involve citizens in the academic enterprise and bring the academy into the expanded public sphere.\u201d[119]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A digital history that views users as passive consumers overlooks the democratizing possibilities of participatory practices. And if we further define democracy as necessitating challenges to inequalities, then even participatory projects may fail to measure up. Over the past several years, digital humanists have offered examples of participatory projects that do.  The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, the Colored Conventions Project, and the Refusing to Forget Project, for example, all capture a democracy of access, collaboration, and activism. After providing maps and other material on \u201cthe dispossession and resistance by San Francisco Bay area residents,\u201d the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project allowed users to \u201cHelp Stop Evictions\u201d by donating to the \u201cnot-for-profit collective,\u201d reporting illegal vacation rentals, supporting local unions, avoiding calling police on neighbors, and pledging to abstain from renting from anyone who has unscrupulous landlords. Similarly, the Colored Conventions Project, an exploration of nineteenth-century Black organizing, offers educational tools\u2014exhibits and lesson plans\u2014and archival materials to encourage both learning and research. But it also encourages visitors to \u201cMobilize NOW for a Future Where Black Lives Matter\u201d through voter registrations and census participation. The project\u2019s dozens of teaching partners assented to a \u201cmemo of understanding\u201d that includes a promise to \u201ccommit to confronting the under-representation of women\u201d by incorporating the voices of women alongside formal male delegates in teaching assignments to capture those \u201clargely written out of the minutes\u201d of formal conventions. The Refusing to Forget project, a digital collaboration dedicated to raising awareness of the spate of state-sanctioned, anti-Mexican violence in the early-twentieth-century Texas-Mexico borderlands, similarly combines collaborative scholarship, educational tools, and public engagement. In addition to sharing primary documents and lesson plans, the project organizes historical marker campaigns, sponsors museum exhibits, and holds teaching workshops.[120]<\/a> Like the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and the Colored Conventions Project, the project shows that digital work, scholarship, and real-world issues are not so easily disentangled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most immediately, projects like these show that technology cannot be the only defining feature of digital history or of the broader digital humanities. Critical race and gender studies  have offered the most pointed criticisms of the digital humanities and remind practitioners that democratization demands a reckoning with deeper, structural inequalities.[121]<\/sup><\/a> The work of Audre Lorde and others reminds us that broken systems won\u2019t fix themselves.[122]<\/a> Lisa Nakamura argues that race and racism suffuse our digital lives.[123]<\/sup><\/a> Whiteness, critics argue, dominates the institutions and logics of digital space.[124]<\/sup><\/a> Even coding\u2014once a feminine activity\u2014has been thoroughly gendered as masculine.[125]<\/sup><\/a> Scholars such as Safiya Umoja Noble\u2014who urges the digital humanities to \u201cconsider the degree to which our very reliance on digital tools \u2026 exacerbates existing patterns of exploitation and at times even creates new ones\u201d\u2014argue that, as Noble puts it, \u201cthe political, social and economic dimensions of technologies\u201d are all \u201cco-constituted in racialized and gendered ways that involve power and often foster and maintain systematic discrimination and oppression.\u201d[126]<\/sup><\/a> Miriam Posner, for instance, has warned against the fetishization of code among digital humanists, arguing that passive calls encouraging women and persons of color to learn to code fail to confront longstanding structural inequalities and therefore actively perpetuates structural racial and gender inequalities.[127]<\/sup><\/a> And even code, some critics argue, is not valueless. \u201cThere is no such thing as a \u2018merely technical\u2019 design decision,\u201d wrote Julia Flanders. \u201cOur technical systems are meaning systems and ideological systems.\u201d[128]<\/sup><\/a> Fiona Barnett, Zach Blas, micha c\u00e1rdenas, Jacob Gaboury, Jessica Marie Johnson, and Margaret Rhee, drawing on the work of queer theorist Kara Keeling, even created QueerOS to confront what they argue are foundational inequalities embedded in our digital tools.[129]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

History-minded digital humanists have likewise proposed alternative practices. Kim Gallon calls for \u201ca technology of recovery, characterized by efforts to bring forth the full humanity of marginalized peoples through the use of digital platforms and tools.\u201d She specifically champions the \u201cblack digital humanities\u201d\u2014the intellectual space created by the collision of Black studies and the digital humanities\u2014which,  she argues, \u201ctroubles the very core of what we have come to know as the humanities by recovering alternate constructions of humanity that have been historically excluded from that concept.\u201d[130]<\/sup><\/a> Jessica Marie Johnson, a scholar of transatlantic slavery, has criticized digital historians for replicating the very dehumanization they so demonize. \u201cFrom blogs and journals built on fourth-generation hypertext markup language (HTML) guided by cascading style sheets (CSS) to databases using extensible markup language (XML) and standard query language (SQL),\u201d Johnson argues, \u201cscholars using digital tools mark up the bodies and requantify the lives of people of African descent.\u201d Like Gallon, she champions a Black digital practice to counter the \u201cpresumed neutrality of the digital.\u201d Digital historians, such work suggests, must recover not just lost voices but paradigms of imagination occluded by longstanding power inequalities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pedagogically minded digital humanities projects have especially taken these criticisms to heart. William Thomas and Elizabeth Lorang, for instance, advocated \u201can alternative modality of engagement with the digital on our campuses\u2014one built around reciprocity, openness, local community, and particularity.\u201d[131]<\/sup><\/a> Amy E. Earhart of Texas A&M, a large public land-grant university, and Toniesha L. Taylor of Prairie View A&M, a nearby historically black land-grant university, turned these ideas into practice. Their White Violence, Black Resistance Project<\/em> sought not only to \u201cbring to light timely historical documents\u201d but also, employing students from both institutions, to \u201cexpose power differentials in our own institutional settings.\u201d[132]<\/sup><\/a> Such projects remind us that, however well-funded and well-defined it becomes, the digital humanities betrays its founding principles if it remains confined to an esoteric community of coders and tech-utopians. It must be practiced with fundamental ends in mind. It must be designed to be used. It must privilege accessibility. It must seek out readers and reach actual users. And it must draw upon the insights of humanities scholarship to push the boundaries of what democracy means by exposing and confronting the inequalities that suffuse our objects of study as well as our professional structures. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Digital history is certainly capable of refashioning professional paradigms. Its much-touted emphasis on collaboration, for instance, cannot be underestimated. In 2011, AHA president Anthony Grafton urged historians to reject the myth of the solitary scholar. Arguing against Wilhelm von Humboldt\u2019s idealization of \u201cloneliness and freedom\u201d as the hallmarks of academic life, Grafton wrote, \u201cthere is much to be gained by recognizing, and promoting, collaboration \u2026 and, with it, the elements of joy and creative fantasy that can too easily be lost as we go about our traditionally lonely craft.\u201d[133]<\/sup><\/a> If academic historians typically toil under a professional paradigm designed for the isolated scholar, the so-called \u201cdigital turn\u201d and the rise of digital history have generated new collaborative energy that spills across traditional research opportunities: new technologies and emerging paradigms are facilitating academic collaboration. And it need not even be institutionalized. Andrew Torget, reflecting on his early work at the University of Virginia and arguing that \u201cdigital projects by necessity require collaboration,\u201d nevertheless believed collaboration could be flexible and informal. \u201cI see,\u201d he said, \u201ca movement towards collaborative teams built around projects and problems that will last for as long as the project or problem does. You may have a home department, but you will also have collaborative teams that form and dissolve over time depending on what you\u2019re working on.\u201d[134]<\/sup><\/a> But is collaboration enough?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over two decades of work in digital history and digital humanities have opened access to new resources. Universities and grant-giving institutions have provided homes for practitioners. University presses have embraced open scholarship and professional norms are shifting accordingly. In the meantime, digital humanities scholars have built proper platforms for new projects: vast worlds of knowledge are within reach of any average web user. A textbook project can begin with a WordPress installation. Inviting mass collaboration is as easy as adding a CommentPress plug-in. Encouraging students to communicate with a text\u2014and with each other\u2014is as easy as a one-click Hypothes.is integration. A personally curated exhibit is as easy as a visit to a digital humanities librarian and an installation of Omeka. But it takes work, too. As one digital historian wrote during this article\u2019s open review, \u201cturning such accessibility into something meaningful is where the hard work comes in.\u201d[135]<\/a> Democratization doesn\u2019t happen on its own. Democracy isn\u2019t some fortunate byproduct of technological advancement. We may be able to save our students from exploitative textbook companies, for instance, but the pursuit of a truly democratized digital history requires more substantive change than individual academics, and perhaps even administrators, can achieve. History can<\/em> be open source, in other words, but the pursuit of democracy requires throwing off shackles more burdensome than copyright restrictions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The New Left\u2019s radical democratic visions inspired much early work in digital history. Contemporary practitioners\u2014buffeted not only by a popular neoliberal mania for \u201cdisruption\u201d and libertarian notions of techno-futurism, but also by higher education\u2019s decaying public mission and intransigent structural inequalities\u2014still share those dreams. Spanning the rise and maturation of digital history and the digital humanities, invocations of democracy have transcended their original context and could become just another tool for digital humanists to carve out greater and greater academic space for their work and for themselves. But such invocations have allowed practitioners to challenge traditional academic boundaries surrounding the production of distribution of knowledge. \u201cDemocracy\u201d is, and always has been, at root a discourse about power: about agency and access and equality. \u201cDemocratization,\u201d therefore, cannot rely on institutions, philanthropy, or even technology alone, but must emerge consciously alongside critical self-reflection in the conception and execution of the work. And even then, democracy may prove unobtainable. An endless, hopeless, necessary dream.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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[1]<\/a> This article underwent the first open review in the history of the American Historical Review<\/em>. The authors would like to thank Alex Lichtenstein and Lara Putnam for embarking upon this experiment and the many  readers who participated in the open review platform, currently archived at ahropenreview.com.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[2]<\/sup><\/a> Roy Rosenzweig, \u201cCan History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past,\u201d The Journal of American History <\/em>(June 2006), 117-146. 119.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[3]<\/sup><\/a> Ibid., 137, 145<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[4]<\/a> This paper largely restricts itself to processes in the United States. Ideologies surrounding the digital humanities, and particularly the rise of open access, have different contexts outside of the U.S. The United Kingdom, for example, now requires open access publishing for many recipients of state research funding. See Margot Finn, \u201cPlan S and the History Journal Landscape: Royal Historical Society Guidance Paper,\u201d Royal Historical Society<\/em> (October 23, 2019) [https:\/\/royalhistsoc.org\/royal-historical-society-publishes-guidance-paper-on-plan-s-and-history-journals\/<\/a>].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[5]<\/a> See especially Drew VandeCreek, \u201c\u2018Webs of Significance\u2019: The Abraham Lincoln Historical Digitization Project, New Technology, and the Democratization of History,\u201d Digital Humanities Quarterly <\/em>1.1 (2007), http:\/\/www.digitalhumanities.org\/dhq\/vol\/1\/1\/000003\/000003.html<\/a>. These ideas within the digital humanities drew on wider trends in studies on technology and communication. Philip E. Agre argued that digital technologies would enable \u201cthe intellectual lives of academics to be democratized,\u201d thereby opening the \u201cexisting scholarly and library practices [that] reflect the wisdom of centuries.\u201d Yochai Benkler rejoiced in 2006 that \u201ca radical change in the organization of information production\u201d was leading to \u201cbetter democratic participation.\u201d Agre, \u201cSupporting the Intellectual Life of a Democratic Society,\u201d Ethics and Information Technology<\/em>, 3 (2001), 289. Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom<\/em> (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 2.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[6]<\/a> Sharon Leon has traced the contributions of women in the rise of digital history, noting that while women performed much of the labor, men\u2019s names dominated project mastheads. The founding essays on digital history were likewise nearly all written by white men. Gender often divided those who performed the work from those who were given platforms to articulate its significance. Sharon M. Leon, \u201cComplicating a \u2018Great Man\u2019 Narrative of Digital History in the United States,\u201d in Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and the Digital Humanities<\/em>, edited by Elizabeth Losh and Jacqueline Wernimont. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[7]<\/a> William G. Thomas, \u201cTrends in Digital Humanities: Remarks at the CIC Digital Humanities Summit,\u201d Keynote Address, CIC Digital Humanities Summit, April 19, 2012 [http:\/\/railroads.unl.edu\/blog\/?p=794<\/a>]. Cameron Blevins similarly argues that digital history began with \u201can overriding ideology: to democratize access to the past.\u201d Blevins, \u201cDigital History\u2019s Perpetual Future Tense.\u201d Writing in 1999, Ed Ayers trumpeted the historical profession\u2019s recovery of forgotten voices\u2014of women, people of color, the poor\u2014but said, \u201cThe great democratization of history over the past few decades has not been accompanied by a democratization of audience.\u201d The digital humanities, it was argued, would do just that. Edward L. Ayers, \u201cThe Pasts and Futures of Digital History,\u201d Virginia Center for Digital History, 1999 [http:\/\/www.vcdh.virginia.edu\/PastsFutures.html<\/a>].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[8]<\/a> Stephen Robertson, \u201cThe Future of RRCHNM,\u201d November 17, 2014 [http:\/\/.chnm.gmu.edu\/about-rrchnm\/the-future-of-rrchnm\/<\/a>].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[9]<\/sup><\/a> Draxler, Bridget, et al. \u201cDemocratizing Knowledge.\u201d Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory<\/em>. <\/em>September 21,2009 [http:\/\/hastac.org\/forums\/hastac-scholars-discussions\/democratizing-knowledge-digital-humanities<\/a>].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[10]<\/a> Rosenzweig, \u201cLive Free Or Die?: Death, Life, Survival, And Sobriety On The Information Superhighway,\u201d American Quarterly<\/em>51 (March 1999), 172.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[11]<\/a> Safiya Umoja Noble, \u201cA Future for Intersectional Black Feminist Technology Studies.\u201d Scholar & Feminist Online<\/em> 13, no. 3\u201314, no. 1 (2016): 1\u20138; Kim Gallon, \u201cMaking a Case for the Black Digital Humanities,\u201d in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, <\/em>edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein (Minneapolis: University Minnesota Press, 2016) [https:\/\/dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu\/projects\/debates-in-the-digital-humanities-2016<\/a>]; Jessica Marie Johnson and Mark Anthony Neal, \u201cIntroduction: Wild Seed in the Machine,\u201d The Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research<\/em> Vol 47, No 3 (2017). See also \u201cSlavery in the Machine,\u201d a special issue of sx archipelagos<\/em>, 3 (July 2019), http:\/\/archipelagosjournal.org\/issue03.html<\/a>, especially Johnson, \u201cWe Are Deathless (Slavery in the Machine)\u201d and \u201cXroads Praxis: Black Diasporic Technologies for Remaking the New World.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

[12]<\/a> In Brown\u2019s estimation, neoliberalism has left democracy \u201cgaunt, ghostly, its future increasingly hedged and improbable.\u201d Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution<\/em> (MIT 2015), 9. See also Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West<\/em> (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019). Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics<\/em> (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009); Henry A. Giroux, Terror of Neoliberalism: Authoritarianism and the Eclipse of Democracy<\/em> (Routledge: 2004); Mark Olssen, Liberalism, Neoliberalism, Social Democracy Thin Communitarian Perspectives on Political Philosophy and Education<\/em> (Routledge: 2009); and Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Democracy: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy<\/em> (New York: Beacon Press, 2004).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[13]<\/a> In his 2016 exploration of \u201cthe struggle for self-rule\u201d in the Atlantic world, Toward Democracy<\/em>, Historian James T. Kloppenberg argued that democracy has been less a unified set of institutions and more an unattainable goal after which we must forever strive. James T. Kloppenberg, Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought <\/em>(New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). As John Dewey wrote in 1926, \u201cDemocracy has to be born anew every generation.\u201d John Dewey, \u201cThe Need of an Industrial Education in an Industrial Democracy,\u201d Manual Training and Vocational Education<\/em>(February 1916), 410. From Alexis de Tocqueville to Jane Addams to Alain Locke, positive definitions of \u201cdemocracy\u201d have fueled both investigations and interventions into American life. For a sampling of additional recent work detailing historical contests over \u201cdemocracy,\u201d see, for instance, Manisha Sinha and Penny Von Eschen, editors, Contested Democracy: Freedom, Race, and Power in American History<\/em> (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); Caleb McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform<\/em> (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013); and Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln<\/em>(New York: Norton, 2005).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[14]<\/a> Alexis Lothian and Amanda Phillips, \u201cCan Digital Humanities Mean Transformative Critique?\u201d Journal of e-Media Studies<\/em> 3 (2013), 4. DOI:10.1349\/PS1.1938-6060.A.425.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[15]<\/a> Stephen Robertson, former director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, credits the rise of digital history to \u201cradical historians committed to democratizing the creation of the past and to collaborating with teachers.\u201d It is this democratic commitment, he argues, that distinguishes digital history from digital humanities.  Stephen Robertson, \u201cThe Differences between Digital Humanities and Digital History,\u201d Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, <\/em>edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein (Minneapolis: University Minnesota Press, 2016) [https:\/\/dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu\/projects\/debates-in-the-digital-humanities-2016<\/a>]. See also Tom Scheinfeldt, \u201cThe Dividends of Difference: Recognizing Digital Humanities\u2019 Diverse Family Trees,\u201d Found History<\/em>, April 7, 2014 [https:\/\/foundhistory.org\/2014\/04\/the-dividends-of-difference-recognizing-digital-humanities-diverse-family-trees\/<\/a>]; and Susan Hockey, \u201cThe History of Humanities Computing,\u201d in Susan Scheibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth eds. Companion to Digital Humanities<\/em> (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[16]<\/a> For a humorous representation of the scores of definitions, see Jason Heppler\u2019s \u201cWhat Is Digital Humanities?\u201d (whatisdigitalhumanities.com), a project that aggregated 817 descriptions of digital humanities produced between 2009 and 2014.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[17]<\/a> Kathleen Fitzpatrick, \u201cThe Humanities, Done Digitally,\u201d Debates in the Digital Humanities<\/em> (Minnesota, 2012). For an even broader definition, see Jessica Marie Johnson\u2019s scheme of four digital humanities: “digital humanities as articulated by global academic institutions,” “humanistic inquiry using digital tools,” “digital media as material and messaging,” and “digital practice as using the digital to live in the world.” Jessica Marie Johnson, “4DH + 1 Black Code \/ Black Femme Forms of Knowledge and Practice,” American Quarterly<\/em> 70:3 (September 2018), 666.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[18]<\/a> Budapest Open Access Initiative, \u201cBudapest Open Access Initiative Statement\u201d [https:\/\/www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org\/read<\/a>].; Peter Suber et al, \u201cBethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing\u201d [http:\/\/dash.harvard.edu\/handle\/1\/4725199<\/a>]; David Wiley, \u201cDefining the \u2018Open\u2019 in Open Content and Open Educational Resources\u201d [http:\/\/opencontent.org\/definition\/].; Peter Suber, \u201cA Field Guide to Misunderstandings About Open Access\u201d SPARC Open Access Newsletter, April 2, 2009  [http:\/\/legacy.earlham.edu\/~peters\/fos\/newsletter\/04-02-09.htm<\/a>]; The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, \u201cOpen Education Defined\u201d [https:\/\/hewlett.org\/strategy\/open-education\/<\/a>].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[19]<\/a> See James Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago<\/em> (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987); Maurice Isserman, If I Had a Hammer…: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left<\/em> (New York: Basic Books, 1987); Irwin Unger, The Movement: A History of the American New Left, 1959-1972<\/em> (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1974); Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left<\/em> (New York: Albert Knopf, 1979); Wini Breines, Community Organization in the New Left, 1962\u20131968<\/em><\/a>: The Great Refusal <\/em>(New York: Praeger, 1982); and Rebecca E. Klatch, A Generation Divided: The New Left, the New Right, and the 1960s<\/em> (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[20]<\/a> Bonnie Goodman, \u201cIn Memory of Roy Rosenzweig,\u201d History News Network<\/em>(January 8, 2008), [http:\/\/historynewsnetwork.org\/article\/43739<\/a>].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[21]<\/a> See, for instance, Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution<\/em> (New York: Doubleday, 1984).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[22]<\/a> Stallman would champion \u201cfree software\u201d over \u201copen source\u201d software. Richard Stallman, \u201cWhy Open Source misses the point of Free Software,\u201d GNU, [http:\/\/www.gnu.org\/philosophy\/open-source-misses-the-point.html].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[23]<\/a> Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira note, for instance, that an early draft of Eisenhower\u2019s \u201cmilitary-industrial-complex\u201d used instead \u201cmilitary-industrial-academic complex.\u201d  <\/sup>Chatterjee and Maira, editors, The Imperial University Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent<\/em> (Minnesota: 2014), 17. See also Wendy Brown, \u201dThe End of Educated Democracy\u201d Representations <\/em>116; Colleen Lye and James Vernon, \u201cThe Humanities and the Crisis of The Public University,\u201d Townsend Center Newsletter <\/em> (Fall 2011), 19-41. For how neoliberalism poisons pedagogy, see especially Enrique Dussel, Pedagogics of Liberation: A Latin American Philosophy of Education<\/em>, trans. David I. Backer and Cecilia Diego (Punctum Books, 2019); Paulo Freire, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed<\/em>, trans. Donald Macedo (New York: Continuum, 2005); and Linda Mart\u00edn Alcoff, \u201cEducating with a (De)Colonial Consciousness,\u201d L\u00e1piz<\/em> 1 (2014), 78\u201392.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[24]<\/a> Susan Hockey most prominently identifies Busa\u2019s project as the first digital humanities project. Susan Hockey, \u201cThe History of Humanities Computing,\u201d in Susan Scheibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth eds. Companion to Digital Humanities<\/em> (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). Busa\u2019s project, notably, obscured the labor of the women who turned the project into reality and drew rebukes from humanists who feared the dehumanization of quantitative-based scholarship. Melissa Terras and Julianne Nyhan, \u201cFather Busa\u2019s Female Punch Card Operatives,\u201d in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, <\/em>edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein (Minneapolis: University Minnesota Press, 2016) [https:\/\/dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu\/projects\/debates-in-the-digital-humanities-2016]; Meredith Hindley, \u201cThe Rise of the Machines,\u201d Humanities<\/em>. 34, (2013).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[25]<\/a> According to Wendy Brown, the twentieth century was, \u201cfor all its ghastly episodes\u201d and \u201cthe cruel exclusions of Western humanism,\u201d still \u201csomething of a golden age for public higher education.\u201d Brown, Undoing the Demos<\/em>, 180. Neem likewise argues that Americans have long expected higher education to serve society, but the needs of society have increasingly become indistinguishable from the needs of the market. Neem shows how, for instance, the evolution of the Common Core demonstrates that \u201cthe importance of knowledge for personal growth or effective citizenship is relegated to the sidelines.\u201d Johann, N. Neem, What\u2019s the Point of College? Seeking Purpose in an Age of Reform<\/em> (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), 64-65.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[26]<\/a> Public funding for universities has plummeted since the 1970s. From 1976-2001, appropriations, as a percent of state revenue, for higher education fell nationally from 6.7% to 4.5%. Thomas J. Kane and Peter R. Orszag, \u201cUse of State General Revenue for Higher Education Declines,\u201d Tax Policy Center and the Urban Institute (2002) [https:\/\/www.urban.org\/sites\/default\/files\/publication\/59871\/1000462-Use-of-State-General-Revenue-for-Higher-Education-Declines.PDF<\/a>]; Christopher Newfield, Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-year Assault on the Middle Class<\/em> (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 1; and Colleen Lye, Newfield and James Vernon, \u201cHumanists and the Public University,\u201d Representations<\/em> 116, The Humanities and the Crisis of The Public University<\/em> (Fall 2011), 3. During those same years, the number of faculty grew by 75.8%; the number of nonfaculty professionals grew by 239.2%. Jack H. Schuster and Martin J. Finkelstein, The American Faculty: The Restructuring of Academic Work and Careers<\/em> (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 269. On the growth of corporate accounting practices in higher education, see Newfield, Unmaking the Public University<\/em>, 127-129. For a critical assessment of new administrative methods, see the work of Charles Schwartz, a retired physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, who made a retirement hobby out of fact-checking the university\u2019s financing. Charles Schwartz, \u201cFinancing the University\u201d [https:\/\/www.ocf.berkeley.edu\/~schwrtz\/]. Government deregulation incentivized many of these trends. The 1980 Bayh-Doyle Act, for instance, allowed universities to profit from research (even publicly funded research), reorienting academic priorities around their commercial potential. According to former president of Harvard, Derek Bok, researchers using corporate funds are subsequently twice as likely \u201cto be influenced by commercial considerations in choosing their research topics.\u201d Derek Bok, Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education<\/em> (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 61. For more on the neoliberalization of the university, see also Ellen Strecker, The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of the American University<\/em> (New York: The New Press, 2010); and Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters<\/em> (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[27]<\/a> Steve Jobs would later describe the catalog as \u201cone of the bibles of my generation.\u201d See Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism<\/em> (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006) and Andrew G. Kirk, Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism<\/em> (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2007).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[28]<\/a> In a 2011 exploration of the new career trajectories created by the digital humanities, for instance, Tom Scheinfeldt, the managing director of the George Mason Center for History and New Media, reported that 90% of the Center\u2019s budget was supported by grants and,  \u201cWith a very few exceptions, staff positions at CHNM are contingent on continued grant funding.\u201d Tom Scheinfeldt, \u201cCenter for History and New Media, George Mason University,\u201d in Off the Tracks: Laying New Lines for Digital Humanities Scholars<\/em> (2011) [http:\/\/mcpress.media-commons.org\/offthetracks\/part-two-position-descriptions-at-established-and-emerging-digital-humanities-centers\/center-for-history-and-new-media-george-mason-university\/<\/a>]. The University of Virginia\u2019s Scholars\u2019 Lab was, administratively, under the University of Virginia Library and staffed by \u201clibrary faculty\u201d and \u201cstaff.\u201d Bethany Nowviskie, \u201cThe Scholars\u2019 Lab (Digital Research & Scholarship Department), University of Virginia Library\u201d in Off the Tracks. <\/em>On the overall prominence of staff in DH, see especially, Leon, \u201cComplicating a Great Man Narrative.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[29]<\/a> Randy Bass et al, Crossroads Project<\/em>[http:\/\/crossroads.georgetown.edu\/]. For more on Crossroads<\/em> and its innovations see John Carlos Rowe, ed. A Concise Companion to American Studies<\/em> (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2010), 335-336; Matthias Oppermann, American Studies in Dialogue: Radical Reconstructions between Curriculum and Cultural Critique<\/em> (Frankfurt\/New York: Campus Verlag, 2010), 167-168; and Ann Kovalchick and Kara Dawson, eds. Education and Technology: An Encyclopedia<\/em> (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2004),182;<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[30]<\/a> C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, \u201cTextual Criticism and the Text Encoding Initiative,\u201d (paper presented at the annual meeting for the Modern Language Association, San Diego, California, December 1994). Available online at: http:\/\/www.tei-c.org\/Vault\/XX\/mla94.html. See also Susan Hockey, \u201cThe History of Humanities Computing,\u201d in Susan Scheibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth eds. Companion to Digital Humanities<\/em> (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[31]<\/a> Ed Folsom and Kenneth Price, The Walt Whitman Archive<\/em>[http:\/\/whitmanarchive.org\/].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[32]<\/a> Morris Eaves et al, The William Blake Archive<\/em>[http:\/\/www.blakearchive.org\/staticpage\/archiveataglance].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[33]<\/a> Despite significant support from various foundations, the project requires subscriptions that continue to hamper access. Only one of the two authors of this piece, for instance, has access through their university to the excellent database.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[34]<\/sup><\/a> Michael O\u2019Malley and Roy Rosenzweig, \u201cBrave New World or Blind Alley? American History on the World Wide Web,\u201d Journal of American History<\/em>84 (June 1997), 135-155, 146.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[35]<\/sup><\/a> Gary J. Kornblith, \u201cVenturing into the Civil War, Virtually: A Review,\u201d The Journal of American History<\/em> 88 (June, 2001), 145-151, 146.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[36]<\/sup><\/a> See, for instance, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, \u201cAbout,\u201d n.d. (http:\/\/chnm.gmu.edu\/about\/).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[37]<\/sup><\/a> Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, \u201cOur Story,\u201d n.d. (http:\/\/rrchnm.org\/our-story\/history\/).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[38]<\/sup><\/a> Virginia Center for Digital History, \u201cAbout,\u201d n.d., (http:\/\/www.vcdh.virginia.edu\/index.php?page=About).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[39]<\/a> Digital History: Using New Technologies to Enhance Teaching and Research <\/em>[digitalhistory.uh.edu].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[40]<\/a> History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web <\/em>[http:\/\/historymatters.gmu.edu\/<\/a>].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[41]<\/sup><\/a> Lisa Spiro, \u201cThis Is Why We Fight: Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities,\u201d in Matthew K. Gold, editor, Debates in the Digital Humanities<\/em> (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[42]<\/sup><\/a> George Veletsianos and Royce Kimmons, \u201cAssumptions and Challenges of Open Scholarship,\u201d International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning<\/em> 13 (2012), 166\u201389, 167, cited by Martin Paul Eve, Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies, and the Future<\/em>(New York: Cambridge, 2014), 3.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[43]<\/a> Spiro, \u201cWhy We Fight.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[44]<\/a> Andrea Hunter, \u201cThe Digital Humanities and Democracy,\u201d Canadian Journal of Communication<\/em> 40 (2015), 407-423.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[45]<\/a> The Orlando Project <\/em>[http:\/\/orlando.cambridge.org\/<\/a>]; Omeka <\/em>[https:\/\/omeka.org\/<\/a>].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[46]<\/sup><\/a>  Anne Burdick et al, Digital_Humanities<\/em> (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012), 82 [https:\/\/mitpress.mit.edu\/books\/digitalhumanities].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[47]<\/sup><\/a> Martin Paul Eve, Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies, and the Future<\/em>(New York: Cambridge, 2014), 16.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[48]<\/a>Creative Commons licenses built on the earlier work of David Wiley and his Open Publication License. In 2002, Wiley dissolved his license and formally joined Creative Commons. David Wiley, “OpenContent is officially closed. And that’s just fine.,” Open Content<\/em> (June 30, 2003). Early critics however, accused Creative Commons of failing \u201cto confront and look beyond the logic and power asymmetries of the present.\u201d See David Berry and Giles Moss, “On the \u201cCreative Commons\u201d: a critique of the commons without commonalty,” Free Software Magazine<\/em>, Issue 5 (July 15, 2005). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

[49]<\/a> UNESCO, \u201cForum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries,\u201d July 1-3, 2002, http:\/\/unesdoc.unesco.org\/images\/0012\/001285\/128515e.pdf<\/a>. See also Sally M. Johnstone, “Open Educational Resources Serve the World”<\/a>. Educause Quarterly<\/em> 28: 3(2005), 15-18; and T.J. Bliss and M Smith, \u201cA Brief History of Open Educational Resources\u201d in: Jhangiani, R S and Biswas-Diener, R., eds., Open: The Philosophy and Practices that are Revolutionizing Education and Science<\/em>. (London: Ubiquity Press, 2017). 9\u201327.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[50]<\/a> For a timeline of the Public Library of Science, see https:\/\/www.plos.org\/history<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[51]<\/sup><\/a> \u201cThe term \u2018open access,\u2019\u201d according to Martin Paul Eve, refers to the removal of price and permission barriers to scholarly research.\u201d Martin Paul Eve, Open Access<\/em>, 3.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[52]<\/sup><\/a> Jo Guldi and David Armitage, \u201cWhy Open Access Publication for The History Manifesto?\u201d Cambridge Open<\/em> (2014) [http:\/\/historymanifesto.cambridge.org\/blog\/2014\/09\/why-open-access-publication-history-manifesto#sthash.FYCNEiH9.dpuf]. \u201cThis is a new era for all of us,\u201d said Harriette Hemmasi, university librarian at Brown University, upon receiving funds to explore digital publishing. Carl Straumsheim, \u201cPiecing Together Publishing,\u201d Inside Higher Ed<\/em> (February 25, 2015) [https:\/\/www.insidehighered.com\/news\/2015\/02\/25\/researchers-university-press-directors-emboldened-mellon-foundation-interest].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[53]<\/sup><\/a> Martin Weller, The Battle for Open: How Openness Won and Why It Doesn\u2019t Feel Like Victory<\/em> (London: Ubiquity Press, 2014), 2.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[54]<\/sup><\/a> Eve, Open Access<\/em>, 7<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[55]<\/a> Sharon Leon, surveying NEH-grant-winning digital history projects, found that \u201cthe Divisions of Preservation and Access, Public Programs, and Education Programs\u201d funded the majority of projects. Leon, \u201cComplicating a Great Man Narrative.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[56]<\/sup><\/a> Straumsheim, \u201cPiecing Together,\u201d n.p.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[57]<\/sup><\/a> Amanda Patrick, \u201cThe Goizueta Foundation supports creation of a Digital Humanities Laboratory at Yale,\u201d Yale News<\/em>(December 11, 2014) [http:\/\/news.yale.edu\/2014\/12\/11\/goizueta-foundation-supports-creation-digital-humanities-laboratory-yale].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[58]<\/sup><\/a> Daniel J. Cohen, \u201cFrom Babel to Knowledge: Data Mining Large Digital Collections,\u201d D-Lib Magazine<\/em> 12 (March 2006) [http:\/\/www.dlib.org\/dlib\/march06\/cohen\/03cohen.html].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[59]<\/sup><\/a> Eve, Open Access<\/em>, 3; \u201cWhen presented with the concept of OER, most faculty say that they are willing to give it a try,\u201d concluded one report. I. Elaine Allen and Jef Seaman, Opening the Curriculum: Open Educational Resources in U.S. Higher Education<\/em>(Wellesley, MA: Babson Survey Research Group, 2014), 2.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[60]<\/sup><\/a> Eve, Open Access<\/em>, 4<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[61]<\/sup><\/a> Digitalculturebooks, \u201cAbout Us,\u201d n.d. [http:\/\/www.digitalculture.org\/about\/].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[62]<\/a> On the question of funding and sustainability of open access publishing, see Martin Paul Eve, Paula Clemente Vega, and Caroline Vega, \u201cLessons from the Open Library of the Humanities,\u201d Liber Quarterly<\/em> 30 (2020), 1\u201318.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[63]<\/sup><\/a> Carl Straumsheim, \u201c\u2018Paying It Forward\u2019 Publishing,\u201d Inside Higher Ed<\/em> (February 10, 2015) [https:\/\/www.insidehighered.com\/news\/2015\/02\/10\/u-california-press-builds-open-access-publishing-model-around-paying-it-forward].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[64]<\/a> Ulrich Herb, “Open Access and Symbolic Gift Giving,” in Open Divide: Critical Studies on Open Access<\/em>, edited by Joachim Sch\u00f6pfel and Ulrich Herb, 69\u201381 (Sacramento, CA: Library Juice Press. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.5281\/zenodo.1206377<\/a>. See also Samuel Moore, \u201cCommon Struggles: Policy-Based vs. Scholar-Led Approaches to Open Access in the Humanities\u201d (unpublished Doctoral Thesis, King\u2019s College London, 2019) [https:\/\/hcommons.org\/deposits\/item\/hc:24135\/<\/a>] and Ryan Burns, “New Frontiers of Philanthro\u2010Capitalism: Digital Technologies and Humanitarianism,” Antipode<\/em> 51 (2019), 1101-1122.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[65]<\/a> The 1980 Bayh-Doyle Act, for instance, allowed universities to profit from even publicly funded research, redirecting research toward commercial potential.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[66]<\/a> In the late 1990s the University of Chicago redesigned its core curriculum based on the advice of management consultants. David L. Kirp, Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line <\/em>(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 33-51. According to the former president of Harvard Derek Bok, researchers using corporate funds are twice as likely \u201cto be influenced by commercial considerations in choosing their research topics.\u201d Derek Bok, Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education <\/em>(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 61. BB&T bank has funded grants at over 60 colleges requiring courses to assign Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged<\/em>. S. Douglas Beets, “BB&T, Atlas Shrugged, and the Ethics of Corporation Influence on College Curricula,” 13 (2015), 311-344. See also Brown, Undoing the Demos<\/em>, 270-271. For an example of corporate dollars creating an academic initiative designed to meet corporate needs, see the relationship between J.P. Morgan Chase and the Lerner School of Business at the University of Delaware. [https:\/\/www.udel.edu\/udaily\/2019\/december\/jpmorgan-chase-lerner-certificate-data-analytics\/<\/a>].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[67]<\/a> Between 1976 and 2001, the number of faculty grew by 75.8% compared to 239.2% growth for nonfaculty professionals. Jack H. Schuster and Martin J. Finkelstein, The American Faculty: The Restructuring of Academic Work and Careers <\/em>(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 269. On new accounting practices see Newfield, Unmaking the Public University<\/em>, 127-129; and Neil Fligstein, The Transformation of Corporate Control<\/em> (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). For a critical assessment of new administrative methods, see the work of Charles Schwartz, a retired physicist at UC Berkeley, who made a retirement hobby out of fact-checking the UC administration. [https:\/\/www.ocf.berkeley.edu\/~schwrtz\/<\/a>] See also Ellen Strecker, The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of the American University <\/em>(New York: The New Press, 2010); and Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters <\/em>(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[68]<\/a> For more on Manifold see https:\/\/manifoldapp.org\/<\/a>. For examples of projects built through the platform see https:\/\/cuny.manifoldapp.org\/projects\/all<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[69]<\/sup><\/a> Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy<\/em> (New York: NYU Press, 2011), 174.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[70]<\/sup><\/a> See, for instance, Open Library of Humanities, \u201cAbout,\u201d n.d., [https:\/\/www.openlibhums.org\/site\/about\/].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[71]<\/sup><\/a> Straumsheim, \u201cPiecing Together,\u201d n.p.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[72]<\/sup><\/a> Hunter, \u201cDigital Humanities and Democracy,\u201d 418.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[73]<\/a> Jo Guldi and David Armitage, The History Manifesto<\/em>(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[74]<\/a> PLOS refers to their process as a transparent Peer Review History. For more see https:\/\/www.plos.org\/faq#loc-Peer-review-history<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[75]<\/a> Robert Darnton, \u201cGoogle and the Future of Books,\u201d The New York Review of Books<\/em>, (February 12, 2009).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[76]<\/sup><\/a> William Pannapacker,\u201cStop Calling It \u2018Digital Humanities,\u2019\u201d The Chronicle of Higher Education<\/em>(February 18, 2013; http:\/\/chronicle.com\/article\/Stop-Calling-It-Digital\/137325\/).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[77]<\/sup><\/a> Thomas, \u201cTrends,\u201d n.p.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[78]<\/a> Roy Rosenzweig, \u201cLive Free Or Die.\u201d 161.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[79]<\/a> Siva Vaidhyanathan, \u201cIntroduction: Rewiring the \u2018Nation\u2019: The Place of Technology in American Studies,\u201d American Quarterly<\/em>58 (September 2006), 557.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[80]<\/a> Safiya Noble identifies digital utopianism as a neoliberal ideology and credits critical theorists with complicating triumphalist DH narratives. Safiya Umoja Noble, \u201cA Future for Intersectional Black Feminist Technology Studies.\u201d Scholar & Feminist Online<\/em> 13, no. 3\u201314, no. 1 (2016): 1\u20138. Brian Greenspan, however, argues that utopian ideas are necessary for radical ends. Brian Greenspan, \u201cAre Digital Humanists Utopian?\u201d in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, <\/em>edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein (Minneapolis: University Minnesota Press, 2016) [https:\/\/dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu\/projects\/debates-in-the-digital-humanities-2016]. See also Ruth Levitas, \u201cFor Utopia: The (Limits of the) Utopian Function in Late Capitalist Society,\u201d Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy<\/em> 3 (2000): 25\u201343; Louis Marin, Utopics: The Semiological Play of Textual Spaces<\/em> (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanities Press International, 1984); and Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[81]<\/sup><\/a> Mark Sample, \u201cI\u2019m Mark, and Welcome to the Circus,\u201d HASTAC Blog, September 10, 2010 [http:\/\/hastac.org\/blogs\/cforster\/im-chris-where-am-i-wrong].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[82]<\/sup><\/a> See, for instance, Pannapacker,\u201c\u2018Digital Humanities.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[83]<\/a> Gary Rhoades and Sheila Slaughter, \u201cAcademic Capitalism, Managed Professionals, and Supply-Side Higher Education,\u201d Social Text<\/em> 51, Academic Labor (Summer, 1997), 9-38; Sheila Slaughter and Larry L. Leslie, Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University<\/em> (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades, Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State, and Higher Education<\/em> (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); and Robert Nisbet, The Degradation of the Academic Dogma: The University in America, 1945-1970 <\/em>(New York: Basic Books, 1971).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[84]<\/a> Strecker, The Lost Soul of Higher Education;<\/em> Neem, What\u2019s the Point of College?<\/em>;Newfield, Unmaking the Public University; <\/em>Larry G. Gerber, The Rise and Decline of Faculty Governance: Professionalization and the Modern American University <\/em>(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014); Gaye Tuchman, Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University<\/em> (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Frank Donoghue, The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities <\/em>(New York: Fordham University Press, 2018); and Herb Childress, The Adjunct Underclass: How America\u2019s Colleges Betrayed Their Faculty, Their Students, and Their Mission<\/em> (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[85]<\/sup><\/a> Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Richard Grusin, Patrick Jagoda, and Rita Raley, \u201cThe Dark Side of the Digital Humanities,\u201d in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, <\/em>edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein (Minneapolis: University Minnesota Press, 2016) [https:\/\/dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu\/projects\/debates-in-the-digital-humanities-2016].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[86]<\/sup><\/a> Daniel Allington et al, \u201cNeoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities,\u201d The L.A. Review of Books<\/em>(May 1, 2016) [https:\/\/lareviewofbooks.org\/article\/neoliberal-tools-archives-political-history-digital-humanities\/]. For one of many rejoinders, see Juliana Spahr, Richard So, and Andrew Piper, “Beyond Resistance: Towards a Future History of Digital Humanities,” The L.A. Review of Books<\/em>(May 11, 2016) [https:\/\/lareviewofbooks.org\/article\/beyond-resistance-towards-future-history-digital-humanities\/].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[87]<\/a> We could here also address the MOOC frenzy, but that bubble has begun to pop and the passion has calmed, whether or not the pernicious logic behind its \u201cdisruption\u201d-minded indictment of education remains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[88]<\/sup><\/a> Stevan Harnad, \u201cOverture: A Subversive Proposal,\u201d in Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads: A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing<\/em>, ed. Shumelda Okerson and James J. O\u2019Donnell (Washington, D.C.: Association of Research Libraries, 1995), 11\u201312. The adjunctification of academic labor admittedly complicates presuppositions of gainful compensation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[89]<\/sup><\/a> Martin Paul Eve, Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies, and the Future<\/em>(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 18; see also Peter Suber, Open Access<\/em>(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012), 9-15.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[90]<\/sup><\/a> John Willinsky, The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship<\/em> (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009). As Cable Green, Creative Commons\u2019 Director of Global Learning, put it, \u201cWhen the marginal cost of sharing is $0, educators have an ethical obligation to share.\u201d Cable Green, \u201cOpen Education: The Moral, Business & Policy Case for OER,\u201d Keynote Address, Affordable Learning Georgia Conference (December 11, 2014) [http:\/\/www.affordablelearninggeorgia.org\/documents\/Cable_EveningPlenaryKeynote.pdf].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[91]<\/a> Alex J. Lichtenstein, \u201cEditor\u2019s Comments,\u201d AHR Open Review<\/em>, https:\/\/ahropenreview.com\/HistoryCanBeOpenSource\/editors-comments\/<\/a>. See also Karin Wulf, \u201cGuest Post: Karin Wulf on Open Access and Historical Scholarship,” The Scholarly Kitchen<\/em> (March 25, 2015) and Eric Slauter and Karin Wulf’s 2014 working paper, “Open Access for the Humanities: A View from the William and Mary Quarterly<\/em>” [https:\/\/oieahc.wm.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/Slauter_Wulf_OA_MCEAS.pdf<\/a>].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[92]<\/a> Alex J. Lichtenstein, \u201cEditor\u2019s Decision,\u201d AHR Open Review<\/em>, https:\/\/ahropenreview.com\/HistoryCanBeOpenSource\/editors-decision\/<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[93]<\/sup><\/a> Thomas, \u201cTrends,\u201d n.p.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[94]<\/a> Online access, of course, does not even necessarily guarantee greater access. See David Parry, \u201cBe Online or Be Irrelevant,\u201d AcademHack<\/em>, January 11, 2010 [http:\/\/academhack.outsidethetext.com\/home\/2010\/be-online-or-be-irrelevant\/<\/a>].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[95]<\/a> Patricia Nelson Limerick, \u201cInsiders and Outsiders: The Borders of the USA and the Limits of the ASA: Presidential Address to the American Studies Association,\u201d American Quarterly<\/em> 49.3 (1997) 449-469, 453.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[96]<\/a> Lorna M. Hughes, Digitizing Collections: Strategic Issues for the Information Manager<\/em> (London: Facet Publishing, 2004), 286; Jean Dryden, “The Role of Copyright in Selection for Digitization,” The American Archivist<\/em> 77 (Spring\/Summer 2014), 64-95.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[97]<\/a> Murtha Baca, \u201cPractical Issues in Applying Metadata Schemas and Controlled Vocabularies to Cultural Heritage Information,\u201d Cataloging & Classification Quarterly<\/em> 36 (October 2003), 47-55. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

[98]<\/a> Mintz and McNeil, Digital History<\/em>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

[99]<\/sup><\/a> Weller, Battle<\/em>, 76. For evidence that OER improves learning outcomes, see Lane Fischer, John Hilton III, T. Jared Robinson, and David A. Wiley, “A multi-institutional study of the impact of open textbook adoption on the learning outcomes of post-secondary students,” Journal of Computing in Higher Education<\/em> Vol 27 No 3 (December 2015), 159-172.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[100]<\/a> Scott E. Casper ed., “Textbooks Today and Tomorrow: A Conversation about History, Pedagogy, and Economic,” Journal of American History<\/em> Vol. 100, No 4 (March 2014), 1139-1169.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[101]<\/a> The American Yawp: A Free and Online, Collaboratively Built American History Textbook <\/em>[http:\/\/americanyawp.com]. For more on The American Yawp, <\/em>see Daniel Story and Alex Lichtenstein, “Ben Wright and Joseph Locke on The American Yawp,” AHR Interview<\/em>, November 19, 2019 [https:\/\/directory.libsyn.com\/episode\/index\/show\/ahrinterview\/id\/12089015<\/a>]; Joseph Locke and Ben Wright, “A Free and Open Alternative to Traditional History Textbooks,” Perspectives on History<\/em>, 53:3 (March 2015) [https:\/\/www.historians.org\/publications-and-directories\/perspectives-on-history\/march-2015\/a-free-and-open-alternative-to-traditional-history-textbooks<\/a>]; “Compiling and Open History Textbook: An Interview with American Yawp Editors Joseph Locke and Ben Wright,” Perspectives on History<\/em> (April 20, 2015) [https:\/\/www.historians.org\/publications-and-directories\/perspectives-on-history\/april-2015\/compiling-an-open-history-textbook-an-interview-with-american-yawp-editors-joseph-locke-and-ben-wright<\/a>]; and Rachel Beltzhoover and M. Omar Siddiqi, “A Conversation with Ben Wright and Joseph Locke, Editors of The American Yawp,” The American Historian<\/em> (February 2015) [https:\/\/tah.oah.org\/content\/conversation-ben-wright\/<\/a>];<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[102]<\/sup><\/a> Rosenzweig, \u201cCan History Be Open Source?,\u201d 117-146.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[103]<\/a> Henry Jenkins, \u201cConfronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century\u201d [https:\/\/www.macfound.org\/media\/article_pdfs\/JENKINS_WHITE_PAPER.PDF].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[104]<\/a> See, for example, Tapscott and Williams, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything<\/em> (New York: Penguin, 2006).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[105]<\/a> Miriam Posner, \u201cWhat\u2019s Next: The Radical, Unrealized Potential of Digital Humanities,\u201d Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, <\/em>edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein (Minneapolis: University Minnesota Press, 2016) [https:\/\/dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu\/projects\/debates-in-the-digital-humanities-2016].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[106]<\/a> Tara McPherson, \u201cWhy Are the Digital Humanities So White? or Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation\u201d <\/em>Matthew K. Gold, editor, Debates in the Digital Humanities<\/em> (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012) <\/em>[http:\/\/dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu\/debates\/text\/29].; Bethany Nowviskie, \u201cWhat Do Girls Dig?\u201d [http:\/\/nowviskie.org\/2011\/what-do-girls-dig\/].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[107]<\/a> See especially Sharon M. Leon, \u201cComplicating a \u2018Great Man\u2019 Narrative of Digital History in the United States,\u201d in Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and the Digital Humanities<\/em>, edited by Elizabeth Losh and Jacqueline Wernimont (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[108]<\/a> See also Henry Jenkins, \u201cBringing Critical Perspectives to the Digital Humanities: An Interview with Tara McPherson\u201d Confessions of an ACA-Fan <\/em>(March 20, 2015); David Kim, \u201cArchives, Models, and Methods for Critical Approaches to Identities: Representing Race and Ethnicity in the Digital Humanities\u201d (PhD dissertation, UCLA, 2015.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[109]<\/a> Oral historians Julianne Nyhan and Andrew Flinn identified \u201crevolutionary\u201d and \u201cunderdog\u201d as the recurring motifs with which digital humanists described themselves. Julianne Nyhan and Andrew Flinn, Computation and the Humanities: Towards an Oral History of Digital Humanities<\/em> (London: Springer, 2016).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[110]<\/a> Carol Fadda et al, Democratizing Knowledge Project<\/em>[http:\/\/democratizingknowledge.syr.edu\/index.html].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[111]<\/a> \u201cPublic history is not only history for a large audience,\u201d Thomas Cauvin explains, \u201cbut involves public participation as well.\u201d Thomas Cauvin, Public History: A Textbook of Practice<\/em> (New York: Routledge, 2016), 179.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[112]<\/a> Suzanne Fischer, “On the Vocation of Public History,” #alt-academy (May 8, 2011) [ http:\/\/mediacommons.org\/alt-ac\/pieces\/vocation-public-history<\/a>].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[113]<\/a> Andrew Hurley, \u201cChasing the Frontiers of Digital Technology: Public History Meets the Digital Divide,\u201d The Public Historian<\/em> 38 (February 2016), 70.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[114]<\/a>  Sheila A. Brennan, \u201cPublic, First,\u201d Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, <\/em>edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein (Minneapolis: University Minnesota Press, 2016) [https:\/\/dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu\/projects\/debates-in-the-digital-humanities-2016]. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

[115]<\/a> Andrew Hurley, \u201cChasing the Frontiers of Digital Technology: Public History Meets the Digital Divide,\u201d The Public Historian<\/em> 38 (February 2016), 80. See also David Hochfelder, \u201cMeeting our audiences where they are in the digital age,\u201d History@Work<\/em>, March 30, 2016; and Lara Kelland, \u201cDigital Community Engagement Across the Divides,\u201d History@Work<\/em>, April 20, 2016.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[116]<\/a> Lara Kelland, \u201cDigital community engagement across the divides,\u201d History@Work<\/em>, April 20, 2016.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[117]<\/a> Laurenellen McCann, \u201cBuilding Technology With, Not For Communities: An Engagement Guide for Civic Tech,\u201d Medium.com<\/em>, March 30, 2015. https:\/\/medium.com\/@elle_mccann\/building-technology-with-not-for-communities-an-engagement-guide-for-civic-tech-b8880982e65a<\/a>. See also Wendy F. Hsu, \u201cLessons on Public Humanities from the Civic Sphere,\u201d in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, <\/em>edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein (Minneapolis: University Minnesota Press, 2016) [https:\/\/dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu\/projects\/debates-in-the-digital-humanities-2016].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[118]<\/a> See Sharon Leon, \u201cAbout,\u201d in User-Centered Digital History<\/em>, https:\/\/digitalpublichistory.org\/about<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[119]<\/sup><\/a> Anne Burdick et al, Digital_Humanities<\/em>, 93.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[120]<\/a> The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project<\/em> [http:\/\/www.antievictionmap.com\/]; The Colored Conventions Project<\/em> [https:\/\/coloredconventions.org\/<\/a>]; and Refusing to Forget <\/em>[http:\/\/refusingtoforget.org\/<\/a>]. See also Million Dollar Hoods: Mapping the Fiscal and Human Cost of Mass Incarceration in Los Angeles<\/em>, a project \u201cworking to de-carcerate California\u201d [https:\/\/milliondollarhoods.pre.ss.ucla.edu\/<\/a>] and Million Dollar Blocks, <\/em>the project that inspired Million Dollar Hoods <\/em>[https:\/\/c4sr.columbia.edu\/projects\/million-dollar-blocks<\/a>].<\/em> Other examples of activist digital history include Torn Apart \/ Separados<\/em>, an exploration of the detention of immigrant children and its financial infrastructure [http:\/\/xpmethod.columbia.edu\/torn-apart\/volume\/2\/index<\/a>]; Project Toxic Docs<\/em>, a curated archive of previously classified documents related to industrial poisons [https:\/\/www.toxicdocs.org\/<\/a>]; Mapping Islamophobia<\/em>, created byfaculty, staff, and students at Grinnell College\u2014and released early\u2014to combat \u201cthe incredible rise in Islamophobic events\u201d [https:\/\/mappingislamophobia.org\/<\/a>]; and the suite of projects from the University of Michigan\u2019s Carceral State Project, especially their activism around the murder of Cynthia Scott and collaboration with the Michigan Youth Justice Center [https:\/\/sites.lsa.umich.edu\/dcc-project\/<\/a>].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[121]<\/sup><\/a> See, for instance. Jessie Daniels, \u201cRace and Racism in Internet Studies: A Review and Critique,\u201d New Media and Society<\/em> 15, no. 5 (2012): 695\u2013719.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[122]<\/a> Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, eds. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color<\/em> (New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1983), 94-101.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[123]<\/sup><\/a> Lisa Nakamura, Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet<\/em> (New York: Routledge, 2002). Legal scholar Jerry Kang was among the earliest to consider how race and representation function on the web. Jerry Kang, \u201cCyber-Race,\u201d Harvard Law Review<\/em> 113, no. 5 (2002): 1130\u20131208. See also Jessica Marie Johnson and Mark Anthony Neal, \u201cIntroduction: Wild Seed in the Machine,\u201d The Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research<\/em> Vol 47, No 3 (2017).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[124]<\/sup><\/a> See, for instance, Moya Z. Bailey, \u201cAll the Digital Humanists Are White, All the Nerds Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave,\u201d Journal Of Digital Humanities<\/em> (Winter 2011); and Tara McPherson, \u201cWhy Are the Digital Humanities So White? or Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation,\u201d in Matthew K. Gold, editor, Debates in the Digital Humanities<\/em> (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[125]<\/sup><\/a> Janet Abbate chronicled how the representation of coding evolved from a feminine activity in the mid-twentieth century to a masculine one at the dawn of the twenty-first. Janet Abbate, Recoding Gender: Women\u2019s Changing Participation in Computing<\/em> (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012). For gender and DH, see also Donna Haraway, \u201cA Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,\u201d in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature<\/em> (New York; Routledge, 1991); Deb Verhoeven, \u201cHas Anyone Seen a Woman?\u201d Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations Speech, (2015), debverhoeven.com\/anyone-seen-a-woman. On intersectionality, see especially Roopika Risam, \u201cBeyond the Margins: Intersectionality and the Digital Humanities,\u201d Digital Humanities Quarterly <\/em>9 (2015); and Safiya Umoja Noble and Brendesha M. Tynes, editors, The Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Class, and Culture Online<\/em> (New York: Peter Lang, 2016).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[126]<\/sup><\/a> Safiya Umoja Noble, \u201cA Future for Intersectional Black Feminist Technology Studies,\u201d Scholar & Feminist Online<\/em> 13, (2016), 1\u20138; Noble, \u201cToward a Critical Black Digital Humanities,\u201d in in Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, editor, Debates in the Digital Humanities<\/em> 2019 <\/em>(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[127]<\/sup><\/a> Miriam Posner, \u201cSome things to think about before you exhort everyone to code,\u201d Miriam Posner\u2019s Blog: Digital Humanities, Data, Labor, and Information<\/em> (February 29, 2012), https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/some-things-to-think-about-before-you-exhort-everyone-to-code\/<\/a>. Safiya Noble likewise has identified the push to get black girls to code as \u201can individualized, privatized approach to thinking about Black women\u2019s empowerment, in neoliberal fashion.\u201d Safiya Umoja Noble, \u201cA Future for Intersectional Black Feminist Technology Studies.\u201d Scholar & Feminist Online<\/em> 13, no. 3\u201314, no. 1 (2016): 1\u20138.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[128]<\/sup><\/a> Elizabeth Losh and Jacqueline Wernimont, eds., Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and Digital Humanities<\/em> (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), xvii. For the relationship of DH\u2019s digital tools and its broader values, see Natalia Cecire, \u201cIntroduction: Theory and the Virtues of Digital Humanities.\u201d Journal of Digital Humanities<\/em> (2011), http:\/\/journalofdigitalhumanities.org\/1-1\/introduction-theory-and-the-virtues-of-digital-humanities-by-natalia-cecire\/<\/a>; Stephen Ramsay, \u201cOn Building.\u201d Stephen Ramsay Blog<\/em>, January 11, 2011. http:\/\/stephenramsay.us\/text\/2011\/01\/11\/on-building\/<\/a>; and Tom Scheinfeldt, \u201c\u2018Where\u2019s the Beef?\u2019 Does Digital Humanities Have to Answer Questions?\u201d in Matthew K. Gold, editor, Debates in the Digital Humanities<\/em> (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012) [http:\/\/dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu\/debates\/text\/18<\/a>]; and Roopika Risam, \u201cNavigating the Global Digital Humanities: Insights from Black Feminism,\u201d Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, <\/em>edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein (Minneapolis: University Minnesota Press, 2016) [https:\/\/dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu\/projects\/debates-in-the-digital-humanities-2016]; Siva Vaidhyanathan, \u201cAfterword: Critical Information Studies,\u201d Cultural Studies<\/em> 20 (2006), 292-315.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[129]<\/a> Fiona Barnett, Zach Blas, Micha C\u00e1rdenas, Jacob Gaboury, Jessica Marie Johnson, and Margaret Rhee, \u201cQueerOS: A User\u2019s Manual,\u201d in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, <\/em>edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein (Minneapolis: University Minnesota Press, 2016) [https:\/\/dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu\/projects\/debates-in-the-digital-humanities-2016]. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

[130]<\/sup><\/a> Kim Gallon, \u201cMaking a Case for the Black Digital Humanities,\u201d in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, <\/em>edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein (Minneapolis: University Minnesota Press, 2016) [https:\/\/dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu\/projects\/debates-in-the-digital-humanities-2016].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[131]<\/sup><\/a> \u201cWilliam G. Thomas III, and Elizabeth Lorang. \u201cThe Other End of the Scale: Rethinking the Digital Experience in Higher Education,\u201d Educause Review<\/em> (September 15, 2014).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[132]<\/sup><\/a> Amy E. Earhart and Toniesha L. Taylor, \u201cPedagogies of Race: Digital Humanities in the Age of Ferguson,\u201d in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, <\/em>edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein (Minneapolis: University Minnesota Press, 2016) [https:\/\/dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu\/projects\/debates-in-the-digital-humanities-2016]. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

[133]<\/sup><\/a> Anthony Grafton,\u201cLoneliness and Freedom,\u201d Perspectives: The Newsletter of the American Historical Association<\/em>, 49 (March 2011) [https:\/\/www.historians.org\/publications-and-directories\/perspectives-on-history\/march-2011\/loneliness-and-freedom].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[134]<\/sup><\/a> Scott Nesbit et al, \u201cA Conversation with Digital Historians,\u201d Southern Spaces<\/em>(January 31, 2012) [https:\/\/southernspaces.org\/2012\/conversation-digital-historians].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[135]<\/a> Jordan Taylor, Comment on \u201cRevised Manuscript,\u201d AHR Open Review<\/em>, https:\/\/ahropenreview.com\/HistoryCanBeOpenSource\/revised-manuscript\/.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

History Can Be Open Source: Democratic Dreams and the Rise of Digital History[1] In 2006, pioneering digital historian Roy Rosenzweig published an article in the Journal of American History entitled \u201cCan History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past.\u201d By then Wikipedia had already become, he said, \u201cperhaps the largest work of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":14,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"bgseo_title":"","bgseo_description":"","bgseo_robots_index":"index","bgseo_robots_follow":"follow","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-146","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ahropenreview.com\/HistoryCanBeOpenSource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ahropenreview.com\/HistoryCanBeOpenSource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ahropenreview.com\/HistoryCanBeOpenSource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ahropenreview.com\/HistoryCanBeOpenSource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ahropenreview.com\/HistoryCanBeOpenSource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=146"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ahropenreview.com\/HistoryCanBeOpenSource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/146\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":150,"href":"https:\/\/ahropenreview.com\/HistoryCanBeOpenSource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/146\/revisions\/150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ahropenreview.com\/HistoryCanBeOpenSource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}